history

[Continuing my series of interviews with the Nisei children of Japanese immigrants early in the 20th century. Below is my third interview with Tom Takeo Matsuoka, which took place Aug. 31, 2000, a little less than a year before he died at the age of 98. Once again, his daughter, Rae Takekawa, sat in on the interview and assisted.]

DN: How old were you when you went back to Japan?

Tom Matsuoka: Three.

DN: And how old were you when your mother died?

I'm preparing for my upcoming cross-country trip aboard the Dreams Across America "Dreams Train" -- during which I'll be trying to tell the stories of some of the 100 immigrants who are embarking on a whistlestop tour of the country to share those stories. The posts will be carried here, at the Dreams Across America blog, and at Firedoglake. In order to introduce the kinds of issues and stories we'll be talking about, I thought I would run some interviews of immigrants -- or more properly interviews with the children of immigrants -- who tell both their stories and their parents' I conducted in the 1990s: specifically, the raw interviews of Japanese Americans that provided the basis for Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community

What follows is a transcript of an interview I conducted in March 1992 with Tom Takeo Matsuoka, who was 89 at the time. Matsuoka was a "kibei" -- American-born (in 1903) and thus a citizen like most Nisei, but one who returned to Japan at an early age and was educated there, then came back to the United States (in 1919) and remained as a citizen. Matsuoka was a community leader in the rural Bellevue farming community near Seattle through the 1920 and '30s. He was arrested the day after Pearl Harbor by the FBI and detained at by the Justice Department for some six months; upon being reunited with his family at the temporary facility at Pinedale, Calif., he worked to get them out on a work-release program and they relocated to Chinook, Montana. After the war the family bought a farm in Chinook and remained there for another 48 years. When I interviewed him, he was living in Ridgefield, Wash., near his daughter, Rae Takekawa, who assisted with the interviews.

[This was one of my earliest interviews with a Nisei immigrant, and it shows: the conversation is unfocused and skips around a great deal, and a number of salient questions went unasked because I had not developed a good ear yet for what the interviewees were telling me. (Some of the notations, incidentally, are taken from my handwritten notes.) I interviewed Matsuoka twice subsequently (I'll be running the latter of these, which has fewer of the flaws of this interview, shortly as well). Matsuoka's story forms the human core of Strawberry Days, which was finally published in 2005.]