Patrick Hayashi | Interview 1 | March 10, 2023

FARRELL: Okay, this is Shanna Farrell with Patrick Hayashi on Friday, March 10, 2023. This is our first session for the Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives project and we are speaking over Zoom. Patrick, thank you so much for joining me today. It's a pleasure to speak with you. We're going to start in a way that I don't typically start, but I wanted to ask you about something recent in your life, which is your interest puppetry. How did you get interested in puppetry?

HAYASHI: This is my puppet Enrico. I was watching some on news clips about a puppet, Little Amal. She's a twelve-foot puppet and she represents

a ten-year-old Syrian girl who's walking through Europe to try to find her mother. Almost everywhere she goes, she brings people to tears. Kids hold her hand, so she shook hands with the Pope. But then in Greece, the local school children had worked for weeks making puppets to greet her but when she went to their town, their village, some racist thugs started throwing rocks at her, and they end up not only hitting her but also some of the school children. I thought, jeez, puppets have a power 00:02:00when they're handled masterfully, and so that just got me started learning more and more about puppets and puppetry. I'm seventy-nine now, and so there's a question about how many years I have left, and I read somewhere that it's helpful to ask how many more Thanksgivings will you have. It puts a particular focus on the question. When I asked that, I immediately came up with an answer of, well, maybe two, maybe seven. Whatever the answer was, the number was not large, so the question is how do I spend the remaining years. Puppetry seemed to be 00:03:00a good thing to explore because I do some speaking, and I do some of work in leadership development for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Sometimes I sing in the talks, and I thought, well, maybe I'd try to add a little puppetry to it too. The reason for that is if I do something that's unexpected it gives permission to the participants to do things that are unexpected. In this one program that I've participated in for over twenty-five years, the participants, 00:04:00they're all pretty high-ranking college administrators, they do amazing things when they do their final presentation about how they experienced the workshop. They'll do some drumming, they'll do dancing, they'll sing, and some people just talk, but they open up in a really remarkable way. I remember this one man from Mt. San Antonio Community College in Los Angeles. He was from Vietnam and he talked about growing up in Vietnam and living in an apartment with thirty-six other people. And then he moved, and he moved to an apartment 00:05:00with only twenty-one other people and so it was better. When he finished high school, he came to the United States with his family and he began at Laney College, and he was an honor student even though he was working full-time. He transferred to the Haas Business School, it's a very hard school to get in, and again, he won high honors there, but he was working full-time in a financial firm. I thought, well, this guy is amazing, but in his statement, he said that he and his siblings were working so hard just to keep the family afloat that he didn't notice when his father got cancer. His father didn't want to bother the kids 00:06:00because he saw how hard they were working, and so when they finally found out, his father was beyond help. When he is talking about this, he starts to cry, and I thought, wow. Anyway, I don't know what that has to do with puppetry but --

FARRELL: Does participating in puppetry made you think about storytelling or even how you want to tell your own story?

HAYASHI: About fifty years ago, Clark Kerr headed up something he called the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, and that Carnegie 00:07:00Commission commissioned several books, about I think maybe close to fifty books on different aspects of higher education. There was one Israeli scholar who was asked to write about the American college presidency. He studied American college presidents and he concluded that the most important function of an American college president was to be a storyteller, to tell the story of the institution in a way that people came to appreciate and support it financially and politically and emotionally. 00:08:00The more I read about leadership, the more I've become convinced that that really is the major function of storytelling of college presidents or college leaders of any kind.

FARRELL: So yeah, let's talk a little bit about your story. Can you tell me where and when you were born and a little bit about your early life?

HAYASHI: I was born in the Topaz, Utah, in 1944. I was born in a Japanese American concentration camp and I don't remember anything about that, but the Topaz has affected my entire life and it continues to affect my life. I've just been interested in understanding that 00:09:00more and more. My mother had a rheumatic heart and after the camp, she died when I was eleven. My father believed that Topaz had essentially killed my mother by wearing her down because it was a tough life, and he became very quiet. He was always very quiet, then he became almost completely shut in. That quietness contained a rage, sorrow, a whole range of emotions, and it's affected me deeply. I think many 00:10:00people who studied the Holocaust have studied the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Oftentimes it's transmitted through stories, but often times, through the absence of stories as well, and so storytelling has become a big interest of mine. Jerome Bruner, who was a cognitive psychologist at Harvard, wrote an essay that said that the story is the most important creation of humankind. It's what distinguishes us from other creatures. We have a propensity 00:11:00and an ability to tell our own narratives and the narratives of our community, and that's what I've been doing.

FARRELL: Can you tell me your mother's name and some of your early memories of her?

HAYASHI: Her name was Alice or Aiko, A-I-K-O, and she was a gentle person and extremely hardworking. I remember once she's told me that my father, Henry, or Taro, had never told her that he loved her, but she always knew that he did. Now that was an unusual 00:12:00conversation but I never forgot it. When she died -- she got progressively weaker as her heart got progressively weaker, she lived in a hospital bed in our living room. I remember one morning, early morning around seven o'clock, my father calling the family doctor saying that, "I think Alice has died." I remember going down and there she was lifeless in the bed. I also remember my brother, Gerald trying to shake her awake, 00:13:00and then my father saying to me after the ambulance came to take her away that he wished that she could've lived just a little while longer. Now one of the things that my mother did during the summers was that she worked in Hunt's cannery, which was about five blocks away from where we grew up in Hayward. I think she got off around one o'clock, and she would was stand next to a conveyor belt and pit peaches -- she had a little specialty knife for that. My father would set the alarm and he would always go pick her up. She would've preferred to walk home, 00:14:00but he wouldn't think of that. I always saw these little gestures like that, well, she realized that he truly loved her. I remember one time about five or six years ago, my brother Norman -- my oldest brother -- asked me if I had ever seen Dad hit Mom. I said, "No, have you?" He said he wasn't sure because one time he got in the car and something had happened between the two of them, and my mother was just very quiet and might have been crying. That's a disturbing question 00:15:00but I thought about it when, in Monterey Park and in Half Moon Bay, there were these mass killings, and the murderers were older Asian men. I think we have two mass murders a day in the United States and so we've become numb to them, but the fact that the killers were old Asian men made me think of the conversation with Norman. There is a Black psychotherapist named Resmaa Menakem who believes that 00:16:00poor people of color almost from birth, the violence of racism becomes embodied in us. I found that to be an interesting point of view because I could imagine those old, Asian men living really tough lives and being pushed down by racism, and that something triggers that, and they go fly into a murderous rage. Rage has always been a challenge of mine. I've always been an angry person, and sometimes, 00:17:00something could set me off, and I'd be crazed. There was a time when I was appointed associate vice chancellor for admissions and enrollment [at the University of California, Berkeley] in 1988. That appointment resulted in me being the highest-ranking Asian American in the UC system at the time. I was appointed because in 1986 after years of steady growth, the Asian American enrollments at Berkeley dropped, and community leaders accused the campus correctly of using illegal means to try to suppress 00:18:00Asian American enrollments. The big concern was that white enrollments were dropping sharply as a result. I was Chancellor Heyman's assistant at the time, and Mike Heyman and I would meet every morning as soon as he got in, and we'd go over the days. He was feeling a lot of pressure because of the Asian American enrollment accusations and Asian American community leaders putting pressure on him that he eventually apologized in a legislative hearing in Sacramento. The community leaders thanked him 00:19:00for this apology, but they also said, "There are no Asian Americans in high-level positions on campus and if you mean what you say, you'll appoint at least one." Mike was a big man -- six-four or something -- and he would walk around. He was walking around in one of our meetings after that hearing and he was saying, "You know they're right, I should appoint an Asian American, but where in the hell could I find one?" That's how I got appointed associate vice chancellor. And the appointment was covered in Newsweek, it was covered in Der Spiegel, it was covered in the Economist, it was covered in the 00:20:00Asian Wall Street Journal and so it was a big deal. But it was difficult for me because it was very, very clear that I was appointed because I'm Asian. One of the things that I had to do in this new position was I had to do a lot of public presentations about admissions, and everywhere I went, people would ask me about just how did I get this job. They were, of course, asking me how did I feel about being an affirmative action appointment, being appointed in 00:21:00substantial measure because of being Asian. I would try to handle those questions through joking around. I would say that “there was this admissions controversy over Asian American enrollments and the chancellor had to do something, and for me, it was a matter of being on the right race at the right time.” Describing myself as the “Asian for the occasion” always made people smile and laugh except other Asian Americans. They looked sad and disappointed and so I didn't 00:22:00quite know what to do. It was a tough time. But then I got invited to speak at the annual banquet of the Golden Gate Optimist Club. This was a service club that was by and run by Asian Americans, principally Japanese Americans. The most prestigious Japanese Americans in the Bay Area were members of the club, my family physician for example, and I was a guest of honor. After dinner, I was speaking, and for the first time, I was able to relax as I spoke because I was with my own people. I told them that what gave me the most pleasure and satisfaction 00:23:00about overseeing admissions was the work I was able to do in racially integrating the campus, recruiting and enrolling larger numbers of Black students and Hispanics students.

FARRELL: This is -- oh, sorry, go ahead.

HAYASHI: Oh, go ahead.

FARRELL: I think you're getting at representation matters, and these things are really important, and we're definitely going to talk more in depth about this as we go. But I do want to back up a little bit and talk a little bit more about your early life and your family. I'm wondering if you could tell me a little bit about your mom's background, what generation she was -- a little bit about her story?

HAYASHI: She was a Nisei, second generation. She grew up in Los Angeles 00:24:00and my uncle put together a family history with a family tree, and he noted that she was adopted. Now, I didn't know what that meant and my uncle died before I was able to ask him, so I don't know what that meant. She trained as a seamstress and she was quite skilled at making clothes, and for Halloween, she used to make our own costumes. But to my everlasting shame, I wanted the store-bought costumes that all the other kids had and so I wasn't able to appreciate it. She loved crossword puzzles and she read I think romances. One of the 00:25:00wonderful things about my family is that we're all readers -- all of us read constantly. That legacy came from my father because he was reading constantly, and he would take us, the kids, to the library every week without fail, and we would hang out for an hour in the library. I was blessed because the Hayward Library had an extraordinary children's librarian. We used to sit around not so much maybe watching 00:26:00TV, but just sitting around as a family with my mother, and that became our evening gathering and I think it pleased her. I know as a kid, I didn't really understand or appreciate all that she was going through, but I remember those moments, they were warm family moments. She was also the person who connected us with the larger Japanese American community. My father was, as I said, very quiet. I suspect that he was also shy to a degree. The Japanese American community coalesced around one or two churches 00:27:00or temples, and we went to a church in Hayward that was built by a local minister and nurseryman, and so he built it on his land. I found out -- it was a Holiness Church -- and I found out much later that the Holiness Church is a kind of extreme branch of the Pentecostal church. In the South, in a lot of Holiness churches people speak in tongues and the spirit invades them and it possesses them, but 00:28:00in my Holiness Church, the tongue people spoke in was Japanese. They had services in both English and Japanese. Our whole family, that was the community center of our family. But when my mom died, we lost touch with the church because my father didn't have the kinds of inclinations and skills to continue that connection. I remember she died I think in early December and then for around Christmas time, the church in the early evening sent some carolers to our house, and they were caroling. I'm not sure but I think that the 00:29:00convention would for our family to go out and thank them but we didn't. We didn't even acknowledge that they were there and I remember that. It's so funny I've never talked about this before, about the deep separation that occurred between my family and the Japanese American community.

FARRELL: You didn't acknowledge them? Do you have a sense of that?

HAYASHI: I don't, other than I think that my father was pretty shy, and I think that their appearance may have embarrassed him -- and I'm not sure, I'm just guessing. 00:30:00When I think about it, there may have been some anger too about how could any God allow this to happen, but I don't know. It's one of those occasions in our lives that form us, but we don't really understand them. I don't understand them.

FARRELL: Yeah.

HAYASHI: The interesting thing, now that I'm talking about it and this is the first time I've ever talked about it, is that the lack of resolution about what happened and why it happened. I think it's true of a lot of events in our lives and it's the indeterminacy that shapes us in 00:31:00a particular way.

FARRELL: What was it like for you to have that separation from the church after your mother passed away?

HAYASHI: I think like a lot of Japanese Americans -- oh, Masako [Takahashi] talks about this -- I remember growing up, I wished that I were not Japanese American. I wished that I was white and I would fantasize about it, and even to the extent of hoping that one day I would wake up being white. That's a strange way to grow up. Had we stayed connected with the church, then I 00:32:00would've made Japanese American friends, I would've played in Japanese American sports leagues. I wouldn't have danced because it was Pentecostal, and I heard that Pentecostals are opposed to premarital sex because that it could lead to dancing and -- but --

FARRELL: Like that town in Footloose?

HAYASHI: Yeah. I just had no connection and so I grew up with white friends and white activities. I played a lot of sports and I was a terrible student in high school. I 00:33:00think that in retrospect, one of the reasons I was such a terrible student was because of the void that my mother's death left in me. My oldest brother Norman, he took off and went to LA where he became a skin diver. He did a lot of diving, that was his community, and he worked in a printmaking shop. My other brother Gerald, as soon as he graduated from high school, he joined the marines, and so we just went our separate ways. My little sister Marilyn, 00:34:00she was sent to live with my uncle Warren and his wife and their children in Oakland where we grew up in the family home. My father would bring her home with the weekends, and finally she said that she couldn't stand the arrangement, so she lived with us as part of the family. I think she missed the family such as it was.

FARRELL: Does birth order go Norman, Gerald, you, and then your sister?

HAYASHI: Yes, and I didn't know about birth. Norman is four years older than me, Gerald is two years older than me, then me, and then my sister is four years younger. I had it worked out that babies appeared every two years except 00:35:00for my sister. I remember thinking for a while that something happened to the missing sibling.

FARRELL: That's interesting, yeah. [laughs] I'm wondering then if you could tell me a little bit about your father Henry -- and I won't be able to pronounce his Japanese name correctly, so I'll call him by his American name, Henry -- what was his background and then some of your early memories of him?

HAYASHI: Dad went to Berkeley. I actually have a wonderful picture of him sitting on the lawn outside of the Life Sciences Building and he has, on the ground next to him, a he pile of books that I think 00:36:00were tied together with a belt-like arrangement. I think that he was part of some Japanese American student club, and then he wanted to be an engineer. But after the camps, being the eldest son, I think he felt obligated to take over the running of the family nursery. It was trashed during the war. One of the things about Japanese Americans is that there is a missing generation. That 00:37:00most Japanese Americans came expecting to make their fortune and returned to Japan, but like a lot of immigrant groups with that hope, they become part of the life and rather than return to Japan, they created their own lives here. At a relatively older age, they send for wives, their relatives in Japan arranged marriages. The Issei, the first generation, and the Nisei, the second-generation, there is almost a missing generation between them because they didn't realize that they were hanging around in the United States. When they finally sent for their wives, 00:38:00rather than being in their mid-twenties, they were more likely to be closer to forty and so I think that missing generation affected a lot of things. Among other things, it affected communication between the Issei, the first generation and the Nisei. When we were put in into concentration camps, that generational divide became exacerbated because for -- at least initially -- meetings held in Japanese were prohibited. The Nisei took over, they became the leaders of the community, and they kind of inverted the traditional hierarchy in our community. 00:39:00And then Issei were not allowed to be citizens, and so the Nisei had that characteristic that the Issei did not have. I just think really a lot of stress developed between the generations.

FARRELL: What generation was your father?

HAYASHI: He was Issei.

FARRELL: Issei, okay.

HAYASHI: No, he was a Nisei, Nisei.

FARRELL: Okay, yeah, because if his family had a nursery, that would make sense if he was Nisei, yeah, okay. Was he from the Bay Area or down South?

HAYASHI: He was from the Bay Area. My grandfather had started a florist and a nursery in Alameda, and that's how that happened. 00:40:00I think that in the camps, my grandfather was in his mid-seventies and my father was still in his twenties, so there was that huge gap there. I remember my father rather proudly saying that my grandfather had gone to high school, and in that time period, going to high school was like going to college. My own older brother Norman thought that my grandfather was a pretty strict and demanding man with respect to his sons fulfilling their obligations for family 00:41:00and community. I mentioned this earlier, one of the big things about my father was that he read and made us all readers and that was a blessing, and I think it was a blessing to him too. The other thing that that he did was that he -- well, do you know how when you go to a florist or a grocery store and you buy flowers that they come in these little plastic sleeves? My grandfather invented that and he patented the process. What he did is he created the sleeves 00:42:00in paper and they're cone shaped so that they can nest in each other and there's a hole in the bottom. These plastic sleeves would go over a stand and you put the potted plant on the top of the stand and then you pull up the innermost sleeve, and the plant is automatically wrapped. Growing up, I remember that we had the originals prototype of the stand that he developed. I don't know what happened to it, it's a regret, I wish I could have it. He sold the patent, but the guy didn't pay him, so he sued and he regained the patent, but he wasn't even able to mass-produce it. But then 00:43:00my father also patented a clamp, I should have brought it, but it's way to clamp tubing together. I remember that he had my little sister Marilyn do the typing for the patent application. I asked her what the patent was for and she said, "I can't tell you. Dad made me promise not to tell anyone." When he died and we were cleaning out my dad's house, I got all of his stuff surrounding that patent, the prototype. I remember I have one thing where he had this back of the envelope calculations if I sell 10,000 00:44:00of these at five dollars apiece. Anyway it was really interesting to see that. One of the things we did is we used to get peat moss in big bales about the size of a bale of hay. My job was to break them up using a shovel because they were really compacted. But he kept trying to develop a machine that could do that, break up the peat moss, so the whole old nursery was littered with welded carcasses of peat moss breakers that didn't work. He also built a tractor, which would use a car engine 00:45:00for it. It was a miniature tractor, and so he was always inventing and creating.

FARRELL: Did you work in the nursery growing up?

HAYASHI: Oh yeah, I don't know how old I was when I started working there. All the kids worked in the nursery. I probably started working when I was around seven or eight, maybe a little older. I started working whenever the child labor laws permitted me to work and the family was scrupulous in adhering to the child labor laws, and I got paid. I think I started at seventy-five cents an hour, and 00:46:00I would get a check and then I'd deposit it. The nursery was a big deal in our family, it was. Everything revolved around the nursery. One of the things that happened is that my father and my uncle, but particularly my father, demanded that we work very, very hard and efficiently. Efficiency was a big value for him, and I grew up being compared with my older brother Norman and my brother Gerald 00:47:00who were both extremely hard workers and smart workers. I grew up thinking that I was just an awful worker because that was the message I was getting from my father. But it was only after I started working outside the nursery with the other people that I found that I worked harder than almost anyone else and smarter too. Now, I'm very interested in how people learn how to work. I think that having a work ethic, not only an ethic but also attention to how to work smart is a real gift in a person.

FARRELL: [I usually ask people 00:48:00about their early] life quite a bit but how do people learn how to work, I think that's a really interesting thing to think about. I wonder how much of that had to do with your age as well? You're younger than Norman and Gerald, so as you get older, it's easier for you to work harder, but age might play a role in that as well. But what were some of the jobs you had at the nursery when you were growing up?

HAYASHI: [laughs] One was to help load trucks. We grew azaleas and Easter lilies and cyclamen and rhododendrons. The azaleas were grown in peat moss, so the pots were very light, and so I was always tried to see how many pots 00:49:00I could carry in one load and I got up to seven. I would somehow hold two pots in each hand, have two in my elbows, and then I could hold a seventh one by pulling my hands together so I'd walk to the truck that way. I think my father thought I was insane and because it takes longer to do that than make two trips. I would the break up the peat moss, I would water. One of the things about growing up in agriculture is it's a seven-day job. There's no time off. We had a flood once and so we raised all the beds and put them on cinder blocks. One 00:50:00of my jobs was to crawl on my belly throughout the nursery painting a line of insecticide around the block to keep insects from getting up. Well, that was an awful job -- it was wet in there. But to keep me from getting bored, I used to make these mazes that the smart insect could get through. My father would see these mazes on the cinderblocks and it confirmed his belief that I was a good-for-nothing guy. Those were the kinds of things I did.

FARRELL: Did you enjoy that work?

HAYASHI: No, it was all manual labor and 00:51:00because my father saw me as essentially lazy and not very smart about working, I got more manual labor, rote kinds of things to do. One of the things I did is that in order to raise the beds, I had to cut two-by-fours in eight-inch lengths. I'd take an eight-foot two-by-four and then saw it in eight-inch lengths. But I would do that all day and it's just very hard to keep sawing all day, but that was the kinds of things that I did. As a result, I got very strong, and that's one good thing about manual 00:52:00labor is that you get strong.

FARRELL: Were your father's parents around the nursery at all when you were growing up?

HAYASHI: No, when the nursery was in the back of our family home in Oakland, yes, but then when it moved to Union City, they wouldn't come. They were too old, basically.

FARRELL: Okay, did you spend any time with them growing up?

HAYASHI: Only when we lived in Oakland. My grandfather preferred to speak in Japanese and I didn't speak Japanese. I remember him; I remember every night he would have a half shot of whiskey. 00:53:00I think it was hard on my mother because it fell to her to do all the cooking and cleaning, and she was weak. She had, at that time, three kids, my father, my grandmother, grandfather, and my uncle all lived under one roof, so she would have to do all the cooking and cleaning for all of us. It wasn't that my father was on extraordinarily demanding about it, it's just that at that time, that's how the rules shook out. He would work all day. After the war, he and my uncle 00:54:00became gardeners, yeah, so that they could get an income stream. They'd have a gardening route. I think that was hard on my father and my uncle because you're essentially a servant, and they're both very proud people. After they worked all day, they would come home and work in the nursery trying to repair it and build it up and on weekends, that's all they did.

FARRELL: Yeah, I wanted to ask also if you have a sense of how your parents met?

HAYASHI: I think it was an arranged meeting. 00:55:00After the introduction, I don't think they would have been compelled to marry each other. I think they genuinely fell in love with each other. My mother had a capacity to really appreciate how my father expressed his love for his family, which is through supporting everyone. I think my father was able to appreciate my mother's warmth and also the fact that she worked very hard on behalf of all of us. I think that her heart failure 00:56:00saddened him in a deep way. She had open heart surgery in the late ‘50s, and that was when open heart surgery hadn't been as fully developed as it is now, and she could hear the doctors operating on her.

FARRELL: Wow.

HAYASHI: She said that she heard them say, "Wow, I think she's gone," and they said, "Well, let's try this one last thing." They were able to save her. But I don't know exactly what was wrong with her. Probably today, you could do a lot more.

FARRELL: Yeah, yeah, I'm also wondering too as you're growing up if there were any special holidays? In general, were there 00:57:00any holidays that were special in your family that you always looked forward to every year or were a part of your annual ritual?

HAYASHI: Christmas was a big deal because our parents gave us very nice presents at Christmas, and so that was a big deal. We would usually hold it with just our immediate family, and that was pretty much it.

FARRELL: Well, so for Christmas, were there any foods or were there any things that you looked forward to eating every year at Christmas?

HAYASHI: I don't remember that. I don't think that food 00:58:00was an important ritual for us. But as I say that, I think about that one tradition with us, we would have a family dinner on Sundays, Sunday afternoon. That was when my parents would have steak, and I didn't like steak and so they would make me a hamburger, which was just fine with them, but we all sat around. I don't remember family conversations. I think conversation, I don't know how developed it was. We were a quiet family. I read about other families, and they were pretty boisterous and convivial, that wasn't our family.

FARRELL: Yeah, I'm wondering if you feel like 00:59:00now might be a good time to talk about your family's experience at Topaz? Or is there anything else in this part of the conversation that we left out that you want to discuss?

HAYASHI: No, one of the things that happened at Topaz is that my father and uncle worked as harvesting beets. One of the reasons that the camp was located in Utah is that some politicians lobbied for the camp to be there because they could use the men as a source of labor in agriculture. Somewhere mid camp, my uncle and father went to Chicago. The men 01:00:00were allowed to leave and go to Chicago or in the Midwest away from the coast, and they worked there. I never talked to my father about that, or my uncle. My brother said during the Q&A -- I gave a talk about the Topaz Museum at the California Historical Society -- and during the Q&A, my brother Norman described how my father came back from Chicago, and my grandfather and grandmother took him and Gerald 01:01:00and said, "Let's go outside." My father went in to see my mother and then Norman said, "And then nine months later, Pat was born." That's pretty much what I know about the camps in my family there. I visited it, Topaz, and I went to where my family's barracks where. It was interesting. There's hardly anything there then. I got to know Jane Beckwith who started the Topaz Museum. She would teach a class for Utah teachers on 01:02:00Topaz, and I got to know her, and then I would I help her teach that workshop. It was, I think, a two-day workshop or something like that, and I used to enjoy it. There were usually thirty people in each workshop and they were there by choice, and so they were very, very interested in the camps. I'm not sure about this, but I think that some Mormons have a particular interest in the local history, and so, and they were exceedingly polite. Jane is not a Mormon, but she grew up with Mormons, and she would say that 01:03:00of the thirty people, at least twenty-nine were Mormon. I said, "How can you know?" She says she just knew, and she said some of the men wore a particular underwear under their shorts, and you could see them. It was kind of like tights. One year, when I was talking, I actually opened the program. I said that a team of religious anthropologists at BYU [Brigham Young University] had made a wonderful discovery that they had found strong archaeological evidence corroborated by biblical verses that Jesus Christ 01:04:00was Japanese, and [laughs] they were stunned. They're all white, and they were stunned, and I said that, "No, they had strong evidence that Jesus loves miso." It was really funny. People in the front the, men who were really polite, they start wadding up paper and throwing it at me, little paper balls, but I enjoyed them. I enjoyed working with Jane, and I enjoyed talking about Topaz. It gave me an opportunity to reflect on it, and I could say whatever I wanted. It wasn't my job to tell the history. 01:05:00I remember one time, I shared with them a poem by Sylvia Plath called "Sheep in Fog." Part of it says that, "The hills step off into whiteness, people or stars regard me sadly, I disappoint them. The far fields melt my heart." I said that one of the reasons I love that poem is because it gave me a sense of how my father must have felt. That he had this incredible burden put on him. That he had to turn away from his own interests and just work to keep the family 01:06:00together and supported. One of my brothers asked or maybe my sister asked, "Were we poor growing up?" I said, "I don't know. We never wanted for anything, but we didn't have stuff that other families had." My brother said, "We were extremely poor." Gerald said this day, yeah, and he gave examples. So I think it was tough on my uncle and father.

FARRELL: I've heard some of the interviews you've done or some of the talks that you've given and had heard you say that not a lot was discussed about your family's time at Topaz. I want to talk about that in a second, but did your brothers ever talk about it? 01:07:00HAYASHI: Only Norman. There's this organization called J-Sei in Emeryville. It's a community center, a beautiful place, and I think he took a class. It might have been run by Ruth Sasaki and he wrote there. He told me that Topaz really affected him in a negative way. That he was bullied and he was afraid of my father, and so it made him, I think, vigilant and fearful. Now, I would never have guessed that from 01:08:00 Norman.

FARRELL: So he would've been around four?

HAYASHI: Yeah, he was born probably in '40.

FARRELL: Those are probably some of his earliest memories.

HAYASHI: Yeah.

FARRELL: Yeah, yeah.

HAYASHI: There was a woman who somehow came upon a box of children's paintings from a woman who taught a children's art class at Topaz. She was presenting at J-Sei and she said that they were able to identify all of the children except one, Makoto Hayashi, and my brother Norman said, "That's me," because that's his Japanese name. He was able to see the picture he had painted as a kid.

FARRELL: Hmm, 01:09:00yeah, I also had heard in some of those talks that your family didn't talk about Topaz very often, but your mom did talk about James Wakasa.

HAYASHI: Yes.

FARRELL: I am interested in what your takeaway -- I've heard you mention it -- was her warning you to be wary of white people. But I'm wondering if you could share what the story you heard about James Wakasa was from your mom?

HAYASHI: My mom told me that an old deaf man, Mr. Wakasa, who was walking his adopted stray dog around the perimeter of the camp, and he would do that every afternoon. His dog got caught in the barbed wire fence and Mr. Wakasa went to save him and 01:10:00release him. The sentry ordered him to back away from the fence, but because he was deaf, he couldn't do it, and so the sentry shot and killed him. That was one story she told me. The other story was about her uncle, who was really I think her second cousin, who was picked up right after Pearl Harbor and he was a doctor and taught kendo and he was a community leader. I think the FBI had a long-established list of community leaders and swept through the community and arrested him. They took him away and then a week later contacted his wife and said that she 01:11:00could claim his body because he had died of complications related to his diabetes, but he wasn't diabetic. Those two stories were the two stories that she told me. I think the moral of the stories was don't trust white people, it's a dangerous world.

FARRELL: A couple of follow-up questions on that is when did you put that together that that was the moral of the story?

HAYASHI: I didn't like the stories because I didn't like the message and so I just forgot about them. But then in 01:12:00I think in -- I forgot -- in the late ‘80s, there was an art exhibit called The View From Within of art that was produced in the camps. I had zero interest in art, but I went there, and I was looking at the paintings and drawings. I felt really uncomfortable in museums because I hadn't grown up going to museums other than an occasional field trip from school, so I didn't know how to behave there. I didn't know if there was a dress code or I didn't know which way to walk. But as soon as I went in there and I started looking at the paintings, I started to choke 01:13:00up. It was the astonishing because I'd never responded to any art, and something was happening internally. I choked up with more and more and then the fourth painting I saw was Chiura Obata's Sumi sketch of James Wakasa falling over after he was shot, and I started to sob. It was terribly embarrassing, but everyone around me, was mainly Nisei, they were crying too. That's when I started revisiting the camps in a systematic way. When I taught Asian American studies 01:14:00at Berkeley, I taught freshman reading and composition. At the time, there wasn't much Asian American literature, so we taught mainly Black literature but there was one book, No-No Boy, that had been written by John Okada. It was in the camps, there was a questionnaire administered, and two of the questions were especially problematic. One question was: Do you swear or do you repudiate any allegiance to the Emperor of Japan? The other question was: Are you willing to fight in combat in the armed forces? 01:15:00A lot of Japanese Americans thought that the first question was will you repudiate allegiance to the Emperor was a trick question. Because I don't think any Nisei had any allegiance to the Emperor, and they felt if they repudiate it, it was an indication that they had allegiance. The Issei, who were not citizens and were unable to be citizens because of racist laws, if they repudiated allegiance to the Emperor, they would become stateless people without a country and would have no rights whatsoever. And then: Will you serve in the armed forces? 01:16:00That was a tricky question because the JACL -- Japanese American Citizens League -- were encouraging people to say, “Yes,” and to volunteer to fight. But a lot of people felt, “I'm in a prison camp and you want me to fight?” I gave that book to my father for Christmas and he opened it up, unwrapped it, and he said, "No-No Boy, I was a no-no boy." Because the people who said, “No,” and, “No,” were called no-no boys, and they were ostracized by the Japanese American community. That astonished me because I had seen my father as pretty passive and I couldn't imagine him taking a stand, a 01:17:00principled stand. He didn't know the consequences because some of the people who said, “No,” and “No,” were sent to Tule Lake.

FARRELL: Yeah, and he wasn't sent to Tule Lake.

HAYASHI: No. I asked Jane [Beckwith] about that, and she said not everyone who said, “No,” and, “No,” was sent to Tule Lake, and so, but I don't know, I wasn't able to talk to my father. When my dad died, we had a new minister at our church who didn't know him, so he convened a family get-together in our family house. We were talking about Dad so that he could get information for his eulogy. I remember my brother Norman saying that he made readers out of all of us, 01:18:00yeah, which was true, and my sister Marilyn remembered him brushing his false teeth. He would keep them in a jelly jar and in the morning take a toothbrush -- and they used Ivory soap to brush their teeth -- and she said that he sang "You are My Sunshine." Imagining my father singing was unheard of, yeah, and then I said, "Well, Dad was a no-no boy." My uncle Warren said, "Henry was a no-no boy. Are you sure?" I explained to him about the gift and he said, "I was a no-no boy too." I had thought to myself, well, that pretty much says it all about communication in our family, no one 01:19:00said anything to anyone.

FARRELL: They didn't communicate that to each other. I mean being a no-no boy, there's a lot there, and so I have to imagine there were reasons that they didn't share that with each other. But it is interesting that it comes out for both of them later in life.

HAYASHI: Well, they were very, very close, and my mother said that they had never had an argument. They had worked nearly every day of their life together. But there was ten-year difference between them and Warren was my dad's half-brother because my dad's mother had died and so my 01:20:00grandfather remarried. I've always wondered about how you could spend your life with someone and make a decision like that with unforeseen consequences and not talk to your brother about it. I think they made principled decisions, decisions that could have had major consequences for them and their families, but that they kept it to themselves because they saw it as personal matter. I think it was a matter of their own dignity and own courage. It was interesting to see that, my uncle's reaction to learning that Dad was 01:21:00a no-no boy too.

FARRELL: I find that really interesting because the literature on no-no boys is that they were mostly sent to Tule Lake, and it was more of a public thing. It's interesting to hear this was a private matter for them and, as you mentioned, one of personal dignity.

HAYASHI: Yeah. That's the problem of having these questions too late. Now, a friend of mine is a top executive in the Japanese American Citizens League, the JACL, and she said, "Why don't you join?" I said, "My family hates the JACL." JACL was referred to as the Jackals, and a lot of it is because 01:22:00of their position of appeasement and encouraging people to go to war and die.

FARRELL: [How did your family express their feelings about the] JACL?

HAYASHI: Just silently. There was just contempt and it wasn't discussed. Things were so rarely discussed, yeah, and I think on a continuum, more on the quiet side of Japanese American families. But from what I gathered from a lot of my friends is that the camps were rarely discussed. One of my close friends Judy Sakaki, she grew up thinking that the camps were kind of summer camps. I think that's true of a lot of people.

FARRELL: You know, what you just mentioned are things that 01:23:00we've been hearing from people that we've been interviewing. A lot of people thought they were summer camps because it's just referred to as camps. When you don't have a sense of it and there's a lot of silence around it and it's not discussed, as a little kid hearing that, your mind is going to go to the positive version of that instead of the negative one.

HAYASHI: Yeah, but I think that in my case, we did not discuss the camps, but the message that was sent from my father and my mother and my uncle was that the camps were an awful, unjust experience, and unforgivable. 01:24:00When I was teaching Asian American studies, freshman reading and composition, I read a lot of James Baldwin. There's one essay in particular, "Notes of a Native Son" where Baldwin's father had died, and there were race riots in Harlem right at the time his father died. There was broken glass and people who he described as “race men” standing on corners feeling angry. There were the groups of church people just trying to keep the community together and not hurt itself by trashing the community. 01:25:00He's drunk and he goes to the father's funeral, and someone -- the minister -- starts a eulogy about his father. He describes his father as an upright, responsible person who was generous to his family and his church, and Baldwin is astonished because he didn't see his father that way at all. I guess his father was suffering from some mental illness and he saw his father as a menacing, stern, emotionally crippled person, spiritually crippled. But then as he's hearing this other description of his father, he starts to think that maybe 01:26:00his father was like this, that he was generous and responsible. He remembers a biblical verse, "Thou knowest this man's fall, but thou knowest not his wrassling." He focused on his father's failures, but he didn't know anything about how hard he had tried, so that made me reconsider my own father. I knew all of his failures and particularly his emotional remoteness, but I didn't know how hard he tried. Then there's this is a reassessment that constantly goes on in our lives if we're lucky. 01:27:00That had a big impact on me. The other thing that Baldwin did is he helped me understand my rage. And how if you've been suppressed constantly by racism, that goes somewhere and then it explodes. That was my pattern, and then it made me realize that it must have been my father's experience as well. He was a proud man, he was smart, but it was clear, the injustice was clear to him and so it must have gone somewhere.

FARRELL: Mm-hmm, 01:28:00the internalization of all that I think is also where it becomes embodied as you were talking about at the beginning as well. When you internalize it, it becomes part of your body and can be a physical thing.

HAYASHI: Yes.

FARRELL: I really appreciate you sharing all that. These are really interesting points, and I'm wondering at what point you came to be aware of these things? Was this later in life or was this as it was happening, halfway?

HAYASHI: I think it started when I got involved in Asian American studies and then started reading and teaching No-No Boy and "Notes of a Native Son," 01:29:00and understanding that being a person of color in the United States and what that meant. But I think with me and a lot of other Japanese Americans, maybe particularly Japanese American men, that our initial stance is I never would've gone into a camp, I would've resisted, I would've gone to a federal prison instead. As you get older, you start realizing that imagined, hypothetical valor is a form of deep cowardice, and then you say would I have really done that? The answer is 01:30:00probably no. I had to work through my own chagrin and realization that a lot of my judgments about my father were not fair, were not textured, and so that that's been interesting too.

FARRELL: Yeah, and we're going to, I think, in our next session, talk more about your career and your work in the Asian American studies department and being head and things like that. We'll talk more about that next time. But I am just backing up a little bit. One thing you mentioned this, and I've also heard you talk about how your family's nursery was basically stripped bare, before they went to Tanforan, before 01:31:00Topaz, in about twenty-four hours it was stripped bare. What was it like for your family to come back to the Bay Area?

HAYASHI: I can only imagine it. It was my uncle who told me about how everything had been vandalized and trashed, and things were stolen, and I guess it was a real mess and it was painful for him to describe it. My father never said a word about it and that's all I know. It was one of those things. It was an event that I know was momentous, extraordinarily important in my family's life and in my life, but it was unspoken. 01:32:00But somehow, the enormity and the root meaning of the enormity is “great evil,” so the enormity of the event was transmitted to me but how, I don't know. I just don't know. But the message was clear, forceful, and it has always stuck with me.

FARRELL: When you and your family came back, you mentioned Oakland, but I also knew you went to school in Hayward. Did your family come back to Oakland or was it Hayward?

HAYASHI: We came back to Oakland, and I went to school down the street. 01:33:00I thought that I was the only Asian in my class, but a woman who was in my class stayed in touch with me and she now lives in Nevada. She sent me our class photo and there were four or five Asians in my class.

FARRELL: Oh, interesting.

HAYASHI: Yeah, and I remember the first time I went to kindergarten there, my mom asked me how it was and I said, "The teacher is really nice but people smell." She explained to me that white people smell. I later figured out that what I was detecting was a body odor 01:34:00that was a result of what people ate, and white people ate stuff that was different than we ate and so they smell differently. Years later you figure this stuff out. I remember one time, the teacher, this one teacher would have us recite The Lord's Prayer, which I liked because I think even at that time -- I was attracted to language, beautiful language. But when I told my mother that, she didn't like it at all and for clear reasons, but they would never say anything about it. The 01:35:00family nursery was all important. It was behind our house in Oakland on 73rd Avenue. Next to it, one of my uncles, my father's brother his own nursery. I knew that and I grew up in the nursery, and I read this short story by the writer Toshio Mori and it's called "The Chessmen." He describes two people working in a nursery, one younger and the other older, Japanese Americans, and they knew that someone was to going to be laid off, so they were competing against each other silently. I thought to myself, well, 01:36:00he knows everything about nurseries. He has everything exactly right, what they look like, how they feel, what the environment looked like. Well, he wrote this anthology called Yokohama, California, and the Yokohama, California, was a name for what is now Oakland, Chinatown. We found a copy of that anthology, and it was out of print, so we xeroxed it, and we used that in the freshman reading and composition class. I had heard that Toshio lived in the Bay Area, so I called directory assistance, that was when you could do that, and 01:37:00they gave me his phone number. I called him up. It was about 7:00 in the evening and I told him about how we found his anthology and how much I admired it. I said, "If it's ever possible, I would love to meet you." He said, "Well, tonight is not good, but how about tomorrow?" So I went over to his house. I took my daughter because I was so nervous. It's like going to see a god, and he was just the warmest, nicest man. He had just suffered a stroke, so his left arm was paralyzed a little bit. He brought out this whole scrapbook of his career and he said that his goal was to publish 01:38:00by age twenty-six when Hemingway had published his first work. He admired Hemingway and he used to copy Hemingway, he’d learn by copying. We had this wonderful conversation and it turned out that he lived across the street from us on 73rd Avenue and he worked in my family's nursery. That's why he described it so beautifully is because it was our nursery.

FARRELL: Wow, that's pretty remarkable.

HAYASHI: Yeah, it was amazing, and he remembered me. He said that I used to run around yelling a lot.

FARRELL: Wow, that's pretty cool.

HAYASHI: Yeah, it's very cool, I know. But what's especially cool is that because of Asian American studies, his book was republished, and you can get it now, and 01:39:00he was acknowledged. Before he died, people were able to express their appreciation and admiration, so it was a nice outcome.

FARRELL: Yeah, actually, I just made a note to look it up because that sounds really interesting and especially given there's the connection to your family. That's cool.

HAYASHI: Yeah.

FARRELL: I'm thinking that this might actually be a good place to leave it for today and then next time, pick up with your education and we'll move into your career from there. And then, of course, we'll talk about art and things like that, but does that seem okay to you?

HAYASHI: It sounds fine.

FARRELL: Okay. Do you have anything that you want to add for this part of the conversation anything that we didn't discuss? 01:40:00It may come to you later, and we can always add it in next time too. I don't want to put you on the spot. I just want to give you the opportunity if something does come to mind.

HAYASHI: Well, the part that I think about but there are all these blank spaces. My sister, who is much more perceptive than I am especially about our family, said that my father built this platform so that my mother could take the laundry and put it on the platform and hang out our clothes to dry, 01:41:00and that was yet another expression of his care for my mother. That's an area that I don't know much about. I actually should talk to my sister because I guess that she was more attentive and perceptive about things like that. We're having a family get-together next year, I think organized by my sister. I think she knows that we don't have many years left and so while we're all alive, maybe we can get together and talk about it, we'll see.

FARRELL: Yeah. Well, here's to many more Thanksgivings. [laughter] 01:42:00Well, thank you so much, it's been a real pleasure to talk with you, and I really appreciate you sharing all of this. We're just really thrilled to have your perspective as part of this, and again just really appreciate you taking the time in sharing all this.

HAYASHI: I don't know if we can discuss this, but I got a sense initially that one of the questions that animates this project is what was it like to be Japanese American at Berkeley? I've have been thinking about that. I got to know Clark Kerr pretty well, and 01:43:00he used to come over to my office twice a year to be briefed on admissions. It was interesting because I would always offer to go to his office, which was on Channing but he would never accept that. He always preferred to come see me, and I think it was a matter of courtesy and humility. He would come to my freshman seminar and the students would read The Uses of the University. He would talk about growing up Quaker and he said that he grew up in a 01:44:00low Quaker community, and I think he went to Oberlin, and he said that was a high Quaker college. I'm thinking, there's a low Quaker and a high Quaker? [laughs] I had no concept of that. He began his career as a labor organizer in Salinas, in Central California. He said that he saw real violence in people trying to break up demonstrations, and he said that once he saw real violence, he became a dedicated pacifist. My students are hearing this, this person who created the university 01:45:00in his image and they were just astonished by his openness. After the class -- he would come twice in each term -- they would line up and have him autograph his book.

FARRELL: Oh, interesting.

HAYASHI: Yeah, and I was like, jeez. But my point there is that I have been thinking about Japanese Americans and me at Berkeley. I think that the Clark's vision of the multiversity is a huge sprawling, complicated enterprise and with internal parts that contradict each other.

FARRELL: Yeah.

HAYASHI: You can find your way and you can be many different people over the course of your career, and that's been true for me.

FARRELL: Yeah, and 01:46:00we're going to talk a lot more about that next time. I think that question -- you're probably getting what was it like to be Japanese American at Berkeley is from your outline, which is one of the things we want to know what it's like to be you, but, yeah, especially given your work with merit-based test -- the SAT score, standardized testing, we’ll go into that kind of thing. We'll talk about that a lot more in-depth next time.

HAYASHI: Okay.

FARRELL: But, yeah, I think that this one, we're laying a lot of the groundwork for that as well.

HAYASHI: Thank you, I enjoyed it.

FARRELL: Oh good, good, I'm glad, I this is okay. I'm going to pause the recording and we'll talk about the next one.

HAYASHI: Okay.