Unintentional ASMR - Togo Tanaka - Soft Spoken - Interview Excerpts From "The Great Depression"

i lived in in hollywood los feliz and vermont i moved to glendale the following year i was working full time as an english editor of a daily newspaper called the ralph ushimpo still being published here in los angeles after 90 years but i had um received a degree from ucla in political science and had gone to work in my senior year for the rap simple i always thought that every new job that i had i improved my condition while in school i worked 12 hours on saturdays at the holy month market for three dollars a saturday and uh the job at the rafa simple paid me i think 65 a month plus three meals in the commissary you know of the newspaper and um as i look back it never occurred to me that it was you know hard times it was enough to eat we had a roof over our head paid our rent and i took the streetcar down to the job every day and i enjoyed it i saw people on street corners selling apples i read about in the newspaper that we were in a deep depression that there was unemployment i think about that time they talked about a bonus march to washington dc and you couldn't work for a daily newspaper reporting what was happening in the city even though this was an ethnic newspaper without being aware of the fact that there was a worldwide depression times were hard the government in washington dc had started out by declaring a bank holiday and we knew that times were hard i think while the weight scale was such i think i remember at that time we quoted the fact that if you were a manager of a safeway store and earned um enough to support a family of four two children a couple and if you got 125 dollars a month that was going scale the dollar was worth a great deal more in those days and so he didn't get as many of them but we were in a depression and what little economics i'd studied at ucla i had learned that in the early days in the 19th century we didn't call it a depression we called it a panic and then in the 1930s newspapers picked up the term depression and that's what we were suffering wasn't a joke it was kind of ironic but the most successful entrepreneur among the japanese americans i think one of them more successful in the los angeles area was a man named susumu h-a-s-u-i-k-e japan born but he had had the drive to not only own one fruit and vegetables store but he had a chain of them i don't remember how many he had at its peak but it ran into several dozen and it was said that if you got an engineering degree at uc berkeley they weren't handing out those degrees of ucla uh you could get a job polishing apples and stacking potatoes for three-star produce that it wasn't unusual to go to a fruit stand and discover that degree in my own case i was offered a scholarship to the university of missouri journalism but it was just for a tuition that didn't cover the the um cost of living so i chose to go where i could you know work and earn a salary i think the uh jobs were relatively limited for uh people of japanese descent in those days as they were for other ethnic groups who belong to so-called minorities i think that california had a long history of anti-oriental political agitation they organized labor you know first because when the chinese were brought in to build the railroads i think successive waves of asian immigrants all ran into the same thing same thing that southern europeans ran into in new york and on the east coast i think during my student days at ucla i if you lived in california in the 1920s i've lived here since 1916 so but uh you knew that you were not really a first class citizen on an equal footing with other you know classmates one it wasn't just the economic difference i think it was more a question of knowing that customs that were you know cast in concrete here i remember um first time i walked down here into westwood village to get a haircut i was a sophomore at that time and uh i was told that your hair is different so go to a little tokyo that was not an uncommon experience see if you went into uh good restaurants i couldn't afford them anyway but you know you usually might be seated in the back now this might not have been that common in experience but i think it was in that for most people who were visibly different you know if you were black we didn't say black and white you were a negro or there's other or japanese or chinese there weren't many other asians but i think the japanese and chinese born the brunt of the early anti-oriental you know feeling just generally i think most noticeably and i ran into this on graduation from ucla and attempting to buy a home and you discover that within the legal framework of how you buy a home there was a thing called um uh i think it was a deed which said occupancy of this property can be only by a person of caucasian descent which eliminated a lot of us so i think in those ways later as i became an english editor of the rapha shimpu and discovered that literally in little tokyo i had never lived in a segregated racial community until i began to work for the newspaper my parents had always lived in you know we had the worst house in a caucasian neighborhood you see or they my exposure was to customers of my parents food stand and in the course of a day if i talked to a hundred people or waited on them and often i did more than that there might there probably be not a single japanese person but um they discovered that in a way we were hemmed in in a ghetto because there's so many laws and rules that said you cannot do this you cannot you cannot be licensed as a lawyer or as a doctor or as an accountant or in the professions because they were restrictions based upon your race and that was pretty much um typical i think it was accepted by the first generation japanese but not so by the second my parents never did feel at home i think my mother did she accommodated whatever had happened and she was i think i don't think she was baptized but she accepted christianity and and sent her children to christian sunday school my father who took refuge as a confucian scholar and background in buddhism simply said that this was a white man's country there's no place for me if he had ever been successful in business or otherwise he probably would have taken us all back to japan but he was not a businessman and so he could never afford to so he's really put up with it you know uh i had very dear and good friends at school uh one friend i lost this past year we have known each other since we were in the third grade at las vegas elementary school it's a long time and um i i would say most of my friends all of my friends in the school days were not japanese i feel very much at home very much part of it and i think in 1923 when japan had that very severe earthquake and my father had brought me up to believe that you could never get a square deal in dealing with anybody who was not japanese but i remember taking a shopping bag and walking all over hollywood collecting donations from people to help people who were made destitute by that earthquake and brought back a lot of money a bag full of coins and bills and i began to question my father he began to feel that much of what he was saying applied to him but not necessarily to his children i think it was kind of funny when i read a great deal i went to the library constantly and remember one year we were too um he's you know the idea of putting a bookmark with your name on it and i think my father's influence showed because i looked at some of those early bookmarks and i had carved a japanese sword and then my name and i put that in a book as i look back on it in later years that was kind of funny but it it certainly indicated that my father came from what they call a samurai family in japan is very proud of her and i i know one of the greatest disappointments uh that he expressed to my wife was that when he was getting older he asked me would i like his collection of swords or his books he left me his books and he left my wife as swords i wish i had learned to read japanese i never did i was typical i think of those who when i was born i believe my father i was born at home in portland oregon and my father a year or two later i think registered me as a japanese subject that they did that in japan so i was uh but i by virtue of having been born in the united states i was an american citizen and at the outbreak of or before the outbreak war we were made conscious of the fact that if you had dual citizenship you were subject to the laws if i were in japan i'd have to serve in the japanese army in this country i'd be eligible for the draft and that was my situation when just before pearl harbor when my wife and i married i renounced japanese citizenship part of it was due because my boss the publisher of the ralph shimpu had believed strongly himself that if we were going to live here we should be citizens of the united states now he couldn't become one because the laws forbid that but but there was that dual loyalty fear in much of the public in california i think that may account from the behavior of japanese americans during world war ii they were out to prove that they belong here i was home in glendale yeah and it was sunday and i had this call from my friend who was on the staff of the los angeles examiner magna white and he called and said the japanese are bombing pearl harbor and so my immediate reaction well i'll have to go down to the newspaper and put out an extra which i did and um i think the i can't my mind is fuzzy and i thought um uh during that hectic day we um we worked on putting out uh the calls were coming in everywhere from everywhere the uh english section staff was very small at the time luis suskey who had been editor for many years she was the first editor was the person with whom i worked they had another bilingual editor named george nakamoto who had thought he had greater opportunities in japan and he left so i took his place and the first uh responsibility that mr comai the publishing gave me was he said you work with the japanese section editor who does the front page see and i said well i don't you know read or speak japanese very well well you understand enough so that my every morning i my job was to take the either rango or densu shortwave wireless dispatchers that came in from tokyo every morning and there it was in english japanese written in english called romaji and mr shimozuma would read that to me and it wouldn't maybe like greek or latin and uh then he would explain to me what it meant and i would be taking notes and i would each morning uh write in english the article that appeared in the paper i did six years of that and got to be fairly good and i became conversant with the sound of japanese words you know i was reporting about the japanese invasion uh in china the uh i guess uh the occupation of manchuria the military you know influence in the japanese government and uh reporting that uh at the same time reporting on the impact of that in the united states you know the um sinking of the gumbo at penne and the yangtze river there are many incidents that made me aware that the thing that was happening was growing hostility the clash of interests between the united states and japan and that made me realize that one day and i'd taken i think i uh in my major in political science i think if you go back to the 1930s one of the lectures there was a professor charles titus who had been in i think in military army intelligence and he lectured on what he called the colombian picture a theory developed by professors at the university of columbia university on why eventually japan and the united states would fight a war on the pacific and i think i also mentioned my reading of a book that i've read many times over by homer lee the valor of ignorance pointed out how these two forces would meet and fight a bat a war in pacific he also predicted that japan would lose uh he didn't go further on to see what they would do in the economics if you're following the war but that was something that i lived with every day being with the japanese language newspaper and incidentally the raphsimpo still is being published is the largest you know japanese language newspaper in the united states um as i look back on it i was writing propaganda uh apologizing for what japan was doing and that was you know considered the role that if you're a japanese american with a sensitivity about the need for what you're doing for your own people in quotes then you were defensive about and you wanted to explain all the good things that were coming out of what japan was doing in east asia we were being attacked in the mainstream media the hearst newspapers with people who are you know writing about the yellow peril the threat to uh the safety of the republic you know with people who were multiplying like rabbits on the west coast the japanese um we were not japanese americans we just simply were japanese and the the um i think the tone of the los angeles times which today is regarded as middle of the road or even left of center on many issues felt that there really may or may not have been a place for the descendants of the japanese immigrants i think they felt the same way about the chinese the the uh you had the native sons and daughters of the golden west the american legion some the the grange these were organizations of groups of people who really owned and ran cities and communities and areas up and down california and i think the their ability to you know influence the legislature to pass laws that restricted uh the opportunities for people who are not of caucasian descent that was the order of the day the thing that we feared probably was that we would either be incarcerated put into camps or deported we had in the congress of the united states senators from say mississippi i think there was a man named stuart there's another one named rank and stewart was from tennessee but people who i used to you know subscribe to and read the congressional record you know uh i think senator stewart quoted a very popular sports writer whom i uh read faithfully except when he wrote about anti-trump he was named henry mclemore and he says you know by god if when a war comes the only thing we can do is to round them all up put them on an island in the pacific and sink the island i mean this was not an uncommon point of view this made you know people who are living in these uh if they weren't physical ghettos there were metal ghettos people who felt that the walls around them were so high it was hard to get over them and that most of us you know had been born and raised on the west coast we didn't know what the rest of the country was like and as a consequence i think there was a great deal of anxiety that my god what's going to happen if and when the war comes and this may uh count in my as i look back in retrospect the only vocal organization representing this beleaguered group was called the japanese american citizen league and you know much of what this group and its leaders did at that time maybe was an overreaction to this fear that my god we don't have too many defenses and we haven't got too great a chance i think this is what happened in october of 1941 two months before pearl harbor i had been for some time talking with my publisher uh i had i think in 1939 and 40 uh created some real problems for the business office by uh in my uh i think uh eagerness to fight against discriminatory practices i had picked up a quotation from a san francisco publication called the newsletter and wasp and i quoted them because at that time there was a drive on to deprive japanese fishermen in this terminal island area of their right to run those to earn the livelihood they were going to pass laws that would restrict them and i picked up a quotation from the newsletter and wasp in san francisco and ran it without permission and we got sued by that paper fifteen hundred dollars now for someone earning sixty five dollars a month that's a fortune and i thought he was going to fire me instead he sent me to a lawyer that represented the newspaper a man named marcus roberts and said he's going to lecture to you on what you should do that out of ignorance you've done these things it's going to cost the publisher you know more than a year's salary for you he um didn't fire me he told me to go and study law you see i didn't know where i could find the time i was i was holding another job beside the nutrients because i wanted to earn some more money but i went down to the university of southern california library and began reading things eventually i took a correspondence course from lasalle extension university when i had reported to mr kumai that during world war one german language newspapers owned by and quotes enemy aliens were allowed to publish under what was called the espionage act of 1917 and uh expressed to him the opinion that perhaps that might apply to us if and when war came uh he arranged with the central japanese association which was an organization of first generation japanese to have its president a man named nakamura go to washington and i would go with him and mr nakamura would take care of central japanese association business and i would see mr francis biddle the attorney general and ask him if he could then grant to the rapha shimful the permission to publish and i did i flew in it was about two months before pearl harbor to washington dc first time i really had been out of los angeles county i think uh since i moved here as an infant and i saw mr middle and i also then took that occasion to interview and visit about 80 members of the senate and congress and the house of representatives beginning with the california delegation and wrote articles for the raw food about it and uh in the in that experience i discovered that you know i was ordered by the war department to appear the day after my visit with mr biddle to go to the munitions building of the war department and i was interviewed and interrogated for a good part of the day by a man named colonel sumter bratton head of g2 which was intelligence of the army and his assistant a major wallace moore at that time i discovered for the first time to my surprise that the army had a complete set of the rafa shimpu all the editorials that i had ever written in the six years that i was an english editor and they also had things in the japanese section and i was questioned as to whether or not i had written for both sections because they were in contradiction to one another one waved the american flag they said the other way of a japanese flag and that they were you know they made it quite plain that it looked rather suspicious uh it was for me a learning experience of course how do you say that you know for the greater glory of the emperor of japan and the greater east asia co-prospering sphere that the japanese are like big brothers to the chinese they're going to teach them you know not only manners but to civilized it shook me up i wonder what in the world and then at that point i realized how inadequate i had been because i didn't understand japanese i didn't read it and i didn't write it and i'm certainly in my own mind they don't believe a word that i said when i said i don't know what's going on there that uh pearl harbor after i'd been notified by a friend at the los angeles examiner that the japanese were and had bombed pearl harbor i drove down into the newspaper by then i had come into an automobile and didn't have to take a train or a street car and i spent the day there uh on that day we were answering inquiries and i i i'm jotted down that you know a man named damon runyon came in to interview me about what uh he wanted to know how i felt and what was when i said what do you think is going to happen to us she said well who knows but i he wrote a column about little tokyo on on that day and i remember uh being approached by two gentlemen from the federal bureau investigation who said they had a presidential warrant for my arrest and i must come along with them so i didn't have time to say you know we had uh five or six staff people too there as well i want to call my lawyer no no time for that i thought i'd call marcus roberts and uh i couldn't call and just come along so i was taken to a central jail and booked and they fingerprinted me took my picture took all of my things and i was put into a cell with uh there was a young mexican who says what are you in here for and he said he was had been taking and selling drugs but he carved a little uh crucifix out of a toothbrush handle and gave it to me i carry that for years he said he was a german but i think he was a russian and i said why are you in here he says well there's this jewish you know restaurant i've been going to for years and every time i go and i've been saying hi hitler these are my cellmates for my first nighting they moved me on the third or fourth day to lincoln heights all of my friends japanese-americans they're all first-generation japanese i knew them all they moved us around and i was taken to lincoln heights and then from there moved to county jail on top of the hall of justice i was in for 11 days and nights my wife thought i was dead or you know that there was a doctor from gardena i think his name was honda or honda and he committed suicide in there he had been accused of being the head of the japanese veterans association he died uh in there but uh they just released me i think they one reason i have a fetish about keeping or you know a diary all these years that the fbi got a hold of my diary then and of course i went everywhere as a uh uh what is it uh as a reporter and an editor i know being when i was interrogated on my way by the two agents i said well what are you you know uh arresting me for i said well you've been there to see attorney general battle you've been in the white house to see mrs roosevelt all these congressmen and your movements are so suspicious you know and i said well i'm a newspaper magazine but uh they told me um that's uh the reason for i'm held on suspicion years later under the freedom of information act i was a member of the black dragon society i remember the communist party and furthermore they didn't believe that my name was my own so because togo was in name of a japanese admiral who had sunk the russian fleet in a battle well i was worried about my wife and she was pregnant she was nine months pregnant but you make the best of it and i prayed a great deal i think people tended to accommodate you know they uh simply uh made the best what they could i think it was a bitterness we were mad uh i must have found an outlet for it by writing to people that i had known there was one gentleman who later became he ran for governor of california robert walker kenny became attorney general when earl warren was governor and i admit bob kenney when he was a reporter later became a superior court judge and he was a great teacher about you know politics and i corresponded with him and i said you know i don't understand i'm now an enemy alien 3 c yeah yeah that's what it was in 1944 when i was now out and a volunteer worker for the american friends service committee helping to bring people out of you know auschwitz and belson and european death camps and finding jobs for them in chicago he wrote me and said i'm coming to chicago for the democratic national convention and he was a henry wallace delegate he invited me to the palmer house and we had lunch and he said i finally found out that you're never you know you still think you're going to be uh taken into either naval intelligence or into the army he says forget it see you'll never make it and i said why he said well simple you've got people on your draft board to say that you are a figment that you've been planted in this country and that's why uh you know i said well i don't even read or write japanese well that's why they you fit the need force you know them to find someone who i learned secondhand about the overall problem in california from a man named carrie mcwilliams who was a wonderful teacher he had become i think under governor olson a democratic governor had chief of housing and immigration immigration referring to you know oklahoma migrants who were coming here and i shared with him the feeling that the arrogance of the established people who were well off in california and trying to exclude these people was no different from the racial bigotry that victimized people who were not you know within the majority group and so not only was i empathetic or sympathetic to their plight but wondered what in the world people could do in any way to help and later on in my chicago years i had the chance to become an editor of the american school news which was a correspondence publication and i've met many many people from oklahoma in that and i found that you know i had always felt deprived because of my race and yet i had the ability now to help you know thousands actually there were several hundred thousand of these students around the world but in the united states who were deprived of a decent education and so i felt that it was an interesting topsy-turvy kind of world where you had an opportunity to use what you had to help others and i think the flight of the okies uh you know the chief of police of los angeles had uh patrols at the border to turn these people back or in every way that and so you know when i mentioned the john steinbeck's book and the movie that was made of it i think that helped to enlighten people about the 30s and what the economic plight and we you're there are examples of that today because we have the same kind of problems on a bigger scale i that was my first world's fair in uh treasure island san francisco and i was impressed by the foreign exhibits but it was nothing like subsequent fairs that i had been to but i think it was california's effort to begin to dig itself out of the economic depression and that kind of attempt you see it even today you hope that it succeeds i think my first reaction was one of disbelief that it was a flagrant you know uh demonstration of the uh what the japanese military were intending to do i think they were flaunting and looking for you know some reason but i went dutifully to try to give the japanese version of of why it uh it happened the meddling by the united states that if you get into a war zone you might get shot or you might get sunk and i think it was the cries from boycott of japanese goods and the anti-japanese feelings that that engendered you know just generally in california and southern california i think spread a feeling of uneasiness among uh people who were japanese-american readers of our newspaper i think we've uh with all of the things that people say may be wrong with this you know my wife and i have visited by last count 43 countries around the world but since then we've been we've been all over the world we've met people we visit with them in their homes we love to travel with all the things that are wrong i think that you know we talk about the goals in our constitution and declaration of independence and the bill of rights and these are there's nothing static about them and the fact that we have not been able to you know fulfill those goals it's each time we come home to this is home whatever is wrong with it we prefer to be here to any other place in the world and we have i think a lot of friends who feel exactly that way i served on the board for a few years of an organization here called the constitutional rights foundation and we observe the bicentennial of it i think last year i no longer am on that board and in you know for about 45 years i've been a recipient of the lincoln foundation's publication and a few years ago after you know we had been enraged for all these years about what had happened to us and the violation of our civil rights i learned that the great emancipator suspended the bill of rights in order that the union could survive we and uh if it's a question of survival what choice do we have the fact that we happen to be on the wrong end of made us you know victims but had we been sitting where the people who had to make those hard decisions were we might have done the same thing but ultimately i think justice does prevail when i had the privilege of working for the and with the american friends service committee in chicago for i guess was 1940 three four up to five so about two and a half years every morning see i i was i couldn't be a quaker because i didn't feel i was good enough to adopt their principles but every morning you know that we'd hold hands in a circle the whole staff would be and they would pray in their fashion whatever came to mind you see and um they defined it as you know not living by the teachings of jesus that you know the lack of concern for those less fortunate which typified the attitude of so many people when they talked about the homeless the poor and the old keys and then i remembered we were rescued in the very depths of the worst experience we had when we didn't know whether we're going to have to go back where they wanted to kill us or how or were they going to deport us to japan the quakers came along and made it possible for us to get over that and come to chicago and they were the first people who were welcomed on both sides of a battle zone so we uh and we look back and uh members of various christian church groups did a great deal to salvage and to save you know us uh why shouldn't we do the same for others and i think this is one of the lessons that we learned out of our evacuation experience you don't give up and that whatever the obstacles may be you do not lose faith and you know i choose to try to take the positive reaction to whatever may happen but you know you're going to go eventually but you want to delay it as long as possible but if you've been close to it you get a sense of values that uh and i think uh it begins with family we we just celebrated our 52nd anniversary in in honolulu

Channel: retox44

Views: 57,025

Rating: 4.8685122 out of 5

Keywords: unintentional, asmr, interview, excerpts, great, depression, the, series, raw, footage, relax, relaxing, voice, audio, sound, sounds, asian, man, male, mouth, 1930's, soft, spoken, softly, speaking, mellow

Id: kKG-GYHjTyA

Length: 41min 33sec (2493 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 07 2020