Ken Nakazawa Rediscovered
This series recovers the life and writings of Ken Nakazawa, a multi talented Issei playwright, essayist, and critic who taught at USC in the prewar era. Nakawaza was one of the first ethnic Japanese to hold a position as professor at a major American university. He also was an employee of the Los Angeles Japanese consulate and a public defender of Tokyo’s foreign policy during the 1930s. His prewar popularity career reveals the space open to outstanding talents, even on the West Coast, but also the price of identifying with the Japanese “enemy.”
Stories from this series
Part IV—After Pearl Harbor
June 2, 2024 • Greg Robinson
Read Part 3 >> Ken Nakazawa was arrested by FBI agents on December 7, 1941, in the wake of Japan’s raid on Pearl Harbor. Presumably his name had already been marked down on the Justice Department’s prewar “ABC list” of potentially dangerous aliens to be rounded up in case of war. At first, he was placed in detention on Terminal Island, and was then sent on to internment at the Justice Department Camp at Fort Missoula in Montana. In August …
Part III—the 1930s
May 26, 2024 • Greg Robinson
Read Part II >> Ken Nakazawa would have defined himself as an internationalist. Throughout his career, he advocated international understanding through study of foreign cultures. At an Institute of International Relations in Riverside in November 1927, he gave a speech proposing that differences between East and West be composed through “positive differences,” as had been the case in art and literature. Yet in the years before 1931, he hardly touched on international politics in his public statements and writings. A …
Part II—Prewar Cultural Arbiter
May 19, 2024 • Greg Robinson
Read Part I >> Although Ken Nakazawa achieved a modicum of public fame in the 1920s from his plays and his writings, he achieved his greatest renown as a public figure in the following decade. A watershed moment for Nakazawa was his selection as an essayist by the Boston-based Atlantic Monthly magazine. His first contribution, which appeared in the Atlantic’s February 1929 issue, was “The Spirit of Japanese Poetry.” Nakazawa provided an atmospheric, almost Lafcadio Hearnesque reading of Japanese poetry—one …
Part I—The Early Years
May 12, 2024 • Greg Robinson
Prominent among the few Issei to be accepted in mainstream American culture in the years before World War II was Ken Nakazawa. Nakazawa was a well-respected professor at University of Southern California—one of the first ethnic Japanese on the faculty of an important American university—as well as a lecturer, essayist, playwright and interpreter of Japanese culture. He also served as diplomat and community leader at the Japanese consulate in Los Angeles. However, Nakazawa's outspoken support of Japan’s invasions and occupation of China …
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