Nichi Bei News
The Nichi Bei News rose out of the ashes of the historic Nichi Bei Times (1942-2009) and Nichi Bei Shimbun (1899-1942) legacy to launch the first nonprofit ethnic community newspaper of its kind in the U.S. in September 2009. From community issues and events taking place in the historic Japantowns and beyond, to entertainment profiles, food, film and book reviews, politics, hard news and commentaries, the Nichi Bei News has you covered. Published by the innovative nonprofit Nichi Bei Foundation, it proudly follows the rich tradition of some 125 years of community leadership through quality media.
Updated Jnauary 2024
Stories from This Author
A ‘Comprehensive Treatment’ of the Wartime Incarceration of Japanese Americans
Jan. 27, 2022 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
During the 1980s, I was privileged to co-direct the Honorable Stephen K. Tamura Orange County Japanese American Oral History Project (OCJAOHP), jointly sponsored by the Japanese American Council of the Historical and Cultural Foundation of Orange County and the Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton. In addition to producing 15 bilingual oral history volumes with pioneering Issei and Nisei, this project yielded a survey of Japanese American historical sites in Orange County and …
The American Democratic and Multicultural Promise
Jan. 13, 2022 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
In 1949, when I was 10 years old, my family moved from New Jersey to Goleta, Calif., where I enrolled as a sixth grader in Goleta Union School. It historically had always been an integrated school, as were the schools in the neighboring county seat of Santa Barbara. However, another Santa Barbara County town, Carpinteria, for some 27 years prior to 1947, had consigned its Mexican American students, mostly children of lemon workers, to the segregated classrooms of Aliso School. …
A ‘consequential’ collection of JA history
Aug. 27, 2021 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
This is the second of two outstanding books by eminent historian and journalist Greg Robinson consisting primarily of his “The Great Unknown and the Unknown Great” columns in the San Francisco-based Nichi Bei Weekly. In reviewing for the NBW the first book, The Great Unknown: Japanese American Sketches, published by the University Press of Colorado in 2016, I explained that its 10 chapters encompassed the “‘unknown’ activities and/or achievements of selected noteworthy individuals.” As for the University of Washington Press volume here under …
Minding and mining the gaps of one family’s trauma
Aug. 13, 2021 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
I immensely enjoyed and was greatly enlightened by Sansei psychotherapist Judy Kawamoto’s singular book. I would classify its genre as a meditative memoir. As she succinctly notes, “psychotherapy is dubbed ‘the talking cure’” (pp. 80). It typically involves a therapist asking patients probing in-depth questions about every aspect of their lives so as to assist them with addressing and redressing their problems. In the case of Forced Out, Kawamoto enacts the twin role of therapist and patient. All of her …
Book on Heart Mountain football team achieves brilliance
July 30, 2021 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
For a number of years I have been working on a sports and society book treating the social and cultural transformation of Southern California in the early Cold War period through the lens of prep football as epitomized by a Dec. 14, 1956, California Interscholastic Federation championship game between Downey High School and Anaheim High School played before a record crowd of between 40 and 60,000 fans at the Los Angeles Coliseum. I sensed that I was stalled in completing …
San Francisco J-Town’s redevelopment-era transformation
Feb. 8, 2021 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
My first visit to San Francisco’s Japantown occurred in May 1974. It came about when I, along with two colleagues in the Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton, Betty Mitson and Ron Larson, journeyed to the City by the Bay to conduct tape-recorded interviews with the prominent Communist couple Karl Yoneda (1906-1999) and Elaine Black Yoneda (1906-1988). After interviewing them for two days, the Yonedas kindly invited us to be their dinner guests …
A ‘community study’ of Minidoka
Jan. 25, 2021 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
During the May 1995 symposium that Mike Mackey organized in Powell, Wyoming on the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans at the nearby Heart Mountain Relocation Center, Mackey toured Bob Sims (1936-2015) and me around Powell. One topic we three non-Nikkei historians of the Japanese American wartime incarceration (all beholden to Roger Daniels) discussed on that occasion was our common burning desire to write a narrative history of a particular War Relocation Authority-administered concentration camp: Mackey of Heart Mountain, me of …
Inmates’ historical narratives for the layperson
Jan. 11, 2021 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
Back in 1980, very little had been written about the World War II imprisonment experience of more than 5,500 Japanese American aliens (Issei) within the hodgepodge of 24 U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Army concentration camps as against what some 120,000 aliens and Nisei/Sansei citizens of Japanese ancestry underwent in the 10 War Relocation Authority-administered concentration camps. Accordingly, the former confinement sites were often carelessly dismissed as “those other camps.” During the succeeding 40 years, a profusion of studies …
Bridging Historical Traditions
Oct. 12, 2020 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
In recent years historians have increasingly moved away from writing about the history of a single nation state, so-called mononational history, to writing an innovative variety of international history known as transnational history. Unlike traditional international history, which focused on the formal relations between two nation-states, this new form of historical inquiry seeks instead to illuminate how the events and developments that occurred within two countries overlapped and interpenetrated one another. Unfortunately, such an approach has been at a discount …
Nisei is propelled to share firsthand accounts of camp
Sept. 21, 2020 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
In 2019, Paramount released the biopic feature film on British rock singer Elton John entitled Rocketman. Sam Mihara’s slender and well-written autobiographical book, Blindsided, also showcases the life of a rocket man. It, too, could have been titled Rocketman. After all, upon completing his undergraduate and graduate engineering degrees at the University of California, Berkeley and UCLA, Mihara enjoyed a distinguished 42-year career at Boeing as a rocket scientist. Then, 14 years after his 1997 retirement, he forged a new …
