Interview with Author Daniel James Brown – ep 1

[Music] Hello and welcome to the Seattle Magazine podcast.

I’m Jonathan Sposato, the owner and publisher of Seattle Magazine.

Daniel James Brown is the author of Facing the Mountain, a true story of Japanese American heroes in World War II, The Indifferent Stars Above, Under a Flaming Sky, which was a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, and of course, The Boys in a Boat, a New York Times bestselling book that was awarded the American Literature Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.

He has taught writing at San Jose State University and Stanford University.

He lives outside Seattle.

Welcome, Daniel.

Hi, thanks for having me.

Now, I understand that you just saw an advanced screening of The Boys in a Boat movie.

What were your thoughts?

Yeah, so I have to be a little circumspect at this point about what I talk about in terms of the details, but yes, a couple of weeks ago, I was invited to a private screening with George Clooney, who directed the film and his wife and a few other folks.

So we went into the screening room down in Burbank and we saw the full film.

It’s in the can.

It’s done.

It’s completely edited and ready to go.

And I liked it.

I liked what I saw a lot.

And I’ll have a lot more to say about that as we get closer to the release.

Yeah, that’s right.

So can I just ask one more thing, which is just in general, what is it like to see something that you’ve written turn into a big screen movie?

What’s that like?

It was pretty exciting.

I think my wife was maybe more nervous than I was.

We were both nervous sitting there waiting for the movie to start.

I have to say, George Clooney came over and sat down with us and talked to us for a while before we saw it.

And that sort of sprinkled some stardust in our eyes and probably predisposed us a little to like what we were about to see.

But in fact, I genuinely liked what I saw a great deal.

You know, it’s a really interesting thing seeing a 400-page book adapted to two hours of running time.

And inevitably, there are some decisions that have to be made about what goes in and what doesn’t go in.

But that’s the level in which I’m very happy.

You know, I think they got at the spirit of the book quite well.

That’s great.

And I’m actually joined by my two esteemed colleagues here at Seattle Magazine, Executive Editor-in-Chief Rob Smith and also our Chief of Opportunity, Linda Lowry.

Thank you for being here, everyone.

Oh, of course.

Looking forward to it, Jonathan.

So why don’t we get kicked off and actually for more really great conversation on boys in a boat, stay tuned for part two of this podcast.

So let’s jump into thoughts about Seattle.

Daniel, you are familiar with Seattle.

You’ve lived in a Bay Area.

Generally, what are your own impressions of Seattle?

What is your own personal history or connection to the Emerald City?

And how would you describe Seattle to a friend?

You know, I came up.

I grew up in the Bay Area, but I came up to Seattle in 1988 to work for Microsoft, actually.

And my wife and I both fell in love with the city and the area immediately, which surprised me because I grew up attached to my sort of homeland, which is the Bay Area.

But it was a wonderful place for us to raise small children for one thing.

We had one newly arrived baby when we got here and we had another baby shortly after that.

So they are now adults in their 30s.

So they grew up entirely in the Northwest in and around Seattle.

And you know, I just think that I feel a little bit splits these days because I do have this deep loyalty to the Bay Area where I grew up and my father grew up.

But I think at this point, my loyalty to the Seattle area is equal to that.

So it’s just a terrific town, a terrific area.

You know, in the process of writing, particularly the boys in the boat, I wound up learning a lot about Seattle history, particularly Seattle in the 1930s.

And that was fascinating to me.

I like when I walk around any city, I like to know what has come before me.

And so the process of writing the boys in the boat really made me feel bonded to the Seattle area.

And certainly the response to that book also has reinforced that.

Wonderful.

My question to you is, can you share a fun fact about yourself that you have not shared with your audience?

Oh my goodness.

Well, I mean, some people know this because I think it was in my bio for a while.

But I was a beekeeper as a kid and I’ve been a beekeeper on and off ever since.

And it’s kind of a quirky thing to do.

But I fell in love with the world of bees and with beekeeping when I was eight or nine years old.

And I got my first hive, I think when I was 12.

And so it’s been this sort of through line in my life, wherever I’ve been until very recently.

I’ve always had some beehives.

The very recently part is that a couple of years ago, a bear got into our yard and took out the beehives.

And I haven’t had the heart to start a new hive because the bears have been around more and more.

Well, I’m allergic to bees and that sounds horrifying.

So Daniel, I know you taught writing at San Jose State University in Stanford.

Then you became a technical writer and editor.

How does one go from there to becoming an author?

Good question.

I mean, it was a surprise to me.

I got to the point when I was working at Microsoft.

Microsoft was a fascinating place to work.

I enjoyed it a lot.

But by about 2000, I had come to the point where I wasn’t really that interested in what I was doing.

It had never been a particular passion of mine.

I had always wanted to be a writer since I was a small child.

And so while I was still at Microsoft, I sat down and I just started writing a book.

It was a book about this forest fire in Minnesota in which my great-grandfather died and my grandfather escaped on a burning train.

And it was all very dramatic.

So I went back to Minnesota and I did some research there.

And then I came back to Redmond and I sat down and I just wrote a book about it.

And I didn’t know how to go about it.

I didn’t at that point know that with a nonfiction book, you generally sell the book based on a proposal.

You don’t actually write the whole book first.

I didn’t know that.

So I wrote the whole book and it took me about a year and a half.

And then I spent another year and a half or so trying to find an agent, trying to find some way to get it published.

Finally, it got published quite obscurely.

But that was sort of a foot in the door.

It taught me that I could be a writer.

I could actually write an entire book.

And then Barnes & Noble actually got interested in that book.

They picked it up and they put it on their Discover Great New Writers shelf in front of one of the stores or yes, all the stores.

And that caught the attention of the bigger publisher.

And so my writing career sort of took off from that point.

So since then, you have written a book about the Donner Party.

You’ve written The Boys in the Boat, Facing the Mountain.

How do you choose what you want to write about?

All my books have come through some kind of personal connection.

You know, that book about the fire in Minnesota.

That was literally my mother’s father that had escaped on the burning train.

And she had kept a bunch of memorabilia from that.

The Donner Party thing was, of course, something had been written about a great deal.

But I actually had a firsthand connection with that.

I had a great uncle who was as a very young boy participated in the first rescue expedition up into the Sierra Nevada that reached the Donner Party.

And he had kept a diary.

And when I was a small boy, I remember my uncle getting me handle that diary and page through it.

So I always felt sort of a personal connection with that piece of history.

It was real to me because I had actually held this diary.

And then The Boys in the Boat was the next book.

And that was literally because my neighbor, Judy Rantz-Wilman, her father was Joe Rantz.

And so I started talking to her and her dad and took off from there.

In part one of our podcast, we will be discussing in depth the book, Facing the Mountain.

Facing the Mountain is an unforgettable chronicle of wartime America and the battlefields of Europe.

Based on Daniel’s extensive interviews with the families that are protagonists, as well as deep archival research, it portrays the kaleidoscopic journey of four Japanese-American families and their sons, who volunteered for 442nd Regimental Combat Team and were deployed to France, Germany, and Italy.

Woven throughout is the chronicle of a brave young man, one of a cadre of patriotic resistors who stood up against their government in defense of their own rights.

Whether fighting on battlefields or in courtrooms, these were Americans under unprecedented strain, doing what Americans do best, striving, resisting, pushing back, rising up, standing on principle, laying down their lives, and enduring.

How did you find the four stories in Facing the Mountain?

That must have been a treasure trove of choices you could have had.

Yeah, so again, it was kind of a happenstance and a personal connection.

In 2015, I attended, I was honored at the what they called the Mayor’s Arts Award.

I was there to receive recognition for the boys in the boat, but I shared the stage with a gentleman named Tom Ikeda.

Tom was there because of his work with the Densho Project.

He spent over 25 years collecting the oral histories of Japanese Americans who lived through the World War II experience and videotaping these first-hand accounts, these oral histories.

I was sitting on the stage listening to Tom talk about what he did at Densho, and I just thought it was really interesting.

I’m always looking for stories.

So he and I chatted, and then I went home that night, and I got online, I got on the Densho website, where he has made all this material available to anybody that wants to see it.

And I started to watch and listen to these first-hand accounts of all these folks that have lived through this experience.

And there were so many wonderful stories that I was just sort of mesmerized right from the beginning.

And so I went back and started talking to Tom, and he and I went back and forth for about a year about various ways to approach a book centered on the Japanese-American experience during World War II.

And if I can sort of jump in as an Asian-American, I’ve often felt that growing up, that this was one of the most untold, under-visible stories of American history.

I had the honor of interviewing George Takei about a year ago.

He’s, of course, written about his own internment experiences via the form of a graphic novel, and he speaks eloquently and beautifully about how that changed his family in some very tragic ways.

And this is something that, again, as an Asian-American, I’m so glad that these stories are made more and more visible.

I mean, there’s so much there that is highly resonant with what’s going on today and what has happened to our country in a division.

Yeah.

And I will say that I really was fascinated by these stories, and Tom was extremely encouraging.

I still hesitated to write a book about this because I’m not Asian-American.

I’m not Japanese-American.

And so it was really only with quite a bit of prodding from Tom, but really when I started talking to the family members of the four individuals that I wound up focusing on.

And the family members were very encouraging.

They were very welcoming.

They shared all their materials with me.

And so I wound up in a place where I felt like I really needed to write the book.

And as you say, part of the reason I approached it was that having written “The Boys in the Boat,” I had a big platform for the first time as a writer.

I really felt listening to these stories that I could use my platform to get them out in front of a wider audience.

And so ultimately, that’s why I wound up taking it on.

Yeah.

I would say that there is an interesting thing that as you are aware of where– I don’t know if the correct term is “gatekeeping,” but there is a lot of potential backlash that one can face if you’re not from the particular group that you’re writing about.

You know, one of my other projects is “JoySauce.”

“JoySauce.com,” which is an all Asian-American focused media platform with articles, podcasts, reality TV shows, scripted narratives.

And early, early on, one of the things that people took issue with was that my wife, who was non-Asian, was involved in a project.

And it was very frustrating.

It’s like, hey, we need allies.

We need other people to also lean in and tell our stories.

We can’t just rely on ourselves.

Obviously, we’ve got to self-activate as well.

But it’s actually okay if others also want to join.

Yeah.

I mean, I’m a big believer in allyship in general, and certainly that’s the way I was thinking of it.

I mean, I also, I guess I would point out, I mean, people are, you know, if they don’t want to read a book written by a wife, I about this experience, I understand that.

But one of the things that was in my mind was if you look at the sources for this book, they are all, almost all, the first-hand accounts of people that live the experience.

I tried very hard and never to substitute my voice for the voices of the people that were telling the original stories.

And so I saw my job in writing this book as simply weaving those stories together in a way that would be compelling.

And then, as I say, putting on the platform that I had.

So that’s how I went at it.

Well, I love the fact that you mentioned that you have a platform now after writing “Boys in the Boat.”

And I also love that you brought in Tom Akita, who wrote your preface to “Face in the Mountain.”

Well, I would just say that, you know, even as I was talking to Tom and I was looking at, there are hundreds and hundreds of people whose lives are chronicle on the Densha website.

I still had this problem of like, this is way too much stuff.

I didn’t really want to write a comprehensive history of Japanese-American experience of World War II.

That’s not what I do.

I write personal stories.

I try to focus on real individuals and what kind of light their lives shed on a particular slice of history.

So I wanted it to be personal.

So I knew I needed to narrow the focus down.

And that was the biggest challenge, because as I say, there was so much good material.

I wound up really interested in sort of a single question that provided the focus.

And that was right after the attack on Pearl Harbor, young Nisei men, Japanese-American men of draft age in particular faced a particular dilemma.

Everybody who was Japanese-American suddenly faced all kinds of problems.

But young men of draft age had a particular dilemma.

And that was that, here these guys are, they’re going to high school or college or working on the farm or whatever.

And a few days after Pearl Harbor, all their high school friends and their dorm mates and the people they know at work, all the other young men are going down to the enlistment offices and signing up for the Army.

When they go down, they are told universally that they can’t enlist, that they are something called an enemy alien, even though they are in fact American citizens.

And at the same time as the months go on, they and their families are being rounded up and incarcerated in these camps.

So what do you do if you’re a young man in that situation?

You may want to serve your country.

You may be outraged by what’s happened, but you may all very well also be outraged at what’s happening to you and to your family.

And so I think there’s an interesting nexus there, interesting point of departure for something to explore as the sort of central dilemma in the book.

And that’s, so I wound up focusing on four young men of draft age.

And Daniel, how did you choose those four young men?

What persuaded you that that was going to be the best narrative for your story?

First of all, they were all four of them had good well documented stories.

In other words, they had done multiple interviews both with Densho and/or other places.

In all those cases, the families were very amenable to me talking to them and to telling their sons or their fathers or their grandfathers story.

So that was all very, very important.

But then beyond that, I wanted some geographical diversity.

The experience of young men in Hawaii was very different from young men on the mainland.

The young men in Hawaii were not being rounded up and put in camps.

Their fathers, in many cases, were, but they weren’t subject to wholesale incarceration.

So I wanted to show the difference between the experience of those who lived in Hawaii and those who lived in the mainland.

I wanted some diversity on the mainland.

So I wanted some people from the Northwest, somebody from California.

And so I was just trying to get all those bases covered.

And I didn’t get all the bases covered.

I mean, there are aspects of the Japanese-American experience during the war that I don’t really get into.

For one thing, quite a few of these young men wound up in the Military Intelligence Service, the MIS, acting as translators and listening in on Japanese transmissions or interrogating prisoners.

And there’s a whole interesting set of stories around that experience, too.

But I focused more narrowly on young men who served in the US Army and specifically in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which was this all Japanese-American unit that fought in Europe.

How different was the experience of a Japanese-American in Hawaii as opposed to the mainland?

Yeah, there’s quite a bit.

When these two groups came together at basic training at Camp Shelby in Mississippi, they really did not get along because their experiences had been so different.

You know, kids, they grew up in Hawaii.

They grew up, first of all, in a sort of more multiracial context than the mainland kids had.

They spoke almost universally.

They spoke Hawaiian-Pidgin English, and that was a language that bonded them together.

Many of them either worked themselves or certainly their parents had worked in the cane fields under really brutal conditions.

And so that was one set of experiences.

It was very different than, say, a kid from Spokane or a kid who was a student at UCLA who might have a much more typical American middle class, working class, middle class, whatever kind of experience.

They didn’t speak that kind of language.

They didn’t have the same set of expectations about where their lives would go.

And so, as I say, it was a distinct enough difference that it caused a lot of friction when these two groups met in basic training.

How’d you come up with a title for the book?

I think my wife came up with the title.

I am absolutely terrible with titles.

It sort of works on a couple levels.

One is just sort of this notion that metaphorically Japanese Americans and these Japanese American young men that I’m writing about immediately after Pearl Harbor just sort of suddenly this mountain of troubles rose in their path.

And they had to find a way through it or around it or over it.

But it’s also just a geographic or topographical fact that when the 442nd was fighting in Italy and then again in the Vosges Forest on the French-German border, they were always fighting their way uphill.

The Germans always had the eye ground.

Time after time, these guys had to fight their way up some hill in Tuscany or some mountain in the Vosges Forest or back in Italy again on the Gothic line.

They were always fighting their way uphill up to the side of some mountain.

So it worked on that level also.

Is there anything else that you like to say regarding the 40/42nd Regiment that wasn’t shared in the book?

Boy, I tried to get as much into the book as I could.

The only thing I think I’d say along those lines is those are just three experiences and there were several thousand people in the 442nd.

And so there were a lot of experiences that I didn’t document.

The medics, for instance, there were a lot of great stories that I found on the Densho Archives that I wasn’t able to fold in just because it would have been too many characters.

Some of the medics had incredible stories.

These guys weren’t even armed oftentimes going out beyond the front line to try to bring back in wounded Nisei soldiers and coming under fire while doing so.

The chaplains were really interesting, the role that they played.

So there are a lot more stories and there’s a lot more breadth and depth to the story than you can tell with just three or four characters.

But I did try to find people whose experiences were representative.

Going into this, what was your knowledge about how Japanese Americans were treated at that time?

You know, not probably a lot more than any other white guy in my age of my generation, except that maybe a little more because I grew up in California.

And my father worked in the flower business in the flower market in San Francisco.

And then I later worked for his company.

And we sold supplies to florists and to growers, nurserymen.

And I would say probably a third, 35, 40 percent of our customers were Japanese American florists or growers.

I have this very distinct memory.

My father was a very gentle, soft-spoken man.

He very seldom got angry, visibly angry.

But I have a very specific recollection when I was quite young of him talking about what had happened to his customers during the war and how they had come back after, come back from the camps after the war.

They had found their greenhouses shattered or the land they’d been growing on taken away from them and how they had had to start all over with their businesses and how many of them were unable to start those businesses again.

It was something that really affected my father to the point I could see it in him.

And so that made a big impression on me.

And in the back of my mind, I think that’s always really bothered me just because it was so unusual.

The terminology around this has changed considerably since World War II.

And you use more modern terminology in the book.

Could you talk about that a little bit?

Well, first of all, let me just say that generally, as far as sending people off to the camps, the government deliberately designed a lot of very euphemistic language to surround the experience of forcing people out of their homes and locking them up behind barbed wire.

They called that an evacuation.

These were basically concentration camps.

They called them revocation centers.

There’s a whole bunch of language that the government used to try to soften what was happening.

And I have a little note up front in the beginning of the book about that.

And then I would also come back to the word I just used, which was concentration camp.

I wouldn’t want anybody to think that I’m conflating these Japanese American camps with something like Auschwitz or Dachau.

Those were slave labor camps and/or death camps.

And there was nothing else like them in modern history.

But that said, these were in fact concentration camps.

They were designed to concentrate a particular population, based on their ethnicity, to remove them from the general population, to concentrate them in a single place or single places behind barbed wire for the duration of the war.

It’s a term, actually, that Franklin Roosevelt used before the war, talking about the hypothetical need to have camps like this, which became not a hypothetical.

So again, I wouldn’t want people to be offended by the use of that term, but I think it’s important to use it honestly and correctly.

What was your biggest surprise in writing the book or the whole process of researching and everything?

There’s always just one surprise after another in a book like this.

And it may sound trite.

I don’t have any combat experience myself.

And so writing battle scenes was something I worried a lot about.

And I talked to a lot of people who have been in those, including the Nisei veterans that I was writing about.

I was surprised by the extraordinary courage that these young men demonstrated in circumstances that I couldn’t even conceive surviving.

I mean, there were a lot of circumstances where I think I would have withered up and blown away long before I got to the juncture that they not only survived, but actually prevailed in.

So it’s more than one single thing.

It’s just this over and over again, seeing the absolute courage that the young men in battle displayed.

My next question is– I’m just going to say it.

What are your feelings on land reparations post-interment?

Because, for example, in Bellevue, there was a law that no Asian Americans could live in their city up until the 80s.

I believe– I’m not sure about this, but I believe the land on which the Bell Square Mall is built was land that was owned by Japanese– farmed by Japanese American farmers for decades.

I think some form of reparations is due.

There were payments to those people who were actually interned.

There were payments of $20,000 made during, I believe it was, the Reagan administration.

But that $20,000 didn’t, of course, begin to replace the real cost of having lost businesses like my father’s customers and friends did.

So I’m no expert on it, but personally, I think there’s reparations that could be made.

This is a question, Daniel, that I recently asked of the great American playwright, Asian American playwright, David Henry Huang.

And I think I asked George Takei this similar question, and I’ll ask you this question because you are now a subject matter expert.

Do you think things are better today for Asian Americans or worse?

Wow.

I so much want to say better.

And I probably would have said better a few years ago, but it seems to me that we’re backsliding.

And maybe we weren’t ever better than– and the backsliding was just in my perception.

But as an outsider, as a non-Asian American, it does feel to me that in the last six, seven years, whatever, there’s been a big backward movement in terms of prejudice, discrimination against Asian Americans from the general American population.

I think that’s extremely unfortunate.

And that’s probably one of my motives for writing this book, too, was that in addition to how personally attached I became to the people I was writing about, I became really invested in the Japanese-American community in particular and started to see the world more through their eyes than certainly I had before the experience of writing the book.

So, yeah, unfortunately, I don’t think we’re moving the right direction.

I personally can’t decide either.

So I appreciate your candid answer there.

But in all of this, may we continue to be inspired by the bravery of the 442nd and kind of channel the spirit of go for broke and continue to be inspired by your allyship, Daniel, and the work that you do in amplifying these various voices.

I find this whole story of the 442nd one of the most under-focused stories in American history.

And in many ways, I would argue it’s one of the most American of stories, right?

You have an outgroup that’s been marginalized who are constantly being told that they’re not American, that they’re alien citizens.

How much more can you possibly prove your patriotism than to die for the flag?

And so I am just shocked that there’s not already a movie being made of this, or is there?

Well, we shall see.

I’ve been talking to a director named Destin Daniel Cretan, and Destin is…

We’ve actually got a preliminary deal with Disney to do not a feature film, but to do a series.

So it would probably be five to eight episodes, hour-long episodes.

It’s a big enough story that we feel that it should be…

It’s too much to try to cram into a two-hour running time movie.

So we think that the series format will work better.

So Disney actually has a group within Disney Films that is called Onyx, and it’s a label, if you will, that’s dedicated to telling the stories of people of color.

And so Destin is very much involved with them.

And so he set up to direct this series, and we have a showrunner, and we were about to write the pilot and kick that whole process off when the writer’s strike started here a couple weeks ago.

So it’s in limbo for now, but I’m very committed to it.

Destin’s very committed to it.

The folks at Onyx seem very committed to it.

So I’m optimistic that once the writers are appropriately compensated that we can move forward.

Well, Daniel, we are incredibly excited to see this come to fruition.

So will you promise to talk to us when that time comes?

Sure, I’d be glad to.

Okay, great.

And that concludes part one of our conversation with bestselling author Daniel James Brown.

Stay tuned for part two, where we will be discussing arguably his most famous book and one that originates right here in Seattle.

Boys in the boat.

Thank you for listening to the Seattle Magazine podcast.

You can always find us on seattlemag.com.

Look for new episodes approximately every two weeks on our website.

A special thank you to the entire Seattle Magazine staff and to podcast producer Nick Patrie.

Contact Lisa Lee at Lisa@seattlemag.com for partnership opportunities.

Until next time, let’s keep celebrating Seattle. [music] [BLANK_AUDIO]