Biography Hawaiʻi; Koji Ariyoshi; Interview with Franklin Odo 7/30/04 #2

I'd rather edit a back collection of his memoirs and all that stuff. Oh, yeah. Whether he should put together, just watching for that, even just five years ago, the sense that he was just completely sort of, out and left the yield. Literally, and whatever was watching the last five years he's been rehabilitated. I don't know if he riddled. Yeah, go to the end. Oh, okay, well, no. Pojirio, she comes back to start up a newspaper in 1948. He's arriving in the thick of it in some ways, in terms of what's going on in Hawaii. One of the first stories he has to cover is the Ryan and T-Firing. Could you talk a little bit about what he came back to in terms of the way that sort of race and ideology and labor and all those things were sort of coming together and trying to shape out a kind of new things where I do culture for a while. Well, let me, the stuff that I know, I feel I know best about the returning veterans that the AJs coming back from Europe and the MIS and the whole contestation for political rule

and work within the Democratic Party and the new kinds of configurations of recent power that are beginning to emerge. And that coming up against the heightening tensions of the Cold War and really it's, you know, it's 1949 after all that what's it doing where we left off talking about Yanan and the Red Army and it's 1949 when the Chinese Communist take over China and there's a tremendous upheaval in the United States about who lost China and since we couldn't have lost it and Sharon Square must have been somebody who was double dealing us and including our internal enemies. So it was a very intense period and in the local scene it's some years before what is sometimes called the bloodless revolution of 1954

but there's a lot of political activity among the post-war of vets who are coming back and people are beginning to exert some level of political activity. So when Koji comes back in 1948 he's coming into a scene that's already three years after the end of the war and there are already people on the scene who are inserting themselves into local politics who I think believe that they have you know, they're beginning to develop this mantra of having secured a place in post-war Hawaii that had been denied them by the Republican, how they big five powers before the war and that things had to change and so you've got the whole burns

you know, you have Jack Burns and the liberal wing of the Democratic Party beginning to emerge but their whole sort of foundation is secured on a pro-America not necessarily anti-communist but certainly not one that would likely embrace anything like Marxism. So it's at the, on the one hand, he's coming back into a situation in which Japanese-Americans are becoming an extremely important force in electoral politics. On the other hand, he's coming back as the spokesperson for an ideology that is highly suspect and certainly one that will be hostile. He comes back as a newspaper man and he's talking about the importance of the record

or the importance of any kind of general journalism of what's coming out of the advertising in the start. Well, there would have been very important, wouldn't it? I cannot say, I don't recall reading any account that is, to me, satisfactorily taking account of the importance of the record in a period. I don't really have a good sense of that. I don't know how many people really read it. I don't know whether it influences a lot of folks. I don't know whether it turns people around. I think it educates folks. And certainly the people who are involved in it, people like Koji are dedicated and extremely committed to its usefulness and its importance. But I'm not sure how critical it is to the politics of the late 40s and the 50s. The back is something

you mentioned a couple of minutes ago which was the references to the mantra and trying to find a particular sort of mainstream. Who within the Japanese American community in English groups in some ways got left out of that movement or what kind of things couldn't fit within it? Boy, that's a really important question, I think. And one image that comes to mind and you can help me remember, when is it that Danny Neue makes his very famous speech about the fascist got one arm and the Communist can have the other one of 50. But I think that's one, that's sort of the image that haunts me about really the big five, the Republican stalwarts trying to

thwart this rising Japanese-American Democratic Party partnership that's emerging. And the way they see to do that is to taint it with the allegations of communist leanings. And so the whole Hoy VII kind of thing is a part of that, because it's so much of that is Japanese-American. The Japanese-American ILWU Democratic Party I think if they could have the hope, I think, was to if they could get the electorate to buy that as a package and they could be able to maintain that, that Republicans could maintain the stranglehold over the polls for at least another decade or so. And then didn't work. And I think because people like Dene Noria and what became the mainstream Democratic Party were able to forge a mainstream

kind of platform that scuttled into the only joke George Erioshi ever told in his life was when he was initially campaigning he would say, I'm George Erioshi and I'm not related to Koji Erii. Not moving not so much of a joke at the time anyway. Just in general, a comment on sort of the personal costs of people fighting these rules in the late 40s and early 50s. I mean, it's always generally across America, the business of just the kind of personal costs and the kinds of strains and the kind of strikes that were necessary for people to deal with these kinds of attack on trying to change race and ethnic political policy. Well, for me, sometimes it's helpful to recall that that the Communist Party

was about they actually thought they were trying to create a revolution to overthrow capitalism and implement socialism. And so the stakes were very high and maybe it should come as no surprise to us looking at it in hindsight that people who were wanting to defend capitalism would do everything they could to destroy these both the movement and the people. And so everything that was at hand was used. The media, education, you know, law enforcement and everything else. So, they, people like Koji were up against an extraordinary force that had the Soviet Union after I couldn't withstand this. You know, I mean, this was a pretty amazing array of wealth and power that they might that perhaps in retrospect,

you know, was not something that they could have impacted. So, across the country, I mean, there were very much, you asked how they felt doing that. I'm presuming that they they believe what they were doing and what they were doing. And felt they had to go ahead in some form or fashion to try to not just improve life, but to try to improve the conditions under which your revolution could take place or substantial change anyway could take place. So, I, I have to believe that they really thought they were doing the right thing. And they were suffering and they were being persecuted literally and seriously. But they felt they had to do that. This is a question that's worth knowing that. I was going to say might be looking at you.

Good. We want to take it into the 60s now and that many movements to try to do in some ways re-assess that earlier history. Could talk a bit above sort of the whole formation of ethnic studies and why that's an interesting question. I never knew Koji. And when all of this was going on in the late 60s and the 70s, I was in Los Angeles. And involved in similar kinds of activity, antiwar, black power, support for Native Americans and Aslan in the Southwest. So I had, although this Hawaii was my home and I was following some of this, I felt a little distanced from it. And it was very interesting to me to,

I recall meeting some of the ethnic studies people at conferences in Northern California in the early 1970s. And I was curious about what was going on, but not curious enough to try to actually understand it at the time. And I think the first time I really got really curious about why Hawaii was a little different from, say, LA or San Francisco or Washington or New York City. Is that the movement here was beginning to win some battles? They actually got the cops to stop doing some things. And they got the state to stop redoing some things. I won't go into the specific ones, but I said, you know what? These folks are actually preventing the state from actually running over some areas in some people's lives. And we're having trouble doing that in LA.

And when I came back in 1978 to work with the ethnic studies program at the time, most of the people I worked with at the University of Hawaii had been engaged in community struggles of one kind or another. And that was their primary focus at the time. And so it was very interesting to me to see how you did that using a campus as a base or something of a base. The relationship to Koji was, I didn't know Koji, as I said, I didn't know him personally. I didn't know his stuff very well when I first came back. And I read later and learned more about who he was and what he'd done. For my colleagues who were younger faculty members in the mid-70s, mid to late-70s, Koji was, from what I could see, he was very important because he was somebody who had been part of a left movement earlier,

maintained that stance. Never seemed to have gone off track ideologically. And then his flower shop thing, rather than buy into becoming a part of a labor leader or something else. And so I think they admired and that he was willing to talk to them and mentor them was helpful as well. What was in it for him is a different story, I think. These were local kids whom he could talk to and who could influence to some extent. I think there was not much of an older left that he could influence at any great degree anymore.

And so this was his way, perhaps, of giving back to the society to perpetuate his own, maybe validate his own stance, psychologically, or he's getting older now. He's actually being acknowledged for his work in China. And at least some parts of the society had begun to see that as a valuable contribution that he had made. So there are some things coming back to him that had gone by the boards for some time. And to see a younger generation of radical intellectuals who looked at him for guidance, I think, must have been a very warm kind of feeling for him. And so I think he appreciated that. I don't know that Koji was any more important to the younger folks than other people, except in the area of working towards that oral history project

that Koji had helped to establish. Talk about more generally about what are the kinds of principles this is called? What are the principles underlying the notion of the need for ethnic studies as a discipline, as a field, and how would those fit in with the kind of life that Koji had led? Koji had led. I think the critical thing is not to be dismissed. The need to be respected. The need to have your own families, your community, your point of view, your orientation. You know, you can have things argued, but to be dismissed is probably the thing that you want to avoid. Which I think is why I've had some questions about our slogan, I guess you call it.

Our history are way. Because I think most people who are in ethnic studies really know there is no one way. There is no one history. At the same time, everybody's entitled or all communities are entitled to some versions of the way they interpret their histories, even though they may be wrong, that those are really, really important to people and they need to be treasured. And I think he had one, I would dare say, Koji felt he had one history one way. He knew what the truth was, how history developed, and he had an ideological way of looking at how human society developed. That's the point of Marxism. But I think he also knew that in terms of local communities and local people, feeling a sense of empowerment, that they needed to be able to assert that, and that that was a really critical part that he wanted to support.

Now, I don't know this, but I will also venture to say that, given what we know of Koji, that for him, that would have been a stage, that the next stage would have been to see things his way. But that's logical, I think. Almost like one of the ironies that he ends up as the state's first officer of historic preservation. Yes, right, the historic preservation, right? How do you think, I mean, the pure speculation, but it's something that we're not, how do you think Koji would want to be remembered in the way? Boy, that I don't know, you know? At what point in his life, maybe a good question, you know? In Yanan, I would like to remember it, or while he was being victimized by the Hoi Seven stuff, or while he was mentoring the ethnic studies young faculty,

and towards the end, I think he would suggest that that's the part that he would like to have been remembered, that he'd lived all of this, and he'd stuck to his guns, and he could still be where other people thought he was in the dustbin of history, that he could help people try to make some change and try to do some good things here. He comes from an intensely studied group, he's an exact contemporary of Dan and Roy, he ended up in a very, very different history. What can we learn from him about the history of Japanese-Americans in Hawaii in terms of what we need to think about in the future? I think the Senator Inoue has done extraordinary things in many respects, including bringing lots of resources that are needed back to Hawaii, and some things that the people in Hawaii don't know about the Senator, including his extraordinary work with American Indians, and being singularly important to creating a...

Wait a minute, sorry. The Republican cellphone. I wasn't sitting down in the way I was the strong man. No, no. It does actually, right? Anyway, I'm not aware that Dan and Roy has very strong ties to Judaism for one thing, but also to other Native people's issues like Native Americans, and so working at the Smithsonian, I can tell you that this unbelievably large, split and different, new Native American museum coming up on the mall in September of 2004, that that would not have happened without Senator Inoue.

So I know this part about him that people may not be aware of, but I do think there is a danger that Inoue, Matsunaga, and to a slightly different degree, the George Arioshi, that what looks like a monumental success story of AJAs in Hawaii will overshadow some of the dissident elements, and there are so many of those stories that I think Koji's story is extremely important, because it will help, I think, people focus on the fact that there are huge numbers of people who are not as famous as Koji, but who had other kinds of ways of looking at the world, and of looking at Hawaii, and of looking at relations with people, and so on, that really need to be uncovered, and I would suggest that people should do that within their own homes, look to their brothers and sisters, cousins, their aunts, uncles, I mean, there are really lots of stories like that lying around, so I'm happy you're doing this.

Any other questions? Thank you for having me. Did we leave?