Hugh Macbeth, Sr., a Black attorney from Los Angeles, is largely forgotten today, but he deserves commemoration as an outstanding defender of Japanese Americans during World War II. Born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1884, Hugh Ellwood Macbeth attended Fisk University and Harvard Law School, graduating in 1908. After living …
I was privileged to attend the 2013 Japanese American National Museum conference in Seattle. It commemorated the 25th anniversary of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, granting surviving Japanese Americans redress for their wartime confinement. The conference was a concentrated and rather intense experience, for a number of reasons.
Read Part 1 >>One hint as to the prevailing spirit was that during the day several different people spoke of working in Jewish firms, which were the only ones that did not practice discrimination, or compared their experience with Jewish friends and classmates (Frank Moritsugu spoke of being hired in …
At the first Japanese Canadian Heritage Committee conference I attended, back in 2010, I was invited to come on the night before the main event and give a warmup with some historical background. At the Keisho conference last year, I was asked to attend and then speak about my reflections …
On the weekend of March 31-April 1, I traveled to Toronto to attend the Keisho Conference at the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre. The conference, organized by the Heritage Committee of the JCCC (with help from Sedai, the Japanese Canadian Legacy Project) was designed to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Japanese …
Read Part 2 >>In 1995, a conference on the Japanese American experience was held at Northwest College in Powell, Wyoming. Among the conference speakers were historian Yuji Ichioka, who presented a paper on Buddy Uno, and Hosokawa. According to surviving tapes of the sessions, Ichioka asserted during his presentation that …
Read Part 1 >> Kumpei William Hosokawa was born in Seattle on January 30, 1915. Although he did not begin speaking English until he went to kindergarten, he developed an early interest in reading and sports. He excelled in basketball, and later helped found a local Nisei basketball league. Like …
One of the difficulties of doing Japanese American history is maintaining a balanced perspective in the face of politically and ideologically-charged debates. Many chroniclers of Japanese Americans, in trying to debunk racist wartime images of Nisei as disloyal and pro-Japanese, have perhaps gone rather too far in the other direction.
Hisaye Yamamoto, who died on Jan. 30, 2011 at the age of 89, remains known primarily as a literary artist, a crafter of powerful short fiction—such as her signature stories “Seventeen Syllables” and “Yoneko’s Earthquake”—as well as assorted newspaper columns. Yet the story of her development as a writer is …
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