Interview With Irene Hirano

MJ: Irene Hirano, thank you for joining us today.

IH: Thank you very much.

MJ: Your title says you're the executive director and president of the Japanese-American National Museum.

IH: Correct.

MJ: What does that mean?

IH: Well, I was hired by the museum board in 1988 to administer and manage the overall operations. I was hired as the first director, and that includes the responsibility of ensuring that the institution reaches its mission that that we have other resources, including staffing, volunteers and finances to make that happen.

MJ: How long was this in a planning stage? What was this genesis of this museum?

IH: Well, it was primarily second-generation Japanese-Americans who believed that it was important to create a facility that would preserve and tell the story about Japanese-Americans. Most of the Niseis are now in their 70s and 80s, and they were very concerned that much of the story of their past and the story about their parents, the first generation, was not documented, was not recorded, was not part of American history books, if they did not share that story that it could be lost forever.

So they began to create the Japanese-American National Museum here in Los Angeles to expand it to reach a national base support and to ensure that there would be a permanent legacy.

MJ: When was the work first begun?

IH: The institution was founded in 1985 and began with a group of businessmen here in Little Tokyo and also with a group of Nisei veterans, and they merged their efforts and formally started the institution in the mid-'80s.

From that point they began to raise some initial funds and to hire staff.

One-Dollar Lease

MJ: What kind of reaction have you had from the Greater Los Angeles community?

IH: Well, it's been really amazing how much support bas been garnered. The building that the museum is located in was originally a Buddhist temple. It was owned by the city of Los Angeles and the City Council felt that it would be an appropriate building to turn over to the board. It has a lot of history. This building was built in 1925, and so the City of Los Angeles not only gave the museum this building for a dollar a year on a very long-term lease, it gave the museum a one million dollar grant, as well as the State of California that gave a 750,000 dollar grant.

So the city, in terms of what it has done to help found the institution, has been an important part.

In the Greater Los Angeles area, certainly people from the Japanese-American community have rallied together to provide financial support but a tremendous amount of volunteer support as well.

Auspicious Beginning

MJ: When did the museum officially open?

IH: The museum opened to the public it May of 1992, and it was an auspicious beginning because it occurred on the day of the Rodney King trail. When the results came back and there were major riots here in Los Angeles we were scheduled to open to the public. Former Prime Minister Kaifu had come to Los Angeles to be a part of the opening, as did many important dignitaries from all over the country.

Needless to say, we had to change some of those plans but, in many ways, it showed the importance of the museum as an educational institution, that there was a great deal of understanding between cultures and between cautious segments of our various communities, and the long-term need to address that through education was one of the reasons that this institution was founded.

Family Background

MJ: What was your family's personal experience with this?

IH: Well, I'm a third-generation, Sansei. My father was born here in Los Angeles and my grandfather and my grandmother came to Southern California in the early 1900s. My father, because World War II broke out, was drafted by the U.S. Army, served in the army, and was schedules to be discharged just shortly before Pearl Harbor Day. Needless to say, he stayed in the army as a result of that, but my father's family were all forced to leave their homes. My grandfather's family were all forced to leave their homes. My grandfather was into farming. He had to leave behind his farm.

They were first taken to Santa Anita Rae Track, and from there sent to Roar in Arkansas, and so all of my aunts and uncles, my grandfather were all put into camp. My grandmother, who was ill at the time, was separated from the family. She was put into a hospital in Riverside and, unfortunately, passed away before they went to camp, but I'm sure for her it must have been a very hard way to end her life, and I'm sure for my grandfather and for my father's family that it was hard to be separated not only for just loss of their home and their farms and so forth but to have the family split up in that regard.

My mother was born in Japan so, actually, I'm part Nisei, part Sansei, so they were very much affected by the war.

Parallel Experiences of Racism

MJ: What do you say to critics who say that it's unfair to make the comparison between what happened here and what happened in Germany? How do you respond?

IH: Well, those are certainly different events. The incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II, they were denied their rights, they had to give up what they had worked for up until that point. Two-thirds of them were born in this country and they were put in camps where there were barbed wires, armed guards.

The death camps in Europe were certainly a totally different experience, but the roots of that, in terms of racism and the fear and the kind of discrimination that can ultimately result, if unchecked, in whether it was the incarceration of Japanese-Americans or the death camps during World War II. I think it is important to understand those parallels. It certainly is not the same experiences, ant there is certainly, from our perspective, no attempt to say that, but I think what is important is that there are similarities in the fact that people were herded from their homes and forced to live behind barbed wires of in confined concentration camps.

Reluctance to Talk about Incarceration

MJ: We've noticed a reluctant on the part of some of the people who have been through this experience to talk about that. Why is that?

IH: For most of us that are third generation we didn't learn about the camp experience directly from our families. My family talked about being in something called "camp" but, quite frankly, I didn't know what that meant until I got to college and did a research paper as part of the class, and I heard that story repeated over and over again by my friends or others that I met.

After the war the Niseis came back to the West Coast, some remained in the Midwest and some went East, but all of them were determined to rebuild their lives, to contribute to their country and to make a better place for their own children. So they never talked about the experience. I think they wanted to bury it, put it behind them, and it wasn't until a most recent period working to obtain redress and an apology from the U.S. government that more of the stories have begun now to be shared and told.

So I can understand it was a painful period. For many of them they could not understand why the government did not provide them the rights that they were entitled to under the U.S. constitution. But I think that they were determined to ensure that their families were able to have many opportunities that this country has to offer. They were loyal Americans and, you know, I think just put it behind them.

Now I think they're, through the work that we are doing and through the fact that I think they recognize that if they don't share the story and if they don't help all Americans understand what happened, that it is liable to happen again.

MJ: Thanks you for joining us today.

IM: Thank you very much

Interviewee: Tomo Mukai
Interviewer: Mark Joseph

MJ: Tomo Mukai, thank you for joining us today. This place we're sitting right now has a special meaning to you. Can you tell us about this?

TM: Well, 50 years ago we were interned here and my two brothers and I and my mother and father lived here, and it was in Heart Mountain, Wyoming, and it was very cold at wintertime and it was nice during summer. But when I was a kid all we thought to do was just to play, and I think my dad and mom had a rough time.

MJ: When you sit here right now and you look around, what sort of memories come back to you?

TM: Not much really except that we lived here.

Start of War and Word to Move

MJ: When did your parents come to the United States?

TM: My dad came over here back in 1917 and then went back and came back out here in 1923, and then my mother came out here in 1930.

My father before the war was vice president of Mutual Trading Company and that's when the war started. When the war started we were at Griffith Park Zoo with a family named Takahashi, and I remember the siren blowing full blast.

And then I think it was sometime in 1942 we sat at the corner of Alainacan and Beverly, I mean, not Beverly but Garvey, and we took a bus from there and we went to camp to Pomona.

MJ: Do you remember when your family first got the word that you'd be moving to the camps?

TM: No.

MJ: Do you have any idea what your parents were feeling or thinking at the time when this happened?

TM: Well, I really don't know because they never talked about it, nobody ever talked about it. My folks, especially my mom, we never talked anything about camp, and after they came back they just went to on their way and tried to put life together.

MJ: Did your parents lose their property?

TM: No, they didn't lose their property. They lost everything that was in.

MJ: So when you got the work, you got on buses and took off?

TM: Yeah.

Life in Camp

MJ: So we're in the room right now, but it's obviously really bare now. What was it like back then?

TM: Like this except for the furniture that my dad made or whatever he put it. Mainly all the stuff, you know, they give you a bed, a cot, or otherwise just the stuff that you make. Just like if you look over there I think he made that part and that's where he had a number and that's how they found us.

MJ: What was a typical day like in your young life?

TM: Like I said, eat and play. That's about it.

MJ: You had a lot of friends of your age?

TM: Yeah.

MJ: And what kind of games did you play?

TM: Baseball, football, wintertime make a sled and go down the hill.

MJ: What about parents? What would parents be doing on an average day?

TM: My dad used to work at the mess hall. I guess my mother, I don't know. She used to do her think, I guess.

MJ: When you were a kid in the camps and just hanging out, did you think you were an American or a Japanese, or did you not think about those kinds of things?

TM: Well, we were Japanese because all we did was talk Japanese, we weren't talking English. My dad and mom couldn't talk English, so we talked in Japanese.

MJ: So you thought of yourself as Japanese?

TM: Yeah, but now I can't talk Japanese. Whatever I knew I kind of forgot it. I've got a little bit.

MJ: How long did your family spend in the campus?

TM: From '42 to '46, I think.

Moving the Barracks

MJ: How did they track you down and find out that you were the family that had lived in this area?

TM: Well, what happened is that my dad put this number up against the wall here, and I guess after 50 years they were looking at the barracks and they found this number and they looked this up, and that number belonged to my dad and our family. So that's when they asked us if we wanted to go up there to Wyoming and take a look at our barracks, so my kid and I, we went.

MJ: So you traveled to Wyoming with your son, and did you bring this back physically to California?

TM: The barrack, well, we helped them take it apart for a couple of days. We didn't do too much work, but we did some of it.

MJ: So they brought this back piece by piece?

TM: Yeah, piece by piece. They took it all apart. They took the roof off and took the sides off and they trucked it down from Wyoming in October '94.

Trying to Forget Past

MJ: Did you talk about this kind of thing with your kids and your family a lot?

TM: No.

MJ: Why is there a reluctant to talk about things like this?

TM: Well, it's in the past so you try to forget about it.

MJ: Other groups seem to keep their memories alive remind people constantly of the injustices that they suffered. What is it about the Japanese character that doesn't want to swell on the past and things like that?

TM: Well, I think my folks never did talk about it so I figured it was like an everyday thing where they will keep it in your mind and they may want to make sure they remembered things like this, but they never talked about it, so I never talked about it.

MJ: Could this happen again?

TM: I don't think so, not in our time anyway.

MJ: What would you like to have people learn from your experience?

TM: Well, I feel that if you are a citizen of this country you should be treated as a citizen of this country and not just like a minority.

MJ: Thanks you for joining us today.

TM: Thank you.