Gene Oishi’s passing draws the curtain on a unique Japanese American life. I will leave it to others to write his life story. For myself, I wish to speak about my friend Gene, a man who embodied wisdom, courage, profound curiosity about the world, and a wicked sense of humor.

I can’t recall precisely when I first heard of Gene Oishi. I knew and admired his book In Search of Hiroshi. However, I didn’t actually meet Gene until fall 2007. My friend Taunya Banks asked me to speak in her “Asian Americans and the Law” class at University of Maryland Law School. I gave a lecture on Hugh Macbeth, a black lawyer who was an outstanding wartime defender of Japanese Americans. Taunya invited Gene to act as commentator.

From the start, Gene fascinated me. Although in his mid-70s and sporting the grey beard of a sage, he seemed spry and youthful. I then spoke to him after class. Gene recalled taking a trip to Japan as a young man with his father that had changed him. Whereas he had always felt himself an outsider in America as a Nisei, he was amazed to discover a place where he fit in, both by appearance and culture, and seemed to adapt easily, despite his minimal command of Japanese.

Gene suggested that we stay in touch, and we started an extended dialogue about our mutual work. As a longtime supporter of civil rights for minorities, Gene was intrigued by my research on alliances between blacks and Nisei, and the support that many African Americans had shown for their Japanese American counterparts during and after World War II. He wrote me that his own experience was that Japanese Americans were generally indifferent to the plight of other groups, and described how he himself had been raised to believe in the superiority of the Japanese race:

My parents felt no responsibility for the American society at large, only for their own families and to a lesser extent to Japanese people in America and Japan. The values they taught me were good ones, they kept me more or less on the straight and narrow; but for me to become an American, or perhaps a citizen of the world, I had to unhook and discard the racial component of their teaching. That’s the lesson I have been trying to pass on to my children, and whether through my influence or their mother’s, or perhaps mostly on their own, they have turned out to be very decent and responsible people, which pleases me immensely.

He wrote me in March 2009 that he was preparing to teach a course on Chinese philosophy, and said of his new interests:

As for me, I’m now fighting off senility by investigating my Buddhist roots: reading, writing and lecturing on Buddhism at various continuing education venues. I find it gratifying because my students are people my age who are open to and are curious about a philosophy and religion so foreign to their own. What they probably don’t fully realize is that Buddhism, although I was raised as a Buddhist, is also a recent discovery for me as well.

The next time I saw Gene was in fall 2009. I wrote him that I would be coming to the Baltimore-DC area, and Gene invited me to his house for dinner, explaining that since his wife Sabine was away he was “batching.” When I mentioned that it was my birthday, Gene generously permitted me to set the guest list—a rare privilege in my experience of hosts!

It was a lovely, convivial dinner. Gene was an excellent cook, able to prepare a diverse menu of dishes. It was the first of several dinners that I had with Gene, either at his house or outside. Gene was most often joined by his wife Sabine, whom I found to be a lovely person.

In April 2012 I had the privilege of working together with Gene, at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS). Heidi Kim organized a roundtable on “New Approaches to the Japanese American Incarceration,” and invited me, Gene, Setsuko Nishi, and Cherstin Lyon to present. It was one of the liveliest panels I have ever attended. While Setsuko was then in her 90s—it was in fact the last time I saw her before her death shortly afterwards—and Gene by then almost 80, the two of them stole the show with their provocative comments about interpretation. We circulated our papers by email afterwards.

Meanwhile, Gene did me a good turn. In mid-2009, I published my book A Tragedy of Democracy, a study of wartime Japanese confinement across North America. Soon after it was published, Gene wrote me to say he had read it, and learned a lot—for one thing, he said that even as a Japanese American, he had known next to nothing about the Japanese Canadian experience. Gene also had a number of interesting thoughts on other matters I had addressed in the book. For example, he cast doubt (rightfully) on the extent of anti-Japanese violence and prejudice on the West Coast in 1942, which defenders of mass removal had used to justify the policy as a protective measure.

Because Gene was both a well-regarded writer and a Japanese American who could vouch for the accuracy of my research, I asked him if he would be willing to consider posting his reaction to my book online. He agreed, and posted an extended critique of Tragedy on both Amazon and Barnes & Noble. His review was both generous and incisive. In particular he said:

Greg Robinson's latest book, A Tragedy of Democracy, is worthy of being the definitive work on Japanese American/Canadian wartime experience. As a Japanese American who spent World War II in an internment camp, I have over the past fifty years read nearly every book that has been written on the subject and I wondered what could be added to the mountain of information already available.

Gene likewise contributed valuable perspective on another text. In late 2011, I sent him an article I had done comparing the prewar writings of journalists Buddy Uno and Bill Hosokawa, who had both visited China in the late 1930s and written about the Japanese occupation. He wrote me a long essay made up of his thoughts on my article. His critique improved and sharpened my work.

I then had a chance to reciprocate in regard to Gene’s writing. When I first met him, he told me that he was writing a novel made up of short stories. By the beginning of 2011, he made the decision to try and find a publisher. He mentioned that an agent in New York had expressed interest in the book, then titled “Bread Crumbs,” but had ultimately turned it down. In another note, he stated:

I don’t know if my novel will ever get published. I’ve asked my wife to get it self-published should I die before her, so friends and family would have a copy. I am very pleased with it; it does what I wanted it to do, though not quite in the form I had previously conceived of it…The stories are based on my personal memories that have been reimagined and embroidered, but I think they accurately capture the spirit and feel of the times…The novel if published is not likely to be embraced by the Japanese American community, but I have always felt the story needed to be told with all of its complexities and subtle nuances.

Gene asked me if I would read the text. Because of being busy with other projects, it took me four months to get to Gene’s manuscript (Gene told me afterwards that my silence left him thinking that I had not liked it). When I did read it, I was knocked out by its vivid portrait of prewar Japanese community life and family life in the camps. After completing the wartime section, I wrote him in the “first excitement of discovery” to tell him that I thought it was likely the best piece of fiction I had ever read about Japanese Americans. He asked me to read the remainder of the work. After I finished it, I wrote him with renewed admiration:

You have a great honesty and fluency of description as well as a sense of humor to temper it. There were things that are so intimate and poignant that they were almost painful to read. I have never heard such a fine explanation of the feelings of Nisei about the camps….

Even if I had the life experience to tell the stories, I would not have been able to write with such candor and sensitivity. No doubt it takes maturing and distance to make sense of and recount elements of one's own life (granting that it is a fictionalized and conflated version of events). You have that, Gene. While your spirit remains young, and keeps you in touch with the feeling and sensations of that slightly awkward Nisei boy who feels nowhere at home, you have the gift of that maturity and enormous empathy [that] makes it possible for you to see through the eyes of the mother and father, and also the warring brothers.

Gene mentioned that he had submitted the manuscript to Kaya Press. I volunteered to write to editor Sunyoung Lee, who was a friend as well as a person whose ability I respected, and offer my endorsement. In 2014, Kaya published the novel, under the title Fox Drum Bebop. Gene invited me to a book party at his son Peter’s house in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was almost giddy over becoming a published novelist for the first time in his 80s. He told me that my letter had been instrumental in leading Kaya Press to publish his novel and said that he would always be grateful. I was naturally pleased for Gene, though I doubted that my intervention had been that decisive.

Two years later, the AAAS honored Fox Drum Bebop with its annual Creative Writing Prose Award. Gene invited me to sit with him at the awards ceremony. He told me that this accolade meant a great deal to him, as he had never before felt that his perspective and work were understood and appreciated by his own community.

I saw Gene several times over the following years, and we maintained a frequent and (to me) interesting correspondence. In particular, Gene was passionately interested by the book on Nisei author John Okada that my colleagues Frank Abe, Floyd Cheung and I were putting together. Though he had very mixed feelings about Okada’s novel No-No Boy, he generously volunteered to read and comment on portions of our manuscript. When the AAAS conference was scheduled for Washington DC in Spring 2020, Gene invited me to come up to Baltimore, and offered to put me up for the night, Sadly, COVID intervened, and I ended up cancelling the trip.

The last time I saw Gene was in June 2023. I was in Washington DC, for an event, and came up to Baltimore with my friend James Sun to meet Gene and Sabine for lunch and a show at the Baltimore Museum of Art. By then the Oishis were living in a life care community, which required a large adjustment on their part. At lunch, Gene told me that, since his 90th birthday earlier that year, for the first time he was starting to feel his age, and felt frustrated by the number of activities he now felt unable to pursue. Indeed, he grew so tired that after lunch he skipped the museum and went directly home.

In September 2023, I wrote Gene to tell him of the death of my father. He responded with a long sympathy note about how great a bond I had with my parents, and how he wished his own father had been more open. I was touched by his sensitivity. Life intervened, and we did not have further contact these last months.

I will miss Gene greatly. Beyond being a friend, he was for me an example of the Nisei who left the West Coast and made lives for themselves in unfamiliar and often hostile circumstances. His career as a journalist, and his focus on understanding Japanese Americans and the impact on them of their traumatic wartime experience, gave him a fascinating perspective on the world. He was also, as our mutual friend Mark Williams put it, “such good company,” with wide knowledge in diverse fields and a talent for storytelling.

© 2024 Greg Robinson