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
Groundbreaking fieldwork a guidebook to Nikkei journey of (further) discovery
Nov. 2, 2017 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
In spite of being involved in researching and writing about Japanese American history for 45 years, I have only been to Japan once, and then for but a week in the Tokyo-Yokohama area. My purpose was to participate in a conference of the Japan Oral History Association. I was accompanied to this gathering at Tokyo’s Rikkyo University by a Japan-born, U.S.-educated colleague at the Japanese American National Museum; she had served an extended professorship at a Japanese university and was …
‘Historical portrait’ adeptly conveys Nikkei’s lifestory
Oct. 20, 2017 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
One of my favorite songs by country singer Hank Williams, Jr. — whose political and social philosophy I revile — is “Family Tradition.” The book under review here falls into the same category as that particular record’s title, and does so in a very profound way. Indeed, it was precisely owing to family tradition that Naomi Shibata felt stirred to write Bend with the Wind in the first place, and which by her then doing so resulted in that tradition being …
Historian ‘illuminates’ JA history
June 7, 2017 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
In Kenji Taguma’s resplendent foreword to this latest of historian Greg Robinson’s cavalcade of exemplary volumes devoted to illuminating the Japanese American experience, he rightly observes that The Great Unknown is a work that “epitomizes the importance of the community press in preserving history.” Of course, had Taguma and his allied supporters within the Nichi Bei Foundation not labored so mightily and resourcefully to keep alive the most venerable of the Japanese American community newspapers, the columns underpinning Robinson’s book in …
Changing Season: A Father, A Daughter, A Family Farm
May 3, 2017 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
In the mid-1980s, while researching the World War II incarceration experience of Americans of Japanese ancestry at the Gila River Relocation Center in south central Arizona, I discovered a brief yet very enlightening 1982 autobiographical volume on this subject by David Mas Masumoto. Entitled Distant Voices: A Sansei’s Journey to Gila River, it was self-published by the 28-year-old author-agriculturalist under the aegis of the Inaka Countryside Press in Del Rey, Calif. (20 miles south of Fresno). Five years later another …
An “Immersion” Into Terminal Island Nikkei Lives
April 21, 2017 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
As an oral historian, I have always been addicted to reading obituaries, especially those relating to the World War II Japanese American experience. For example, a recent transfixing obituary for me was that devoted to 97-year-old Kazuko Kuwabara (1918–2016) in the December 7, 2016 issue of the Los Angeles Times. There were two reasons for my interest in this particular death notice. First, it directly pertained to the book under review here, since Kuwabara was a Kibei-Nisei born in Los …
A “Powerful” (and “Critical”) Case for the Asian American Movement
March 22, 2017 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
In commemoration of the 75th anniversary of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, which prompted the U.S. government to imprison 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry (two-thirds U.S. citizens) in concentration camps, a double-edged protest march was staged on the night of December 7, 2016, in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo community. Among the protestors was 80-year-old Sansei activist Jim Matsuoka, who at age seven was impounded with his family and 10,000 other Japanese Americans at eastern California’s Manzanar, one of 10 War …
Author Pays Forward Japanese American Legacy of Resistance
Nov. 8, 2016 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
In his essay for a 1999 Mike Mackey-edited anthology, Remembering Heart Mountain, Lane Hirabayashi cautions Japanese American incarceration scholars not to over-generalize about Japanese American “resistance” to oppression within the War Relocation Authority-administered concentration camps. However, he then quickly subdues this prudent warning by declaring: “My reading of the archival record confirms, repeatedly … the frequency and tenacity of resistance on multiple occasions and multiple levels.” Four years earlier, in his edited volume of Richard Nishimoto’s writings pertaining to World …
Scholars Showcase Future of Diverse Nikkei Community
Nov. 1, 2016 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
During my involvement in Japanese American studies, from 1972 to the present, I have been struck by two simultaneous developments. The first is a growing sophistication in theory and methodology among its academic practitioners; the second is a decreasing connection to and concern for the Japanese American community by these same scholars. While I do not see this bifurcated situation, which has been remarked on by many others in the field, as a “crisis” worthy of “alarmist” pronouncements, I do …
‘Monumental’ research on Manzanar
Oct. 20, 2016 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
Manzanar occupies a special place in my consciousness and conscience. I was first introduced to this eastern California site in 1972 by a California State University, Fullerton, History Department colleague and close friend who was a teenage Nisei inmate there during its successive World War II iterations as a Nikkei detention center run by the Wartime Civil Control Administration and the War Relocation Authority. Among my earliest oral history interviews were those done with Manzanar detainees, camp administrators and appointed …
The Fukuhara Family Caught Between Two Sides
Oct. 13, 2016 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
At our vacation residence in the small San Luis Obispo County community of Los Osos, Calif., my wife and I have a delightful neighbor who is genuinely a “voracious reader.” By far this woman’s favorite genre of literature is historical fiction. While customarily she shuns non-fiction books, she is open to perusing such works with one proviso: they must read like captivating novels. For this reason I have previously recommended to her a trio of exemplary 2015 Nikkei history books …
