Ethnic studies is important because society is and will continue to be diverse. The study of how people get along with each other is crucial if we are to build a more perfect union of freedom and justice for all. Women’s studies is an important allied field in this work to be sure.

I would hope that ethnic studies programs and departments become more commonplace, and that some of the subject matter that is now taught mainly in ethnic studies would be integrated into other parts of the curriculum.

For Asian-Pacific American studies, there will be a shift as the children of today’s immigrants start having families and children. In the last census, the overwhelming majority of Asian-Pacific Americans were either immigrants or the children of immigrants. I would expect that someone who grows up in a household where everyone was born in this country will have a different experience than someone who has come from elsewhere, or who grew up in a household where “over there” is as real as your father and mother. So the research questions might shift away from studying the experience of making a life in a new country to other questions. What does it mean to be identified as a “foreigner” if both you and your parents are U.S.-born, for instance?

I was born on the island of Oahu, but I don’t consider myself a native because I am of Japanese-American descent. A Hawaiian would be someone of indigenous descent. The indigenous population can trace their origins back for thousands of years. Today, about 10 percent of Hawaii’s population is indigenous.

Have you examined the Japanese-American experience on Hawaii in comparison to the experience on the mainland?

World War II had a terrible impact on Hawaii, but after the war it got better. There was a strike against the “big five” Hawaiian corporations, which included Dole and C & H.

The “Big Five” corporations ran Hawaii as an oligarchy – had pretty much total control of the legislative, executive and judicial branches of the government, and in addition controlled the economic life of the territory. The “Big Five” ran the economy because they controlled not only employment in the major industries – sugar and pineapple – but also owned most of the land and controlled shipping. The union was the vehicle for the ordinary working person to have a say in the way their life went. If your boss also runs the government, and they do not allow you to vote, you can see how important a union would be. The successful strike of 1946 was the beginning of the end of absolute rule by the “Big Five” and the actualization of justice for all.

The experience for individuals living on the mainland was terrible during the war – it did not improve until the late 1950s and 1960s. I first noticed this impact, as a child of that World War II generation, when I went off to college at Yale and compared my experience with my Japanese counterparts on the mainland.

Fujita is actually my birth name. When I married my wife, who is of Indonesian-American descent, I took on her name and she took on my last name.

Originally, I wanted to become a physical oceanographer, but I’m not good at math so I decided on American studies. From Yale, I went on to UCLA and then earned my doctorate at the University of Michigan in American culture.

My interests center on how ordinary Japanese-Americans had an impact on the Supreme Court’s decision to award more than $1 billion as redress to Japanese-Americans who were incarcerated during World War II.

I'm especially interested in Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, a woman who had been in Manzanar as a young woman and gave birth to her first child there. In the 1980s, she was able to unearth major documents and prove that the prosecution had lied to the Supreme Court during the war when it found the exclusion and incarceration of Japanese-Americans to be constitutional. I'm also interested in Fred Koematsu, a former draftsman, who was convicted for violating the exclusion orders during World War II. He was the first person in history to have a Supreme Court decision set aside, using documents found by, among others, Herzig-Yoshinaga.

Both of these individuals speak to my central concerns, demonstrating that “ordinary folks” can make a difference and hopefully inspire our students who tend to come from backgrounds similar to Herzig-Yoshinaga and Korematsu. Cal State Fullerton has a superb archive of materials on the World War II Japanese-American experience. We are privileged also to have Arthur Hansen, professor of history, who is one of the foremost scholars in this field.

What research did you conduct while a visiting scholar at the Smithsonian?

I wanted to see if I could trace the effects of the Japanese American exclusion and incarceration upon a specific group of non-Japanese Americans, anthropologists who worked for the War Relocation Authority. These trained observers saw the result of a “relocation” and of government-decreed “forced assimilation” at close range. I wondered if they had talked about that experience, and if that affected their thinking about the “termination” carried out upon Native Americans by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. “Termination” was the bureaucratic description of govern- ment policies that recapitulated in many ways the government's actions affecting Japanese-Americans during World War II. Termination sought to alienate undigenous peoples from their lands, and to scatter them so widely that they could not survive as cultural groups.