As one kid growing up on Kaua‘i, Micah Mizukami, 34, fondly remembahs enjoying da serenity of walking through da sugar cane field in Lihue. Now as one adult and as da Associate Director of da Center for Oral History at da University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, he admits that silence can be little bit unsettling sometimes especially when he trying for conduct one interview and da oddah person not really talking back. Luckily Braddah Micah wen go pick up some tricks of da trade along da way.
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Lee Tonouchi (LT): What school you went, what year you grad?
Micah Mizukami (MM): I went Kaua‘i High, graduated in 2009.
LT: What your ethnic backgrounds?
MM: Japanese, Okinawan.
LT: What village you from?
MM: In Okinawa, it would be Ishado village in Nakagusuku. And then on my Japanese side, it would be Kumamoto and Yamaguchi.
LT: You can try explain what is oral history?
MM: Okay. I think it gets a little confusing because in popular culture, there’s a lot of media that use the term “oral history” in a very different way. Like they talk about the oral history of a movie, but it’s not really an oral history. They’re just doing really short interviews with the cast and crew about the film production. So that’s more of a popular usage than the more academic usage of it. So people might have heard “oral history” in that kind of context, but the actual scholarly field is much more in-depth and has much more rigor that goes into it
LT: So what den is your academic-kine oral history?
MM: You could say it’s the longest existing form of history. Cause you look at indigenous groups, everything has been passed down orally. So these histories are preserved orally and that’s kind of the origins of oral history.
And then you get into the twentieth century or twenty-first century with the advances in technology, those oral transmissions could then be recorded. So now oral history as a field is documenting these memories and experiences as historical record and then putting them in an archive, making them accessible to researchers or community. From there we’re able to do interpretation and activation of these historical materials so that a lot of underrepresented voices have an opportunity to have their stories be amplified through oral history.
LT: How you came interested in oral history?
MM: In undergrad, I had an opportunity to do oral histories as a way to understand my Okinawan identity. So I went to Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. It’s a really small school with about a thousand undergrad students and about a hundred international students from Japan.
The students from Japan would always ask me, “Oh, are you Japanese?” And I’d be like, “Yeah, I’m Japanese Okinawan.” And then they’d be like, “Oh, Okinawa is part of Japan. So they’re the same thing, right?” Growing up in Hawai‘i, I wasn’t exposed to many Japanese nationals so I was like, how come all these Japanese people are saying it’s the same thing?
That’s why I took an oral history course at Willamette so that I could do a summer research project in Okinawa where I got to talk to Okinawans and see how they talked about their identity.
LT: And das when you fell in loooove with oral history!
MM: Actually no. So then I kind of forgot about that project. After I graduated I did the JET program in Japan and I was on Tokunoshima island. Administratively, they’re part of Kagoshima prefecture, even though geographically and culturally they’re closer to Okinawa and historically part of the Ryukyu Kingdom.
There I noticed the language on Tokunoshima was so different because I had studied Japanese in college. That’s why I got interested in pursuing my master’s in language documentation, the field of linguistics. So I spent three years on the island and then I came back to Hawai‘i to do my Master’s in Linguistics at UH Mānoa so I could do language documentation and conservation work.
LT: So how come you nevah stay in linguistics?
MM: I found I really didn’t like it. It was just me asking questions like, “Oh, how you say this word?” or “Is this sentence grammatical?” and stuff like that. I found that when I was doing the field work for language documentation, my favorite parts were after I turned off the recorder and I’d just be talking stories with the elders. That’s the part I really enjoyed.
LT: Who you grateful to in helping you on your path to becoming one oral historian person?
MM: I think my grandparents. If you think about oral history in Hawai‘i in particular, a lot of the early oral histories at our center were all about the plantations.
And growing up, I heard a lot of plantation stories from my grandparents. So my grandpa, Hisao Ishimoto, always talked about the sugar plantation on Kaua‘i. And then my grandma Karen Higa always talked about the pineapple fields on Maui. Hearing all these stories made me want to understand what life was like for them, because it was so different from when I was growing up,
LT: What is one of da interesting projects you wen do for da center?
MM: I think one that stands out was one we did with the National Park Service where we went to Pu‘uhonua o Hōnaunau and the Ala Kahakai National Historic Trail. For that one we talked to lineal descendants of the land and individuals who have worked to maintain the trail. For that one we got to camp there when we were doing our initial research because there’s a lot of historic archaeological sites along the trail. So to maximize our time there, we camped.
But it was interesting because when we got there to camp it never rains in that area. Luckily the National Park Service staff had set up a tarp just in case. So we were all huddling under this tarp and it was raining so hard that the rain was dripping through the tarp. And then the director at the time, for our Center for Oral History, Davianna McGregor, she’s a historian, but also a Native Hawaiian activist, she was like, “Oh, we haven’t introduced ourselves to this place.” So she led us in a bunch of oli [Hawaiian chants] to kind of announce ourselves. And then the rain stopped and we were able to sleep out under the night sky.
LT: What da most rewarding part about your job?
MM: I think it’s when people reach out and say, “Hey, my grandpa was interviewed by your center. Do you have a recording?” And then I send it if we have it. Unfortunately we don’t have all of them, but we have most of the original recordings. So when I’m able to send it back, they often say things like, “I haven’t heard my grandpa’s voice in decades. Thank you so much.” I think this shows the value of oral history and having these kinds of recordings preserved.
LT: I curious. So I wen go READ lotta oral history books. So I wuz tinking if oral history stay oral, why you tink we still gotta write ‘em down? Why you guys even make transcripts? For what? For why? Shouldn’t da recording itself be da final result?
MM: Yeah, that’s a really good point. I think it’s still a topic of discussion within the field of oral history. The reason why there’s transcripts is because historians like paper documents as the primary source. And there are still some historians today who don’t consider oral history to be history because it’s not written down. So early on, to make those more like permanent records, they were transcribed and that kind of set the foundation for how oral history is today.
But you get to modern times and transcription is such a lengthy process. It takes a lot of time, money, and resources to do a proper transcript. There are some oral history centers that instead of doing a full transcript, they might do like an index, kind of like, oh, from this minute to this minute, they’re talking about this subject. And that’s all they’ll write down so that you have to go back to the original recording.
LT: How you oral historian people transcribe Hawai‘i Creole a.k.a. Pidgin? You guys get one standardize kine way for spelling all da Pidgin vocabularies?
MM: That’s the hard part. Because no more standardized way of spelling. So it’s kind of whoever is transcribing it transcribes it a little bit different. And sometimes the people we interview don’t want Pidgin in their transcript, because they feel ashamed, so we gotta make theirs more English looking.
But sometimes for me, I think it can get really weird if we transcribe it and remove the Pidgin. Here was an example of one I didn’t like. So this person said “da kine” [super advanced Pidgin word which could mean anything depending on the context] a lot, and then we transcribed it as “the kind,” and it felt so wrong! So for those ones, I changed it back to Pidgin. Cause I was like, this doesn’t make sense in English. This has to be Pidgin otherwise you lose all the meaning!
LT: Can regular everyday people conduct their own oral history projects at home too?
MM: I think anyone can. The only part about oral history is it normally ends up in some kind of archive, meaning an institution that can preserve it for a very, very, very long time. With home archives, it’s a little bit different. I think if you wanted to do it at home, nowadays smartphones are so powerful, you can just do a recording on your phone. And it’s good to have the recording on the phone, but also make sure you have the recording saved in Google Drive or something. And then you should have another copy of that same recording maybe on a USB drive or an SD card. So have multiple copies, multiple backups, just in case. So that’s what I would recommend to people at home.
LT: Talking story with strangers must be hard. What your secret in getting people for open up to you?
MM: Sometimes having someone who is coming from the outside makes it easier to talk about everything, because they don’t know you. You’re like a neutral third party, whereas if it’s your son or daughter you have this history with them, so you might have family secrets, who knows?
But that relationship part I think is really important. So before we do the interview, we like to try to meet with them at least once, just talk story informally, get to know each other a little bit so that they know who we are and they’re comfortable talking to us.
I think most importantly it’s just listening to them and showing that you’re listening through the way you’re interacting and asking your questions. That really helps get people to open up.
LT: Who da one person you wish you had da foresight for interview, but you wen miss your chance?
MM: My grandparents. My grandpa died unexpectedly when I was living in Japan during college. So I never got to record him. And then my grandma; I wanted to record her when I started working at the Center for Oral History, but by then she had started developing dementia. I should have recorded her before I started working here. I thought there’d always be more time later.
LT: What kine advice you would give to people who like try do their own family oral history projects?
MM: It’s never too early to start, but it is oftentimes the case that it’s too late. So start now.
© 2025 Lee A. Tonouchi
