An Intimate Look at the Life of ‘An American with a Japanese Face’

It is rare that I find myself reviewing a book on a friend of mine authored by still another friend, but that is the case with Matt Briones’ Charles Kikuchi-centered cultural history Jim and Jap Crow. My friendship with Kikuchi revolved around two events: our participation on a controversial panel at a September 1987 conference held at the University of California, Berkeley, to reassess the World War II work of the (Japanese American) Evacuation and Resettlement Study; and the oral history interview I transacted with Kikuchi in Rhode Island at his family’s Block Island vacation home in August 1988 ...