The Great Depression; Interview with Horace Bristol. Part 3; Interview with Togo Tanaka. Part 1

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

And...marker.

SUSAN BELLOWS:

So, finish telling me your story now.

HORACE BRISTOL:

Well, to finish the story, at any rate, I was photographing these girls playing horseshoes, and the main thing that I was very interested in was the little boy who was right beside me, and he was talking to his mother, and he said, \"Say, Ma, those girls can't play horseshoes for anything,\" as if that was why the people came to...it was at that time, that kind of a show was quite, there was not all the kind of exposure that there. People kind of take for granted nowadays thanks to television and a few other things.

SUSAN BELLOWS:

Thanks, [inaudible].

SUSAN BELLOWS:

So, if you would, can you talk to me a little bit about what you were aware of about the War, at this time, say in '39?

HORACE BRISTOL:

Well, in California, of course, or in the West, we were aware that there was a lot of, sort of, preparation for war. For example, I did a story for Fortune on, when they were developing the first what they called Flying Fortress up in Seattle. In general, a lot of preparation and a lot of effort and money was being spent in... by '47, for what we called preparedness. It wasn't for war, but we, obviously people were worried about, about the possibilities. I happened to be driving with my son over a bridge in Washington when the news came that Hitler had invaded Poland, and my son, who was nine years old at the time, said, \"Well, Dad, if that's the way the world is, it's a hell of a world to bring children into,\" and I agreed with him. I've agreed many times with children who feel that the older people can't adjust their lives so that we can live in peace. The only way that economies develop is when they can count on either defense spending, or war spending, as we did later on. So, we're still facing that now, the hangover from...Our prosperity here, in the West, was built on defense spending, and we're feeling the lack of it now.

SUSAN BELLOWS:

Yeah. When your son said that, were you beginning to feel afraid about what was going on overseas, were you afraid you—

HORACE BRISTOL:

No, I, I mean I think it was such a shocking event. I don't know how many people remember about 1939, when they went in, but it was totally unexpected. I mean, we'd sort of lulled ourselves into the belief that everything was going to be all right, and it was a shock. Here we were facing, we weren't facing war actually ourselves, but it was the beginning of war. Of course, when war actually came, I went into the Navy and was lucky enough to be able to still continue to do stories with, with a photographer, under a photographer, who commissioned, who himself was commissioned, and then commissioned five officers to photograph the Navy at war.

SUSAN BELLOWS:

Was there, you were living in California all during these years, was there a little bit more awareness of what was going on in Japan, or any fear of...

HORACE BRISTOL:

Oh, there was, there was really, the Japanese, I mean, California or the West, has been very racist anyway, beginning with people like William Randolph Hearst, who was my wife's, my, pardon me, my mother's employee [sic]. She was an editor of a woman's section of a Hearst paper, and Hearst was talking all the time about the \"yellow peril\", and how Japan was such a danger to, to America. So the farmers were aware in some ways, in a resentful way, of the fact that the Japanese would come and get a small piece of otherwise wasteland, and turn it into a truly productive situation. The farmers were, I don't know whether I should say envious, but they were resentful of the Japanese ability to do that. And they criticized it, based, largely on the basis, well, they said, they worked long hours, the wife works, the children work, and of course that happens to be a rather Japanese convention, everybody turning to and working, and it was true. So, when war came, California was quite happy to confiscate the land and incarcerate, or whatever you want to call it, the Japanese in internment camps. By that time, I began to be a little bit understanding and resentful myself of this attitude towards hardworking people, who wanted nothing more than just to be allowed to work hard.

SUSAN BELLOWS:

Were you shocked by Pearl Harbor, were you surprised by that?

HORACE BRISTOL:

Well, I didn't believe, I didn't believe that the Japanese would be powerful enough to undertake such a thing, because Japan is a very small place, with practically no resources, and we're such a big country, with every resource, and I couldn't believe that the, that the Japanese would make war on the United States. One of my, when I went to Japan later on, one of the men that I was quite interested in reading about was an admiral, Japanese admiral named Yamamoto, who said, frankly, he said, \"This a great mistake. We're never going to win this war.\" He'd been an ambassador in Washington, and he knew the power of America. But I never personally expected to see this happen, or the day that Pearl Harbor occurred.

SUSAN BELLOWS:

I think, tell me a little bit about what happened in California after Pearl Harbor.

HORACE BRISTOL:

Well, there was, I was in Alaska when Pearl Harbor occurred, and when I finally came down to, managed to get back to California, I was, I knew that my life as a photographer was going to be very restricted, because California, particularly, had almost hysteria about the Japanese landing as they did at Pearl Harbor, so that any photography that could be considered of strategic objects was forbidden here. I mean, if you even took a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge, people would say, that could be used for spying. So I was quite happy to go into the service, into the Navy, and be able to take pictures that were sort of constructive. My wife called, I was in the Navy as Lieutenant-Commander for four years, and my wife calls me the photographer correspondent who never took pictures of blood or anything like that. I tried to do stories that were constructive, about what Americans were doing and could do, not actually the devastating part of war. Perhaps it's a cop-out on my part, but I felt I could still do a job in a constructive way.

SUSAN BELLOWS:

Well, I think everybody felt very differently about that war. I wanted just to ask you if you have any—

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

SUSAN BELLOWS:

Yeah, I know...summary thoughts about how living through those years changed you, changed your attitude, maybe not something you were aware of at the time, but, you know, something that you became aware of when you looked back on those years and what they meant to you, how they—

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

Cut.

SUSAN BELLOWS:

OK, I want to just talk about, what you think when you look back on those years, how it changed you or changed the country, or what started, maybe, during those years.

HORACE BRISTOL:

Well, at 84, you have a lot of time to think about what we all did wrong, actually, and if we learned anything from the last depression, I hope that it will be in some ways conducive to understanding of what we must do in the future. I feel that, for one thing, television is a very good thing to make, particularly the young people, what it was like, and what it shouldn't be like in the future. So, I'm very grateful for having gone through these years, and learning something. I mean, unfortunately, nobody can learn except by experience, I mean, textbooks and all that don't help too much. Sometimes I think television is going to help people do this.

SUSAN BELLOWS:

But what did you learn during those years, would you say?

HORACE BRISTOL:

Well, \"learn\" is a big, big order. How I feel, I feel that we all should be aware of what goes on around us, rather than just take it all for granted. Because, I know, as a young man, I was relatively young in the '30s, I just took things for granted. I found out that things didn't work out very happily for lots of people, just around me. I wasn't thinking about the outside world, but, I mean, here in my own communities, that is, in California, where I felt it was my home and community, and should have been responsible for. I took everything for granted. I just, I hope that that doesn't carry on into the '90s and the next century, actually, where people will be aware of what's happening.

SUSAN BELLOWS:

Now, you started to tell me, you thought the '30s were the beginning of an awareness of, and I wasn't quite sure—

HORACE BRISTOL:

Oh, well, the '30s were the beginning of, as far as I was concerned, of the fact that, that Americans are not exempt from problems at all, that we have to understand and accept, and find some sort of solution for them. I mean this, I know this sounds very utopian or something, I don't mean that, but I just feel...the people that I met, for example, in the, in the \"valley where the grapes of wrath were stored,\" in that particular case we were so unaware, and so uncaring, that, of our own people. I mean, I'm happy to see that today we're caring a little bit about what's happening in Somaliland, or Somali, Somalia, but I do hope that we also can be considerate of our own people and planning more for the way we do it in the future. I'm sorry, that's not very good...

SUSAN BELLOWS:

No, no, no, that was—

HORACE BRISTOL:

Not very well-worded.

SUSAN BELLOWS:

It was very fine. Thank you.

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

OK, let's cut.

SUSAN BELLOWS:

Yeah.

HORACE BRISTOL:

OK.

SUSAN BELLOWS:

Thank you so much.

[end of Bristol interview; beginning of Tanaka interview]

CAMERA CREW MEMBER:

Marker.

INTERVIEWER:

OK, let's start off by, if you could tell me, where you were in 1937, what you were doing that year?

TOGO TANAKA:

I lived in Glendale, California. [coughs] I take it back I lived in Hollywood, Los Feliz and Vermont. I moved to Glendale the following year. I was working, full-time, as an English editor of a daily newspaper called the Rafu Shimpo, still being published here in Los Angeles after ninety years, but I had received a degree from UCLA in political science, and had gone to work, in my senior year, for the Rafu Shimpo .

INTERVIEWER:

So, one of the things that we're looking at in this film is the economic climate in, in the end of the decade there, '37 and '38, and there were a lot of reports that everything was getting better, and the Depression was over, I wonder if you could tell me what, what it was like for you at that point, were things getting better economically for you?

TOGO TANAKA:

I always thought that every new job that I had I improved my condition. While in school I worked twelve hours on Saturdays at the Hollymont Market for three dollars a Saturday, and the job at the Rafu Shimpo paid me I think sixty-five dollars a month, plus three meals in the commissary, you know of the newspaper. And, as I look back it never occurred to me that it was, you know, hard times. There was enough to eat, we had a roof over our head, paid our rent, and I took the street car down to the job everyday and I enjoyed it.

INTERVIEWER:

Did you see a lot of hardship around you still, or—?

TOGO TANAKA:

Yes, yes I did. I saw people on the street corner selling apples. I read about in the newspaper that we were in a deep depression, that there was unemployment. I think about that time they had talked about a bonus march to Washington D.C., and you couldn't work for a daily newspaper, reporting what was happening in the city, even though this was an ethnic newspaper, without being aware of the fact that there was a world-wide depression. Times were hard. The government in Washington D.C. had started out by declaring a bank holiday, and we knew that times were hard. I think while the wage scale was such a, I think I remember at that time that we quoted the fact that if you were a manager of a Safeway store, and earned enough to support a family of four, two children and a couple, and if you got $125 a month that was going scale. The dollar was worth a great deal more in those days, and so you didn't get as many of them. But we were in a depression, and what little economics I had studied at UCLA, I had learned that in the early days in the Nineteenth Century, we didn't call it a depression, we called it a panic. And then in the 1930s newspapers picked up the term depression and that's what we were suffering.

INTERVIEWER:

I wonder if you can help me understand a little bit what kind of opportunities there were for Japanese Americans? Would you mind telling a little bit about some of the obstacles that you talked about?

TOGO TANAKA:

Yes. Well it was a standing—it wasn't a joke, it was kind of ironic—but the most successful entrepreneur among Japanese Americans, I think one of the more successful in the Los Angeles area was a man named Susumu Hasuike, H-A-S-U-I-K-E, Japan born, but he had had the drive to not only own one fruit and vegetable store, but he had a chain of them. I don't remember how many he had at it's peak, but it ran into several dozen. And it was said that if you got an engineering degree at UC Berkley—they weren't handing out those degrees at UCLA—you could get a job polishing apples and stacking potatoes for Three Star Produce, but it wasn't unusual to go to a fruit stand and discover that ingredient. In my own case I was offered a scholarship to the University of Missouri, Journalism, but it was just for tuition, but it didn't cover the, the cost of living. So I chose to go where I could, you know, work and earn a salary. I think the jobs were relatively limited for people of Japanese descent in those days, as they were for other ethnic groups who belonged to so-called minorities.

INTERVIEWER:

So was California very receptive of a community for Japanese-Americans?

TOGO TANAKA:

Well, we were born here, [laughs] most of us were. So, I think that California had a long history of anti-Oriental, political agitation, the organized labor, you know, first because when the Chinese were brought in to build the railroads, I think successive ways the Asian immigrants all ran into the same thing, the same thing that Southern Europeans ran into in New York and, and on the East Coast.

INTERVIEWER:

I'm going to have to interrupt you, and I want to pick up that story. We've run out on this roll.

TOGO TANAKA:

Oh sure.

INTERVIEWER:

-five minutes to warm up and then we'll, then we'll give you a full ten minute roll.