Arthur A. Hansen
@Art_HansenArt Hansen is Professor Emeritus of History and Asian American Studies at California State University, Fullerton, where he retired in 2008 as the director of the Center for Oral and Public History. Between 2001 and 2005, he served as Senior Historian at the Japanese American National Museum. Since 2018, he has authored or edited four books that focus on the topic of the resistance by Japanese Americans to their unjust World War II oppression by the US government.
Updated August 2023
Stories from This Author
Stimulating an Appreciation of America’s Diverse History and Cultures Through Preservation
Dec. 12, 2014 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
The most fitting way I can think of to begin this review of Mary Adams Urashima’s Historic Wintersburg in Huntington Beach, is to appropriate and slightly modify what the great American poet Walt Whitman said in relation to his most notable poetic volume, Leaves of Grass (1855): “Whoever touches this book touches a (wo)man.” A resident of Orange County’s Huntington Beach and a passionate advocate of historic preservation, the perfervid desire of Urashima to preserve significant historical structures and sites …
A Young Nisei’s Life, Reimagined
Nov. 25, 2014 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
I knew of Gene Oishi, the Nisei author of Fox Drum Bebop, well before I actually met him. This was because in 1968 he became implicated in a national (even international) cause célèbre for his victimization in a high-profile racist episode. Then a Baltimore Sun reporter, Oishi was slumbering in his seat on a political campaign plane flying from Las Vegas to Los Angeles when a fellow passenger, Republican vice presidential candidate Spiro Agnew, gestured toward him and inquired, “What’s …
The Fruits of Santa Clara Valley’s Asian Laborers
Nov. 7, 2014 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
As Cecilia Tsu tells readers in her cogent introduction, its underlying purpose is “recovering the intertwined history of the Santa Clara Valley (in California) when it was known as the Garden of the World (1880-1940) along with the history of the Asian immigrants (Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino) who farmed its famed crops,” primarily orchard fruits and berries (p. 13). Clearly, and thankfully, Tsu’s scholarship for her first book did not materialize within a socio-cultural vacuum; rather, it was deeply rooted …
An Intimate Look at the Life of ‘An American with a Japanese Face’
Oct. 3, 2014 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
It is rare that I find myself reviewing a book on a friend of mine authored by still another friend, but that is the case with Matt Briones’ Charles Kikuchi-centered cultural history Jim and Jap Crow. My friendship with Kikuchi revolved around two events: our participation on a controversial panel at a September 1987 conference held at the University of California, Berkeley, to reassess the World War II work of the (Japanese American) Evacuation and Resettlement Study; and the oral …
Nisei Revisits Her Wartime Past Through Watercolors
Sept. 12, 2014 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
Through a sophisticated blend of artwork, prose, and photographic images, plus an assortment of other useful illustrative materials, Lily Yuriko Nakai Havey has crafted in Gasa Gasa Girl Goes to Camp what is assuredly among the very most exquisite, insightful, and candid memoirs of the World War II Japanese American experience. I vigorously applaud the University of Utah Press’ marketing of this volume—which hinges on Havey’s pre- and early-adolescence incarceration at the Santa Anita Assembly Center in Southern California and …
Nikkei History Meets Multi-generational Family Memoir
April 22, 2014 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
Although its publisher markets Looking after Minidoka as a “memoir,” this volume can lay equal claim to being a “history.” It is, in fact, the superlative fusion of these two genres that accounts for the most fundamental value and utility of this richly documented, exquisitely composed, and diversely illustrated work. Rather than a personal memoir, Neil Nakadate (an emeritus professor of English at Iowa State University) has fashioned a family memoir that conveys to readers the historical experience of his …
‘Masterpiece’ Traces Battles Nikkei Fought for Justice
April 15, 2014 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
On the dust jacket of this volume, I am quoted as pronouncing it to be “a substantial contribution to Japanese American historiography and collective memory.” That reserved opinion was based upon my reading of the penultimate manuscript draft that University of Hawai‘i Professor Eileen Tamura revised into In Defense of Justice. Having now read the published version of this work, I am prepared to proclaim it a masterpiece deserving of inclusion in the pantheon of books on Japanese American World …
Viewing Seattle's Nikkei Community through Multiple Lenses
April 8, 2014 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Seattle was the West Coast’s most populated Japanese American city. However, in the subsequent years prior to World War II, both Japanese San Francisco and Japanese Los Angeles not only surpassed the then-nicknamed Queen City in numbers, but also overshadowed it in geographical, commercial, and cultural importance. This situation remains intact today. Still, it could plausibly be argued that in terms of the historical representation in published books of these three …
Memories of a Colleague and Friend: Karin Higa
Nov. 22, 2013 • Arthur A. Hansen
On the afternoon of Wednesday, October 30, 2013, four current Japanese American National Museum (JANM) staff members and one past staffer emailed me about the death on the previous day of 47-year-old Karin Higa, the museum’s longtime and highly esteemed former senior curator. Several of these messages included an attached remembrance of Karin by Laura Kina, an artist and associate professor of art at Chicago’s DePaul University, whose research focuses on contemporary visual art, Critical Mixed Race, and Asian American …
A Stirring Memoir of Adolescent Manzanar Stories Weaved With Senior Hiking Adventures
Nov. 14, 2013 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
My first trip of many to the World War II Manzanar concentration camp site occurred in the spring of 1972. On that occasion I accompanied my California State University, Fullerton, Nisei colleague, Kinji Yada, on his personal pilgrimage to the place in eastern California’s Owens Valley where, as a young teenager in 1942, the U.S. government had imprisoned him and his family “for the duration” and to which he had not returned since his 1945 departure. Four decades later, in …
