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Japanese American Project

The second shared venture, done in conjunction with the Japanese American Council (JAC) of the Historical and Cultural Foundation of Orange County, consisted of fifteen interviews with pioneer family residents of the Japanese American community of Orange County, California. Of these interviews, which were done by enrollees in a CSUF Department of History community oral history class composed about equally of CSUF students and JAC members, seven were with predominantly Japanese-speaking Issei (immigrant-generation Japanese Americans), whose transaction and processing necessitated the services of competent bilingualists. Fortunately, these were provided on a volunteer basis by college-educated wives in Orange County’s large overseas Japanese business community who were affiliated with the JAG. Published as fully bilingual volumes, these interviews, along with eight other ones done exclusively in English with Nisei (citizen-generation Japanese Americans), constituted the first phase of the ongoing Honorable Stephen K. Tamura Orange County Japanese American Oral History Project, named after the founding co-chair of the JAG in recognition of his rise from his roots in the local Japanese American community to appointment in 1966 as the first Japanese American appellate judge in the continental United States.

     A third set of cooperative undertakings during the project’s last phase has been the publication of two novels penned by project interviewees dramatizing the Japanese American World War II experi­ence from contrasting perspectives. The first of these novels, The Harvest of Hate, was written by Georgia Day Robertson, an Orange Countian who supervised the high school mathematics teachers at the three camps in the PostonWar Relocation Center during the war.  Although submitted originally by Robertson for publication consideration in 1946, its ultimate publication did not occur until forty years later in 1986.  (The manuscript, along with other of Robertson’s war-time papers, had been secured in the late l960s for the CSUF Special Collections by Dr. Giles Brown, Dean of Graduate Studies, and brought to OHP’s  attention by Special Collections Librarian Linda Herman.) Issued jointly with the JAG as a hardcover volume (in June 1989, it was released by Lynx Books of New York as a mass-market paperback), this novel depicts the crisis of the Evacuation through the eyes of the several members of the fictional Sato family, who farmed in the San Diego area prior to being interned at Poston. The second novel, Seki-Nin [Duty Bound], saw print in 1989 under the dual copyright aegis of the project and its Nisei novelist, George Nakagawa. Also published in hardcover form, this novel focuses upon the plight of a Seattle-area Nisei, who, out of deference to parental fears for his future, forsakes his native country in 1940 to accompany his parents back to Japan, only to be drafted three years later into the Japanese army and sent to fight, and be killed, in China. Both of these novels, appended with portions of project interviews with their authors, have been widely reviewed in the mainstream and Japanese American community press.

     In addition to these cooperative publication activities, the project  has continued to extend and diversify its archival holdings. Consistent with its established pattern of collection, the project added more interviews with Japanese American wartime evacuees, especially those who took part in resistance movements; WRA appointed personnel; and social scientists who studied the Evacuation. But while these older categories were augmented, they were also broadened and variegated. For example, a 1982 interview with a Nisei teacher turned social activist, Hannah Tomiko Holmes, took up her wartime evacuation from the School for the Deaf in Berkeley, California, her incarceration at the Manzanar and Tule Lake centers, and her resettlement in Chicago as a student at the Illinois School for the Deaf. Then, too, a 1987 interview with a WRA administrator, Paul S. Robertson, high­lights his seven-month directorship of the isolation center for alleged Nisei “troublemakers” established by the WRA in the spring of 1943 at Leupp, Arizona, on the Navajo reservation. Instead of recording further interviews with those “applied” social scientists employed by the WRA through its Community Analysis Section, the project branched out to interview five social-scientific observers connected with the theoretically attuned University of California—sponsored Evacuation and Resettlement Study (ERS): Robert F. Spencer, an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, who served as a field anthropologist at the Gila Relocation Center in Arizona; Charles Kikuchi, a retired Veterans Administration social worker, who was an ERS participant-observer at Tanforan (California) Assembly Center and Gila Relocation Center and also collected life histories in Chicago among resettled evacuees; Rosalie Hankey Wax, an emerita anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, who conducted fieldwork at the Gila and Tule Lake camps; James M. Sakoda, an emeritus professor of social psychology and statistics at Brown University, who carried on participant-observation for ERS at Tulare Assembly Center and the relocation centers at Tule Lake and Minidoka, Idaho; and Setsuko Matsunaga Nishi, a sociologist at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, who surveyed the wartime resettlement pattern of Japanese Americans in St. Louis and Chicago.

Finally, this phase in the project’s development has witnessed the production, in 1989, of two more CSUFHistory Department M.A. theses by project members. The first, “Medicine in a Crisis Situation: The Effect of Culture on Health Care in the World War II Japanese American Detention Center,” by Michelle Gutierrez, makes resource­ful use of existing project interviews with an Issei, Dr. Yoriyuki Kikuchi, chief of the dental clinic at Manzanar, and Frank Chuman, the Nisei director of the Manzanar hospital. The second, “Interned Without: The Military Police at Tule Lake Relocation/Segregation Center, 1942-46,” by Reagan Bell, is heavily reliant upon interviews he transacted for the project with soldiers who were stationed at the Tule Lake Center as well as with a man who served there as one of its assistant directors. Both Gutierrez and Bell illustrate a practice increasingly being followed in the project: that of employing mature students rich in life experiences as interviewers, editors, and inter­preters. In the case of the former, she graduated from a university with a degree in microbiology and worked for a decade as a laboratory technician at the University of Southern California/Los Angeles County Hospital prior to matriculating in the graduate history pro­gram at CSUF; as for the latter, a World War II veteran who witnessed his Southern California classmates at Tustin Union High School being evacuated to Poston and other centers in 1942, he finished a twenty-year U.S. Army career prior to completing his B.A. in history and commencing graduate history studies at CSUF.

   During its two-decade existence, the Japanese American Project has been fortunate to have the dedicated service and support of countless individuals. Apart from those already named, a number of other people associated in some significant way with the project deserve recognition for their contributions. Dr. Kinji K. Yada, a colleague in the CSUF Department of History and a wartime internee at the Manzanar center, has assisted the project as a resource person from its inception through the present [sic]; not only has he provided timely translations and trenchant advice, but also taught classes taken by project personnel in Japanese and Japanese American history and shaped and sharpened the M.A. theses of a selected few of them. Elizabeth Stein, later a faculty member in the CSUF Department of English, gave unstintingly of her time and editorial talents as an undergraduate while discharging her duties as the project’s associate director during its second stage of development.

   Others who were important to the project for their promotional work in this same period were Duff Griffith and Reed Holderman. Since 1980, the project has bene­fited greatly, particularly in connection with its work on the Honor­able Stephen K. Tamura Orange County Japanese American Project, by the efforts of volunteers drawn from Orange County’s Japanese American population and the county’s overseas Japanese business community. Noteworthy in the former category were the following individuals: Myrtle Asahino, Yasko Gamo, Susan Hori, Charles Ishii, Gale Itagaki, Hiroshi Kamei, James Kanno, Carol Kawanami, Grace Muruyama, Dr. Ernest Nagamatsu, Clarence Nishizu, Shi and Mary Nomura, Iku Watanabe, Dorothy Wing, and Rae Yasumura. The latter category was headed up by Masako Hanada and Yukiko Sato, who coordinated the team of translators, transcribers, and editors associated with the production of the bilingual volumes in the Tamura collection. Members of this team included Keiko Akashi, Kokonoe Baba, Kazuko Hone, Hisako Maruoka, Etsu Matsuo, Setsuko Naiki, Kyoko Okamoto, Yoko Tateuchi, Yumiko Wakabayashi, and Chiharu Yawata. GSUF students instrumental during this third phase of the project have been Phillip Brigandi, Jeanie Corral, Richard Imon, Ann Uyeda, Alan Koch, Cynthia Togami, and NoraJoesch. Although the CSUF Oral History Program staff, spearheaded by its able and indefatigable former Associate Director and Archivist Shirley E. Stephenson, has facilitated the work of the project in many ways from its beginning, in recent years the role of staff members Kathleen Frazee, Shirley de Graaf, Debra Gold Hansen, Gaye Kouyoumjian, and Garnette Long, especially in the area of technical processing, has been both spirited and substantial. During the l980s and early 1990s, the project has enjoyed the support of two new OHP directors, Professor Lawrence de Graaf and Michael Onorato, both faculty members in the CSUF Department of History, the OHP’s administrative parent. Finally, the five History Department chairs during the life of the project — Professors George Giacumakis, Thomas Flickema, Robert Feldman, James Woodward, and Frederic Miller  have demonstrated leadership beneficial to its growth and development. 

   Throughout its existence, the project has been largely self-supporting as a result of the sale of its assorted publications. In its formative years, a small amount of subsidization was provided by the CSUF School of Humanities and Social Sciences and a series of research grants awarded to student project members through the university’s Departmental Association Council. The largest infusion of funds into the project came about, however, during its second developmental stage via Comprehensive Employment Training Act salary payments for trainees attached to the project. In recent years, financial assistance has flowed from several sources: 1) the Japanese American Council of the Historical and Cultural Foundation of Orange County; 2) the Mac Neel Pierce Foundation, with student scholarships; 3) CSUF faculty research and travel grants; and 4) donations from project interviewees and their families. 

   Almost from its outset, project holdings and personnel have been consulted by a variety of researchers, from affiliates of local historical societies and agencies, both within and outside of the Japanese American community, through writers of doctoral dissertations and scholarly studies. The media have also turned to the project for assistance on a regular basis, extending from area newspapers through network television stations in Japan and the United Kingdom, and from low-budget documentary film makers through producers of mass-circulation feature films like Come See the Paradise (1990). The recent movement for redress and reparations to Japanese American survivors of the Evacuation has dramatized the value of project documents, and it is likely that they will continue to be valued by researchers for many years to come, even after the project as an institutional entity has come to its inevitable end.

ARTHUR A. HANSEN
Director, Center for Oral and Public History

Visit the National Park Service website on Manzanar
http://www.nps.gov/manz/hrs/hrs.htm