Tag: reflections
OHC URAP Student Zachary Matsumoto Reflects on Work with Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Project
Zachary Matsumoto is a sophomore at UC Berkeley currently studying History and participating as an Oral History Center URAP apprentice. He was drawn to the Oral History Center after attending a Bancroft Roundtable presentation about the Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Oral History Project. American history is a current academic interest of his, including the histories of communities relating to his background as a Chinese and Japanese American. In his free time, Zachary likes to go for runs, watch sports, and play taiko.
Reflections on Work with the Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Project
by Zachary Matsumoto
This fall of 2023, I became a URAP student at the Oral History Center under the guidance of Shanna Farrell, Amanda Tewes, and Roger Eardley-Pryor. My work throughout this semester largely consisted of researching, analyzing, and writing about the oral histories of the Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Project, as well as the Japanese American Confinement Sites Project. These oral histories highlighted a historical event that greatly affected my own family.
In 1942, the United States government, at the beginning of its involvement in World War II, issued Executive Order 9066. This order imprisoned Japanese Americans living on the West Coast and placed them in remote prison camps across the country. My paternal grandparents and their families were among them. Growing up, my parents told me of my grandparents’ histories as incarcerees, stressing the wrongdoing and unfairness done to them by the US government. As I grew up reading and watching material on Japanese American incarceration, I began to understand the details of the incarceration experience: how truly unfair it was; the crippling effects of losing a home for a remote prison camp; the silence of incarcerees afterward; and how themes of incarceration endure today.
Fast forward to 2023, when I joined the OHC as a URAP student and explored the oral histories of Japanese Americans. One component I learned from these oral histories was the traumatic intergenerational effects of incarceration: the pain and guilt that incarcerees passed down to their children, and at times even their grandchildren. This was a very eye-opening experience for me, as I personally felt as if the incarceration of Japanese Americans was an important, but almost distant historical event in my own life. Reading these oral histories, as well as listening to a podcast series “From Generation to Generation: The Legacy of Japanese American Incarceration,” based on the very same interviews, was at times an emotional experience. Hearing of descendants losing their sense of belonging, feeling disconnected with their culture, and living without the knowledge of their families’ incarceration experiences was heartbreaking to hear.
But what really struck me about these oral histories was not only the intergenerational pain and sorrow, but the agency exhibited by the project narrators after incarceration. This is something I knew but not really understood the scope of. This agency, as recounted in the oral histories, was both public and private. Patrick Hayashi, a man born in the incarceration camps and whose oral history I studied extensively, demonstrated activism as one of California’s first Asian American Studies professors and by fighting against prejudiced admissions practices. But more privately, he vowed to reexamine the trauma of his family’s past through creating artwork and educating Utah teachers on incarceration. Other individuals, in the 1970s and 1980s, participated in the redress movement, in which Japanese Americans questioned the wrongdoing of WWII incarceration and successfully drew attention to this experience. This eventually led to a formal apology and reparations paid by the US government.
Even in more recent years, the agency and activism of individuals in the oral history interviews shines brightly. Ruth Sasaki, an author, joined an organization named Tsuru for Solidarity: a group that fought against the forced incarceration of migrants crossing the US-Mexico border. After the Trump administration detained migrants at the US-Mexico border, including children, as part of the Zero Tolerance Policy, Sasaki and twenty-six other Tsuru for Solidarity members flew to Oklahoma to protest, along with a large number of Native American, Latino, and African American activists. Sasaki’s story, in particular, served as a reminder for me of the living memory of Japanese American incarceration and how that community in particular could serve as a key fighter: a guard against the unjust, unprovoked incarceration of marginalized groups today.
One moment of agency, in particular, was very personal for me and my interests. Roy Hirabayashi, a longtime San Jose resident and the descendant of Topaz survivors, recalled the founding of San Jose Taiko, a taiko (Japanese drumming) performance group. As San Jose Taiko began its performances and found its sound and style, Hirabayashi realized he did not know many traditional Japanese themes and rhythms for playing taiko; instead, he took rhythmic inspiration from music he was exposed to in the Bay Area, such as R&B and Latin soul. According to Hirabayashi, “We felt we were establishing pretty much early on that we, in Asian American sound, using what we called the Japanese drum, the taiko, our version.” For Hirabayashi, taiko was not just a performance instrument but an intentional expression of his developing Asian American identity. This, to me, shows his agency and sense of self. Reading Hirabayashi’s oral history also highlighted my personal connection to this interview. As a child, my mom drove me forty minutes to Santa Rosa so I could learn and practice taiko. Now, as a sophomore in college, I am a current member of Cal Raijin Taiko, UC Berkeley’s taiko organization and performance group. The fact that an instrument that occupies an important place in my own life is wrapped in the history and agency of Japanese Americans captivates me and brings me closer to the history of the Japanese American experience.
Over the course of my URAP experience in the Oral History Center, I felt my eyes further opened to the individual experiences of the descendants of incarcerees. What stands out was not just their guilt and attempts to cope with the scars of incarceration, but instead their strength through identity and activism. As a Japanese American myself, I feel proud to be part of this legacy of strength. In the future, I hope to continue exploring my identity, and what it means to be a descendant of the incarceration camps. As I explored the oral histories in the Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Project, I encountered personal questions: why am I not feeling the same burden as the descendants of incarceration? Why do I feel as if incarceration was a memory without a strong effect on my own life? These questions remain in my mind, and I will continue to seek answers to them throughout my life.
Looking Back: Oral History Center Staff Reflects on 2021
As we transition from 2021 to 2022, the Oral History Center staff reflects on a year that moved both fast and slow and was full of change, yet much of the same. I asked our team to share their highlights from the past year. Join us as we look back on the moments in which our team found hope, joy, and inspiration in over the past twelve months. — Martin Meeker, OHC Director
“This year, we received so much good news about new endeavors, and projects that had been on hold in 2020 came roaring back. I am ever grateful to all our project partners who saw the potential of these remote oral history projects, and for narrators who were willing to be flexible and try new technologies for recording interviews. One such project is the Save Mount Diablo Oral History Project. Shanna Farrell and I have been working on this project to document the history of this Contra Costa County land trust organization in celebration of its fiftieth anniversary on December 7, 2021. We will be turning these important interviews into podcast episodes of The Berkeley Remix, so stay tuned for more to come on this project!”
–Amanda Tewes, Interviewer/Historian
“2021 has been a remarkable year for the Oral History Center, and I am as thankful as ever to be a part of such a uniquely talented organization. I listened on as interviewers conducted more oral histories than ever through a carefully planned combination of remote and in-person interviews. I marveled at my good fortune to work with a talented team of student workers who process, preserve, and edit our video oral histories in a variety of formats. We continued our rich collaboration with University of Southern California MMLIS interns to enhance access via improved metadata for oral histories from our archives. Student workers and interns provide significant contributions to the Oral History Center year in and year out, but their navigating academics, work, and daily life through the challenges of a pandemic was especially inspiring. Thanks are due to the contributions of recent graduates Yarelly Bonilla-Leon and Abigail Jaquez; continuing mentors Max Afifi, Tasnima Naoshin, and Lydia Qu; and newest team members Mina Choi and Vivien Huerta-Guimont. I am excited to see what the Oral History Center will accomplish in 2022!”
–David Dunham, Operations Manager and Project Manager, Rosie the Riveter / WWII Home Front Oral History Project
“This year I’d like to highlight the stellar work of the undergraduate student employees on the editorial team. They maintained their professionalism and high-quality work throughout the pandemic and I’m impressed with how much they’ve been able to accomplish. A big thank you to my team of student editors, spring graduates Jordan Harris and Ricky Noel; current employees Mollie Appel-Turner, Adam Hagen, Ashley Sangyou Kim, and Lauren Sheehan-Clark; and research assistants Deborah Qu and Serena Ingalls. The student editors serve critical functions in our oral history production, analyzing entire transcripts to write discursive tables of contents, entering interviewee comments, editing front matter, and writing abstracts. They do the work of professional editors and we would not be able to keep up our pace of interviews without them. The research assistants conduct research for our social media outreach and other projects. Excellent writers in their own right, the student employees also research and write articles highlighting individuals and projects in our vast archive. These contributions have enabled us to better share the wealth of our collection with scholars and the public. You can read about their experiences working remotely during shelter-in-place in this newsletter, and keep an eye out for their insightful articles in future editions.”
–Jill Schlessinger, Communications/Managing Editor
“In our second pandemic year, we continued some remote interviewing while resuming our traditional in-person recording for certain projects. Although there was a period of adjustment, and though there is still no substitute for sitting together in a room to share a story, the fact is that we now interview people across the country and around the world in a way that would not have been possible just a decade ago. I’m grateful for in-person interviewing, but I’m also thankful for the opportunities to do remote interviewing and to do more online, interactive teaching. Among my 2021 interviews, there are too many highlights to name, but what stays with me is the description of a formative moment, the life experiences that were rich and meaningful, the way a crescendo of a voice raised in excitement brings a point home, or the way a pause gives space and time to let the meaning of what has been said sink in.”
–Paul Burnett, Interviewer/Historian
“For me, “home” has been an important theme throughout 2021, particular as this year ends. Home can mean different things to different folks, but it often involves the people and places with the greatest mutual influences in our lives. My oral history interviews in 2021, which totaled nearly 100 recorded hours with a mix of academic, political, and environmental actors, included Zoom calls beamed into a narrator’s home as well as face-to-face recordings physically inside their homes. Whether conducted online or in person, our narrators invite us into their homes in various ways. Narrators often share stories of where they lived and with whom throughout their childhoods and in their personal lives. These memories of “home,” as it’s evolved over time, are replete with rich and complicated human and more-than-human relations that recall moments of happiness and heartbreak, dissonance and discovery, and emotions sometimes unresolved or rarely recalled but still surprisingly powerful. The stories a narrator chooses to tell, or not tell, can say a great deal about their sense of home, as well as who, what, or where gets included there for them at different times. In 2021, both my narrators and I also experienced how the ongoing COVID19 pandemic has reified and refracted the role that home plays in our lives. The blessing of vaccines helped many of us expand—at least for a moment or two—the realms we’ve called home since the pandemic began. Additionally, during these final months of 2021, my family and I experienced the blessing (and complications) of purchasing and moving into our own first home. As the year ends, I remain deeply grateful for the privilege and responsibility of joining narrators in their homes, of hearing about the evolving influences that home has played in their lives, and also reconciling and reconstituting the many meanings of home in my own life.”
–Roger Eardley-Pryor, Interviewer/Historian
“There’s a lot to celebrate as 2021 draws to a close. I’ve been able to work on new oral histories and continue existing projects with the help of remote recording technology. I’ll be forever grateful that the OHC has been able to adapt our model using Zoom so that some semblance of normalcy persists through the continual waves of uncertainty. I was able to interview people I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to for ongoing projects like the East Bay Regional Park District oral histories and start the pre-interview process for our newly funded project about Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives. As we enter 2022, we’ll likely have a mix of in-person and remote interviews, but I (and my narrators!) appreciate the flexibility and options that are now integrated into our interviewing process. Also with the help of Zoom, we were able to continue our Introductory Workshop and Advanced Summer Institute, so that we could train those who wish to enhance their oral history skills. Lastly, I published my second book, A Good Drink: In Pursuit of Sustainable Spirits, and was able to do a number of virtual events, including a roundtable with The Bancroft Library. Lots to celebrate, indeed! Here’s to a healthy, productive, and successful 2022 with much more to toast!”
–Shanna Farrell, Interviewer/Historian
“After a tumultuous 2020, the past year ushered in much to celebrate and be grateful for at the OHC. Thanks to the resilience of many narrators, projects new and old were put into the books. The Yale Agrarian Studies Project, featuring the oral histories of famed social scientist James C. Scott and affiliates of his Agrarian Studies Program were officially released in September. The Chicana/o Studies Oral History Project, which was launched in 2017, also finally reached the finish line. Composed of in-depth interviews with nearly two dozen scholars who played a vital role in the field’s formation and development, the project will be released in early 2022. Our partnership with the California State Archives also grew to new heights this past year. Building on the oral history we conducted with Governor Jerry Brown, we initiated a new project on Governor Schwarzenegger’s signature climate change program: The Global Warming Solutions Act (AB32). We were also able to conduct a new round of interviews for the State Government Oral History Program—a program I’m happy to report has been given a multi-year renewal by the state legislature. Lastly, I completed a short documentary film on Japanese American Redress with Emi Kuboyama at Stanford University, who is also an alumni of the OHC Summer Institute. The film features oral histories we conducted with community leaders and former staff of the Office of Redress Administration. Thanks to a grant from the Takahashi Foundation, we will be reediting the film in the coming year for classroom and television use. Here’s to a productive 2021 and an even better 2022.”
–Todd Holmes, Interviewer/Historian