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know. I had to drink a pint of vodka, trying to muster the courage. It was one of the hardest things I ever had to do in my life. But I don’t know how I could have lived with myself if I didn’t. A pint of vodka! I just told him the news and that if he needed to talk to David or visit, he only had a short time to do it. That was about it. The ball was in his court. I had delivered the message; I had done my duty. So he flew to Oakland, visited David at the hospital, and David passed away a couple of days later. Earl was there when my father showed up. I never saw him. He didn’t tell me what time he was coming. He also didn’t attend my brother’s funeral. But then he didn’t attend his mother’s funeral. He didn’t even attend his father’s funeral and he was still in town then. I never talked to my brother about seeing our father, but by then, he was so far gone with that morphine sulfate. But I’m sure there was recognition. So you could say I never made peace with my dad. In a way, there was nothing left to resolve. Now it’s ironic that I’m the one having to deal with my father’s affairs after his death. Over the years I built this reservoir of strength, knowing that the time would come when I would have to tend to his matters. That was the other thing. Of all of my relatives, my brother has been the closest to me in spirit. I didn’t have that connection with my parents at all. But I felt a close bond with my brother. It’s pretty sad that he passed away, and the alcoholism was more of a symptom than the disease itself.63 MASCULINITY, RACE, AND CITIZENSHIP IN POSTWAR OAKLAND The physical fight between his father and uncle was a pivotal moment in the development of Richard’s masculinity. “For days afterward,” Richard recounts , “I walked around with the hood of my jacket down over my head.” It was “one of the most horrible traumas, emotionally, I had experienced.” This altercation signaled a clash between the two primary masculine role models in his life. Uncle Riuzo, who lived with Richard, David, and their father in their grandparents’ home, represented the embodiment of “good manhood.” One of Riuzo’s childhood mentors, K. Hata, was an advocate of Japanese assimilation into American society. Hata worked with the Japanese consul and respectable U.S. institutions, namely the Boy Scouts, YMCA, and YWCA, to promote the membership of Japanese American youth into racially integrated organizations. His purpose was to “assist the Japanese to assimilate [into] American ways and customs . . . to become useful citizens in modern ways.”64 In choosing the newly created Boy Scouts of America, Hata was  “Learning to Do the West Oakland Dip” promoting a normative American masculinity for Japanese boys. Those who founded the Boy Scouts in  feared that an increasingly urban, industrial society and the feminizing influence of mothers and teachers were creating “soft” and “overcivilized” boys. To create physically and mentally rugged men (and responsible workers upon which to build the expansionist nation into a formidable world force), the Boy Scouts promoted physical activity, outdoor wilderness activities, and fatherly influence through the re-creation of the western frontier.65 Riuzo apparently learned these lessons well. After his own scouting experience, as a young adult, Riuzo spent his Friday and Saturday nights in Oakland as Scoutmaster for a Japanese American troop and teaching a Red Cross junior lifesaving class.66 Richard’s father, Shozo, also joined the Boy Scouts as well as junior high basketball and high school ROTC, but later in life he diverged from the pathway of normative masculinity and the respectable ways of the Aoki family.67 Richard traces his father’s descent into an outlaw lifestyle to his World War II incarceration. Although a young child at the time, Richard recalls his father’s forceful views inside the camps, rejecting—or perhaps more accurately feeling rejected by—the model of American assimilationism. Even earlier, in the late s, poor academic performance and a pregnancy forced Shozo out of the university. The loss of a college education and potential middle-class income and lifestyle, in conjunction with the ways the incarceration emasculated...

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