Jonathan van Harmelen
@jonathanJonathan van Harmelen is currently a Ph.D student in history at UC Santa Cruz specializing in the history of Japanese-American incarceration. He holds a BA in history and French from Pomona College and an MA from Georgetown University. He can be reached at jvanharm@ucsc.edu.
Updated February 2020
Stories from This Author
Hung Wai Ching: The Founding of the Varsity Victory Volunteers and relations between Chinese and Japanese Americans
March 20, 2020 • Jonathan van Harmelen
The study of relations between Chinese and Japanese Americans during WWII is a small yet growing field. Although both immigrant communities shared experiences of racial discrimination, tensions between Chinese and Japanese immigrant communities increased drastically following the invasions of Manchuria and China. Following Pearl Harbor, anti-Japanese sentiment forced Chinese Americans to distinguish themselves and take a position against their neighbors. Yet as historian Greg Robinson notes in his column for Discover Nikkei, a number of Chinese Americans stood as advocates …
Eugene Rostow’s Japanese American articles: A Reconsideration - Part 2
Jan. 30, 2020 • Greg Robinson , Jonathan van Harmelen
Read Part 1 >> Eugene Rostow’s twin articles appeared in late summer 1945. The overall thesis of both pieces was that the indefinite “internment” of West Coast Japanese Americans under prison conditions, and the severe property losses they had sustained, had been a grave injustice - “the worst blow our liberties have sustained in many years.”1 Worse, by upholding the government’s actions in the “Japanese American cases,” the Supreme Court had converted a “wartime folly” into permanent legal doctrine.2 Rostow …
Eugene Rostow’s Japanese American articles: A Reconsideration - Part 1
Jan. 29, 2020 • Greg Robinson , Jonathan van Harmelen
In the annals of civil rights, a special place should be reserved for Eugene Rostow. In 1945, even as Japanese Americans remained confined in camps by official order, Rostow, then a young law professor at Yale University, published a pair of articles that criticized their wartime treatment. In his first article, “The Japanese-American Cases - A Disaster,” published in the Yale Law Journal in mid-1945, Rostow presented a powerfully-reasoned critique of removal and incarceration as America’s “worst wartime mistake,” and …
Dentistry in Camp
Dec. 27, 2019 • Jonathan van Harmelen
The late Hiroshi Kashiwagi’s short play Laughter and False Teeth remains a staple of Asian American Theatre. In an interview with Emiko Omori in her landmark film Rabbit in the Moon, Kashiwagi explained the real-life background of the piece in the experience of his mother at the time of mass removal: “she had to go to camp without teeth. And she was only, as I say, about forty. And she had to go like this all the time. [Covers mouth …
Findings from a small town archive
Nov. 28, 2019 • Jonathan van Harmelen
If you go to the heart of downtown Arroyo Grande, you will find tucked away in a small house the South County Historical Society. Stored in the house are thousands of documents and other artifacts chronicling the town’s century-and-a-half existence and the lives of its inhabitants. For instance, among the documents in the house is a pair of check registers belonging to the former Chief of Police, Fred Norton. Yet rather than being a record of payments, however, each page …
Giotta Fuyo Tajiri — An Artist's Voyage
Oct. 10, 2019 • Jonathan van Harmelen
In June 2019, Discover Nikkei published an article of mine on the Nikkei community in the Netherlands and on popular reactions there to the Redress Movement. In it, I covered the life and work of Shinkichi Tajiri, one of the most prominent modern sculptors in the Netherlands and brother of Pacific Citizen editor Larry Tajiri. Thanks to the influence of my friend and mentor Greg Robinson, I have become fascinated with the life and work of the far-flung Tajiri family …
An Activist’s dilemma: the life of Katsuma Mukaeda
Aug. 29, 2019 • Jonathan van Harmelen
For many of the issei interned by the Justice Department during World War II, their years in confinement posed serious questions of loyalty and identity. Many had once strongly identified with the old country, and had worked to forge what Eiichiro Azuma has identified as a “shin-nippon,” or new Japan, in the New World. Yet their decades of separation from their Japanese homeland, and the arrival of a new Nisei generation during the 1930s, led many to rethink their allegiance. …
Dutch Newspapers and Nikkei Stories - Lessons from Japanese-American Incarceration and Redress from Afar
June 27, 2019 • Jonathan van Harmelen
On the morning of Friday, October 30, 1992, readers in the Netherlands opened copies of the NRC Handelsblad, one of the largest papers circulated in the country. The front page commemorated twelve and a half years of Queen Beatrix’s reign, and page 3 shows a grinning George HW Bush in Michigan for a speech on the 1992 campaign trail. Reports on the brewing war in Bosnia circulated throughout, showing the plight of civilians as they moved through bombed-out neighborhoods. For …
Brother Theophane Walsh
April 9, 2019 • Greg Robinson , Jonathan van Harmelen
In November 2018, the New York Times wrote an article highlighting the work of Father Ruskin Piedra, the priest of the church Our Lady of Perpetual Help in New York City.1 At 84, he busies himself with supporting litigation on behalf of immigrants - some from his own parish - to protect them from deportation. Amid the dreadful news of family separation and confinement of children in detention centers, Father Piedra’s work is a hopeful reminder that despite the callousness …
