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
Hope amid hardship
April 30, 2018 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
This altogether beautiful book by noted Seattle-based art historian and curator Barbara Johns strikingly testifies to the oft-stated judgment that a picture is worth a thousand words. The core of The Hope of Another Spring is the astonishing illustrated diary that Issei Takuichi Fujii (1891-1964) fashioned (almost completely) while incarcerated during World War II with his wife and two daughters at the Puyallup Assembly Center (Washington) and the Minidoka Relocation Center (Idaho) concentration camps. Described in a discerning foreword by renowned …
A historical survey of Asian Americans in the Heartland
Nov. 22, 2017 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
In 2009, I published an article about Japanese Americans in the Interior West, a field earlier pioneered by two Arizona State University doctoral students, Eric Walz and Andrew Russell. So I was naturally pleased when the Nichi Bei Weekly invited me to review the present book. It, in effect, shifts the venue of the same general topic east to the Midwestern state of Michigan (particularly Detroit’s Tri-County area: Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb counties) and broadens its concern from Japanese Americans …
Groundbreaking fieldwork a guidebook to Nikkei journey of (further) discovery
Nov. 2, 2017 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
In spite of being involved in researching and writing about Japanese American history for 45 years, I have only been to Japan once, and then for but a week in the Tokyo-Yokohama area. My purpose was to participate in a conference of the Japan Oral History Association. I was accompanied to this gathering at Tokyo’s Rikkyo University by a Japan-born, U.S.-educated colleague at the Japanese American National Museum; she had served an extended professorship at a Japanese university and was …
‘Historical portrait’ adeptly conveys Nikkei’s lifestory
Oct. 20, 2017 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
One of my favorite songs by country singer Hank Williams, Jr. — whose political and social philosophy I revile — is “Family Tradition.” The book under review here falls into the same category as that particular record’s title, and does so in a very profound way. Indeed, it was precisely owing to family tradition that Naomi Shibata felt stirred to write Bend with the Wind in the first place, and which by her then doing so resulted in that tradition being …
Historian ‘illuminates’ JA history
June 7, 2017 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
In Kenji Taguma’s resplendent foreword to this latest of historian Greg Robinson’s cavalcade of exemplary volumes devoted to illuminating the Japanese American experience, he rightly observes that The Great Unknown is a work that “epitomizes the importance of the community press in preserving history.” Of course, had Taguma and his allied supporters within the Nichi Bei Foundation not labored so mightily and resourcefully to keep alive the most venerable of the Japanese American community newspapers, the columns underpinning Robinson’s book in …
Changing Season: A Father, A Daughter, A Family Farm
May 3, 2017 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
In the mid-1980s, while researching the World War II incarceration experience of Americans of Japanese ancestry at the Gila River Relocation Center in south central Arizona, I discovered a brief yet very enlightening 1982 autobiographical volume on this subject by David Mas Masumoto. Entitled Distant Voices: A Sansei’s Journey to Gila River, it was self-published by the 28-year-old author-agriculturalist under the aegis of the Inaka Countryside Press in Del Rey, Calif. (20 miles south of Fresno). Five years later another …
An “Immersion” Into Terminal Island Nikkei Lives
April 21, 2017 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
As an oral historian, I have always been addicted to reading obituaries, especially those relating to the World War II Japanese American experience. For example, a recent transfixing obituary for me was that devoted to 97-year-old Kazuko Kuwabara (1918–2016) in the December 7, 2016 issue of the Los Angeles Times. There were two reasons for my interest in this particular death notice. First, it directly pertained to the book under review here, since Kuwabara was a Kibei-Nisei born in Los …
A “Powerful” (and “Critical”) Case for the Asian American Movement
March 22, 2017 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
In commemoration of the 75th anniversary of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, which prompted the U.S. government to imprison 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry (two-thirds U.S. citizens) in concentration camps, a double-edged protest march was staged on the night of December 7, 2016, in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo community. Among the protestors was 80-year-old Sansei activist Jim Matsuoka, who at age seven was impounded with his family and 10,000 other Japanese Americans at eastern California’s Manzanar, one of 10 War …
Author Pays Forward Japanese American Legacy of Resistance
Nov. 8, 2016 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
In his essay for a 1999 Mike Mackey-edited anthology, Remembering Heart Mountain, Lane Hirabayashi cautions Japanese American incarceration scholars not to over-generalize about Japanese American “resistance” to oppression within the War Relocation Authority-administered concentration camps. However, he then quickly subdues this prudent warning by declaring: “My reading of the archival record confirms, repeatedly … the frequency and tenacity of resistance on multiple occasions and multiple levels.” Four years earlier, in his edited volume of Richard Nishimoto’s writings pertaining to World …
Scholars Showcase Future of Diverse Nikkei Community
Nov. 1, 2016 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
During my involvement in Japanese American studies, from 1972 to the present, I have been struck by two simultaneous developments. The first is a growing sophistication in theory and methodology among its academic practitioners; the second is a decreasing connection to and concern for the Japanese American community by these same scholars. While I do not see this bifurcated situation, which has been remarked on by many others in the field, as a “crisis” worthy of “alarmist” pronouncements, I do …
