Excerpts From Interviews With Garrett Hongo Essay

, Research Paper

From an Interview with Bill Moyers

MOYERS: Why did you decide to write poetry.

HONGO: I wanted to explore the life of emotions. As a child in Hawai’i I remember not

only having emotions, but they seemed authorized by the world and the family surrounding

me. As an adolescent growing up in Los Angeles and the public schools there, emotions

seemed to be under a tight reign even in sports. People seemed to want to deny them.

I didn’t understand that as a Japanese American I was experiencing a social and

historical sadness. Because my own family did not suffer relocation, they were trying to

live it down and grow out of their own grief. So I had all these feelings which had no

form of expression. My brother became a blues guitarist, and at first I was just angry,

then I became a poet. Poetry and photography seemed to give me ways to explore and connect

with the history that was repressed.

MOYERS: Repressed in what sense.

HONGO: There wasn’t anything in my high school textbooks about Japanese in America. I

knew that we weren’t there when Lee surrendered to Grant. I knew we weren’t there when

Washington crossed the Delaware.

MOYERS: Or at the Alamo, on either side.

HONGO: Yes, and I wanted the words I was reading to belong to me, but there were no

words for me, no words for my grandfather, no words for my grandmother. They simply

weren’t portrayed, so I felt that I didn’t have an identity. Then I set about trying

to learn that history and to put what did not exist for me on the page. Poetry was almost

completely unwilled, I just had to have it.

MOYERS: Were these concerns shared within your family.

HONGO: With my grandfather, mostly. My own parents were immigrants from Hawai’i to the

mainland and they had a lot to do just to survive and to provide for my brother and me. My

father was an American soldier at the same time that my grandfather was imprisoned in

Hawai’i. My grandfather was born in America in 1899 but was sent back to Japan for his

education, so the day after Pearl Harbor he was arrested and taken down for questioning in

Honolulu. In a sense he was disappeared for a short time, not an uncommon story among

Japanese Americans. My grandfather was a community leader, the president of the Japanese

language school, who sponsored Japanese citizens to come over and be schoolteachers in

Hawai’i. So of course he was under suspicion. He would sit down after dinner every night

with his bourbon and tell me, his oldest grandchild, the story of how he was arrested and

questioned by the FBI and how they tried to trick him into betraying his true identity.

MOYERS: They thought he was a spy.

HONGO: That’s right. And he was still angry about it. He’d tell me the story, and no

one else would listen, they were embarrassed by his passion and by his giving me a

responsibility for this story. I was told that he was senile, but he wasn’t. He was

obsessed with a wrong that he felt needed to be righted and he was also obsessed that the

story had to be told. So he’d tell me the story every night. He said, "You learn the

language good"—he spoke broken English, a Hawaiian kind of pidgin English

because he was educated in Japan—"Learn speak like white Americans. You tell

story." Kids remember that kind of thing. I remembered it.

I share with so many Japanese Americans of my generation a feeling that we have a story

to tell, that we have a responsibility to that generation who suffered the humiliation and

the loss and who did not have their presence in this country endorsed. I’ve been

interviewing Japanese American lawyers and different people who’ve worked on redress,

which is to say compensation for their relocation, and I’ve been more and more impressed

with how this is a way for us to earn back what we all felt we lost during World War II.

MOYERS: When you were talking about that subject with the young people today, they

responded to your poetry but not to your discussion about relocation. They didn’t

understand what the term means. It’s not a part of their experience.

HONGO: Exactly, and that’s why I needed to write the story of relocation into the

books. I remember as a student in Los Angeles, we’d study World War II and there would be

no mention of the evacuation, no mention of Executive Order 9066 that sent 120,000

Japanese Americans from the West Coast in the United States to the relocation centers all

over the barren places of the West and Arkansas. I wasn’t angry about it; I just couldn’t

believe that it wasn’t spoken about so I would raise the question. I didn’t understand

that this caused a great deal of embarrassment to many of my classmates who were mainland

Japanese Americans. I didn’t understand that even the nisei, second

generation, didn’t wish to bring up the subject. It was very painful to them, and a source

of humiliation. Congressman Robert Matsui from Ca

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