In the column I wrote some time ago on the Nisei photographer Yoichi Okamoto, who served as official photographer in the White House during the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson, I spoke about how his photographs go beyond political propaganda and shine as both art and history. This is, if …
The wartime confinement of Japanese Canadians is a landmark in the history of civil rights and race relations nationwide. Like their counterparts south of the border, 22,000 Canadian residents of Japanese ancestry suffered official wartime removal and mass confinement. In addition, their land and personal property were confiscated by Canada’s …
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 …
Throughout the 20th century, Nikkei writers have dreamed of writing “the Great Nisei novel,” a work of literature that would express the Japanese/American experience and show off the writing talents of the second generation. Critics have meanwhile drawn attention to existing works as the “greatest”. Frank Abe, my friend and …
One part of the history of Japanese Americans that has been curiously neglected is the disproportionate support offered them by Black Americans at the time of their mass wartime confinement. Victims of racial injustice themselves, African Americans demonstrated different forms of solidarity to their Nikkei counterparts during those years. In …
My recent article on the French-born mixed-race Japanese writer Kikou Yamata, whose works were published in translation in the United States and discussed in Nisei literary reviews, has inspired me to delve more into the fascinating and varied history of the connections that Japanese Americans forged with France during the …
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