Jonathan van Harmelen

jonathan

Jonathan van Harmelen is currently a PhD 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 has completed an MA from Georgetown University. From 2015 - 2018, he previously worked for the National Museum of American History as an intern and researcher.

Updated October 2019

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Giotta Fuyo Tajiri — An Artist's Voyage

Por Jonathan van Harmelen
10 Out 2019

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 (read Greg's article on Shinkichi Tajiri here). After putting together that article, I had the chance to interview Giotta ...

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An Activist’s dilemma: the life of Katsuma Mukaeda

Por Jonathan van Harmelen
29 Ago 2019

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. The New World was their new home, despite the institutionalized racism they encountered in the United States, and most did ...

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Dutch Newspapers and Nikkei Stories - Lessons from Japanese-American Incarceration and Redress from Afar

Por Jonathan van Harmelen
27 Jun 2019

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 Dutch audiences in 1992, all this must have felt rather familiar.

However, on the front page of the weekly ...

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Brother Theophane Walsh

Por Greg Robinson, Jonathan van Harmelen
9 Abr 2019

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 of the current administration’s policies in regard to immigrants and human rights, there are those working to help them ...

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