Creator: Iwao Ishino, Jeff Charnley

Subjects: Anniversaries, Sesquicentennial

Date: February 27, 2001

Format: Text/pdf

Original Format: Word Document

Resource Identifier: Iwao, Ishino edited.pdf

Collection Number: UA 3

Language: English

Rights Management: Educational use only, no other permissions given. Copyright to this resource is held by Michigan State University and is provided here for educational purposes only. It may not be reproduced or distributed in any format without written permission of the University Archives & Historical Collections, Michigan State University.

Contributing Institution: University Archives & Historical Collections, Office of the Provost

Relation: Sesquicentennial Oral History Project

Contributor: MSU Archives and Historical Collections

Text File: Download

Transcript: Charnley: Today is February 27th, the year 2001. We are in East Lansing, Michigan. I am Jeff Charnley, interviewing Dr. Iwao Ishino for the MSU Oral History Project for the sesquicentennial, which is coming up in 2005.
As you can see, Professor Ishino, we have a tape recorder here for this oral history today. Do you give us permission to record?

Ishino: Okay.

Charnley: I’d like to start first with some general questions about your educational and professional background. Where were you born and raised?

Ishino: I was born in San Diego, California.

Charnley: In what year?

Ishino: March 10th of 1921.

Charnley: So your birthday is coming up soon.

Ishino: Yes, my eightieth is coming up.

Charnley: Eightieth birthday.

Ishino: Yes, and we’re going to have a family reunion to celebrate my eightieth birthday.

Charnley: What were your parents’ names?
Ishino: Tomota [phonetic] and Tei [phonetic] Ishino.

Charnley: You went to primary school in San Diego?

Ishino: San Diego. All the way up through three years of college at San Diego State College.

Charnley: When did you graduate
from high school?

Ishino: I graduated from high school in 1938. Class of winter 1938.

Charnley: San Diego State, was that the name of it at that time?

Ishino: Yes, San Diego State University. No. San Diego State College, at that time.

Charnley: What did you study as an undergraduate?

Ishino: When I was in high school, I was hoping to be an architect. Somehow things didn’t work out that way, and I ended up studying accounting and economics, although I think, in general, it was really a liberal education, rather than such a highly specialized activity.

Charnley: At what point did you change from wanting to become an architect?

Ishino: In high school I had lots of fun in architecture and was interested in designing. In fact, on some project, I got a temporary job working with the city--I guess he’s an architect for the city. They were designing the logos. San Diego High School, SDHS. I worked on the “D” of SDHS. So every time that I went by the sign, I said, “See, I designed the ‘D’ part of that design.”
I was very much interested in architecture. I don’t know if you have a sense of time, but there was a great deal of discrimination and prejudice. There were lots of people of my generation but a little older who graduated from colleges who found it hard to find a job in various professions. That gave me a hint as to seek another profession.

Charnley: In San Diego was there a large nisei and issei community?

Ishino: There were about 2,000,
roughly. I know from reading some of the material of that period. The majority of the people were located on the farms. Then a substantial proportion was involved in commercial fishing,(the tuna industry.) Parents of my nisei friends--you know what a nisei is. Parents of my nisei friends were involved in the fishing industry, and they brought from Japan a
technology or technique of tuna fishing that’s quite an improvement. This is written up in various places. One of my closest friend’s father engaged in importing bamboo poles and special hooks that are used for fishing. So it was quite an industry. Of course, in the farming, San Diego was noted at that time as a winter celery center of the world.

Charnley: Growing up in the Depression, how did that affect your life and your family at that time? How did the Depression hit San Diego?

Ishino: It was pretty rough. In my father’s case, he lost a fruit and vegetable stand business and then got a job as a janitor, or custodian, as they say these days, at Barcelona Apartment Hotel, which was located just outside on Balboa Park. In 1935, there was an exposition, and the hotel was very busy. So I got my first job as being the go-fer or janitorial assistant. I ran the elevator and stuff like that as a summer job.

Charnley: Did you have siblings?

Ishino: Yes, I had two brothers and two sisters.

Charnley: How did the war affect your life at that time?

Ishino: I think you know, but where do I begin?

Charnley: You talked about some of the discrimination, the difficulty of finding jobs, even before 1941. Before the actual attack on Pearl Harbor, did the prejudice toward Japanese Americans increase, or did that come after the attack?

Ishino: It was rather continuous. As a matter of fact, on the very first day after Pearl Harbor, some thousands or so people were picked up. The FBI had already earlier raided the Japanese American Association and got names of people, the leaders, so this was available. On the first day after Pearl Harbor, these men were picked up. Ministers of local churches, Buddhist churches, leaders of the community were picked up. There was plenty of evidence that the war was coming on, as you know.
On February 19th, 1942, President Roosevelt signed what is now known as Executive Order 9066, and that provided for the eventual--evacuation is the term they used--evacuation of all people of Japanese descent in there from the West Coast.

Charnley: That included American citizens like yourself who were born in this country?

Ishino: Yes, and very interesting, they used the term “Japanese aliens” and “non-aliens,” referring to citizens as non-aliens. Interesting use of language. That’s one of the reasons why I like to use the word “nisei” to refer to them.

Charnley: To clearly identify.

Ishino: Right, and then it doesn’t have the word “Japanese” in it.

Charnley: You were in college at the time. Were you living at home?

Ishino: Yes.

Charnley: So as a student you were living at home. How were you notified?

Ishino: Well, they posted these things on the telephone poles in town and, of course, it was in the news. But I told you about the fishing.

Charnley: Yes.

Ishino: These fishing boats ran way down to Baja California and so on, and so they were obviously thought of as potential spies. So we were one of the earlier ones. We were not the very first, but we went and we got our notice on April 1st, 1942, and on April 8th, 1942, we were incarcerated and put into a temporary assembly center, that’s the language they used. It wasn’t until August of 1942 that the permanent center in Arizona was ready for us. So we went from Santa Anita racetrack, just outside of Los Angeles, to a post in Arizona.

Charnley: Were you together with your family?

Ishino: They tried to maintain as much as possible to keep the family unit, except for the parents who were leaders of the Japanese community. They were incarcerated separately quite early.

Charnley: Your parents were with you or you were with them?

Ishino: Yes. My father was not a big-shot. He was a janitor, you know.

Charnley: The Santa Anita racetrack, what were the actual facilities there? The sleeping arrangements and that sort of thing, would they have tents?

Ishino: Again, we were one of the earlier ones. We were put into the horse stalls. Sea Biscuit was one of the famous horses at that time, and we bragged about in staying in Sea Biscuit’s stall. But they did build many more temporary stands later on. I should have brought some pictures, but that’s okay. The facilities were minimal, you know, and we were instructed to only take two suitcases per person.

Charnley: How long were you there at Santa Anita then?

Ishino: We were there from April 8th through August. Then from August, we went to Poston, Arizona.

Charnley: Right in the middle of the summer, too.

Ishino: Oh, it was hot, 110 degrees, yes.

Charnley: Were there armed guards around?

Ishino: Oh, yes. These were just a regular barbed-wire fence around the thing and the watchtowers and lights and so on. What a waste of money in a time of war.

Charnley: Then you and your family went to Arizona.

Ishino: Poston, Arizona, right.

Charnley: What was the name of that, or what was that given, the name?

Ishino: The official name was Colorado River War Relocation Center. Young people these days would rather use the word “concentration camp,” but the official title was “relocation center.”
I don’t know how much of this you want in detail.

Charnley: I think it’s important, because obviously it shaped you as an individual and it certainly shaped your view or affected your career and your experience, didn’t it?

Ishino: That’s the point that I want to make here. The camp that I went to was a very interesting one. It was on an Indian reservation. The head of the Indian Bureau was John Collier [phonetic]. He eventually majored in anthropology, but that’s somewhat beside the point. He had visions of the Japanese coming onto the Indian reservations--this is desert now--and turning this reservation into a
profitable agricultural community. Since the Japanese were good agriculturalists, he had visions of this place, this desert area, turning into a farm, and the Indians could benefit from that.
Then along the way he had a strong hand in supplying the Caucasian white administrators of the camp, who were people who had experience on the Indian reservations. Included in that group was Alexander Leighton who, with his wife at that time, Dorothea Leighton, had worked on a Navajo reservation. So they dreamed up a plan of studying this relocation process. There were problems of administering 18,000 people coming in from different communities on the West Coast: trying to set up a governing system, a police system, a school system, a religious system, etc.
Alex Leighton was in the Navy but assigned to this job, to study the relocation process. He established what was called Bureau of Sociological Research.

Charnley: He was an officer, a regular military?

Ishino: He was Navy officer, a lieutenant. He later became a lieutenant commander.
But, anyway, we brought in another anthropologist Edward Spicer, and Elizabeth Colson was at that time, I think, a Ph.D. candidate, but she eventually became chairperson of anthropology at the University of California.

Charnley: Where was Leighton teaching at a university before the war?

Ishino: He was at Johns Hopkins [University].

Charnley: So he’s approaching it as an anthropological study and test case.

Ishino: Study, yes. He eventually got permission to recruit some fifteen of us niseis to work as interviewers.

Charnley: How did you first have contact with him?

Ishino: Through a friend of mine who said that Leighton was recruiting people. I was in Camp 3. Poston was separated by three separate units. The San Diego bunch went to Camp 3. But for a series of reasons, I moved to Camp 1, where the office of the Bureau of Sociological Research was located.
Anyway, to end the story quickly, Leighton eventually wrote a book called The Governing of Men. But we gathered the data. In the process, I spent a month or so at the University of Denver, learning public opinion research techniques.
The field work project was finished. From September of 1943 to January 1944 we worked in Chicago in the Merchandise Mart Building. I don’t know if you know where that is. We took over John Collier’s office. He had married an anthropologist and was away on honeymoon, so we occupied his office while five of us niseis and secretaries pulled together our field data, and Leighton drafted the book called The Governing of Men.

*****[Pages 11-12 of the original transcript are restricted at the request of Dr. Iwao Ishino.]*****

Charnley: When did your family ultimately get out of the Relocation Center?

Ishino: I don’t exactly remember, but sometime in 1945, I guess. They first came to Washington, D.C., because I was living there. Later on Dad went to work for Seabrook Farms. I don’t know if you know about Seabrook Farms. Seabrook started out with frozen vegetables in New Jersey, and they had recruited Japanese Americans for working on the farms and in the frozen foods industry. They did it with the idea of providing housing on the farms, and that was a great attraction for people who had to resettle. For a while, my folks were in Washington, D.C., and Dad went to work as a single man. My mother was a kind of a housemaid to--who was the famous journalist during the war? I’ve forgotten his name.

Charnley: Walter Winchell?

Ishino: No, another way.

Charnley: She was in Washington?

Ishino: Yes, Washington, D.C. My sisters and brothers were with them. Then they returned to Los Angeles. They didn’t stay in San Diego, but they went to the Los Angeles area.

Charnley: How was it that you met your wife or the person that became your wife? Would you talk a little bit about that?

Ishino: We first met in camp. I was pretty good at badminton, the badminton playing. I think we met playing badminton, but she claims we met when I was working in the Administration Building. That’s another story.
Her father ran a chicken farm, five acres. He had the vision of his son taking over the farm, so he sent three of his sons to California Polytechnic Institute, and they became specialists in poultry husbandry. So when their family moved to Poston, guess who would be running the poultry farm? These three brothers.
Then when the War Relocation Administration worked on the plan of moving these people out of the camps, the Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes--not the Ickes of the current President’s cabinet but, his father--had a wife who had a chicken farm in Silver Spring, Maryland. So guess who got the job to go. My wife’s brothers. So, because her brothers were there in Silver Spring, she came out to the Washington area, and again, we got acquainted.
In those days, there was this segregated unit--I don’t know if you know about this--Go For Broke 442nd Unit.

Charnley: Regimental combat team.

Ishino: Right. Before they went overseas, they had a USO in Washington, D.C. Fort Meade was the place of gathering, so it was right close by. We used to have USO meetings there, or dances and so on. Me and my wife was there, and that’s how I met again.

Charnley: What’s your wife’s name?

Ishino: Mary.

Charnley: What was her maiden name?

Ishino: Kobayashi.
I’ve forgotten when it was, but because the 442nd was doing so well, the Army changed our military classification from 4C to 1A.

Charnley: Oh so now, you were eligible for the draft.

Ishino: Right. So, in June of ’44, maybe it was late in May, I got my draft notice 1A to report for induction. In those days, we had three weeks to get ready, so I had to make up my mind as to whether I’m going to marry this gal or not. I proposed to her one week. The second week we had our wedding. The third week we had our honeymoon. Interesting enough, when we got a place to go for our honeymoon, the travel agent said to the hotel people, “We have a couple here from the Philippine Embassy.”

Charnley: That was your cover story?

Ishino: Yes. So we reported back at the end of three weeks and lined up at the induction center. The sergeant decided to call all the names off, and my name was not on there. I said to this sergeant, “Hey, Sergeant, my name’s Ishino, I-S-H-I-N-O.”
He looks down the list and says, “Oh, you. It says here you report back to your office.” So happily I went back to the office, and everybody was just smiling.
They said, “You got a presidential deferment.”
I said, “Heck, I didn’t have to get married.” [Laughter]

Charnley: I hope you haven’t told your wife that story.

Ishino: We’ve been married for fifty-six, fifty-seven years. June 18, ’44, I don’t know, fifty-six years, almost fifty-six years.

Charnley: It’s amazing.

Ishino: It’s a long story, but do you see what I mean?

Charnley: No, that’s obviously important. After the war, you then went in the military?

Ishino: That’s right.

Charnley: As an officer?

Ishino: Oh, no. I went into boot camp and, to make a long story short, the occupation of Japan was going on. There was still a need for interpreter translators. So the Army continued the military intelligence school, and so I was recruited for that. Some of us who were not as good in language,
took a longer time. So they expected us to extend our enlistment from eighteen months to three years.
I said, “No, I have possibilities of getting to graduate school.” One of the professors, Clyde Kluckhohn [phonetic], who worked on this Pentagon project says, “Well, after you get out of the military, write to me, and we’ll see if we can’t get you into Harvard.” So I declined extending my enlistment and stayed in for eighteen months only.

Charnley: Did you end up in Japan?

Ishino: So I went to Harvard then. I’ll give you the exact date. Let’s see, when was that. Yes. I was a graduate student from June of ’47 to July of ’49 when I passed my oral exam. He had a very interesting department there. It was a new department called Department of Social Relations, an innovative program, trying to bring together sociologists, social psychologists, psychologists, and cultural anthropologists. I had the G.I. Bill and so on, that kind of thing.
When I finished with this oral exam, I was looking for the possibilities of going to Brazil to study the immigrants in Brazil, the Japanese immigrants. But before that happened, John Pelzel, a professor at Harvard, was coming back to Harvard from Occupation job in Tokyo. Dr. Kluckhon wrote a recommendation for me, so I got Pelzel’s in the Occupation. The office was called the Public Opinion and Sociological Research Division. Remember I said something about getting public opinion training at the university of Denver.

[Begin Tape 1, Side 2]

Ishino: I was there in Tokyo until July of ’51 when the office closed.

Charnley: That was your first time in Japan?

Ishino: Yes, very first time.

Charnley: What were your impressions as this was your ancestral homeland?

Ishino: Yes, yes. It was a very sad period when Tokyo was bombed flat, and people were living in the streets in cardboard boxes and so on. Food was short. People used to come around the cafeteria and pick up leftover food and so on. The black market was going crazy and so on. It was an awful time, but an interesting time for me from the point of view of research. I got materials for writing my doctoral dissertation.
The head of the unit at that time was John Bennett, and he was an anthropologist. He says, “Iwao, why don’t you come to Ohio State and let’s write up this report on the Public Opinion and Sociologic Research Division.” He got a grant from the Office of Naval Research, so I was a research assistant at Ohio State from 1951 to 1956.

Charnley: Were you teaching at that time?

Ishino: The latter half of the period I was teaching, and became an assistant professor.
But before I get into Ohio State story, I’ve got to tell you something else. When the job in Tokyo ended, the Pacific Science Board was interested in what the people in Okinawa felt their
future. I don’t know if you know this record, but when the peace treaty was signed in 1951, the future status of Okinawa was left in doubt. The U.S. Government wanted to hang on to Okinawa as the military base for the whole Asian continent, because of its strategic location. We know that from Vietnam period and the Korean War period.
The Pacific Science Board was given the assignment of surveying the opinion of Okinawans as to what they thought their future should be. Should they become a trustee territory, become an independent society, or return to Japan when the peace settlement was finally made? By the way, that settlement was not made until 1972, but that’s beside the point here.
I took three Japanese scholars with me who worked with me in the Public Opinion Research Division: a statistician and two ethnographers with me to Okinawa. It took five months to complete this survey and the report so, I didn’t get to Ohio State University until November of ’51.
Then in 1956, John Bennett, who was this man who invited me to Ohio State, got an invitation to see what the job possibilities were at Michigan State. So both of us came to see Michigan State here. I was very much interested in Michigan State University, because it sponsored a university Okinawan project. I was hoping that if I came here I could get to Okinawa again. John Bennett did not accept the invitation but I came here and was here since the fall of 1956. That’s a long story.

Charnley: When you were doing the survey on Okinawa, did you have contact with the MSU project? Was that open there then, or was that while you were at Ohio State?

Ishino: It was during Ohio State.

Charnley: They opened there. They opened in Okinawa then.

Ishino: They had negotiations going on, but I didn’t know anything about that. But I was hoping that I would get back to Okinawa. I thought I would become an Okinawa specialist, which is an interesting story in itself. [The Ryukyus University project began in 1950.]

Charnley: What were your impressions when you first came to campus here?

Ishino: I was overwhelmed by the size and the beauty of the campus. It was a period when John [A.] Hannah was here, you remember. I don’t know if you go back that far.

Charnley: I only met him once, and that was in his later years. So you had contact with Dr. Hannah personally? Was he at that time--

Ishino: Oh, yes. Well, we’re skipping ahead now.

Charnley: Sure. I don’t mean to skip ahead, but let’s go back to 1956. You made the decision. You and your family came here. You had children at that time?

Ishino: Yes, we had three girls at that time. John Useem [phonetic] was chairman of the department soon after my arrival. He was kind of enough to invite us to stay at their place while we came to look at a place. One of our daughters had measles, and God, that’s amazing. What a stressful time it was for us.

Charnley: You associate your daughter’s measles with first coming to campus.

Ishino: No, how kind the Useems were. They had two sons, and they said, “Well, our two sons had measles and so on, so it’s okay.” If I were inviting some one with measles, jeez.

Charnley: Sounds like real hospitality.

Ishino: We just saw Ruth yesterday. John passed away this year, early this year.

Charnley: This was the Department of Anthropology or Sociology?

Ishino: No, this was the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, because they were combined.

Charnley: What were your initial duties here? You came as an assistant professor?

Ishino: Yes.

Charnley: You were teaching or research or combination?

Ishino: I was doing teaching, yes, straight teaching. I’ve forgotten. There were a couple other anthropologists here, Richard Adams and Ken Tiedke [phonetic]. This was a very fluid time with anthropology and sociology. Social science was greatly expanding. Apparently the war had
increased interest in the social sciences and there was a considerable amount of faculty mobility, which reminds me of one statement of John Hannah. The faculty are too mobility conscious, they don’t have any loyalty to their institution.

Charnley: That issue of loyalty to Michigan State was foremost in his mind.

Ishino: Oh, yes.

Charnley: Do you think he had the ability to tell when someone from the outside was coming in and would be loyal to this University? Do you think he had that ability to pick people that he knew would remain loyal?

Ishino: I don’t know what his thoughts were. I should read his memoir. But he did a fairly good job of building up a good faculty, I think. He used all kinds of methods. Becoming part of the Big Ten was an important part of it.

Charnley: The individual departments of sociology and anthropology, how did they expand, in terms of their programs or students in the late fifties, early 1960s? Was there any center that they established, or was their a focus to their research or expansion or a specialization here at Michigan State? Was there anything in the field that we did particularly well that you recall?

Ishino: Well, one of our strengths was rural sociology. Then we had Al Beegle [phonetic] for demography. Anthropology was not that well known, but it was part of this post-war phenomenon
where sociology and anthropology got together. Ohio State was the same. There was not a separate department for sociology and anthropology.
Then in the early sixties, there was a nationwide movement to split off anthropology and to become independent. So here, I’ve forgotten when anthropology split off. It was somewhere in the period, I think, in 1964. I happened to be in Okinawa at that time, as I said earlier, from 1963 to ’65. So the split took off while I was overseas.

Charnley: Was your family with you when you were in Okinawa?

Ishino: Oh, yes, oh, yes. In fact it made a great difference in terms of the children’s future outlook and so on.

Charnley: They attended school there?

Ishino: Overseas. They had a U.S.
military school there, and so they got pretty good education there. I was pleased to note that.

Charnley: Did you volunteer for the Okinawa project at that time?

Ishino: Oh, yes. Yes.
Before we get to Okinawa, you asked a question about where was the focus of interest in sociology and anthropology. One of the interesting experiences as far as I was concerned was the Institute of Community Development. The Kellogg Foundation gave the university some grant to set up this Community Development. So a few of us, two or three from our department and a couple of people from Political Science and Urban Planning sent people to work on this project of Community Development. It was a very important part of the [intellectual] development of the Department of Sociology, I think. At least I got involved and made a difference in the way I operated in Okinawa, for example. I became conscious of the fact that growth takes place in these urban areas and then changes need to be developed.
I pushed for the relocation of the University of Ryukyus from Shuri [phonetic], where it was crowded, to a much more open area where growth could take place. I was kind of interested in that kind of ideas. A lot of people thanked me for pushing that, although the administration here was a little bit anxious about making such a large move.

Charnley: How far away was that change, in terms of miles? I mean it was more than just going to a rural area.

Ishino: But, the old University was located on Shuri Castle grounds, which took advantage of the existing building and so on. But it became very expensive to build new buildings on this property because the ground was too porous. Furthermore, parking places were limited. They moved out to the countryside. So that was one kind of endeavor I was involved in because of the Community Development Institute.
I’m not exactly sure of the dates on this, but there was another very interesting thing going on. I’ll have to check my data on this, but David Berlo [phonetic] was the first department head that I met and got used to. Do you remember the dean’s name then?

Charnley: Gordon Sabine?

Ishino: Sabine, yes. He had brought in David Berlo, and David Berlo got a grant from AID (Agency of International Development) to run what’s called a communications seminar. People from Third World countries were invited to learn how to be better communicators when they go back home to be involved in their development activities. What Berlo and his staff did was to bring these people in. They were already here in various courses and so on throughout the country. They were brought together just before they go home on a week long seminar. We faculty members were invited to participate in the training activities.

Charnley: That was here on campus?

Ishino: First it was held on campus, but then later on they found a place in Virginia and West Virginia. Faculty members, not only from here but other universities, met and engaged in this training program. The major obstacle in that, for me, was to learn Berlo SCMR, source channel message receiver model. You probably know about that.

Charnley: Learned it in speech class.

Ishino: That was communicated to us and then the problems of decoding and encoding the message and so on. We used that as a very interesting way of teaching these students.
Come back now to Community Development Institute. We used that model, as well as some other models, for this and we got an AID grant to bring in students from Southeast Asia, Thailand, Nepal, Indonesia, and the like. In community development work, we didn’t know exactly in their respective countries what was community development, but at least we wanted them to be trained ethnographers. So we used a technique of having these people go out to our villages in the communities and eventually a half a dozen or more wrote a master’s thesis on this experience.
The reason why I’m thinking about this, last Friday, Greenleaf had an SID luncheon, talking about his trip to Nepal and having lunch with these former students of ours who are now big-shots in their respective countries. We used acronyms, I guess, and a whole series of these. We taught them how to organize the graphic data and the parts using those kinds of acronyms.
Well, this is a little bit off it, but one of our colleagues, Jack Donoghue, by name, who came here, took some of these ideas, and became a director of the Peace Corps Training Program and went to California, San Diego International University. So in a sense he did community development in Okinawa in the Peace Corps, very interesting kind of diffusion of ideas that developed out of this kind of association on campus.

Charnley: It sounds like the grants were very important in terms of the Kellogg grant and the AID grant. Did Dr. Hannah encourage that, the grant development?

Ishino: Oh, sure, oh, yes.

Charnley: Were you involved in grant-writing, yourself, to any degree at that time?

Ishino: No, I didn’t do any grant-writing as such, but I participated in these activities. I was not the principal investigator, but it came out that the proposition. Eventually, I went to the National Science Foundation, as you know, but that’s another project.

Charnley: When you were in Okinawa and you became what was called chief of party, did Dr. Hannah come out at that time, or no?

Ishino: He sure did.

Charnley: What do you remember about that visit?

Ishino: Well, the head of this Okinawa Occupation, the administration part, there was an administrator called civil administrator. He took care of the civilian part of it. It was basically a military government, of course. The head of civil administration, the civil administrator, was a person by the name of Shannon McCune. He was a geographer who made his reputation by setting up Korea, but Hannah came and did one of those official visits with the civil administrator. I sat in with him. After the meeting was over, he said something like, “We cut a lot of grass, but made no hay.” [Laughter]

Charnley: “We cut a lot of grass and made no hay.” [Laughter]

Ishino: My problem with Hannah was this. He had ideas about using the Michigan State model, the land-grant model, and he wanted to change the Extension Service to come under the control of the university and not in terms of the government. That was not successful, but we tried very hard on that one. I didn’t have too much to do with that part of it.
But he had ideas about how the president of the university should be groomed. He brought a promising young man to Michigan State to study Ph.D. and so on and eventually was going to become president of the university. But the Japanese system was to elect the faculty member to become president every two years. So I had the horrible duty of telling President Hannah that it was impossible to change that system so drastically. So that person who came here to be groomed for the president, eventually became provost at the University of Oregon, I guess, or at Oregon State.

Charnley: Oregon State.

Ishino: Amazing kind of unforeseen consequence.

Charnley: Were there any other duties that you did while you were there as chief of party that you were involved in at that time?

Ishino: I was the first nisei to become chief of party, that kind of thing. I don’t know of anything dramatic. I’ve told you about the pushing for new site for the campus, but there are lots of informal things that we’d done in terms of facilitating a relationship between Okinawans and the university staff. I want to give credit to my wife, who was instrumental along with Mrs. Geist here of the English Department. Was it English Department? Geist was a linguist. Linguistics, I guess.
Mrs. Geist and my wife helped organize the faculty of the women of the University Faculty Club. The Japanese universities rarely had the wives involved, because when the professors meet they meet by themselves in favorite eating spots and so on. Okinawans will meet at their favorite bars and so on. And the wives never got together. In fact they only know their names. Now, they facilitated the wives to meet together informally. Very interesting.
We just, this April celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of that University, and we went to Okinawa, ten of us, including former President [M. Cecil] Mackey went there. The group of women met and met with my wife. She had a very great homecoming there.

Charnley: They remembered her.

Ishino: Oh, yes.

Charnley: The Dean of International Programs at that time was who, Glen Taggert?

Ishino: No. It was Smuckler.

Charnley: It was Smuckler. Okay, fine. I just had my dates wrong.

Ishino: I think by that time Taggert had gone, but I’m not sure of that.

Charnley: Did the American participation in Vietnam at that time, did that influence your work at all?

Ishino: Oh, absolutely. It’s an amazing kind of thing. One day you see the area filled with goods of all kinds of military equipment. Then the next morning, they’d be gone because of rapid transportation.
One of the problems we had on campus was--well, that reminds me. I pushed for a faculty club, because I knew that the faculty was meeting in bars and so on, and I thought it would be nice to have on-campus meeting place. When I was at Ohio State, right in the center of the campus was this faculty club. It was a great place to meet faculty and jump and run into faculty that you never expected to see ordinarily. So I had that idea.
It’s a long story about how I finally got approval for that, but when it got built, the students started to demonstrate against it. So I ran into some problems of that kind there dealing with students’ issues. But it represents a kind of movement that the students were involved in and, of course, from time to time there was this anti-U.S. feeling because over one-fifth of the land area was occupied by U.S. Army. Really one reason why we had the University of Ryukyus was to, in some ways, compensate the Okinawan people, for their sacrifices. So I had that kind of problem dealing with the tensions that were building up as a result of the war situation.

Charnley: What year then did you leave Okinawa?

Ishino: In ’65, yes. In 1965.

Charnley: What was your next career stop? You came back to campus?

Ishino: I came back to campus, and by this time the Department of Sociology and Anthropology were separated. So Moreay Maxwell was the chairperson. And soon thereafter Baker Hall was built.

Charnley: I don’t know.

Ishino: When Baker Hall was built, I think somewhere around 1969--oh, I know, I see what happened. I was assigned to James Madison College. I was one of the founding professors. I guess I worked full-time from 1965 to 1969 in James Madison.

Charnley: What was the focus of that college when it was established?

Ishino: James Madison was essentially the college for social sciences and there was one for natural sciences.

Charnley: A residential college?

Ishino: Residential college, yes.

Charnley: Within the broader university?

Ishino: Yes, right, yes. The head of it was Dean Garfinkle at that time. One of the prominent professors at that time was George Wills. I don’t know if you know of George Wills?

Charnley: Yes, yes.

Ishino: He gave me a hard time because he thought I was too liberal, I guess, or something.

Charnley: He was want to give liberals some problems. He’s a teacher in political science.

Ishino: He’s at James Madison. He soon left, but he was there long enough for me to meet him. But it was interesting idea to be located in—

[Begin Tape 2, Side 1]

Charnley: This is tape two of the interview with Dr. Ishino.
When the last tape ended, we were talking about James Madison College, the idea of a residential college. You were talking, when the tape ended, about the living learning aspect, where the faculty could go down to the cafeteria and eat with the students.

Ishino: Right, yes. Another interesting thing about James Madison was the emphasis on writing, we wanted the students to write. Still another feature was Garfinkle’s emphasis on policies. He awakened my thinking in terms of ideology. I used to think of social science as being oriented toward hypothesis generating. But he was focused on polices, what kinds of policies. He had a political science background and so on.

Charnley: The fact that there was a lot of interchange and vitality within the and at the opening of that college.

Ishino: Oh, yes, yes. And it’s still going on very well and the students are doing well, the graduates of James Madison. Amazing.

Charnley: Was there an emphasis on international study or programs at that time or no, did that come later at James Madison?

Ishino: Mike Schecter [phonetic] is well known for his international studies. He’s responsible for that dimension.

Charnley: In your own career, you were publishing at that time, or prior to coming back. Would you talk a little bit about your publications and your route to promotion and that sort of thing?

Ishino: My publishing record is not very good. In fact, I’ve been chastised a number of times on that. One book did come out during that period called Paternalism in the Japanese Economy. I don’t know how many articles I’ve written.
I’m not sure about the timing. I got involved in the Educational Policies Committee sometime in this period.

Charnley: That was a university committee or was that?

Ishino: Yes, university committee. I learned a lot from that committee’s service. Let me see if I can get the exact date on that. Yes. I was secretary of the committee from January 1969 to December. I wrote, tried to summarize it, various kinds of subjects we talked about in that Educational Policies Committee. Very interesting. You can see the widespread coverage of the topics.

Charnley: Yes. Everything from graduation and grading requirements to ROTC instructors and commencement.

Ishino: That was the beginning of that student unrest movement, and students were trashing windows and the like and sit-ins and so on.

Charnley: From the time that you came in 1956 to the 1960s, or maybe when you came back from Okinawa, did you see a difference in students at that time on campus?

Ishino: Oh, yes, there’s tremendous upheaval on the campus.

Charnley: What was the cause in your mind?

Ishino: The things that were going on in Vietnam and the Kent State debacle, you know, the killing of students.

Charnley: What are some of things that you remember? Now your job in 1969 was what?

Ishino: I was in James Madison, but the Department of Anthropology decided they wanted a new chairperson, and they invited me to become the chairperson. I don’t know the details of it, I should look into it, but I was honored to be chosen for that job. Maxwell was my chairperson ahead of me, but I’m still puzzled as to why I became chairperson of Anthropology at that time.
It was a horrible period insofar as I was concerned.

Charnley: In what way?

Ishino: Well, there’s so much unrest. There were student sit-ins and strikes and so on. I’ve got a whole notebook full of clippings of events taking place during that period.

Charnley: Were many of those students who were leaders, were they from anthropology?

Ishino: Yes. For example, here’s a clipping. “Anthropologist to Hold Seminars.” It says, “Seminars relevant to the current national crisis have been organized by the Michigan State University Department of Anthropology.” I have clippings that says the board of trustees would single out anthropology as being a troublemaker on campus in the 1960s so that we were in the hotspot.

Charnley: Did you consult with Dr. [Clifton R. Jr.] Wharton on that, or did he contact you directly?

Ishino: No, my contact was primarily through Dean Winder at that time.

Charnley: This was when Lee Winder was Dean of Social Science?

Ishino: Yes. [unclear] I did meet Dr. Wharton a couple of times, but nonsupport was still a working policy. This was 1970.

Charnley: In terms of the relationship between faculty and students, your role as chair, how did you keep that balance?

Ishino: That was a tough one, you know. There’s two things going on. There was a war on the one hand, and there was Civil Rights movement on the other. So I had the privilege of being an ethnic minority, so that part was pretty good from my standpoint. People didn’t tread on me for being a racist.

Charnley: At that time, the fact that you had been in one of the internment camps, was that a factor that people were aware of that at the time? Or was that not known on campus?

Ishino: My colleagues knew about that, but I don’t know how widespread it was among students.

Charnley: There wasn’t a lot of attention at that time?

Ishino: No. At this point, I should go back to one colleague of mine, Jack Donoghue. Jack Donoghue and I were in Japan on a Fulbright at the same time, 1958 to ’59. He was at the university at Nagano at Sendai [phonetic] City, and I was at University of Tokyo. We agreed to do research together. We had data on the occupation period, the survey of the land reforms of some thirteen villages. This was a 1958 study, so ten years later that we visited the same village.
So Jack and I organized a research project where we took our graduate students to these thirteen villages. When I came back from that Fulbright year, we wrote articles on this project, but that’s beside the point. MSU had this project in Vietnam, and the director at that time, the recruiting person, was Miller Perry [phonetic]. He invited me and my family to go to Vietnam. But I said, “We just got back from Japan. My wife is not ready to take up and move again and so on. But I can recommend somebody.” Guess who it was. It was Jack Donoghue and his wife and his two sons.
So instead of me going to Vietnam, Jack Donoghue and his wife went to Vietnam. When they came back, he was very active in this student thing. He went on national television because he served in Vietnam and knew about it. So my close friend and person I invited here is involved with me in the Community Development project and he eventually leaves and went to the Peace Corps activity. He was a good active participant in the thing.
One of the things that came out of this particular period was the fact that students need to have input into university affairs so that now we have staff meetings where students represent their views there and so on. That kind of thing took place in that 1969 to ’73 period.

Charnley: So the student participation in governments and some of the important decisions, that was one of the outgrowths of some of the student protests.

Ishino: Right, right.

Charnley: Were there any other changes in terms of classroom? Anything that you had to deal with in teaching?

Ishino: Oh, there are lots of things. This is a period of great movement again, and we lost a few faculty members as well as gained some. I have some statistics on one of the things that really bothered me, was the fact that anthropology as a profession was undergoing some kind of intellectual reorientation. By tradition handed down to us, we have four major divisions: linguistics, social and cultural anthropology, archaeology, and physical anthropology. When you put those highly specialized areas into one department, it’s a very difficult thing. If you want to train graduate students for a Ph.D. program, how do you convey information and knowledge to these individuals?
So we had some statistics here. We spent a lot of time designing and talking about graduate curriculum.

Charnley: This was a period when the graduate program here at Michigan State in anthropology expanded?

Ishino: Yes, of course, because we became independent, you see, on our own. We had some conflicts with sociology because there’s some overlap. How do you design programs for those individuals?
Here are the statistics. Between 1964, the year this department was founded, and this current fall term, this is 1971, the department has admitted a total of 199 students. These are graduate students. Of this number, 19 students have completed their degree and are teaching at various universities and colleges. But this leaves 99 students, or 50 percent, who had withdrawn from the program. The largest number are those who are terminating their studies in anthropology. That was a great concern for us in terms of how do we design a program that will keep the students going and keeping their interests up and so on.

Charnley: These were master’s or Ph.D. levels or both?

Ishino: Both. In fact in one time we said that if one receives a Ph.D., a master’s degree comes automatically. But there was some debate about that. However, that was the case. Later on, we worked out a system where you can get your master’s without going on to the Ph.D. That’s what happened in the Nepal cases, those students that tied to the Community Development Institute.

Charnley: In the 1970s, was it difficult to get jobs? Was that part of the reason why some students left?

Ishino: No, no, this was a character of expansion in anthropology. I didn’t think we looked very good in this respect, you see. There was also some interesting things in archaeology, for example. As new buildings are built and urban development takes place, they come across sites that had some archaeological remains. A bill was passed in Congress which prohibited these companies from destroying those sites. That gave the opportunity for archaeologists to get in as specialists in looking after that.

Charnley: That was initially federal legislation? History preservation and that sort of thing?

Ishino: Right. And that opened up a whole new field.

Charnley: In public anthropology.

Ishino: Yes. Then, also, some interest developed in museum work so that museumologists were produced. These things were taking place as well as a lot of smaller colleges opening up anthropology, whereas before they did not. So there was a period of expansion, but at the same time, we had difficulty integrating the curriculum.

Charnley: How long were you chair?

Ishino: Until 1973.

Charnley: Then the decision to leave being chair, was that yours? Or how did that come about?

Ishino: It came about because I had an invitation from the National Science Foundation. This is a period of civil rights and the like. The National Science Foundation was looking for opportunities to have minority people become directors of their programs and so on. John Cornell, a friend of mine when I was at Harvard, was director of the program, and he [recommended] my name.

Charnley: Some of the contacts from the internment camps or later on or something like that?

Ishino: No.

Charnley: Your research afterwards?

Ishino: Yes, at Harvard. The Harvard group. They were the old boys’ network, you know.

Charnley: It was alive and well.

Ishino: It probably was because I was a minority, and NSF was interested in that. I got this job at NSF for two years.

Charnley: In Washington?

Ishino: In Washington, D.C., yes, head of the anthropology program.
After I left, during my period, NSF anthropology and the social sciences were also being reorganized in some very interesting ways. I won’t go into that detail right now.

Charnley: Your family went with you then?

Ishino: Oh, yes, yes.

Charnley: How old were your daughters at that time? Were they in high school?

Ishino: Oh, I’m sorry. I had only one daughter left then. The others were all gone. They had already graduated.

Charnley: Did you have contacts with anybody on campus during that time when you were in Washington?

Ishino: The job had to do with passing research grants, and the system is called peer review. You invite people in to review these important grant proposals. I had the opportunity of inviting a couple of my colleagues here to come to Washington, D.C., to participate in the final decision-making process.

Charnley: You were in Washington during the Watergate scandal?

Ishino: Absolutely, absolutely.

Charnley: The Nixon resignation and the Ford presidency.

Ishino: Right. I saw Nixon fly off in the helicopter leaving the White House.

Charnley: Did you have any contact with, at that time, Vice President Ford?

Ishino: No, no. This is all at a distance. The National Science Foundation was just a block away, block and a half away from the White House grounds. So, every evening after work, I would walk by, and sometimes I’d see Dan Rather just finishing his 6:30 news, some things like that.

Charnley: It must have been an exciting time to be in Washington with what was going on.

Ishino: It was incredible. I remember when Nixon resigned General [Alexander] Haig was Chief of Staff or something, and I remember reading about him saying, “I’m in charge. Don’t worry,” and so on.

Charnley: Did you know when you went to Washington that that would be a two-year stint?

Ishino: Oh, yes. The original agreement Dean Winder made with me, and he’s got it in a letter here, saying that when I come back I’ll go back into chairperson of anthropology. Meanwhile, Bernie Gallin would take my place while I’m in Washington.
When I was in Washington, [Ralph] Smuckler dropped in on me one day and talked about a job as assistant dean in the International Programs. Well, eventually, that invitation happened, you know, and I became assistant dean and director of Institute of Comparative and Area Studies.

Charnley: What were the Area Studies at that time that MSU specialized in?

Ishino: There’s African studies, Asian studies, European studies. That was European and Russian there.

Charnley: Latin American?

Ishino: And there’s Latin American, yes, essentially the same ones that we have now.
Before we leave NSF, let me make a few points. I don’t know how much of this is relevant, but I’m proud of a couple of things that were accomplished. One was the fact that a young Ph.D., still wet behind the ears, got a grant from us, who went to Africa, went to Ethiopia, really, [Afar Valley] and pushed back the human history from 1.7 million years to 3. His team discovered Lucy, and we got great publicity out of that kind of thing.
The decision to grant this young man a grant produced an interesting discussions during the peer review sessions. Anyway, we took a gamble and look what happened.

Charnley: So the grant paid off.

Ishino: Yes, it became national publicity, all kinds of news reports went out and it still continues to this day.
Another event of that period that I learned was that National Science Foundation had a system of trying to inform the board of directors of NSF what was going on in all these areas of science. How do you keep up with what’s going on in biology or physics or chemistry or astronomy and social science? They had a system whereby a unit was responsible for communicating this to the board of trustees. The system was that they put out a newsletter, of course, and magazine report, but more than that they had the directors of these different programs from time to time on a rotational basis present their field of recent developments before the board personally. They had these multimedia things. I had the opportunity to present anthropology at that time. It was very exciting the way they wrote up the materials for you and they made the slides and so on. In those days we didn’t have power points and lights and all. It was a rather cumbersome way of doing it.
But I was rather pleased to note that the head of the National Science Foundation at that time, Richard, I’ve forgotten his name, eventually went out to California, to head up Stanford or head up one of those universities there. He said that he took some of the information that I presented in his talk before some group that he was meeting.
One of the reasons why I tried to remember that was that I think we ought to do that in the university system. The board of trustees ought to meet with individuals, department heads, to be informed of what’s going on in their respective fields, and then to have the follow-up materials passed out to them. It was never done, but, anyway….

Charnley: Sounds like an interesting model.

Ishino: Well, if it works for the National Science Foundation, I don’t know why it doesn’t work here.
The other thing I learned was this: Richard Leakey. I don’t know if you know Richard.

Charnley: Yes.

Ishino: Oh, good for you. Richard Leakey went to U.S. Congress, was asking for some funds to help his program there in Kenya. He wanted a hundred thousand dollars. The congressmen then called on the director of NSF to find the money for that kind of thing if the director’s interested. I was not able to attend the luncheon where this meeting took place because I was on a speaking engagement someplace. Later on, I got a telephone call from the acting director of the NSF saying, “Come on up and let’s have a talk.” So I went on up there, and he gave me the information that I should call the peer review people to see what they think about providing a hundred thousand dollars to this Leakey project.
The Leakey project had the American anthropologists going there for research, and his lab and people provided lots of services to facilitate their activities. For example, we have one anthropologist here, an archaeologist, Larry, I’m blocking on his name, who worked in East Africa. So I did, I called some people and then reported back during the noon hour. I said, “They’re all favorable.”
So, this guy Richard whatever his name was says, “Okay. You put up 10,000 out of your budget, and I’ll put up the rest, the 90,000.” I said, “Okay, that’s a great bargain. 10,000.” I went back to my office and I reported this thing, and my superiors in social science got mad as hell, because this kind of money is for research and not to facilitate some guy’s research lab. I had a hell of a time with them, but, anyway, the point is that somebody upstairs can make a decision just like that on the basis of I don’t know what. Can you imagine the university saying, “We’ll fund 100,000 such and such”?

Charnley: What were your duties when you came back in, it was what, 1975?

Ishino: ’75, yes.

Charnley: Did you return to the chair? Oh, that’s right, you said that. You worked in International Programs. How long were you there working with Dr. Smuckler?

Ishino: 1991. 1981, I think.

Charnley: ’81.

Ishino: That was a tough assignment.
Smucker had the great idea of trying to bring together the knowledge of the area studies in some kind of general principle, but I had a hard time finding those principles or theorems to kind of branch out to all areas. We have CASID here, I forget what, Council for--C-A-S-I-D.

Charnley: Yes. I don’t know what the acronym is. I’ve heard of it.

Ishino: It’s for international development, and the idea is that they would devise knowledge on how to improve the international development of these countries. Now, it’s as if they’ve worked for years on it, but how do you get principles out of that kind of thing? This project or this assignment that I was given was to try to coordinate the information and see what could come out of these area studies in making comparative studies. But, you know, it’s a tough business because we don’t know what a nation is, we don’t know what a site is, the boundaries of it. It’s hard to make any statistical type of generalization.

[Begin Tape 2, Side 2]

Charnley: We were talking about your job as assistant dean of International Programs and the difficulties involved at that time in some of those. Were the budget difficulties that the university faced in the late seventies and early 1980s, did that influence it at all?

Ishino: Yes, when the budget came in the 1980s, in our office, International Studies and the Comparative Areas Studies was cancelled as a result of that.

Charnley: As a result of that. That was under Dr. Mackey?

Ishino: Yes.

Charnley: Because of the general?

Ishino: Yes. Now, to put a positive note on this thing, we did several things. For example, we did studies of the number of courses taught in the area on campus. This has doubled in the survey period we took. The number of other departments which offered courses in the national arena had increased. In the beginning, only 39 percent offered international studies. Today, 66 percent does. So we did that kind.
We also worked with Dick Niehoff [phonetic], Richard Niehoff, who was in International Studies. We started a very important cross-campus faculty program called Global Issues Programs. He was, through his office, being able to bring in well-known speakers from all over the country, and he would meet for dinner and have a nice discussion. Great stuff, and I thought that it created lots of good ideas here on campus for different departments, not just one department.
He also was important in a group called the Swarensteyn group. The Swarensteyn group met in individual faculty members’ homes and had covered every kind of interesting topics. Here’s a list of people.

Charnley: Swarensteyn is spelled S-W-A-R-E-N-S-T-E-Y-N.

Ishino: Yes, yes.

Charnley: That’s interesting. How long did those last, that discussion group?

Ishino: A number of years. I’ve forgotten. I don’t have the exact date because people begin to retire and that kind of thing.
Finally, there was this program which we were somewhat involved, American University Field Staff. I don’t know.

Charnley: Was that in Okinawa or was that in Japan?

Ishino: This is a national organization. They got money from different places, but MSU participated in it because MSU had many faculty members stationed in different countries of the world. This one, Larry Olson, was stationed in Japan, and he wrote many reports. This is an example of one, an attempt to bring together information about that particular country.

Charnley: This publication is American University’s Field Staff and then reports and so on. So this wasn’t just exclusively to Michigan State, but MSU was involved.

Ishino: Active participant in it. We used the reports as basic data for our faculty members.

Charnley: In the 1980s did you go back to teaching, or what did you do after you left the assistant deanship?

Ishino: I went back to teaching.

Charnley: Were the students different in the 1980s?

Ishino: Oh, yes.

Charnley: You talked about the ones that were in the fifties to sixties, but how would you characterize the students that you had when you came back?

Ishino: Let me tell you from my point of view. I grew up in a prewar era and the illustrations I used [World War II] were often outdated for them.

Charnley: You had to update your jokes.

Ishino: I had to update my jokes and my studies and stuff. What’s this, Travis or Beavis, that kind of stuff? I was way out of touch with them.

Charnley: Beavis and Butthead and now the Simpsons and everything else.

Ishino: Right, right.

Charnley: How did anthropology change at Michigan State? Were there changes in terms of the focus? Social science issues, sociology issues, physical anthropology, how had the department changed?

Ishino: Well, we had at the time lost a number of good people, you know. For example, Ralph Nicholas went to Chicago and became assistant provost there. Len Kasden went to the university of Connecticut and so on, did very well elsewhere. Swindler went to the West Coast, University of Washington. We had good people and couldn’t hang on to them, but I suppose that’s the way it was nationally.

Charnley: In terms of your own teaching, what courses did you teach in the 1980s?

Ishino: I became very much interested in the global issues. Remember I told you about that. I tried to take advantage of the experience I had in the international programs. As the assistant dean and director of this program, I was privileged to participate in a number of conferences. I put together a list of meetings I attended in one year there.

Charnley: This is one year, 1977.

Ishino: Right.

Charnley: You attended the Asian Studies Center Retreat, you went to Denver, the Association for the Advancement of Science, International Studies Association St. Louis, Council for Intercultural Studies Programs in New York. It looks like you went from one conference right to the next [unclear] back-to-back conferences. Cincinnati, MSU Conference so you’re back on campus. Sounds like pretty active research and travel schedule.

Ishino: I picked up the useful information and data there, and then I used it in my classes and teachings then.

Charnley: Did you teach any basic courses or were you teaching mostly graduate courses in the 1980s?

Ishino: I taught an introductory course even. They used me all over.

Charnley: Was there any area of your research that you continued on and any publications later in your career? I’m not trying to constantly harp on those, but you obviously did a lot of research.
Ishino: Well, in 1979, I was invited to Japan as part of my sabbatical year, while I was still assistant dean. That’s an interesting part of the old boy network. I got a grant from the Ministry of Education in Japan, and the head of this museum was visiting Washington, D.C., and saw me at the National Science Foundation so he remembered me. In 1979, he invited me to spend four months there.

Charnley: Your sabbatical was spent in Japan.

Ishino: Yes. We stayed at this International House in Osaka. The point is before he started this museum, the National Museum of Ethnology, he traveled around the world looking at examples of good museums, places, and then he built this museum. Very interesting anthropologist.
Also, I should say that this was a period when Japan was riding high on wave of economic growth. So they were spending money rather generously. I learned something about the way modern Japanese companies run. For example, in this museum they had their own bar. Can you imagine a government agency having their own bar? Then after work, they would serve some soup or something in the bar and kind of sit together and talk and gossip.

Charnley: As much a social gathering as—

Ishino: And enhance the communication of the staff. I wish we could do something like that in anthropology, but I don’t know.

Charnley: You were active. You mentioned the club that was there, the Faculty Club at Ohio State or one [speaking over] Ohio State initially. But how about here, were you involved in the university Club?

Ishino: I’m involved through my wife. She puts up weekly ikebna [flower arrangement] at the University Club so I have to go there to clean the vessels and so on. I’m involved in the Tuesday Lunch and Learn Club.

Charnley: At the University Club?

Ishino: At the University Club, and in April I’m a co-chairman of the program at Lunch and Learn Colloquy.
Charnley: You’re the program, so you have to find the program—

Ishino: More than once. [One month’s program each year]

Charnley: When did you retire from teaching?

Ishino: 1991.

Charnley: So you were seventy at that time? Was that when the university had mandatory retirement at seventy, or was that after I’m not sure when Lash Larrowe made the challenge.

Ishino: I’m not sure when that mandatory thing came in.

Charnley: When you came in 1956, did you anticipate that you would be here your whole career, as you ended up?

Ishino: I really didn’t know. My historical, my vision was very narrow, and I was just looking forward to getting to Okinawa.

Charnley: That was the goal?

Ishino: Yes.

Charnley: We mentioned a little bit when we talked earlier about the internment camp. In the 1980s, obviously, there was a move for restitution to some degree. Were you involved in that in any way or were you aware that that was going in Congress or were you ever called to testify?

Ishino: I guess I’