Arthur A. Hansen
@Art_HansenArt Hansen is Professor Emeritus of History and Asian American Studies at California State University, Fullerton, where he retired in 2008 as the director of the Center for Oral and Public History. Between 2001 and 2005, he served as Senior Historian at the Japanese American National Museum. Since 2018, he has authored or edited four books that focus on the topic of the resistance by Japanese Americans to their unjust World War II oppression by the US government.
Updated August 2023
Stories from This Author
The Irony of Nikkei Citizenship During Mass Incarceration
Oct. 31, 2018 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
Each spring semester, my wife, a professor in the online Information School at San José State University, team-teaches a course entitled “History of the Book.” One class assignment has students produce a historical paper about a local library of their choice. Since many of the students are from West Coast areas, often these papers deal with libraries serving communities whose Japanese American residents were uprooted and incarcerated during World War II. Had one of my wife’s past students opted to …
Reconceptualizing the narrative of American art
Oct. 9, 2018 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
I have always been intrigued by the titles authors select to represent their books, and most especially if they are as deftly apt as that ShiPu Wang has devised for the volume under review. Whereas the designation American moderns has customarily been used to depict such canonical white artists as Stuart Davis (1892-1964), Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), and John Marin (1870-1953), Wang devotes his critical attention to four American moderns of Japanese ancestry: Frank Matsura (1873-1913), Eitaro Ishigaki …
Fathoming the ‘lessons and limits of history’
Sept. 12, 2018 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
In his insightful Sept. 13, 2017 Christian Science Monitor review of Karen Tei Yamashita’s Letters to Memory, Terry Hong concluded with this appraisal: “Allusive, quirky, questioning, Letters is a challenging text . . . dense with assumptions of cultural literacy, community insight, historical background. . . . (However) don’t be deterred (as) Letters awaits your inquisitive participation and rewarding collaboration.” My own initial reading of this brilliant book, whose form and content reached well beyond my grasp, inclined me toward affirming Hong’s …
‘Jewel’ of a tribute to Heart Mountain
Aug. 24, 2018 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
Sharon Yamato is truly a lovely person. She is also a lyrical writer, a seasoned journalist, a capable historian, a skilled interviewer, an accomplished curator and a talented filmmaker. The daughter of parents who were World War II prisoners in the Poston Relocation Center in Arizona, she was born after the war in the Japanese American resettlement community of Denver, Colo., and thereafter raised and educated in Los Angeles. While coming of age, Yamato shared with many others in the …
Documenting an evolving movement
Aug. 15, 2018 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
In recognition of my modest role in the conception and organization of this stellar volume, I received a complimentary copy from Lane Hirabayashi, the lead editor for the robust NCRR editorial team (the others being Richard Katsuda, Kathy Masaoka, Kay Ochi, Suzy Katsuda, and Janice Iwanaga Yen). Along with the book, Hirabayashi attached a short note: “This project exemplifies what Asian American Studies is about for me. From, through, and reflecting grassroots knowledge.” Having had the good fortune to read …
Complicat(i)ng the 'mosaic' of history
June 29, 2018 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
This impressive volume, published at the semi-centennial of Asian American studies, serves admirably as an authoritative marker of Asian American history’s coming of age. Edited by two stalwarts in the field, David K. Yoo and Eiichiro Azuma, it consists of a masterful overview introduction by them, plus 27 in-depth historiographical essays penned by leading scholars that are representative of this vibrant multifarious branch of U.S. history. All but one of these scholars are Asian Americans of various ethnicities, with the …
A Nikkei Incarceration Odyssey
June 12, 2018 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
The Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai‘i (JCCH) has been responsible — in part — for publishing three remarkable books: Life behind Barbed Wire: The World War II Internment Memoirs of a Hawaii Issei (2008); Family Torn Apart: The Internment Story of the Otokichi Muin Ozaki Family (2012); and An Internment Odyssey: Haisho Tenten (2017). Taken together, these bountiful volumes have simultaneously achieved the following three ends: substantially enlarged the Japanese immigrant perspective on the World War II Japanese American detention experience; strategically incorporated …
Portals to the Living Past: World War II/Resettlement Era in Japanese American Denver - Part 2
May 24, 2018 • Arthur A. Hansen
Read Part 1 >> Portal 8: Minoru Yasui Plaza – 333 W. Colfax Avenue, Denver CO Originally constructed as a hotel, this strikingly visible high-rise downtown office building for the City and County of Denver was renamed March 1, 1999, as the Minoru Yasui Plaza after the celebrated Colorado attorney and civil rights leader. Subsequently, it was decided that a bust of Minoru Yasui (1916-1986) would be placed at a prominent location in the lobby, and plans were established to …
Portals to the Living Past: World War II/Resettlement Era in Japanese American Denver - Part 1
May 23, 2018 • Arthur A. Hansen
Historical Context: At the time of Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, of the roughly 127,000 mainland Japanese American population, two-thirds of them US citizens, the overwhelming majority lived in the three West Coast states of California, Oregon, and Washington, with approximately 94,000 of them California residents. Colorado’s prewar population of some four thousand Japanese Americans, or Nikkei, was the largest such population among non-Pacific Coast states, though only seven hundred lived in Denver. There, a several-block …
A Case Study of Heart Mountain’s Draft Resisters and Military Service
May 11, 2018 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
This is Mike Mackey’s fifth and, apparently, final book centered on the World War II experience of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in northwest Wyoming. Mackey, who has made his home in both Powell and Cody, the two communities nearest to Heart Mountain, is exceedingly well informed on the camp’s history and passionately dedicated to its historical interpretation and legacy. Accordingly, it has always shocked and saddened me that as a professional historian, Mackey’s knowledge and commitment relative to Heart …
