It's much more difficult to work on a broad subject than on a specific one, because even if it's hard to find the information, if you look hard enough for something specific you will find it, and you will discover things that you wouldn't have thought of before.

The spoken word vanished with the wind. Likewise, the unrecorded life disappears as if it never existed.

They probably do have an Asian Barbie.

It is very difficult to hang onto the relics of history.

Somebody who was born in this country who visited China would later face difficulty getting back in to the USA. We have to keep in mind that the struggles of the Chinese against these exclusion laws really laid down the foundations of civil rights law.

The whole story of the comfort women, the system of forced sexual slavery, the medical experiments of Unit 731, is not something that is in the US psyche. That is changing because many books are coming out.

Often, what you see in the media is driven by economic forces.