Nancy Ukai | Interview 2 | March 30, 2022

EARDLEY-PRYOR: Today is Wednesday, March 30, 2022. My name is Roger Eardley-Pryor, from the Oral History Center of The Bancroft Library at the University of California Berkeley. This is interview session number two with Nancy Ukai as a part of the Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Project. Nancy, it's wonderful to see you again. Remind me where you're located, please. UKAI: I'm in Berkeley, California, at home. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Great. I am at home in Santa Rosa, California. We are recording over Zoom. At the end of our last session together, you had mentioned how you and Jim were both enrolled at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, the SOAS program, and that you had completed a cultural media anthropology degree there. And in the wake of that, then around 2008, you moved back to Berkeley, where you had grown up. I want to ask about that degree program. What was it? What is cultural media anthropology? UKAI: Media anthropology 00:01:00explores how we make media -- "we" being people, society -- and then how media shapes us. And so it can be anything from postcards and printed media to, of course, electronic media. And this was 2008, so I think iPhones had only been around for, what -- EARDLEY-PRYOR: Like a year maybe. UKAI: -- not that long, yeah. Facebook was relatively new. So we were getting this degree in a time where phones weren't even the main thing. I remember one professor saying he was interested in phones versus the internet, and [laughter] that's the trouble of being an older person in a class of young people: the young people are all thinking, "Well, the internet is the phone." At any rate, it was a really perfect major for me, because I had been a journalist, and was still writing, and was also interested in thinking about how information 00:02:00is transmitted, and how that affects how you send it, how you create it, and then how it's received. And, in addition, the University College London is right geographically nearby the SOAS campus, and they're connected under the University of London umbrella, and I was able to audit a few courses in material culture. Their Archeology Department is really famous, and material culture comes out of archeology, so that was really special: fantastic professors, very open, and really helped me think about material culture, which I didn't know at the time was going to help me in future projects. And then the other thing is around that time my husband was getting his Ph.D., and I was listening to a BBC radio program called A History of the World in 100 Objects, and it was a collaboration between the BBC and the British Museum. The British Museum director 00:03:00had gone around the museum and chosen 100 artifacts in their collection at the British Museum that he thought told a history of the world, so from preliterate times to the present. And I remember hearing about that project, and listening to some of the installments -- it's funny: we're such a visual world, but they actually started on the radio with no images -- and I thought, "Wow, this would be a great project for the Japanese American incarceration, because so much material stuff was lost." What survives? And what stories do they tell, especially when the community has self-silenced for so long? What do the objects tell us? And how can we interview people who have direct memories of them? Now, it's very late in 2016 is when we applied for our grant. We should have done this 20 years ago, but you do what you can. So that was very influential in my thinking, as well. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Where does your passion and interest for material culture come from? 00:04:00I'm thinking back about your year in the Buddhist temple, creating silk. Or your mother getting into macramé and creating this incredible art. I've heard you talk about letters, the materiality of letters, and how important those are in recording history, and how valuable they've been to things that you've uncovered in archives, or family letters that you've mentioned. So I'm just wondering, where and why do you think this interest and passion for material culture has come from for you? UKAI: I guess I've always been interested in things. I'm not sure why except that, now that I think about it, again, my mother was a real collector of things, as was my grandfather, who collected rocks, and my uncle, who was the architect, loves art and kind of ethnographic art, things that the collection of is very problematic, but anyway. At that time I was very interested also 00:05:00in textiles, which led me to become a weaving apprentice at Kotokuji Temple in Japan. And so, actually -- this may seem like a tangent -- my media anthropology master's degree thesis was about baby transport and, in other words, baby carriers, and the materiality of how women -- it's mostly women -- carry their infants after birth. And that became, because it's media, the visual representation of baby transport. So what took me into that was an interest in the textiles and the materials that people used, whether it's bark or a baby cradle on the back, which is what indigenous baby carriers were called, or slings. There's all kinds of material things that bind babies to the mother after they're born, and they have a lot of meaning because some materials are thought to be an extension of the womb, or there's this transitional period between when the baby's born and then there's this separate 00:06:00thing outside the body. Meanwhile, in the Victorian world and in the colonial world, women are pushing their babies in wheeled vehicles separate from the body, so there became this visual dichotomy between the colonized countries being quote-unquote "primitive," and things on the body, and carrying a baby on your back or your front or whatever, and not thinking about what is culturally specific and why that's done, simply using that as a category to say "they're primitive, they need to be governed and administered," while we in the West use these highfalutin mechanical things that keep the baby separate. Anyway, that's a whole other thing, but that is what I did for my master's thesis, which got me into postcards, and then I began to collect African American baby postcards, which is another topic, and someday I'd like to 00:07:00donate that collection to a museum, because what I'm looking at is how in the 1900s, when the postcard craze was at its peak in the world, you could see how African American babies were being shown in these postcards in the most vicious, terrible ways, and it was a real eye-opener for me, because you think you kind of understand the racism in your country, and yet I realized I knew nothing, because I thought, how can you stereotype and make a little, sweet, newborn baby into this monster, or this -- ? It was beyond my understanding. So I sort of went from collecting postcards about babies into -- you know how the internet is -- this whole category of African American children, and how they're victimized through postcards, and sent 00:08:00all over the world. So I was beginning to look at stereotypes. And before Photoshop, how particular images would go from being a photograph to a postcard to then, because of weak copyright laws, many, many, many companies taking that image. And the more they did it, the more they reproduced it, it became cruder, grosser, removed, of course, from the original, which was terrible to begin with, but becomes this iconic stereotype, like Aunt Jemima type thing. And you realize the certain tropes: watermelons, cotton, whatever. Anyway, so the baby carrying actually took me into another area that is kind of something I've gotten away from, because I'm doing Japanese American history. But I'd really like to work on that when I'm done. EARDLEY-PRYOR: At the end of your and Jim's degrees in London, 00:09:00you chose to move back to the United States and to resettle in Berkeley, after your children had moved on into their adult lives. Why come back to Berkeley? UKAI: Yeah, it wasn't a plan so much as a convenient thing to do. Because Jim's roots are in Connecticut, and mine are in the Bay Area, and because we'd spent a lot of time here when we were coming back to the U.S. from Japan, it just became a nice place to land for me. Yeah, and Jim was, luckily, very happy with that. And so another issue is that we were going to find a house. Jim was doing his Ph.D. and was going to do a year of fieldwork in Japan. He was doing one on built culture in a Japanese village, and so we were looking for a place 00:10:00that we could get the New Jersey belongings out of storage, put them in a garage in a house that we would buy, and then rent the house out and go to Japan, and we ended up buying a house which didn't have a garage, and I ended up staying behind. And anyway, now we're planted here, in this house. EARDLEY-PRYOR: That's great. UKAI: Which is actually quite like the house, in terms of the year it was built and its feeling, to my house I grew up in, half a mile up the road. And this neighborhood -- which I hope you'll come visit sometime because you're close by -- turns out it was my mother's favorite neighborhood, which I happened to find out. And the way we came across this house was very serendipitous, so my mother's always around. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah. Well, that's beautiful. Things come full circle in some ways. When you returned to California, and this next chapter of your life that we're talking about today, what were some of your experiences reengaging in life 00:11:00and in community networks in California? UKAI: I would say that the first year I was kind of getting settled and unpacking, and I frankly don't really remember. But I must say if we came back here in 2008, and my aunt had just died, and my dad had died a year before that, so there was a lot of kind of selling my parents' house and sorting through their belongings, so there was a transition of not only our moving but also the family changing. And, in fact, a lot of going through their belongings -- this is true of many people of my age -- we Sansei find all of these things about World War II that our parents kept, but we didn't ask about them. We didn't know they existed. And so that's excavated a whole lot of memories, questions, and regret that you didn't talk to them more, because now you can't ask people, especially -- EARDLEY-PRYOR: What were some of those things? 00:12:00UKAI: Letters, photo albums. In fact, let me just see -- I have it right here. This is something my mother had saved, which is -- EARDLEY-PRYOR: What does it say? UKAI: -- the government's final report, called "Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast, 1942." And when she was working at the Library of Congress, the government had just published this. And everybody was throwing them in the trash, and my mother said, "Oh, I'll take one." And now they're actually quite hard to find, but what I learned was that in the inside flyleaf she Scotch taped -- she put her family seal, that says Fumi. And then she pasted her indefinite leave card, essentially a parole card for when she left Topaz. She's given permission, and it's fingerprinted on the back. Anyway, she had put in -- oh! And, in fact, in it is 00:13:00this alien enemy permit to travel with her fingerprint, when she left Los Angeles to come to Berkeley to rejoin the family, and just all of these -- her Library of Congress ID card, 1944; articles. So this little book has become this little, small treasure trove for me. And she even Scotch taped in this envelope here so that she could insert other papers. So this is the kind of thing. I mean, I knew it existed but I didn't know where it was. And not only is the contents something interesting to read now, and valuable, but, of course, she personalized it. And so it's become a touchstone for me, and connects me to her, and the history. Because I knew that she was always -- everybody in that generation in my family was very engaged with the history, and it's not like they sat around and talked about it a lot but it affected them in profound ways, because they would always 00:14:00be looking at books, or if something came on the news they would talk about it. And as a kid I didn't really pay that much attention, and, of course, now I wish that I did, and just plied them with questions and turned on the tape recorder. But at any rate, so material things are sometimes the only thing we have left, and they're silent, and so with our project what we're trying to do is coax out those voices the best we can. EARDLEY-PRYOR: That's the "50 Objects" JACS project? UKAI: That's the "50 Objects" JACS project. But even as a journalist, I'm just always kind of curious, and like to ask questions about things, but I guess the material objects, and possibly because we are in a digital world now, obviously. And so there's something, too, about sensory aspects of material things -- touching, smelling -- you've asked about smells, right? -- that is, I think, human and comforting. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah, there's deep memory associated with all of those tactile and auditory 00:15:00-- all the different senses that come together to shape memory over time. You've spoken about this reengagement with some of your mother's belongings, and harkening back to her experience in the camps, in Topaz. And I'm wondering what relationship that has with your engagement in the Japanese American community in the Bay Area upon your return to California. UKAI: So I think what happened is I was invited, probably in 2012 or 2013, which was only three or four years after we came back, to join a fundraising committee for the Topaz Museum, and this is actually from someone who was, I think, born at Topaz. And he just said, "Oh, welcome back. You need to get involved. They're going to build a museum. It's very important that we support it. There's going to be a lunch. Why don't you join the committee?" So that is what got me 00:16:00involved, probably to some people's regret. [laughter] And that was definitely a way to reengage with people, and meet people who, having been away from Berkeley from 1976 to 2008 -- what is that? [laughter] EARDLEY-PRYOR: Quite some time. Was that through the Friends of Topaz that reached out to you? UKAI: So he was a member of the Friends of Topaz, which was probably a committee, I'd say, of twenty, twenty-five people. And the fundraising lunch committee was much smaller, maybe ten or fifteen. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Who was the person that invited you back in to do -- UKAI: His name is Ken Yamashita. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Great. What happened with the fundraising committee and the event that you were working on? UKAI: So I guess we must have been working on this in the summer and fall of 2013, because I believe the event was held in November 2013, and it was 00:17:00really fun, and it was exciting. And when I joined, I asked Ann Tamaki Dion, who was the President of the Friends of Topaz, "How many people would you see coming to this thing?" And she said, "If we get a hundred I'll be over the moon." Well, over three hundred people came, and a lot of Nisei. I can't remember exactly, but oh gosh, dozens. And so it really had a reunion feeling to it. And we were working on things like, of course, the menu and the entertainment, and I got super involved in -- being a writer and a journalist, I made a program, a double-faced program on eleven-by-seventeen paper, with color copy. I wrote the script for the emcee, and I was on the committee that made table decorations. At that time I didn't have a lot to do anyway, and just got involved in a pretty intense way, and got to know Ann, and probably emailed with 00:18:00Jane a few times, especially about the program. My daughter designed the t-shirt. There was a tote bag. So there was just a lot of stuff I was doing. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah. You mentioned Jane. I'm assuming that's Jane Beckwith, the President of the Topaz Museum Board? UKAI: Yes, thank you, yeah, who I'd never met, but she was this person who had been in Delta, Utah, who had been shepherding the idea of a museum for decades. EARDLEY-PRYOR: What was the relationship between the Friends of Topaz in the Bay Area that you had become engaged with and had this large event with, and those in Delta on the Topaz Museum Board? UKAI: Right. So I was just a member of the committee. Ann Dion was the head of the Friends of Topaz, and the Friends of Topaz is not a 501(c)(3). It's just an informal group that helps the Topaz Museum do things, especially in the Bay Area, because that's where Topaz people came from, the counties 00:19:00in this area: San Francisco, San Mateo, Alameda County, Contra Costa County, and so on. And so many of the descendants came back to live here, and the people who came back from the camps, like my parents. And so there's still a core group of people here, and the Friends of Topaz -- as I understood it, it wasn't called that at that time. It was called something like Topaz Alums of 1945 or something. It was some reference to the high school class. It was a very long, long title. At any rate, they were in contact with the museum, and would kind of help out the museum whenever the museum asked for help. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Where did you host this event that had these three hundred people that came to have their reconnections together? UKAI: So that event was hosted at the Buchanan Street Y, off Geary Street in San Francisco, in Japantown, 00:20:00and that's the place where people were rounded up and they were put on a bus and taken to the Tanforan Racetrack, which had been converted into a temporary concentration camp before the Utah camp was built. And at the time people didn't know where they were going to be going. They didn't know that they were going to be going to Utah. So it was a roundup point, and so some people who went to that lunch, I believe, were actually children at the time, and were taken from the Buchanan Street Y. So it had a big historical resonance for people. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Did your mother or father ever talk about that roundup and transfer to Tanforan? UKAI: You know, they didn't, and I'm sure if I'd asked them they would have had things to say. So I know that it was from the Presbyterian Church in Berkeley. 00:21:00And I've talked to neighbors and friends. Dr. Frank Kami, who I knew from the time I was in elementary school, remembers that he was in Berkeley High School, and they had a car, so he said he and his brother were helping people move their luggage to the church. He said, "We were just running around like crazy that day because people had gotten rid of their cars, and we were -- " I don't even know what happened to his car, but he said, "We were driving around and helping people move." Now, their family had a property on University Avenue near Martin Luther King, which is now Trader Joe's, that area, and it was an old, I believe, Victorian house, and so he went to Berkeley High. And I guess during the war they stored their belongings into a closet or something, and everything got ransacked. The house was used and rented by war-related officials. And then when they came back 00:22:00their house was used as a hostel. But Frank was in high school. He was separated from his girlfriend at the time, so he was very sad. He'd learned to make furniture at Topaz, and actually a lot of his furniture -- and, in fact, I think there's a room dedicated to his family at the museum, so he's very grateful to the museum. And he has been -- I feel that one of the casualties of my being vocal about what I think are the problems with the Topaz Museum has been a relationship with Frank, who's torn because he is so loyal to the museum and to Jane Beckwith, but also I've known him since I was like seven or eight years old, and I'm sixty-seven now. So it's unfortunate. EARDLEY-PRYOR: You had mentioned your work at this fundraiser, writing some of the scripts for the emcee, and drafting this information program. 00:23:00I hear the word "scripts" and it makes me think about what the next engagement piece was for you, with regard to Topaz Museum, the concern about the language of their scripts for what the museum would show in their exhibits. How did you become engaged with what the script was going to be at the Topaz Museum, and what evolved from that? UKAI: Well, yeah, that's a great question, because what happened was the fundraiser and the reunion was a great success. And Satsuki Ina, who was born at Tule Lake, but her parents and her brother were at Topaz, and Kimi Kodani Hill, whose grandfather is Chiura Obata, who was an Issei man who was painting many important documentary paintings at Topaz, and Karen Tei Yamashita, a super prominent writer in our community -- well, nationally, she's won national awards. But at any rate, the three of them 00:24:00gave lectures at that event. And so, on so many levels it was really stimulating and invigorating. But after it was over we had kind of a debriefing meeting, and I remember asking, "So that was a great fundraiser. When's the museum opening, and who's working on the script?" And that is really what started this road to what became a fight over the script. Because we then had a meeting with Jane Beckwith, who actually flew into California, I want to say, within a month and met with the small fundraising committee, or the small fundraiser committee, and tried to answer some of our questions about who wrote it, will anybody be able to review it, what process was used, how does this compare to other 00:25:00museums. Now, we're not museum professionals, but we know enough about what we've seen in other museums, and Manzanar National Historic Site, and so on and so forth. So one pivotal moment at that meeting was when, I think -- and it's in many people's memories -- I said, "Who writes the script for the docents?" Because I was thinking, they're the people who visitors will interface with, so how will they be trained? And they're in Delta. What do they know about the history? And Jane Beckwith said, "That's my territory." And I remember that even people who even now are quite loyal to her -- and I'm sorry to use this vocabulary of "loyal" and "disloyal," because it's really triggering and calls back the divisions and fractures in the community in World War II -- but even somebody who -- well, actually, it was Ken Yamashita. He was highly supportive of her later, and said to us later, "I thought that was a very important moment, because she 00:26:00seemed to be saying, 'Don't worry about that, I'm in charge.'" And I think the general feeling was that the museum, meaning the board and whoever was involved in creating the museum project, was not really welcoming of our voices questioning the process of writing a narrative. And then it came out that there were no historians who were involved in writing it, and there were no focus groups, although the museum said, in their defense, that they'd been holding meetings with people, which they had, but they weren't structured kind of meetings to elicit information about particular events. So, as it turns out, it sounds like it was Jane Beckwith and the museum fabrication company -- I think it was called WOED in the Bay Area who were working on it -- and the museum fabrication company said, "It's expected that you would have an advisory committee," but at that point there was none. EARDLEY-PRYOR: What did you do 00:27:00with that information, and what came out of those meetings? UKAI: So then what happened and came out of those meetings is that Ann Dion said, "Well, let's look into what other museums do." This is a very small committee, and we'd just been kind of talking about getting the committee together to support, raise money for the new museum. So, essentially, Patti Iiyama, who was a descendent, I think she called up Heart Mountain, and I called up another -- maybe she called Manzanar. So we just started doing some of our research and saying, "Hey, what was your process? Who wrote it? How long did it take? What was the role of historians and descendants?" And then, on January 6 -- and I looked this up -- of 2014, I wrote a letter, which I sent to the entire committee of what is now called the Friends of Topaz -- at that time it was something else, Topaz Alums -- and outlined my concerns 00:28:00about the process that the museum board had used to create a narrative, which we were not aware of what was going to be the content or the perspective, on how do you frame it, what are the historical points, whose interviews, whose words are going to be used? And in this letter I said, "I have seen a few graphics and visual elevations of the museum, and one thing that concerned me was the last room," which is, of course, a very important room, because it's the last memory, it's the last thing people see before they leave the museum. And this photograph showed four Nisei kind of in bobby socks, standing under a sign that said Topaz Avenue, in front of all the barracks, in front of a dusty block. And Topaz Avenue is the kind of thing that the WRA did: they put sort of street signs in the block to make it seem like a suburban neighborhood 00:29:00and not a prison camp. And so that concerned me, that they're standing under this street sign, which is obviously a prop of the government to make you think that you're in a normal situation that you're not. And then the other thing is this picture was part of a larger display called Celebrate the People. And the Celebrate the People theme was going to be, according to the board, thirty people who had exhibited resilience in their life. And so it was basically success stories: astronauts, doctors, dentists, filmmakers. And the Board President said, "These will be Topaz people, but, if warranted, other examples can be used, and please turn in names of candidates and the board will review them. And it can be more than thirty, since it can be a rotating exhibit." So an important donor was already selected, and it just seemed like, wow, this is the model minority. You're uplifting these quote-unquote "success stories," 00:30:00implying, of course, that this terrible, horrifying, brutal imprisonment period ended with everyone going on to assimilate, be successful, and be celebrated. So that I included in my letter, which is like a one-page letter to, whatever, twenty-five people. And I said, "I'm not including the board on this because I think this is a community discussion. There have been no historians. There have been no focus groups. And it could be that if our community discusses this last room, and, indeed, the narrative, that people will like it. And I can live with that. But we at least should have a discussion. And so I'm excluding the board in this letter because I think we as a community need to discuss it." Nobody responded. [laughter] No, wrong: one person named Dianne Fukami did, and she is a journalist and a writer, and she said, "Hmm, that's interesting. It sounds like a meeting is called for." So that 00:31:00was good, but then nothing happened. And that was typical. So I should just preface this by saying I told Ann Dion -- very close to Jane, and a long, staunch supporter of the Friends of the Topaz group and the museum -- "Ann, I've written this letter, and I just want to let you know. I don't want to send it out to everybody and blindside you. And I'm going to question the process for putting together the museum narrative, and I wanted to let you know." And her words were -- we're on the phone, it must have been like January 3 -- she said, "Wow, you're putting a bomb on the table." And I was so surprised, because I thought, well, what does that mean? And later on I came to realize that people are very protective of Jane Beckwith, and feel that she doesn't necessarily have the most exemplary social skills 00:32:00-- people say, "Oh, she doesn't have people skills. She's a little removed, a little distant sometimes." But people feel that she's worked so hard that she must be supported and protected from criticism. So I think that's what it meant when she said, "You're putting a bomb on the table." In other words, you're talking about issues that other people have been concerned about but haven't raised. And she said, "But that's good." She was later to change her mind. [laughter] EARDLEY-PRYOR: Did this become a bomb in some way? It sounds like there was no response to your email that went out to the Friends of Topaz group. Did this eventually become a bomb in some way? UKAI: It did. It did, because what I later did was -- well, first of all, the Friends of Topaz internally discussed this a little bit, and I was put in touch with a Topaz board member in San Francisco. I think there were seven. At that time, in 2014, there were 00:33:00probably eight members of the board and three Japanese Americans, so it's always been a white majority board. One of them has since died -- Steve Koga has passed away -- but Bill Sugaya and Steve Koga was in Utah. Rick Okabe was in Salt Lake City -- not a Topaz descendent but a really great guy, he lives in Utah. And Bill Sugaya, Hisashi Sugaya, who was born at Topaz, lives in San Francisco. So I went to lunch with him. We got put in contact, and it was like -- the letter got back to the board, clearly. And we met for lunch, and he said, "Where have you been? We've been working really hard on this." And I said, "Well, I've been actually out of Berkeley for the last thirty years." And he said, "Jane knows more than anybody. We don't need historians." And he's very direct. And we talked for maybe an hour, and at the end he agreed 00:34:00that he would ask Jane Beckwith if certain members of the committee could review the narrative, which was still being written, and have feedback. But the museum was trying to open in 2014, so we're talking like nine months, and they were very reluctant to have people present this bump in the road onto what they were trying to rush ahead to open the museum. And so it was all kind of very hurried, and under stress at the time. But then we started to get the actual samples, and it was clear there were problems. EARDLEY-PRYOR: What were some of the problems you saw in the early drafts? UKAI: The tone. A lot of very general statements were made, like "Everybody felt," or I remember one statement was something like 00:35:00"Despite this, people stood up proudly and carried on." And it was just these blanket statements which characterized more than eight thousand people as having one point of view. And also just the use of many words like "luckily" or "fortunately" or "in the end" -- so, in other words, softening words. And you'd have to go through the script to really highlight those particular things. But in addition, the emphasis on certain topics which we felt were not pertinent to the Topaz story. For example, there was a very large section on Japantown in Salt Lake City, which is interesting, but they weren't incarcerated. And it's good to have that, but it was very large, and it also painted Japantown as this kind of happy ethnic community where there were udon stores and this and that, and just really a lack of discussing the real discrimination. Or, when they talked about laws that were discriminatory, 00:36:00just kind of passing it over. It really didn't feel like it was advocating for our history. Then, the museum in December actually hired a writer to help them kind of revamp and write the rest of the narrative, which was still being produced, and her name is Patricia Wakida. And so at the time people felt, oh -- when I wrote my letter on January 6, I said, "We understand that Patricia Wakida has been hired to help the museum produce the rest of the manuscript, the narrative, and we're pleased about that." But we still were searching for a way to have, as descendants and survivors, input. One of the problems is that we all know so little about the history ourselves that unless you took classes or you have a degree in Asian American history, or you're just reading on your own, 00:37:00people's knowledge of the camp history is very selective. Maybe you know what your parents went through, but you don't necessarily know about what happened in other camps, or about draft resistors in Heart Mountain, or about the people who were stigmatized and sent to Tule Lake. And so we are all saying, we're not historians, we don't pretend to be in a position to judge, but we do know that we should have a voice in the narrative that's going to represent our family and our community history, and this feels wrong. So there were things that factually just could be pointed out to be wrong, and you can just look at the internet and we're hurriedly typing things in and sending it to Jane Beckwith or to the board to say, "This seems wrong," et cetera, but it was clear that the museum was plowing ahead and intended to open in the fall of 2014, and this Patricia Wakida was hired to shore things up. So it wasn't clear quite how things were going to develop, but we knew that we had to keep pressing for representation. 00:38:00And then I had a two-hour discussion with Jane Beckwith, because I was seen as the person who was most vocal about expressing our concerns. So we talked, and she said, "Okay, let's come to an agreement where I will send out portions of the narrative, and then people will have forty-eight hours to respond with comments." And that was better than nothing, so I remember saying yes, and responding, and telling the rest of the committee in the Bay Area that this is what was agreed upon. And that became a real disaster, because we weren't told in advance when you were going to get this email with the script, so it might just arrive in your mailbox on Friday. And I remember one script came literally on the weekend of the Super Bowl and Chinese New Year's. There was no time that anybody was going to have to sit down and read this and in forty-eight 00:39:00hours produce something that would be valuable. Anyway, so it just became a real very kind of messy, difficult, tension-filled process of the museum sending out these bits and pieces of the narrative, and then people rushing back with comments. And that didn't seem professional because we're just a group of survivors and descendants, and we should have a voice, but we're not historians. So -- EARDLEY-PRYOR: Well, eventually the National Park Service gets engaged in this script rewrite issue. How did that develop, and what came from their engagement? UKAI: So we were plodding along, sending our comments back to the museum board, and it just didn't seem like -- we were putting Band-Aids on something that needed a thorough 00:40:00review. Yeah, we were putting Band-Aids on something that needed surgery. So it was sometime in the spring -- and I should look up the date -- that the National Park Service JACS grant program -- Japanese American Confinement Sites program -- which is a unit within the National Park Service, which awards annually grants to different projects which disseminate information and education about World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans and Japanese Latin Americans, and so on and so forth. So actually the Topaz Museum got, in the end, at least $800,000 in JACS grants, so for construction, for doing the narrative. And my digital project that I do with Dave Izu, "50 Objects," was the recipient of a JACS grant project. So, at any rate, at that point it [a newsletter from the National Park Service JACS grant program] was coming to my mother's name in our house, although she was deceased. And the 00:41:00newsletter announced all the previous years' awardees, and how they were doing, and documentaries and curriculums and this and that, and then also included an application for the next round. And there was an envelope, and it said on the envelope something like, "This is the fifth anniversary of the JACS grant program. How are we doing? Please let us know." And I looked at that and took that as an invitation to tell them about the struggles we were having at Topaz." And that was really hard. EARDLEY-PRYOR: This was in the spring of 2014? UKAI: Correct, yeah. EARDLEY-PRYOR: You said it was really hard. I'm sorry, you had said that it was really hard, and I apologize for cutting you off. UKAI: Well, no, because a small group of us -- I would say Satsuki Ina; Susan Hayase, who is an activist in San Jose and a Gila River descendent, so not Topaz; the 00:42:00Omori sisters, Chizu Omori, Emiko Omori -- Satsuki Ina, Susan Hayase, were writing responses to the narratives, so you can just see people's remarks. Because eventually I think we had a document -- it's like a Google Doc, and you could see everybody's comments. And you could see people like Susan -- who was on a national committee, I think appointed by Bill Clinton, to award grants after the redress bill had passed, very informed and extremely knowledgeable -- and you could just see on the timestamp that Susan was just typing out these answers very quickly and responding. She was a wonderful advocate. But at any rate, it did seem that despite our attempts to put a Band-Aid on these problems, we saw that it needed serious work by professionals. I believe by then the museum had asked two historians, Cherstin Lyon and Greg Robinson, 00:43:00to become advisors. So after the fact, and after pressure, they were releasing portions of the narrative to us, and they had hired this writer, Patricia Wakida, and then they had gotten two historians, belatedly, to come and look at the narrative. So anyway, despite that, it just felt like, wow, this museum's going to open in the fall, and it's going to be terrible, and we've sort of been given a little crack in the door to have our input, but the problems are too major. So I ended up writing to the National Park Service, because I thought it was too late, but I wrote a letter saying, "I'm a Topaz descendent. Twelve of my relatives were at Topaz. I'm on a committee that was helping with a fundraiser last year, but now that I've been given access to some parts of the narrative I'm very concerned, and in the future when the National Park Service awards these grants, especially about museum narratives, there should be accountability measures in place. It's probably too late for this project, 00:44:00but I think there are serious flaws, and I'm very concerned about accountability, transparency, and the project itself." And then I included a PDF with images from the elevation of the museum, so kind of showing what photographs were going to be displayed, and with the information, and then I would put my critique, or my response. So I wasn't just writing this complaint letter, I actually included things which I thought they should know and would understand what my concern was. So I then wrote this letter, and it was interesting because before I wrote it, it was so intimidating, and I felt so scared to do that. Because I was questioning myself and thinking, why am I in these meetings at Ann Dion's house, and there's maybe seven people there, and I'm the only one saying, "I'm really concerned"? 00:45:00Other people I knew were concerned but weren't saying anything. So I think what it is, is sort of this, again, concern about protecting the museum as an institution, and all the work that had been done, and coming in in the ninth inning, essentially, before the museum's going to open and say, "Wait, this is an unprofessional process and it's not including people." So I would look around the table and think, why am I the only one saying something? What's wrong with me? Instead of being, oh, this is right. I was having, actually, coffee with Chizu Omori and Emiko Omori, who are the producer and director of Rabbit in the Moon, and very progressive, and extremely insightful about this history. And they kept saying, "No, you are doing the right thing. Your concerns are correct. They are wrong." And so it was funny, but I needed to be kind of bolstered by voices in reality -- or at least my reality. So anyway, I'm still thinking, should I respond 00:46:00to this National Park Service letter? And I distinctly remember sitting in one room in our house -- I remember it was in the afternoon -- and thinking, the stakes are so low for me. Why am I worried about this letter to a bureaucracy? The people in camp who really suffered, who were in prisons, who were in stockades, who were being shunned by their families and their relatives -- this is also being shunned, but at such a low, thin level, right? I'm not going to be arrested, or -- and I thought, if this museum opens in five years with the current narrative, and I was in a position to do something and I did nothing, how can I live with myself? This is small -- this is peanuts. This is nothing. So that made me feel better. And I wrote the letter. I also put in a voicemail to someone named Tom Leatherman, who is, I believe, the National Park Service person for, at that time, the Golden Gate area. And I'm not sure if I had met him yet, 00:47:00but I just left an email with my concerns, and I said, "I'm addressing this to Kara Miyagishima in the Denver office of the National Park Service, but I just wanted to let you know." So I sent my letter, and I expected nothing to happen, because I didn't know anything about the National Park Service and the JACS grant program, and I thought, okay, it'll land in someone's inbox and that's the end. Something like two or three days later I got a phone call, and then that started this whole process, which eventually ended up in the National Park Service doing their own kind of research, looking at the narrative, interviewing people, and saying, "We need a facilitated meeting by the National Park Service," who is the funder, "and we want to bring together the various stakeholders and have a discussion about it." EARDLEY-PRYOR: Wow. UKAI: That took place in Reno, which was, I think, a place that was convenient for people in Utah, people in Denver -- the National Park Service people in Denver -- and then Bay Area people. EARDLEY-PRYOR: What was that meeting like? Who did you feel like 00:48:00were your collaborators in that meeting? UKAI: Yeah. So who went to that meeting? Susan Hayase, who I'd mentioned earlier, in San Jose, and Mark Izu, who is a jazz musician but has a really strong sense of right and wrong. He's not normally someone who gets involved in these gnarly political things, although he's political himself. And I know people were surprised because Mark was not seen necessarily -- he's seen as an incredible artist, jazz musician, Asian-American jazz. Who went to that meeting? Chizu Omori, who was in her late eighties, and Emiko Omori, her sister, and they're long-term activists, and had created Rabbit in the Moon. Chizu is a columnist for the Nichi Bei Weekly. So Chizu, Emiko, me, Susan, and Mark were on our -- oh, and my cousin Tracy Takayanagi 00:49:00Hui. So she's Toddy's daughter, and is a person who's not given to getting involved in political things, but just felt that this wasn't correct. So she attended, too, and was kind of seen as someone who was more quote-unquote neutral. And then from the board's side -- because it was really kind of people who were critiquing resisting the narrative, and then the board's side -- was Jane Beckwith, Rick Okabe from Salt Lake City, Hisashi Sugaya from San Francisco, the board members, and then Kimi Kodani Hill and Ann Dion from the Friends of Topaz. And then Franklin Odo, who is the Founding Director of the Smithsonian Museum's Asian Pacific America Division. He came because he was also writing 00:50:00a theme study for the National Park Service on Asian American markers and memorials. So he came also as someone who was interested in it. And I had actually written to him about this, because I was just cold calling academics -- Gary Okihiro, Franklin Odo -- and just saying, "Help, what can we do?" So that's how I met Franklin. Yeah. And then there were several National Park Service people, and it took months to get this meeting ready. It was two days. EARDLEY-PRYOR: What came out of the meeting? And also, was the National Park Service essentially working as a mediator between the Topaz Museum Board and the community activists in the Bay? UKAI: Yes. So we were there on a Saturday, and it was really funny: they gave us Play-Doh and pipe cleaners. We sat down in our desks. I guess it's to relieve stress? I don't know. That was 00:51:00a little interesting. Anyway, and then we went through sort of -- I don't exactly remember how they structured it, although there is a written report that came out of that, and I was taking minutes, notes the entire time. I'm sure they were very concerned, thinking I would probably post it on social media, but I didn't do that. I just wanted a record. But at any rate, people talked about what they didn't like and what they were concerned about. And at one point it just seemed like, oh, the museum has the overwhelmingly strong support of the Topaz descendants who supported this narrative and said "Let's push forward." And during that meeting, I remember learning that the fifth section of the narrative -- which was very important, because it was about life in the camp, the Topaz, so there was a lot of whitewashing 00:52:00there -- and I realized that I and our side were never given it to review. And so we were kind of going in at a disadvantage because we had less information. So if there's something like five or six parts, we didn't get one major section. Maybe the sixth one wasn't written yet. But it was clear that Ann Dion and those people had gotten it. And I remember saying, "What? You got section five and we didn't?" And then Bill Sugaya, he pointed at Ann Dion and said, "Ann, don't answer that. You don't have to say anything." And it just became extremely tense because it was clear that information flow wasn't equal, that they were really digging in their heels. And at one point Franklin Odo actually, I remember, said to Jane, "Do you understand why we're here?" Which was, for him, 00:53:00I think a strong statement. It was such a naked kind of question about, do you understand what the stakes are and the reason we're all gathered here for this meeting? And then at the end of the day on Saturday, somebody -- I think it was Kimi Kodani Hill -- actually used the word "loyal," said, "You know, those of us who were loyal to the museum think that it needs to go forward," and there was kind of a rush to agree with that. And so then the meeting ended -- it was maybe five o'clock -- and I was very disconsolate, and I thought, okay, that's it, they won. And the National Park Service is kind of sitting there and being the moderator, not saying anything. Because we were pushing for a revamp of the whole thing. So at any rate we went to dinner. And then the next morning we came into the meeting, and I guess there were maybe fifteen people around the table. And because it ended in such a bad 00:54:00way with this discordance, the leader of the meeting said, "All right, everybody go around the room and say how you're feeling about where we are now." So people just kind of said, "Well, we didn't end on a very good note, I'm concerned," whatever. Then, the National Park Service went last, and the person who facilitated the meeting and who had the most power said, "I would like to thank the people who brought these concerns forward. There are deep concerns about the narrative, and if the National Park Service had seen this narrative at the time of the grant application, it would not have been funded." It was shocking, because I don't think anyone saw that coming, because we just were going around -- and basically it said, "This needs to be rewritten," and that was a decision. So that was shocking. 00:55:00In the meantime, I think what might have happened was there was some discussion the previous night after that, the way the meeting ended, where the museum had maybe been told, "This is not going to work," because they immediately came forward with a proposal saying, "We're not going to restructure the framing, but we're going to correct or revise areas that are problematic." And so it was a very conventional kind of narrative, and it's unfortunate because we could have probably pushed for something more just thinking about how do you frame the story. For example, let's talk about James Wakasa. Because the reason I began to do research on this sixty-three-year-old immigrant man from San Francisco, was rounded up in San Francisco, and got shot through the heart by a guard on April 11, 1943, was because I was very interested in that incident. My mother had talked about it. 00:56:00And it was probably one of the most important, if not the most important, event at the camp, and yet it was just kind of given a very shallow treatment. So on my own I went to the National Archives, and I was just doing research. I pulled out his file and was shocked that it was a really thick file. It was very controversial. This monument had been built. You could just see that the full story was much more rich and nuanced and filled with resistor voices that were not in the museum narrative at all. So I had started to do that research, and, for example, that story within the existing narrative at the time was just a bullet point. Oh, that's a bad term. [laughs] It was just one information point. And so to just kind of leave the narrative in place -- they were going to tweak around the edges -- it wasn't great. But it was a victory because it meant that the museum was not going to be able to open the museum with this 00:57:00very flawed narrative until a process was in place and with professional writers, and so on and so forth. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Wow. So there's a lot to unpack. I want to ask about your research on James Wakasa. This was something that you were just doing on your own? UKAI: Actually, let me backtrack a bit. I think I started to do that in earnest after the National Park Service said, "A revision is called for." And that seemed like such an important part of the history that I was really happy to dig into it, and that's probably when I got really involved, after the National Park Service report, and just went to the National Archives, and was stunned at what I saw. And that is what really introduced me to the riches and the stories, the unclassified documents, which had become declassified, and the kind of buried stories that are in these files, and kind of is what led me 00:58:00later on to apply for this grant to do "50 Objects." EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh, that's great. We'll get into this eventually, as well, about the Wakasa Memorial stone being discovered, in part because of research you did at the National Archives, at NARA. And I had the note that that Memorial map, for those that are interested in doing their own research on this, was at NARA in Record Group 59 in Box 2889, and that James Wakasa's evacuee case file is in Record Group 210 in the National Archives in D.C. But that was research you were doing in the wake of this mediated dialogue that the National Park Service oversaw that led to a rewriting of the Topaz Museum script. UKAI: And I have to add that before we went to the National Park Service facilitated meeting in Reno, I think we all had to sign some sort of release 00:59:00or something, or just say that we're going to take part. And what I found out was that Jane Beckwith didn't sign hers, and I was just told this informally by someone at the Park Service. And I said, "Well, if she didn't sign that, how come we all have to sign it and she doesn't have to?" Well, she's so important a player that I guess they didn't want to reschedule the meeting, and so on and so forth. So anyway, she was able to go to the meeting, and I guess might have agreed that there's going to be this meeting and you have to abide by the conclusion. I don't know. At any rate, what happened was after this momentous meeting and announcement by the National Park Service, I got a call from a person at the Utah Governor's Office who was in their Liaison Office for Ethnic Communities or something like that, and her name is Claudia Nakano. And I'd never met her, and she said, "I'm here in San Francisco on State business, 01:00:00and I've understood that there's some controversy about the Topaz Museum script, and I'd like to meet with you and talk about it." And I said, "Oh, that's fine." And she said, "I'm also going to be meeting with Ann Dion." And I said, "You know, why don't you meet with all of us at the same time, so you're not meeting with one group and another group, and just let us all meet together and then we can have a discussion." And she said, "Oh, okay, that's a good idea." So we ended up meeting at a hotel lobby in San Francisco, and it was Ann Dion and, I think, Kimi Hill, and me, Chizu Omori, Emiko Omori, and then Bill Sugaya, the Board member, came. So Claudia is talking, and then it turns out that people on the Friends of Topaz, I believe, were still resisting the decision of the National Park Service. And there was, I guess, concern that if the Topaz 01:01:00Museum Board didn't sign on to this revision proposal that things really couldn't go forward. And so at one point Claudia Nakano said, "So how do you all feel about this decision and the Reno meeting?" And basically the people in the Bay Area who were resisting the narrative were being painted as fringe elements, San Francisco Bay radicals who don't represent the community, pushing for something that isn't really representative of community voices. And so Claudia, who represented the Governor's Office, was hearing this, right? And Bill Sugaya stepped in towards the end of that meeting and said, "The Board supports the decision by the National Park Service." So that ended all discussion. It ended the meeting. He was a representative of the Board, 01:02:00and he was essentially saying, "We're going to do what they say." Now, they're the funders. He had been at the facilitated meeting. But what I learned later -- I didn't email, but I called someone at the Park Service, because they were aware of this meeting in San Francisco. It turns out that people were very concerned that if the Topaz Museum Board and its allies continued to push this narrative of unfairness -- that they were being maligned, that the decision was incorrect and unfair -- they were concerned that it could become a political football. And I was even concerned during that period that if FOX News, for example, grabbed onto something, all of a sudden it blows up, right? This happens all the time. So I was always maybe a little too paranoid, but being in the media previously 01:03:00and just being concerned about that. It turns out the National Park Service was concerned that this meeting was very consequential, and it could actually pose a threat to the JACS program itself. So they were very relieved to hear the Bill stepped in and said, "We support the National Park Service," because that may not have been the point of view of Jane Beckwith, who had said to the Friends of Topaz locally, "Meet with Claudia. Tell her that this was wrong. She'll go back to the Governor. She'll convey whatever message you send." But because we all met together, and then Bill came in and said, "Nope, done, we're going to support it," that was averted. We aren't privy, of course, to those internal conversations, but that told me, wow, they were very concerned that these things can snowball and the next thing you know the whole program could be in jeopardy, 01:04:00which means millions of dollars of educational grants being possibly jeopardized because of intransigence on the part of the Museum to accept the NPS decision. So that was 2014, and then the Museum went through a two-year, three-year period of revision that descendants and survivors had a voice in. But basically, now, Franklin Odo directed that effort, and he had Cherstin Lyon and Greg Robinson sort of assisting him, and it was in more kind of responsible hands. And then the museum opened in 2017. So there was a three-year period of revamping the narrative. EARDLEY-PRYOR: What do you think about the narrative in its final form? UKAI: I still think it presents a very kind of soft presentation. It's conventional. It doesn't handle 01:05:00the resistance at all. It downplays death. So, for example, there is a list of the babies born at Topaz, but there is no list of the people who died. And actually, Ken Yamashita, I remember, told me he had asked Jane, "Can we have a list of the dead? Because we're going to have a list of the babies born." And she said, "There's not enough room." This is such a typical example of people having ideas, wanting a perspective, and then being turned down, and nobody questioning that or pushing back. So I went to the museum in 2017, and I was mentioning to a survivor about that, and she went up to Jane. And I happened to be within earshot, and this person said, "Why is there not a list of the people who died at Topaz?" Because we were standing next to a crib, and over that crib was a list of how many babies had been born at Topaz. And Jane 01:06:00Beckwith said, "There was no artifact." So it's interesting because here James Wakasa is the most prominent death, a murder, and his placard is kind of separated, isolated. It's not woven into the whole fabric of how you tell the story. It's kind of like, "This happened, and there was an uproar, and people wanted to build a monument," and that's it. It's kind of like you're walking, there's a crib, and then you turn the corner, and then there's this big display. It's one, big, gigantic, photographic placard. And then you walk around and there -- so it's disjointed. And, to me, it's not talking about the racism, really. And there's a lot of art. So it's kind of, to me, more of a museum that emphasizes 01:07:00resilience, creativity, the beautiful things that came out, the material, beautiful materials signs that are poignant, and they're the result of injustice. But nevertheless, to me the overriding message is people survived, they made beautiful things. And the original narrative was "Celebrate the People," all of these thirty people who went on to become astronauts and doctors and dentists and whatever, is still basically infused throughout it. But it's not as horrible as it was originally. And if I can just give you one example of a fight over one portion of the narrative in the museum. So there was a display on World War II and how it affected Topaz, but the script said, about Delta, which is seventeen miles away from Topaz, and a small community of, gosh, I don't know -- right now it's like three thousand people, and in the war it was much smaller. It said, "Both 01:08:00communities suffered." And I'll never forget that, because I'm thinking, well, they're not equal. Topaz is not a community, it's a prison. And then there was a list of all of the Delta soldiers who were killed in action. That list was on top of a list of the Japanese American soldiers who were killed in action. So first of all, it doesn't belong there at all, number one. And then, number two, it's on top of the Nisei, and the number was larger, so just if you look at it quickly you go, wow, all these white soldiers died, and the Japanese American soldiers died but there were so few of them. So when you're looking at this elevation, just all kinds of things are going through my mind: both communities suffered, and then you put the white soldiers on top of the Japanese American soldiers. So then we complained. Then the order was reversed: the Japanese American soldiers went on top, the white soldiers went below. Finally it was like, the white soldiers belong 01:09:00in a different historical museum, but not in the Topaz Museum. Finally, that got taken out. So it's like behind every single thing that you see in the museum is this underlying fight that went on. And so although what finally appears seems fine, what could have been just would have made headlines, and it would have really upset people. I really don't know what would have happened. It's in Utah. It's far away. It's 800 miles away from where we are in the Bay Area. But we couldn't let that go through. And that, to me, was just one of the examples where something that was really terribly done presented a perspective which was false, and had nothing to do with Topaz, almost got through. And that's because of the white control of the narrative, which still exists today. EARDLEY-PRYOR: We'll 01:10:00get into more detail on your ongoing experience of that. There's still so much to talk about that happens in the wake of your engagement with the Topaz Museum, particularly around the Wakasa Memorial Stone, and the way James Wakasa comes back to affect things in the present. There's also a lot of other ongoing engagements that you do, particularly around Japanese American art and auctioning. I'm wondering if there's more you want to say about the NPS mediation that leads to the rewriting of the script before we talk about your work in auctions. Is there anything else that comes out of that? UKAI: Thank you for asking, because I forgot to mention that 01:11:00I don't have the date at my fingertips but I had written that letter to the National Park Service, and when they said to me, "May we tell the Board who wrote it? Because they want to know," and I said, "Under normal circumstances I would have no problem, but my experience is they personalize things and will make it all about the person who wrote it and not about the merits of the argument." And I said, "I would prefer that you not mention my name." And they said, "Okay, we understand. We'll just say that they prefer to not be named, and just look at what the arguments are." So what happened was, very briefly, we were meeting at Ann Dion's home for our Friends of Topaz meetings, and I just said, "You know, you've had them all at your house. Why don't we have one at my house, for a change? Just rotate." So we were going to have a meeting about the narrative, and this is after I'd written my letter, which nobody knew I wrote. And I learned 01:12:00that Jane Beckwith, Rick Okabe are flying out from Salt Lake City to attend this meeting at my house, because it was at my house all of a sudden. And then Bill Sugaya came from San Francisco, so all of a sudden it became this extremely momentous meeting, and that was just shocking to me to learn that. And then what happened was we invited various people, since it became that, okay, they're going to bring in the board and people -- normally we'd just have a small meeting internally -- we invited other people who were Topaz people who had not been involved directly with any of this controversy. So Hiroshi Shimizu, who's Chair of the Tule Lake Committee, who was born at Topaz. Masako Takahashi, whose family was a big donor to the museum for many years, was at that meeting. So it was an important meeting. Mark Izu came. Brenda Aoki was there. My cousin was there. And at any rate, 01:13:00in that meeting I was so worried that somebody was going to say, "Who wrote that letter?" Because I couldn't lie. What am I supposed to say, "I take the Fifth?" [laughs] So what happens is in that meeting, Rick Okabe -- I like him so much, I admire him, but he's been working for the Board for a long time, and I can understand that people go, gee, all these -- what their point of view is, "We'd been working for years, we'd been on the ground, and then these people who haven't been around, and, in fact, people who aren't even Topaz, are coming in and criticizing us." So at any rate, one point in the meeting he said, "Somebody in this room is trying to destroy the museum." Silence. And it was clear that through this letter, that was what that meant. And I was sitting next to Ann, and I noticed on her yellow pad she had written in the margins, "Did you write the letter?" 01:14:00And I thought, oh my goodness, this is going to come out. But nobody asked, and so people just danced around it. We had this meeting, and it was very -- it was the first time we all got together and talked, person to person, so that was good. Patricia Wakida was there. So at any rate, what happened was after that there was a FOIA, a Freedom of Information Act, on the letter, and the Board got the letter eventually. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Through a FOIA request? UKAI: Through a FOIA. I felt really targeted. I mean, they didn't know it was me, but they kept implying that it was me. Then they found out it was me. And the letter? Never heard a word after that. Because in the letter I said something like, "I was involved in this fundraiser, 01:15:00three hundred people. People are very grateful to Jane Beckwith. They gave her a standing ovation." I said, "I'm not questioning her dedication, but I do think we need a professional process. And then here's all the problems I see with this narrative." So at any rate, they got the letter and it was a nonevent, but for me it was really traumatic. And there were people who wanted to blast this out to the community. And this is something where I wondered, did I do wrong? And I said, I just don't think we should let that happen. And I'm probably wrong, but I was afraid. And somebody saying, "Let's tell the New York Times." And I guess I was fearful that, knowing how the media can run with things, it can be good and it can be bad, but it's definitely out of your control. So it's probably my own fears, possibly personally, because I was targeted, and also just conservatism, that if we are too loud and too open 01:16:00-- can't we just work behind the scenes to make it right? Well, I've now learned that that doesn't work with this particular board, because unless there's external pressure, change doesn't happen. And it took the National Park Service and the threat of fund removal for the narrative to get revised, and they still don't acknowledge it, and they actually appointed Patricia Wakida, who was brought in to help rewrite the narrative. And then that's the narrative that the National Park Service said wasn't sufficient, was unacceptable, which they would not fund. So then she was brought in, and three or four months later, after the National Park Service meeting, that narrative was thrown out. Then they worked with a group that had done the Heart Mountain narrative, to do a brand new narrative, which Franklin Odo and his scholars 01:17:00oversaw. But anyway, and those people are still the players that are involved in the Wakasa Monument, so it's an ongoing struggle between two sides that has remained under cover, and probably should have come out loud and proud a lot earlier. So I take the blame for probably suppressing some of the things that could have been out, and been angry voices, but maybe that's what needed to happen. But the museum opened. It opened with a revised narrative, and all of the dirty laundry and the fighting didn't come out. And Franklin Odo actually wanted me to write an article about that, and he was the one supervising the revision, so he was in the thick of it. And I said, "Oh, gee, Franklin." He asked me the year the museum opened. I said, "That article needs to be written about how we stood up for telling our own 01:18:00history, but the museum just opened. Do you want to really write this exposé the year the museum opened? Let's wait a little while." Should have written it, because people don't understand the intensity of the museum's resistance to community participation. And the museum narrative fight was chapter one. The Wakasa Monument is a sequel. EARDLEY-PRYOR: In hindsight, you would have done things differently, then? UKAI: I think living in Japan, frankly, for fourteen years, and sort of being imbued in that culture of being aware of what the community is thinking -- and there's a Japanese word, "wa," which means harmony, which is you try and preserve that harmony. And so what happens in Japan is that people kind of grin and bear it, 01:19:00and they work behind the scenes. They do something called nemawashi, which is to kind of get everything established before the meeting, and then when the meeting happens everybody's on the same page. But then when there are these cases like the Narita Airport protest, or certain issues, there are very vociferous groups, but they're always in the minority, and people admire them, but they're voices which have to really struggle. And I think probably living in Japan, I don't want to blame that, but I think I really absorb those lessons, and that's part of the baggage I think I carried. And then there's probably just my personality. And it's not all about me, but people did view me as someone who had an important voice, because I was the one who'd written the letter to the National Park Service and sort of gotten things going, and had been within the committee the only one -- not the only one, Patti Iiyama also wrote a very important something like twenty-page critique of the narrative of, which was circulated among the National Park Service. 01:20:00So, there were other people. But I had been the one whose house was host of the meeting, and so on and so forth. So people listened to me, for better or for worse. It worked out in the sense that the museum did revise the narrative, but it would have been a lot more conflict-ridden. It would have been definitely an uglier kind of fight. And at the time, our committee -- Susan Hayase, Chizuko, Satsuki, et cetera -- we were trying to just make sure that the best possible museum narrative was written. We didn't want credit. We didn't want this to be a fight between anybody. We just wanted to make sure that the history was being told, and that the WRA government oppressor narrative would not be the overriding theme, and the factual layers were corrected, and so on and so forth. So we didn't think it was necessary to push this fight. People knew it was happening. They knew that the museum opening had been postponed 01:21:00for two or three years. They knew stuff was going on, but it was kind of more whispers. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Do you think your engagements now around the Wakasa Memorial Stone would have gone differently had there been more of a light shined on the script rewrite? UKAI: I think that people would have a deeper understanding that the decision to excavate the stone with construction machinery, without archeologists, without community participation, without consulting the fourteen-member committee, they would understand that this was not a one-off or this was just, oh, a lapse in judgment. It's part of a pattern. So to that extent, yeah, if we had published or made more known all of the problems with the museum narrative that this issue with the stone might not have happened. Well, I don't know if it wouldn't have happened, but people would be more sympathetic to what's going on now. And I think eventually that is 01:22:00going to have to come out, and I'm preparing to write something. EARDLEY-PRYOR: You'd mentioned a couple Japanese terms that are philosophical on how to go about engagement. And one that I often hear in association with the World War II prison camps for Japanese Americans is the term "gaman." What ways do you think gaman might be an influence in how we remember the World War II prison camps, and perhaps even your feelings, your mixed feelings, about engaging on the historical issues? UKAI: I would say that gaman has been a really damaging phrase, because it's used as this cudgel to say that this is an admirable quality, which it can be, of course, under circumstances. But when you are stripped of your civil rights, and you've lost all your property and your money, 01:23:00and your family's been dispersed, and people have died, then to look at gaman and to kind of suck it up and swallow your anger, your hurt, your voice, is a negative thing. So I'm glad to see people saying things like "No more gaman." And I think, on the one hand, I've been trying to get stuff out there, but probably not in the most radical way. Maybe an anthropology degree has [laughs] made me self-censor a little bit. I don't know. I guess I naively thought that a lot of working together would allow an amicable conclusion to come out. But it's obvious that doesn't happen, and the museum only responds to external pressure. And they don't play nice, because at one point Jane Beckwith called on Dr. Kami -- I think I mentioned him earlier. I think our friendship has been, 01:24:00unfortunately, hurt by this, because Jane called him up and said, "Nancy's trying to destroy the museum. Can you call her up and tell her to back off?" And so one day I got this call, and he said, "Nancy," and his voice was kind of quavering, and he said, "please don't destroy the museum." Those were his exact words. [laughs] And I thought, okay, I know where this is coming from. And he was just so nervous. And I said, "Frank, we're not trying to destroy the museum. We're trying to make it the best possible museum it can be." And then finally he said, "Okay, well, you young people are going to be the ones who carry this history into the future." And I said, "Frank, let's have lunch. Let's just talk." And he said okay, but then the next day he called back and said, "No, let's not. Just do whatever you want." [laughs] I was furious, and I told the National Park Service. I said, "To call on this nearly ninety-year-old man and put him in this difficult position of calling someone he's known for, whatever, fifty, sixty years, 01:25:00it's terrible. That's how they play." So, yeah. EARDLEY-PRYOR: I want to ask about your engagement with auctions of Japanese American artifacts from camps, because there's a lot of stories that come from this, and they're happening simultaneously as your engagement on the script rewrite and with the Topaz Museum Board. But I just want to ask again: is there anything else you want to talk about before we move into those? UKAI: I think we're good. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Great. So, date-wise, in March of 2015, I have a research note about you learning of an auction in New York City from the Sunday art blog talking about Japanese American art acquired by a historian named Allen Eaton that would then be put forward by Rago Arts and Auction Center. Tell me the story about what happens and your engagement. How did you learn about this, and what 01:26:00did you choose to do about it? UKAI: So it's quite interesting, because I was visiting friends in New York City, and they're not Japanese American. They walked over with the Sunday paper -- it was Sunday, and it was the New York Times arts blog, the newspaper -- and he said, "Hey, you might be interested in this." And the headline was something like "Japanese internment art goes to auction," and there was a watercolor shown. And basically the narrative was there's going to be an auction next month in New Jersey by the Rago Arts company, and material like this rarely comes on the market. And they explained there were going to be barracks signs, and paintings, and so on and so forth, and talked about Allen Eaton. So right away I just thought, well, this is strange, because you do hear about camp artifacts being sold at yard sales or maybe on a platform like -- eBay wasn't as big then as it is now. But 01:27:00to have a real auction with a particular historic collection, which just gives it a whole legitimacy that it never had before. Although I'm not an expert on auctions, but I just thought, this is something new. And having lived in Princeton, New Jersey, I actually had been a customer of Rago before. I had been to his shop in Lambertville, and I had actually attended an auction and bought a chair, a mid-century chair. So I felt like, what's he doing with this? Anyway, that was early March, and the auction was going to be held in mid-April. So I was starting to email my friend Satsuki Ina and Barbara Takei, and just saying, "What's this all about? What should we do?" Well, the catalog was going to go online at the end of March. And once the catalog went online you could see that there were about 450 artifacts, including just this kind of jumble of things which Allen Eaton had collected at the end 01:28:00of World War II, in 1945, as the camps were closing. And he went to five camps, I believe. He was working for the Sage Foundation in New York City, and he was a very famous folk art expert, had written these seminal works on the Appalachians, and he was very interested in immigrants, and how they brought practices of folk art to the United States. And anyhow, so he was very interested in Japanese American immigrant art in the camps, and was thinking of doing, actually, an art exhibition in the camps to cheer up the prisoners, and then somebody started sending him things, and he got so interested he amassed this collection. He wrote the first book on Japanese craft arts in the camps called Beauty Behind Barbed Wire. Anyhow, I didn't know all that at the time but was just thinking, an auction? This is going to be really a historic effort. And now look at all the things that are online, and look at the prices that they've assigned to them, because they have an estimate, a starting bid, and then what they think it will go for. 01:29:00So maybe the start is $300, but they expect it to sell for $1,000. And that just, to me, was obscene. It was gross, that -- EARDLEY-PRYOR: Why? UKAI: Because these are things borne of tragedy, the loss of humanity, freedom, civil rights. Family members died. People had gaman, they had kind of sucked it up. People were so traumatized, many people never talked about it. And so to see these belongings, which managed to survive, be priced and sold in this coldblooded, capitalistic auction platform just felt extremely dehumanizing and a great big insult. And besides that, normally, for example, a nameplate has a name on it, and you go, well, did the person -- Rago, or whoever gave it to them -- have permission to take this thing? So there's a provenance question. Where did it come from? 01:30:00Do the people whose name is on it know about this? Do you have their permission? And there were paintings which definitely -- by Estelle Ishigo and others, George Tamura -- do their families know? These things, if they go into private hands they're lost forever. So the first impulse was this has to be postponed so at least we can do some research and find out if there are provenance questions. Are there receipts? What is the record? So at any rate, those early conversations before the online catalog came out were just kind of more general, like, "What do you do in a case like this? Has there been a case of people resisting these kinds of things?" But no, there really hadn't been an auction before. So at any rate, gee, one week before the auction actually happened, I remember exchanging an email with Barbara Takei, and we were saying, "Well, what are we waiting for? If we don't stand up, nobody else is. 01:31:00First of all, people don't know, and also people don't care. They've got their own battles to fight. So if we don't say something and stand up, it's going to happen, and that's bad. Again, we're in a position to do something. What are we going to do?" Okay. So we had a meeting about ten days before the auction was to occur, in the first week of April, and people actually met in my living room, and Barbara Takei and Yoshinori Himel were on the phone. We had the phone in the middle of the table. And we met for about two hours, and we talked about things like, art is auctioned so why is this quote-unquote "internment camp art" verboten? Are auctions ever acceptable? I mean, we started off with really broad questions. And then it came down to, "So what are we going to do?" We agreed that, no, this shouldn't be allowed to happen. We at least should tell Rago to pause it. So the first thing we would do 01:32:00is we thought we would write a letter and have community leaders sign it and send it to Rago -- so politicians, academics, prominent people, civil rights leaders. So, we're going to draft this letter. Then, number two, let's have a petition, and just get the general people involved to oppose this. First of all, inform them it's happening, and then, secondly, get them to sign on to say "Pause the auction." And then the third thing was let's have a Facebook page, because it's social media, and we can start letting people know. So one week before the auction, I was the one who I guess somehow was given the assignment to start the [Facebook] page, and I did it with my daughter who lives in Los Angeles, and I guess she was maybe thirty at the time. And we created it. We picked a picture. We had already, within our small ad hoc committee, said, "What should we call it? Our History: NOT For Sale?" Then we thought, no, "Our History" assumes everybody knows who "our" is. 01:33:00So we called it "Japanese American History: NOT For Sale." And that took off immediately, because the idea was that you would first of all let people know that there's an auction. Then you have to kind of educate people. Why is this wrong? What are these things? Let's humanize these things. These represent human lives. Why is it wrong to put a price on that, and to have this happen without our input and our -- ? Let's pause this. Let's stop this. So our beginning spot was "let's pause this, and let us research it," but then that became "Stop The Auction," which was fine. And, in fact, one of the interesting things is that in this Facebook page, the way we educated people was through artifacts. So we would have a picture of a painting, and say, "This was made by so-and-so, and this is a little bit of background about them, and this is the tragedy here, 01:34:00and why is it being sold for $500?" And then the next day there'd be another artifact. "Here's a nameplate. Nameplates were used on barracks." So you're kind of educating people to the meaning of these artifacts, but also why they connect to real people, who could be your mother, your grandfather, your whatever. We need to learn more about this, and it's immoral to sell it and treat it as something that you just make profit on, and, in fact, which goes to the highest bidder. And when you start talking about auctions of objects, then you start obviously thinking about auctions of human beings which happened in slavery. So it just became like a bigger context. And I think what Facebook was very good at was allowing this kind of visual promotion of the message with examples that we could just take a screenshot of from the auction catalog and say, "This is item number 678. The estimating bid is this, 01:35:00but this is what it really is. This is our history, and this is why it should not be sold." So we were all sending out emails saying, "Tell your friends to like this." So at one point it was like we were getting a like every minute or minute and a half, and for someone who was barely on Facebook, sitting there watching it tick up. And the outrage was just so strong, so that was really encouraging. And then people who do Twitter were tweeting and kind of joining in, and people were making memes, and kind of things that I didn't really know about, but "Japanese American History: NOT For Sale" became "Stop Rago," for example. And somebody got an ad -- what is that one about -- ? It's an alcohol, where he says, "I like to do this, and -- " Oh dear, I can't remember the exact wording. But at any rate, people were appropriating very popular advertisements and then putting in "Stop Rago" memes. So anyway, it became a thing on its own, 01:36:00and I guess in the course of that one week we got seven or eight thousand followers, which was a lot since we started from nothing and didn't know anybody. And then, oh, the newspapers started writing articles, and, of course, it's also a very visual story with the artifacts, and then we could share those on our website. Then the Change.org petition got started by Lorna Fong, and that took off. And then the interesting thing about that Change.org petition was people didn't write their name and say "Stop the auction," they started writing -- ooh, I get emotional thinking about it -- just a sentence about their family. So it was testimony. And they would say, "I never met my grandfather. He went back to Japan. What you're doing is immoral. Please, out of respect for our community history, stop the auction." And so 01:37:00every single name would have something like the camp, the family number, what happened to the family. And Change.org petition people, one of them said, "This is my favorite campaign ever," because the cause was so important, the response was so immediate, and the voices were so personal. So I have, actually, a binder with all of those comments, because we got that spreadsheet, and it's powerful. And then there were a lot of people who were saying, "I'm a Holocaust survivor and I oppose this," or from an Indigenous person, "We understand completely. Stop the desecration of our property." So it just was really a very moving thing that was continually going, because there was this deadline. I think April 17th was the auction. What's going to happen? And then so the petition's taking off, the Facebook page is taking off, the community letter went -- well, actually, what happened was this community letter, 01:38:00which we thought was going to be so pivotal, was nothing. What we did do was we posted this letter, just saying, "Dear Mr. Rago: Please stop the auction out of respect for our community property and our feelings about this." And we posted it saying, these are the famous people or -- we didn't say that -- prominent community members who signed on. But everybody just started saying, "I want to sign it." And so that took off, and everybody started signing it. And that's great. That's even better, right? So people were, "Please add my name, professor of something in Massachusetts," or, "Please add my name, I'm in Hawaii," and so many different levels. The upsurge in grassroots voices was fast, strong, and spreading through media. And then someone named Stephanie Takaragawa wrote an article for Anthropology Today, I think it's called. [Stephanie Takaragawa, "Not for Sale: How WWII Artifacts Mobilized Japanese-Americans Online," Anthropology Now 7:3 (December 2015): 94-105.] And she talked about how when she read through all the comments she really was able 01:39:00to not only make sense of her own kind of thinking about this, but also hear the voices of so many other people -- in other words, connect with people you would never otherwise know or meet or be able to talk about this. And so it was really an educational moment. And I think at a time when -- 2015, so fifteen years after 9/11. Japanese Americans were able to get redress. After 9/11 there was targeting of people from the Middle East and Arab Americans. And somebody actually -- I believe it was Tom Ikeda -- were saying, wow, this is the biggest kind of expression of voice since redress. And I thought, wow. Obviously it's very different, but the fact that people were speaking out 01:40:00and feeling a sense of solidarity and community and reflection about the history, and how it hadn't ended yet, and how this was a cause that we needed to rally around and stop, was really a very unifying moment. And so meanwhile, Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation had been privately talking with Rago before we even got started, and I didn't know anybody there. And they called a meeting and said, "Let's have legal action. We're going to -- " They had actually been negotiating with Rago and saying, "We will pay, in cash, twice the amount of your top estimate for the entire lots." It wasn't that much. For 450 lots, 300 of which were photographs from the WRA, there was shell jewelry, and a very interesting barrack chair, paintings, calligraphy, documents, 01:41:00carvings, stones. At any rate, Heart Mountain Foundation was extremely interested in Estelle Ishigo's watercolors. She was a white woman who went with her Japanese American husband from Los Angeles to Heart Mountain, Wyoming, and they were very interested in that collection, which was probably the central item that everyone was interested in that auction collection. And at any rate, they had approached Rago and said, "We'll offer you -- " I think Rago's estimate was something like $27,000, if you bought everything at that -- that was their estimate. And I think Heart Mountain offered something like $50,000 cash for the whole thing. And then their consigner -- basically, they said no. So the question was how do we, the Facebook page, the Japanese American Not For History group, work with the Heart Mountain Foundation and kind of continue to apply pressure on the auction house? And furthermore, meanwhile, every time somebody signed 01:42:00a Change.org petition, Rago would get an email. So since 8,000 people signed it, they were getting a lot of emails. They were still pretty firm in their position of not doing anything to stop the auction. And meanwhile people were writing in privately, to different people, saying, "Let's have a strategy in case it goes through. We want to buy this and donate it." I thought, oh my gosh, you're going to have all these strangers bidding against each other, raising the price, more profit for the consigner, more profit for -- I mean, it was just a nightmare. But we had to have a plan B. So another plan B was, all right, you're saying stop the auction, auctions are immoral, and then Friday the auction's happening, so then what do you do? Do you get in there and start bidding? And because it's not transparent, you don't know who you're bidding against. People are bidding on the phone, by email, in person. So anyway, then what happened was George Takei, the actor. People were writing to him saying, "Hey George, get involved," and so on and so forth. 01:43:00And we wrote to him but did not hear from him -- that is, Japanese American History: NOT For Sale. Rago was having two promotional events in New Jersey for the auction, and one of them was going to be the showing of The Cats of Mirikitani, a documentary film. And we asked the filmmaker, Linda Hattendorf, if she would pull it out, and she did, and Rago was like, okay. And then we also asked Steven Okazaki if he would have his documentary film on Estelle Ishigo pulled, and somehow we weren't able to reach him. That, I think, ended up being shown. But there was a lot of pressure on the auction house. Mira Nakashima, the daughter of George Nakashima, the very famous Soul of a Tree, woodworker in New Hope, Pennsylvania, a lot of her father's furniture is sold by the Rago auction house. So people were writing out to Mira and saying, "Use your influence to help them to stop." At any rate, two days before the auction was to occur 01:44:00they had one of these promotional events. Rago stood up and basically said, "We've decided to suspend the auction." That was two days before. And we actually had a Japanese American ally who was sitting in the audience, because he lived in Philadelphia. And it was great because he texted me or something and said, "They've just suspended the auction." Having been a journalist I'm like, okay, we need a second confirmation before we send this out. So I called the auction house and some guy picks up the phone. I said, "I understand that the auction has been suspended. Can you confirm that?" And he said yes. Okay. We got our two confirmations. Put that out on the Facebook page, and it exploded. Oh, and the auctioneer, David Rago, said something like -- oh dear, I can't remember the details, but it was something like "George Takei has agreed to help us have some sort of reconciliation and figure out what to do." So he was sort of 01:45:00considered to be the savior, and everybody was "Thank you." And so we didn't have to bid on our own stuff. Although we were thinking, are we going to rally the University of Pennsylvania and local taiko groups to go to Lambertville the day of the auction? And so as the auction takes place -- and I've been at that Rago auction, it happens quickly. "Here, up for this. This is a barrack plate number this and that." And then, "Do I hear this? Do I hear that?" And then, boom, it's over. And so I knew the whole thing was going to happen pretty quickly. And we thought, well, let's get the media there. And what better way than to have taiko drumming in front of Rago auction? Luckily, we didn't have to go there. [laughs] EARDLEY-PRYOR: Wow. In the wake of this event happening, I looked up how the U.K. Guardian picked up a story on this. It had a quote from David Rago, the founder of Rago Auction Center, who said, "We knew what the camps were, 01:46:00we know that it was a disgraceful period in American history, but we did not understand the continued emotional impact embodied within the material. We just didn't get it." That whole effort that you helped lead and create certainly educated. UKAI: Well, it just, I think, shows you -- and we know that with social media your voice can have such a far reach, right? And I can't remember exactly, but Facebook shows you the analytics. How many countries? What's the number one place that likes are coming from? And literally I think somebody in Iraq and Uzbekistan, the URLs. It was crazy. There were like a hundred -- I mean, it was a lot of countries, and people sending in their voices of support. So this was in 2015. I don't even know what that would be like now, because the social media landscape has changed a lot. But I think Rago 01:47:00did say that. It was probably something politically correct to say, but his behavior was that he didn't budge. However, what I didn't say was that the Heart Mountain Foundation had filed an injunction, or was about to on Friday. And so we really believe that the threat of legal action is what resulted in the suspension of the auction. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Wow. It's fascinating for me to hear your life experience, your family's experience, your educational experience, your work as a journalist, your master's degree on media anthropology, and seeing how all of these pieces come together in the work that you've done just in the past less-than-ten years. UKAI: Yeah, it's weird how things kind of converged. I'm kind of surprised myself, because it's definitely not a master plan. 01:48:00[laughs] EARDLEY-PRYOR: As the Rago auction momentum happened, it's such a short window that you built this global media campaign. It's also around the time that you're working on and applying to work on your grant application for the "50 Objects" JACS grant, which you earned and have worked on, and continue to work on. I'm just wondering what the relationship is between your engagement with the Topaz Museum Board, how that had spiraled in different directions -- then this really powerful example, this moment in the Rago auction, how that influenced your thoughts about what you would do with your own media and artifact analysis project? UKAI: I wouldn't say that I was thinking so clearly and analytically about it, but certain themes were just obvious. And with the Topaz Museum, although it was about a narrative, not necessarily about the artifacts, per se, 01:49:00the theme is: who tells history? Who has the agency to control the narrative? And because they had created this museum script without historians and without community participation, it was all in the hands of, essentially, the Board Director, which was Jane Beckwith. And I don't know, maybe there were a few other people there, but essentially we felt shut out. And I think with artifacts, again, who gets to own these things which represent human lives and stories? So it's another way of saying "Who tells history?" Who owns history? Who has the right to possess it, either the narrative or the material object, or both? So there is this thread of, I guess, just having agency, and feeling that you have a voice, and your voice is important. And I think that in the era of social media it's a lot faster and easier to connect with people, so in that regard 01:50:00these things can take off really quickly, and you can meet new allies. And so people you met in the Topaz Museum fight about the narrative were also many of the same people who immediately recognized the injustice of the Rago auction. So it's like you keep building up this incredible team of people, and I guess you can call it community networking or whatever. But you just get bigger, stronger, and people you work with and trust can help you clarify your own thinking. And it's not like everybody agrees on what to do, but the essential agreement that we get to own our own history, tell our own story, and have the right to possess our own artifacts. So right now, actually, we're working with eBay about their filters, and so that they can start 01:51:00screening for Japanese American artifacts, so that things that are from the camps which are personal items are not sold on their platform. And just the other day there was an artifact of a young woman, it was her scrapbook, and part of it -- I'm not kidding you -- was fingernails and aspirin and an Emory board. And the scrapbook is bad enough, but then these personal items? My husband said, "Fingernails are a body part." But it was just kind of, obviously, creepy, and I forget how many hundreds of dollars it was going to be auctioned for. And an Asian woman, during this period when people are being attacked because of anti-Asian hate crimes, so it's all linked, and people, I think, are getting the message. Yeah, that was from the Amache camp in Colorado, which recently in the last month became part 01:52:00of the National Park Service. So I think all of these forces are kind of working together, where institutional recognition or government recognition of the importance of the camps -- because I think at one point the thinking was Manzanar, it's a national historic site. That'll tell the story. That's going to represent the Japanese American incarceration. And now it's like, whoa. Every camp was different: different administrators, different populations, different histories. Two of them were on Indian reservations, and those Indigenous people resisted and opposed the use of their land for incarceration but were ignored. Tule Lake, the biggest camp, which is the most important camp, where the people considered to be, who were voicing their civil rights, their right to resist and say no to the incarceration, who were then stigmatized by the government and by our own community, and there was a stockade there, and a jail within a jail, and just -- Anyway, so 01:53:00I think it's progress and it's good that at the government level the history is being recognized through things like the JACS program. I think the awareness now at the museum level and the institutional level about difficult objects, traumatic histories, how you tell the story, that's all part of the narrative now. Black Lives Matter, Confederate statues, the public forum: how do you discuss these things? It's all kind of working together, so there's a lot of ferment, and I'm really happy that Japanese Americans can have a place in this history. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Speaking of the government engagement and change over time, in the year after the Rago auction, at the end of 2016 is the shocking Presidential election in which Donald Trump, surprisingly, remarkably, becomes the United States President, inaugurated in January of 2017. I want to ask about your memories of that moment, 01:54:00and what came out of it, particularly given your engagement in these issues of civil rights and memory? UKAI: Well, I think that anybody would be concerned. Obviously, people didn't think that Trump was going to win, and thanks to the Russians and [FBI Director James] Comey saying that about -- . Anyway, David Izu and I had applied for a JACS grant to launch this "50 Objects" project. We actually wanted to do 100 objects, and thought, nope, that's kind of a lot. That's too many. Let's make it 50. But the idea was to excavate the stories behind the surviving artifacts, and "artifacts" defined very broadly, from, say, a gold watch or a handmade carving or a barrack or a landscape. So we're pretty broad in our 01:55:00definition of what is an artifact, but that was informed both by my studies of material culture in London and the British Museum book A History of the World in 100 Objects, and then the Rago auction, which was almost like a trial period. How do you take an artifact and then engage people through the story inside of it, that's embodied by it? And people at the time were stepping up and saying, "Oh, that's my mother in the photograph that David Rago's trying to sell," or, "Oh, that is my family name on that barracks." It was like, oh my gosh, these connections are being made. So when we applied for the grant, we took that information and that immediate, very recent experience and put it in there. So when we got the grant in 2016, in the summer, or we were told we got it, very exciting, and then the Presidential election, of course, was in November, all of a sudden it seems like, oh, now our project has more 01:56:00meaning to us and also significance, because you have a President who's saying that it's okay to have a list of Arab Americans, that you should keep out, you should separate families. I mean, I can't remember now exactly what his policies were, but it was quite obvious that very, very racist -- throwing out that journalist from his press conference, the treatment of women, the treatment of basically people of color. All of a sudden it meant that our project was going to be -- not that we didn't want to be serious, but it just seemed like the stakes were higher, that we had to be very careful and responsible about how we both curated things and the stories we chose to tell. EARDLEY-PRYOR: You've mentioned some of the policies that engaged families and immigrant families coming to the United States, often seeking a refuge from violence. And these issues of immigration 01:57:00-- the border wall, for example -- was a big part from the Trump era that still has significance today. And I want to ask you about your engagement on some of those issues of immigration. In what ways did your engagement with the Japanese American community in the Bay Area that became this much broader campaign of awareness -- how did that play out with relationship to some of the Trump era policies on immigration? UKAI: Well, I was at a Tule Lake pilgrimage, which is the most popular pilgrimage, these annual visits to the sites of incarceration. And the Tule Lake pilgrimage is only held once every two years, but in the year they held it -- I guess it must have been 2018 -- there was a national day of opposition to the "zero tolerance" policy, and it was "Keep Families Together," and it was going to be a national day of solidarity. And at Tule Lake -- it was in July -- about a hundred people 01:58:00who were there at the pilgrimage got together after the traditional service and had a rally, and basically these were survivors. Some of them were in their eighties and even nineties, possibly, and were holding up signs saying "Families Belong Together," "No More Separation," "Protect The Children," and directly tied their incarceration experience as children and survivors of the camps to what is happening now. And it's like, it can happen again. It is happening again. It's happening now. So this idea of "never again" is like, no, it's happening now. And so there was a rally, and one of the chants was led by a guy named Mike Ishii, who is from New York but was very prominent in the Tule Lake pilgrimage for many years. And I remember him chanting "Kodomo No Tame Ni" -- for the sake of the children -- "They're our children. Set them free!" So that became this really wonderful rallying cry. 01:59:00And then the following spring, there was going to be a pilgrimage to Crystal City, Texas, which was a Department of Justice camp, where families were reunited after having been separated into different detention camps. So the father might have been an alien -- in other words, a permanent resident who, for whatever reason, because he was a religious leader or a community leader, was sent to Crystal City, or sent to a Department of Justice camp in Missoula, Montana, Lordsburg, New Mexico. Not the WRA civil-run camps, but the military camps, or the Department of Justice camps. Anyway, Crystal City was a place where families would be reunited, so if the -- EARDLEY-PRYOR: During the incarcerations of World War II? UKAI: During the incarceration. So the men were scooped up, taken away, separated from the families, put in these camps, and then meanwhile the family might be at Topaz or Heart Mountain or whatever. And then, often they would be reunited at Crystal City with the agreement that they would be deported to Japan. Crystal City was also a place that incarcerated German 02:00:00Americans, and also -- not Italian Americans, it was Germans and Japanese. Germans were a much, much smaller proportion. And there were Japanese Latin Americans who were living in Peru -- especially Peru -- and were basically kidnapped out of their homes, brought on a ship, taken to New Orleans, put on a bus or train, and then taken to Crystal City. So it was a very mixed group of prisoners there. So we were going to go to the Crystal City -- what remains of the camp, and there's not a whole lot there, and we were going to take with us survivors -- and I think there were seven or eight survivors, one of whom was born in Peru, two of whom were born in San Francisco -- and go there. And then, after that pilgrimage and spiritual ceremony was held by a Buddhist priest, Reverend Ron Kobata, we were then going to drive one hour east on a bus to the Dilley 02:01:00Detention Center for mothers and children who were migrants and being detained by the government. And the idea was that we would go there and protest as Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated during World War II against the incarceration of women and babies in this Dilley camp. So that was about an hour south of San Antonio. EARDLEY-PRYOR: And this was all in this time period around 2018, you were saying? UKAI: This is 2019. Yeah. So 2018 -- I hope I'm getting the years right -- I believe was a Tule Lake pilgrimage, and then 2019 in the spring, or the early spring, was when we went to Crystal City, had a very powerful moment, especially meeting with Latinos who were really sympathetic, and said, "Oh, my parents remember when your people were here, and they would throw oranges over the fence, and we threw tortillas back." Or, "Some Japanese family gave 02:02:00my family a porcelain rice bowl, which we've always kept from that period." So what was quite interesting was that a lot of these incarceration camps are in red states where the population is basically white, and not terribly sympathetic, necessarily, to talking about Japanese American history. But in the case of Crystal City, because a lot of them had roots in Mexico, for example, were very sympathetic to what we were doing, because they themselves had grown up in segregation, weren't allowed to speak Spanish in schools, weren't represented on the City Council. And so they had this sort of feeling of sympathy that was really wonderful. Plus, they were super hospitable. So that was a really wonderful part of the Crystal City pilgrimage, which I don't think people had experienced before. Then, we drove an hour east to Dilley. And what I neglected to mention was before we went, Mike Ishii put out a national call on social media for people to send strands 02:03:00of folded origami cranes. And, as you know, the crane is a symbol of peace, of the children's peace movement, and Sadako Sasaki was this child in Hiroshima who was exposed to radiation, and folded a thousand cranes to heal, but she died, I think at the age of eleven. So she was a victim of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima. And ever since then, the crane has been this symbol of peace, but also of liberation and compassion and hope. And so what Mike did was kind of deploy this idea of a tsuru, or a Japanese crane, in the cause of Japanese American solidarity with migrant detainees, a visual symbol of Japanese American support and solidarity. We had a partner in Austin, Texas, called Grassroots Leadership, and we asked if we could have people send their cranes there, 02:04:00and he was writing back and saying -- this is two weeks -- "Wow, more boxes are coming in. More bubble wrap envelopes are coming in." And he would send pictures, and this corner of boxes kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. When we finally got there, there were 25,000 paper cranes from all over the country, and Japan. And I don't know how this happened, but we were in a hotel room in San Antonio and opening boxes. Then these long strains -- you know, it's like Christmas ornament lights or whatever: they get all tangled up, right? Somehow got them all organized in rows, rolled them up in plastic sheeting, and then took them the following day to, well, Crystal City, but then to the fence at Dilley, and there we had a ceremony where we were allowed to put things on the fence, but with the agreement that we had to take them down before we left. 02:05:00So we had a very, very moving ceremony where a gong was being hit, and Buddhist priests were there chanting sutras, and people silently went up to the fence and hung a strand of paper cranes. And some of the paper cranes had messages on them. Children had folded them. Church groups had folded them. Some of them had little tags saying where they were from. And so it was really a very powerful moment, a visual representation of support, very beautiful, the colorful cranes. And so what we learned is that there's something about that creative aspect of bringing in art as a protest voice that really engages people in a way that just send a check or write a sign doesn't engage people, but I think it was something that the brutality of holding children could maybe be soothed, or at least visually we're 02:06:00showing through paper cranes that have been individually folded by people, strangers support you. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Wow. You've shared about the ways that particularly the Latino community in Texas had also seen the engagement that Tsuru for Solidarity had, and identified with it. What was the government response to your presence at these sites? UKAI: Well, Crystal City doesn't have a museum. It doesn't have even a local group that's organized. There are local people who are genealogists, and local historians who have records, like of the cemetery and the gravestones. They carry a lot of stories, but there's one man who has a guard tower spotlight, and he said, "Oh, my friend has been saving this. He knows it's important." And this particular man came to the pilgrimage, just heard about it, and showed up 02:07:00with pieces of concrete that were part of the swimming hole, which is actually an irrigation ditch, but they filled it with water, and then, very tragically, two Peruvian girls drowned in it. But anyway, I guess at some point there was construction work being done. This man brought a bag of seven pieces of concrete that had this kind of sea foam green faded paint on it, and he gave one to Kazumu Naganuma and said, "This is for you." And you'd think it was a diamond. And for Kaz it was. He said, "I have no artifacts, and my sister knew the Peruvian girl who died." And he held it with both hands, and he said, "This is so precious to me. Thank you so much." And so to be able to be there and witness that kind of exchange was really a privilege. And Kaz then put it in this plexiglass box, 02:08:00and he's got it on a stand with a plaque, and for him it is one of the only material items he has from Crystal City. So that kind of building of human connections is something you can't replace, and just shows how important it is to show up and meet people. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Wow. Wow. What do you think the impact was for the administration? UKAI: Oh, so what I was going to say was since there is no museum, there are no officials, the school officials were quite helpful in helping us. They opened up their cafeteria. They had this wonderful traditional Mexican dance done by the elementary school students. When we pulled up in the bus at the middle school there was literally a line of five boys on either side in neckties and jackets, waiting for us to arrive and walk through. That's how formal and serious and sincere and wonderful it was. 02:09:00And then we had this lunch together, and it was just really, really heartwarming, and -- yeah, so that kind of thing was -- . And then there was a woman who actually I met -- okay, so my husband had gone to San Antonio for something, a genealogy thing. And I took that opportunity to drive to Crystal City -- this is years before, maybe two years before the pilgrimage. And I went into the Town Hall, and I said, "How can I visit all of the landmarks, the signs, the historic signs, the markers?" Well, there is no map. This woman who works there said, "I'll go with you." It was very informal. She spent the next three hours driving me to each sign. It turns out she used to be a librarian at the public library which, because of funds, had been closed. But she was kind of the informal person who, when German descendants who wanted to know about Crystal City, they would write to her, or she had letters, or she became the repository of stories and artifacts. At any rate, she also came to that 02:10:00pilgrimage, and I think part of the lesson is staying in touch with people. Because we're all so busy that if you don't continue to stay in touch and build on those connections it's also easy to have them go away. EARDLEY-PRYOR: I want to ask about your engagement with the Kitaji Bibles, as well, but I'm wondering: is there anything else you wanted to share with regard to Tsuru for Solidarity? UKAI: No, just that Tsuru for Solidarity I think also shows not only the power of media -- because, number one, all these cranes came out from people who just saw it somehow, through their church or whatever, got involved -- Quakers -- and the power of the crane. So what happens is, now Tsuru for Solidarity has become a place where people have particular political interests -- prison abolition, or HR 40 to support Congressional legislation 02:11:00for Black reparations -- that's another thing that Tsuru for Solidarity is doing. So, I think all of these ways of connecting and becoming an activist voice is just really important, and something we wouldn't have predicted. Tsuru for Solidarity, after going to Crystal City, what we decided was, what are we going to do with all these cranes? Let's go to Washington, D.C. Trump was in power. Let's go to the fence and hang 125,000 paper cranes on the White House fence to symbolize the 125,000 Japanese Americans, Japanese Latin Americans, and Aleuts and everybody who got incarcerated, hang them on the fence and protest the detaining of immigrants. And so that was going to happen in 2020, and we had this big thing going where we were going to get all the hotels. People from Canada, Japan were all saying, "We're going to be there. This is going to be an 02:12:00intergenerational family reunion. We want to march from the Washington Monument to the fence." And the idea of that fervor against Trump, and also knowing that that's where Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, was so powerful. So anyway, we were organizing for this massive national pilgrimage against detention in February of 2020. So, at any rate, we were organizing for that, and very busy, and then Mike goes, "Fort Sill, Oklahoma: the government now wants to use that as a place to detain children, and that's where 700 of our ancestors, of our Issei immigrants, were held during World War II. Let's go," like in a week. It was just amazing. And that's kind of when Tsuru for Solidarity, I think, really took off. And I actually designed a little logo, which was the thing that we used. And Mike said, "Nancy, write a press release." And I said, "What am I going to say? Mike Ishii, Nancy 02:13:00Ukai, and Satsuki Ina are going to Fort Sill, join us?" What happened was Densho got involved and said, "We support you." And some immigrant alliance groups got together and said, "We support you." So all of a sudden we had several logos that made Tsuru for Solidarity kind of more a real thing. Because up until then -- we'd gone to Crystal City but weren't really anything beyond that, I think. Maybe I'm telling the history wrong. And at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, we showed up -- gosh, was it maybe thirty people from seven states? And held paper cranes at the front of the military gate, and protested the government plans to bring [1,400] unaccompanied children and imprison them at the Fort Sill base, which had been a prison for Indian Americans, for Apache, and then during World War II for Japanese Americans. And what happened was we got there and several survivors had agreed to be arrested 02:14:00and commit civil disobedience, and one of them was, I think, eighty-nine. So they were ready. They had brought their glasses and their medication, and left important things at the hotel, and they were ready, if we were challenged, to be arrested. And what that means: you don't end up in the City jail, you probably end up in military confinement, again. So, at any rate, what happened was there was a security person who came out and was very bullying, actually. He was quite large and also very insensitive to what was going on. And he actually at one point said, "Don't you people understand English? Get out." And that was just shocking. What happened was Democracy Now had sent a videographer there, so it ended up being on national television, and the Washington Post had a reporter there. So this confrontation that we had with older people holding cranes, who had been survivors of the camps, saying, 02:15:00"Arrest us," became a very large story, and was really, really powerful. Because what happened was this guy said, "Leave the premises," and Satsuki Ina and Mike Ishii, who were our spokespeople, said, "I won't leave unless you arrest me," or, "Arrest me. I'm not leaving." And then Satsuki Ina said, "We've been kicked out too many times before. We've been removed too many before. No more." And so it was just an awesome moment of standing up against the military authorities. A month later, a much larger protest, which brought together lots of immigrant advocacy groups, occurred in the streets, very large, and Buddhist priests came, and did a ceremony of laying flower leis on the canon, on the military armaments in front of that military base, because a man from Hawaii 02:16:00was shot in the head at Fort Sill, and murdered. So that family sent flowers for Reverend Duncan Williams to lay on the gun there. So at any rate, after that demonstration the government changed their policy. And they didn't say that was because our demonstrations were why they changed their policy, but they said they're going to move the children elsewhere, and Fort Sill will not be used. So that was wonderful. The children will just be moved somewhere else, but we felt like we made a difference. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Wow. Wow. These stories are phenomenal. UKAI: Oh! And then what happened was COVID, so we had to cancel our national pilgrimage to Washington, D.C., and that was a great disappointment. Actually, it wasn't going to be February, it was going to be May. 02:17:00And so much was in the works, we lost money on hotel reservations and stuff. But that's COVID, right? EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh, gosh. UKAI: Because the shutdown was, I think, in March, wasn't it? EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah, yeah, at least in the Bay Area, the nation's first shutdown, March 2020. UKAI: Yeah. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Wow. So much has happened in the past few years. Do you mind if we pause for a second? UKAI: Yeah. [pause in recording] EARDLEY-PRYOR: All right. Nancy, I want to ask about your engagement with the Kitaji Bibles that became for sale in this private art gallery auction. What are the Kitaji Bibles, and what was your engagement with these artifacts? UKAI: I was unaware of such a thing until in February of 2017 I got an email -- and I haven't disclosed this up until now, with the agreement of the person who contacted me, but 02:18:00it was the Superintendent of Manzanar, Bernadette Johnson, who sent an email and said, "One of our rangers got a contact from this gallery in New York, which is trying to sell bibles which were made in Poston. And I think this is an echo, this reminds me of the Rago auction sale, where they're selling camp artifacts for a profit, and we have no interest in responding or getting involved in this unless they want to donate them to Manzanar." And so I got this email, and then she attached the PDF glossy brochure, which showed this immigrant man named Masuo Kitaji in Poston with this gigantic Bible, which he had annotated. And it turns out he became a Salvation Army officer, and that's why he's called Captain Kitaji. Was an immigrant, raised as a Buddhist, 02:19:00came to Watsonville, California, had a motorcycle accident. Grief-stricken, drunk, had a motorcycle accident. Was found by a Salvation Army at the crash site, and nursed him back to health. He then converted to Christianity, and in this thirties became an officer, got his training. And in 1933 -- so he's thirty-six years old then -- he's realizing when he's preaching to these followers, immigrant followers from Japan, in Oakland and San Jose, California, that he needs a dual-language bible. He needs a teaching tool, and he also wants one for future ministers. So he decides that he's going to transcribe a bible, and then annotate it. And he was an artist. He studied, actually, art for six months at UC Berkeley in 1919. And I don't know why he stopped. Maybe money. I don't know. At any rate, he studied art at UC Berkeley for six months. 02:20:00He starts, in 1937, to annotate, in this tiny, microscopic print, a transcription, and then annotating. So he's writing Japanese characters, kanji, and it's just a very visual delight. It's very rich. He annotated over a thousand pages in the first bible, and then he made a second bible, which he never finished, but had even more elaborate drawings. And it's going to require people who know English and Japanese, they know Japanese Christianity, they're familiar with the World War II incarceration, to really analyze these artifacts. Anyhow, this is what was for sale. It was going to be sold privately by the Swann Auction Galleries in New York for $85,000, which was a very large sum. Anyhow, I'm like, "Oh, I've never heard of these, but I do know a Kitaji. I went to UC Santa Cruz with, someone named Diana Kitaji." 02:21:00So I contacted a friend, who then said, "I'll put you in touch." I wrote to Diana, and she said, "Yeah, this is my uncle's bibles." So the family was stunned, because they thought someone in the family had them -- it's a very large family. And they were stunned to, number one, see them for sale, see this glossy brochure, see the price, and then also know that many of their names were in the bible, because not only was this a teaching bible, but it was also a family bible. So he wrote down the baptisms and vital statistics of many family members. So they were saying, "The auction company could have contacted us." So within days -- I think it was three or four days -- they wrote a very strong letter with eight or nine points, and said, "We are insulted. Our uncle's memory has been desecrated. You are selling this bible, and you are using a bible annotated by him while he was incarcerated at Poston 02:22:00as a way to highlight his work and profit off the unconstitutional incarceration of Japanese Americans. And you could have contacted us. Two of us were born at Poston. Our names are here." And then they attached a link, which was in the brochure. "So why didn't you do that?" And anyway, they had a very strong letter, and it was signed by twelve Sansei, which is my generation, third generation to be in the United States, and eighteen Yonsei. That's like my children. I don't even know eighteen Yonsei! [laughs] That family had thirty people, and they're all named Kitaji. I mean, not all of them, but -- I thought, oh, this is a very powerful letter. And I was working with them as they wrote it. I said, "Oh, mention the profit angle. Do this. Do that." Anyway, they're really together, very smart. They got this letter out, and they said, "Please withdraw them from sale immediately," and within a day the firm wrote back and said, "We will." 02:23:00And then negotiations began with lawyers to talk about the disposition. I don't know, but they're in New York, and I just have to believe that the Rago auction news, especially if you're in the auction world, everybody was aware of it. And Rago being in New Jersey, and the East Coast, and the seller was in -- where was he? He was in New York, I believe. RUSSELL: No, no, Greenwich, Connecticut. UKAI: Oh, he was in Greenwich, Connecticut, yeah. So at any rate, it was an East Coast thing. I really felt like they didn't -- so this was going to be a private sale to institutions. Supposedly the bibles were found in a recycling bin in San Francisco, and then the consigner sent them to Swann and said, "These are so important historically, obviously. They should be sold to an institution, not to a private collector." So that's their story. I tend to think they wanted a private sale, because if it were public you'd get another big social media 02:24:00outcry. So -- EARDLEY-PRYOR: Whatever happened to the bibles? UKAI: So, this is very interesting. Then there was this negotiation with lawyers to talk about how to handle this. By then, Swann, which had done a lot of research to put into their brochure, sort of said, "You know what? We're not going to even charge anybody for that." But they did want to pay -- apparently, I understand -- the consigner something, some fee, and I don't even know what it was, but it wasn't nearly $85,000, of course. Some amount of money exchanged hands. I believe the consigner got something. But the family's thinking, how did they get to this consigner? These things are very beautiful objects. They're big. Anybody would look at them, and -- and they're filled with these beautiful, detailed, color drawings. You wouldn't look at those and think, 02:25:00"Oh, gee, how lucky I am today? I found these in the recycling bin." So the family wonders if there was something going on with a healthcare worker or something who helped the -- anyway, I shouldn't say this, because I don't know. But the story is strange. And then furthermore, we learned from California attorneys that there is a finders law, that if you find something in a donation bin, if it has a value of over $100 you have to report it to the police. Now, how do you judge what's $100? But this is definitely worth $100. So that particular line of inquiry wasn't pursued with the consigner. You could say, "Well, where did you find it? What day was it? Did you turn it in? Did you know you violated this law?" But that wasn't pursued. I can't remember your question now, but -- EARDLEY-PRYOR: Did they eventually return to the Kitaji family, the bibles themselves? UKAI: Right. So the Kitajis felt, this is our family heirloom. Their ancestor wanted to create this bible for the use of Japanese language 02:26:00preachers, and publish it for their use, but certainly not for profit, and we would like them back. So then they negotiated it. Brian Taba, who is a fourth-generation Kitaji family descendent, went to New York. They were quite pleased with the way everything shook out. I think the company was pleased that everybody wasn't super angry. Anyhow, he picked them up, carried them back. And then, what to do with them? Well, first of all, the California State Parks, the Monterey District, had the resources and the desire to digitize them -- and we're talking several thousand pages -- because they're involved with the preservation of a Japanese American hot springs called Gilroy Yamato Hot Springs in the Gilroy area, which in 1866 was founded as this fancy hot springs area with a big hotel for the wealthy elite 02:27:00of California. And so you've got these Victorian people coming up in their carriages, et cetera. In 1938, a Japanese American purchased the property, and then started running it as a Japanese American recreational health spa. And apparently, I think the temperature gets to 108 degrees and it's a natural hot spring. So it's a special place. And what does this have to do with the Kitajis now? EARDLEY-PRYOR: So that's how the California State Parks got involved? UKAI: Oh, I'm sorry. So yeah, the California State Parks is involved. It's part of the California State Parks System, this Gilroy Hot Springs. It was in the Henry Coe Park. So they're involved in helping to preserve it, to get the history, to refurbish the cabins, and so on and so forth. Anyway, they digitized the bibles. And then finally the family decided to work with the Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford University, which has something called a Japanese Diaspora Project. So they donated the artifacts to the Hoover, and the family kept 02:28:00the copyright to the digital images. So everyone's quite pleased because the artifacts are safe in a vault at Stanford, and the family gets to keep the copyright to the images, which are now online and available for anyone to look at. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Oh, that's great. So it's viewable, it's publicly viewable through the digitization, but the artifacts themselves are saved in an institution, and the family has ownership of it, essentially. UKAI: So, just to mention, as a footnote, so this spa was purchased by a guy named Kyusaburo Sakata, who was a very successful immigrant lettuce grower in the Watsonville area, and quite an entrepreneur. And they have a hotel register, which shows all of the Japanese Americans arriving from especially the Bay Area, but even from Los Angeles, from different parts of the country, even Japan. So when you look at one of the hotel registers -- and this happens to be the one from 1939 to 1942 02:29:00-- it's so fascinating. I found my mother in there, before the war. And I found my grandparents on my parental side, Keizo and Tsune in the postwar. And I can -- EARDLEY-PRYOR: Wait, they had gone to visit these hot springs? UKAI: Oh, I'm sorry, I'm wrong: in their scrapbook, my grandparents' scrapbook, they had a Gilroy Yamato Hot Springs receipt in the 1950s, and it said how many nights they stayed there, what they paid, the meals, and so on and so forth. So I thought, wow, this is such an interesting snapshot, this hotel register, of the community before incarceration, because people were going there clearly -- I mean, so many people I know in the Bay Area -- Satsuki Ina, Hiroshi Shimizu. Anyway, you look at that, and everybody would look at and know different people. But a lot of well-known people, including I think George Takei's family's there, from Los Angeles, which is unusual because they're from L.A. But a real hot springs, 02:30:00and you think, gee, people longed for the old country, and the ability to take a hot springs ofuro, a bath. So I guess what I'm saying is that these artifacts, Kitaji Bibles -- because what happened is Kitaji, after the war, became the manager of the hot springs, and the hot springs became a refuge for sixty families, or 150 people, who had no homes to return to. And so Captain Kitaji, number one, worked on his second bible at the Gilroy Hot Springs, and he also was the manager of that area. And all of the Kitaji children -- not all of them, but some of them who were born in camp, or born at the Gilroy, in that area -- have memories of it. So I guess what I'm trying to say, in this very [laughs] circuitous way, is that these objects take you places that you don't expect to go, and it keeps connecting deeper and deeper at a granular level to real people. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah, to lived experiences, including your own family's. UKAI: Yeah. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Fascinating. UKAI: To see my mother's handwriting there 02:31:00was really something. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah. Wow. Well, that's great. Is there anything else you want to share from the Kitaji Bible stories? UKAI: Just the fact that Bernadette Johnson was involved with the Rago auction is how we met, and I'd gone to Manzanar and met her in person. She's an ally, and the National Parks are an ally. And I think what these protests do is, number one, they inform people of the issue. When people mobilize together in solidarity and work together, you get to know people. You may not even see them in person. And so she alerted us, right? And we didn't say her name, or the institution, Manzanar, name publicly because we didn't want other potential sellers to know where the quote-unquote "sympathizers" are. So I'm just saying it on this oral history, and maybe, hopefully, 02:32:00nobody will see this. [laughter] EARDLEY-PRYOR: No, I hope they do see it. Bernadette Johnson wrote a really wonderful support letter for this Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Project for our JACS grant, because we've been engaged with Manzanar in helping think about it, design it, and as it's progressed. So she's also been really, really wonderful for this project that you and I are speaking in. UKAI: Oh, right, because you're doing Manzanar interviews, too. EARDLEY-PRYOR: That's right. UKAI: Yeah. So I guess my point is that you keep meeting people who continue to send that crucial, pivotal email, and you share information, and then that leads to the Kitajis. You would have found them anyway, because it's a rather unusual name, you could just Google it, but I happened to go to college with Diana, who then put me in touch with her family. And to have thirty names within three days? Our family's not that big, but their family is very large, very engaged, and it was really awesome to see that power of connection turbo charged, 02:33:00and resulting in a great result in a very short time. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah, that's wonderful. The human connections are remarkable, the way that they weave this tapestry. I want to ask about another major event that's historical. You've mentioned before that the planning for a major march on Washington, D.C. that was organized by Tsuru for Solidarity had to be canceled, in part because of COVID and the shutdowns related to COVID. And the Bay Area, of course, was the first in the nation to have a shelter in place order that came down in March of 2020. I just want to ask what your experience of the COVID pandemic was then and has been? UKAI: Well, I think, like everybody, it was something that once-in-a-century public health event was just shocking. I remember now the first days, the first week in March 2020 when we were in true lockdown. 02:34:00You weren't even supposed to leave your house. And it seems very eerie when I look at it now, because mask restrictions are lifting and so on and so forth, but at the time you didn't know if you touched a counter, right? You were supposed to wash your hands and sing "Happy Birthday" two times or whatever. Yeah, when you came home you had to wash all of your -- I mean, there was just a period, right, where you -- I have a friend whose daughter is married to a doctor, and they were living in separate places for a while because he was afraid that he might bring something home from the hospital and give it to the wife and children. And so that early period was so scary. And when I talked to Nisei who had survived the camps -- sort of bringing it back to the topic at hand -- they said, "I've never experienced anything like this. Even at camp, even though we were imprisoned, and we didn't have freedom, it wasn't this kind of lockdown from talking to other people, seeing people." 02:35:00And so I personally felt that I wanted to go visit some of these elderly Nisei. One is ninety years old, and she lives in San Leandro, which is about a thirty-minute drive. And she's a widow, didn't have children, and just feels very lonely. And I went and visited her, and I went and took her some Japanese food. And I remember driving to her, and driving home and thinking, am I being irresponsible? Because if I get in a crash, then that means an ambulance might have to come, or I'm diverting necessary personnel from truly people who are in danger because of COVID. But during this period I felt very sorry and sad for the isolated Nisei who might be living alone, very isolated, old, and yet living out these kind of last years of your life, really, in this terrible 02:36:00situation. So it's been difficult. And then that also coincides with these anti-Asian hate crimes, because, again, President Trump was saying things like "kung flu," or "the Chinese virus," and racializing it. So the whole period has been very fraught and upsetting. I'm fortunate that I haven't had health problems myself, and in my immediate family. But yeah, it's been difficult for everybody. I think we're the lucky ones. EARDLEY-PRYOR: I want to ask about -- you've mentioned the rise of hate towards Asians, Asian Americans in particular, and ways that you've seen that play out in your life or in your community networks. UKAI: I think there's just much more of an awareness that just walking around the street you might be attacked by somebody, 02:37:00and for no reason, other than the fact that you're Asian and maybe you look vulnerable. And I think Asian women are attacked more than Asian men. Older people are attacked more than younger people. But it just makes you aware of your surroundings and more fearful. At the same time, I think we all know through just -- video, of course, makes such a difference in our awareness of violence, period, but racial violence, too. And I just feel like this is something that other people of color have experienced for many hundreds of years, more than Japanese Americans, for example. And so it just makes you have a greater awareness of the violence that's been perpetrated on vulnerable people for so long that we don't necessarily -- I don't know that I would say before this I felt like I was going to walk down the street 02:38:00and get attacked, any more than anybody would be with street crime, and in California where we're more visible than in other places, but also that might not be something that prevents it, either. I don't know. EARDLEY-PRYOR: I want to ask about your engagements with eBay with regard to our conversations today of provenance on artifacts, particularly artwork, and objects that were created during the incarcerations in World War II. What has your engagement been with eBay, with regard to your broader activism around auctioning of Japanese American art and artifacts? UKAI: Well, I think that what's -- so it's interesting because these things come up for sale on auction platforms 02:39:00all the time, and if you spent as much time tracking each one down, you would have time for nothing else in your life. So I sometimes see these things, and if I see a camp that I know, or, say, it's a family member that you think, oh, that might be their family, you reach out, And the first thing you try and do is work with the seller and say, "How did you get this? Are you aware that X?" And in, I would say, most cases they'll say, "Too bad. If you want it, bid for it." In some cases, people will be really surprised and say, "Let me work with you," or whatever. That just happened yesterday, actually. Somebody's suitcase from a camp, with their name on it and the family number, was spotted. And because the name was on it, it went onto the eBay listing, right? And Barbara Takei and Bif Brigman -- maybe Barbara Takei found it and just said, "Hey, this is the family from Tule Lake, and is this person." And they contacted 02:40:00the family. And, as it turns out, the granddaughter wrote to the seller, and they said, "Didn't know." And they settled it immediately, which is a great thing, because if you ask eBay, "Take this down," then the object for sale just goes underground. It doesn't mean that you know what happens to the artifact. You don't know the seller. So the best thing is if you can reach out to the seller and have some sort of understanding with them. So, at any rate, that's kind of getting a little more granular than speaking about the broader issue of selling World War II camp artifacts that carry these memories, and are materially important, because they survived that period. Selling them for a price, it just feels really painful and offensive to see people bidding on something and then bidding it up. But we live in a capitalist culture, and everybody thinks everything's for sale, and everything has a price. And just going back to the Rago auction for a minute, one of the big motivations 02:41:00for making sure this auction didn't go through was that a lot of appraisers were watching it. They wanted to see what is the benchmark price for a chair, a painting, a shell pin? And auctions do that. They set prices, and that becomes part of the history. And so it was really important to us not only just to prevent it, because this was immoral and it was wrong, but also we didn't want this to become this historic landmark benchmark-setting event. Because every artifact there would then say, "Oh, in 2015 this chair sold for X," and then everyone can compare it. So, as it turns out, we didn't talk about this, but the collection ended up at the Japanese American National Museum, and apparently some money was exchanged -- it was not disclosed -- between the Rago Company and JANM. But I think that's a good thing, because I'd rather not know the number, and I'd rather not other people know the number. 02:42:00But with eBay, of course, there's a starting price, and then you bid it up, or sometimes it's a set price. So this whole auction mechanism is something not only, obviously, at the big auction house level, like Swann Gallery and the Kitaji Bibles, which was a private sale with a set price, or the Rago auction, which was going to be how many lots being sold individually for set prices. So with eBay, what happened was one year ago, so April 2021, Satsuki Ina emailed me and said, "Hey, these Manzanar drawings are going to be auctioned. Somebody let me know." And I was vaguely aware of it, but I was in the midst of something, and I thought, okay, maybe we should follow up on this, because I read about it more and more, and it seemed like, oh gosh. So I drafted a letter, and I was working with somebody named Bif Brigman, who's a former antiques dealer, and who is an activist, and very concerned about artifacts, and was a huge advocate who I met through the Rago auction. And he's in Seattle. 02:43:00Anyway, we worked on a letter just saying to eBay, "Please stop the sale." What turns out in this case of the drawings, which were a set of drawings of nature signed by someone named Matsumura, so the daughter of the man who purportedly made these drawings is Lori Matsumura. She's been in the newspaper a lot so I don't feel badly about saying her name. [In 2022, Lori Matsumura also participated in this Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives oral history project.] And it turns out her grandfather was an incarceree at Manzanar. He went hiking. He was an artist, among other things, and he went hiking in the mountains. He got separated from the parties. They went to go -- I forget -- do what they were going to do, and he stayed behind to do some watercolors or something. A freak snowstorm hit. He ended up dying. They couldn't find him, and then he died in the mountains. Eventually a search party found the body. They had a mountain burial. They brought down some of the artifacts, 02:44:00like his shoes, and I think a belt, and maybe a pocketknife or something like that, and maybe some glasses. At any rate, there was a mountain burial. And so this is her family, and she thought that those drawings were her father's drawings, because the signature matched. So, at any rate, this gave the whole sale of her drawings a lot more emotional weight and documented history, and it's an L.A. family so the L.A. Times started writing about it. And what happened was this letter went out through a group called the Japanese American Confinement Site Consortium, and that's a long way of saying it's a group of Japanese American organizations. Maybe it's a listserv of about 100 or 150 -- I'm not exactly sure -- but it includes a lot of civil rights groups, museum groups, confinement sites, and just any kind of nonprofit and kind of activist Japanese American group. 02:45:00Anyway, they signed on, and the signatures just piled on. And it was a very strong letter, and then a very long list of all the JACLs across the country. I mean -- EARDLEY-PRYOR: The letter was to eBay? UKAI: I'm sorry. The letter was written to eBay, saying, "Please take this listing down, and these are the reasons why. And furthermore, Giichi Matsumura, it's a very sad family history. Are you aware?" So on and so forth. So we, in the meantime, contacted somebody at eBay through the Japanese American Citizens League. David Inoue knew somebody at the Anti-Defamation League, who was in contact with eBay over Holocaust items and the sale of those on eBay. And so David was able to find a person to contact at eBay through this ADL connection. So that was another example of kind of networks and solidarity. We met with the eBay representative -- Lori 02:46:00came on the call, I was there, David was there, I forget, about five or six of us -- and said, "We want to talk to you about this." And within minutes they said, "We're taking it down." And we were just really surprised, because some of us who were used to being in a conflict, say, with museums and so on and so forth expected some digging in. But it was right during the period when these Asian women had been murdered in Atlanta. It was in that environment, and they were very sensitive to that, and said that there is a section at eBay called something like the Offensive Materials Policy, or basically things that are racist, like body parts -- there's all kinds of stuff that people are trying to sell, right? Things that, yeah, are socially abhorrent. But that's a judgment call, right? But at any rate, eBay has that. And apparently there's a law where things that are made on federal property, 02:47:00there's some restrictions on selling those kinds of things, so they counted artwork made in an American concentration camp on federal land as falling into that category. So at any rate, that seller then withdrew them, and eBay gave his contact information to the Japanese American Citizens League. But, to my knowledge, although David reached out to the seller, never got a response. So meanwhile, because they went off the market, that was a good thing, but he could just turn around and sell them to someone else, so that was still a concern. Meanwhile, people's interest moves on, and it's like, "Well, they were taken down, that's good." I don't know that people are necessarily following what happened. So, one year later, the "50 Objects" project, I talked to Lori Matsumura, because we'd gotten to know each other a little bit through the negotiations with eBay, and I had been involved in helping write the letter, and I said, "'50 Objects' would love to do a story about your family history through artifacts, 02:48:00and perhaps we can do something about Giichi, your grandfather. It could be the drawings." And she said, "Oh, that's great. I'd be happy to talk to you, because it's a multigenerational story." And so one year later, she still hasn't been able to get the drawings back, or talk to the seller. It turns out that somebody in our advocacy group knows the seller's name, because a year previous he had purchased, through eBay, Manzanar drawings. Very similar. It's almost like they were in the same camp art class. They used the same paper. They're drawing the same kinds of things. So it's like, how did this seller get two different sets of Manzanar drawings from the World War II camps? And he sold one set to my friend, two years ago, and then he's selling another set, which is Lori's father's set, a year later. How much more does he have? 02:49:00Where did he get them? These are all questions about provenance, which eBay doesn't check on, right? They don't vet their sellers that way. So I contacted the seller and I said, "Let me introduce myself. I'm the director of a project, and we look at the World War II history through a curated collection of objects, and we will be doing a story on the Matsumura family and the eBay drawings will be a part of that story," hoping that he would take this as an opportunity to say, "Oh, let's settle this," happy ending. And instead of trying to reach out -- and the thing is because my friend had purchased something from him, he knew his name, he knew his address, and he had his email, because eBay was unwilling to disclose that, understandably, personal information to anybody. So all we had was -- Anyway, so I'm now in contact with him, and we'll see what happens. 02:50:00I sent him a registered letter saying, "I'd like to do a story about your drawings, or about the family, and the drawings would be a part of it." And he was quite willing to talk, and was quite contrite, and said, "Let's work together. This is a terrible thing. If, after you do your article, we can close the door on this, and never, ever show these drawings again in a museum," which I thought was a rather strange request. But, anyway, but then he started to dig in his heels. So I guess it's been three months since we've been in contact, and he's now questioning whether those drawings are, indeed, Lori Matsumura's father's drawings, although she has submitted signatures of his high school in Santa Monica reports, and also Manzanar school reports, and they are very close to the Manzanar drawing signatures. So I think, in an article, if I were 02:51:00to show his signatures compared to the Manzanar drawing signatures, anybody would look at them and go, "Oh, those are the same." RUSSELL: He's an artist. UKAI: And he's an artist. But I'm not sure how this is going to end, and we'll see what happens. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Gosh, it's wild the way that these issues are evolving and unresolved, that they have this deep, powerful resonance and history in new ways, so that those moments and those artifacts carry new meaning in the present. UKAI: And I think it's always going to be, in our world today, a media story, because the immediacy of social media, of being able to see things, of being able to connect to people, of being able to mobilize a lot of people in a short amount of time, has just, as you know, accelerated the communications and the ability to share information. So it can be pretty intense and pretty crazy, but for stopping auctions it's a good thing. 02:52:00EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah. And this makes me think about NFTs and ownership. One of the themes that you and I have talked about is who owns culture, who owns history, and -- as you're talking about with social media and imagery -- who owns these images? UKAI: Yeah. EARDLEY-PRYOR: Yeah, that's a complicated one. That's tough. I want to ask -- and we're moving towards a point where we can conclude for today, and we'll pick up again. But one of the themes that comes up, along with what we've talked about on networks and solidarity, another theme that is coming up is the way that things carry memories. And so I guess maybe as a final reflection for today, just to hear your thoughts about the ways that objects carry memory, and how those memories are malleable. UKAI: As you know, memories are malleable. They change. 02:53:00Over time they change. What we remember is selective. Obviously, when you tape a meeting and you can look at the transcript, it's going to be different and more specific than anything you remember. That's not to say that memories -- memories are important. Memories are all that we have on certain things. So I've been very interested in the social relationships embedded in these things, to the extent we can find out. How were they made? What materials were used? Who taught them? Or how did they learn to do this? Did they give it as a gift? What are all the social networks and relationships that are embedded in this material thing that you wouldn't know by looking at it? But the more you talk to people about this genre of thing, or this particular object, you can broaden it out 02:54:00to not only more events and people of that time, but to the present, as well. So one of the artifacts now that I'm thinking about is what's called a senninbari, which is a cotton kind of belt that immigrant women made for their American citizen sons who were going to war. And it was made of cotton, and often you would tie it like a belt around your waist, and it would be protecting you. And in Japan, sort of this area in the lower stomach is where the Ki or the source of power lays. So I think Americans talk about the heart, but for Japanese it would be lower, and I think that has a lot to do with martial arts and where the strength of the core comes from, right? Anyhow, "sen" means a thousand, and what it is, these protective belts were made for men going into war. You would get a thousand people -- women, basically 02:55:00-- to put a red knot into this belt, this textile, and it would protect the soldier. And so you would get a thousand to just sort of bring together a lot of people who would protect this person. And often they would have a tiger painted on it, which is a protective animal. And anyway, there's one in the Smithsonian, and it turns out that my friend's mother, Takei, father's paternal side, made one for her brother -- her father, sorry. The grandmother made it for the father. Anyhow, the person who wore this thing into war was one of the people who helped liberate Dachau, and actually picked up Nazi flatware and artifacts from the camp and brought them home. 02:56:00It's really creepy. He, I believe, donated them to a museum, but we're not exactly sure which museum that is, and I'm going to have to look into that. But it's a way of getting back to your question of this artifact, which some soldiers didn't want to wear, because they felt that it would be seen too exotic and weird and like, "You're Japanese, you're not American. Why do you have this?" So some of them, it seems, would carry it and keep it but not wear it. I mean, they're Americans, it's not part of their culture to wear this cotton sash around their stomach to protect them, but their mother and all the friends made it. And I've talked to two people recently in Berkeley, one whose mother made one. One remembers sewing the knot, and the other remembers her mother making it. So these 02:57:00memories are fading really fast. We still have the artifacts, so it's like this rush to get them. And the fact that this particular one was worn by a man who went into Germany, or went into Europe and liberated a Nazi death camp, and then brought back more artifacts -- which really complicates that story, because what do you do with those things? Which the family was very worried about. What do we do with these horrible symbols of genocide and racial hate? It just keeps going on and on. And so that artifact is in the collection of the Smithsonian. And every time you look at an artifact in the museum, you'll just see it has a little one-line description. But of course, it's a story of a family and a person, and it just goes on and on and on. And you can't get the story on every one of them, but I think we do a disservice if we don't try. EARDLEY-PRYOR: That's great. Let's pause today, and we'll pick up in a future interview your engagements around the Wakasa 02:58:00Memorial Stone, and ongoing relationships with the Topaz Museum Board. Thank you so much for today. This has been wonderful. UKAI: Thank you, Roger.