Nichi Bei News
The Nichi Bei News rose out of the ashes of the historic Nichi Bei Times (1942-2009) and Nichi Bei Shimbun (1899-1942) legacy to launch the first nonprofit ethnic community newspaper of its kind in the U.S. in September 2009. From community issues and events taking place in the historic Japantowns and beyond, to entertainment profiles, food, film and book reviews, politics, hard news and commentaries, the Nichi Bei News has you covered. Published by the innovative nonprofit Nichi Bei Foundation, it proudly follows the rich tradition of some 125 years of community leadership through quality media.
Updated Jnauary 2024
Stories from This Author
The Fruits of Santa Clara Valley’s Asian Laborers
Nov. 7, 2014 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
As Cecilia Tsu tells readers in her cogent introduction, its underlying purpose is “recovering the intertwined history of the Santa Clara Valley (in California) when it was known as the Garden of the World (1880-1940) along with the history of the Asian immigrants (Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino) who farmed its famed crops,” primarily orchard fruits and berries (p. 13). Clearly, and thankfully, Tsu’s scholarship for her first book did not materialize within a socio-cultural vacuum; rather, it was deeply rooted …
An Intimate Look at the Life of ‘An American with a Japanese Face’
Oct. 3, 2014 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
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 …
Nisei Revisits Her Wartime Past Through Watercolors
Sept. 12, 2014 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
Through a sophisticated blend of artwork, prose, and photographic images, plus an assortment of other useful illustrative materials, Lily Yuriko Nakai Havey has crafted in Gasa Gasa Girl Goes to Camp what is assuredly among the very most exquisite, insightful, and candid memoirs of the World War II Japanese American experience. I vigorously applaud the University of Utah Press’ marketing of this volume—which hinges on Havey’s pre- and early-adolescence incarceration at the Santa Anita Assembly Center in Southern California and …
Nikkei History Meets Multi-generational Family Memoir
April 22, 2014 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
Although its publisher markets Looking after Minidoka as a “memoir,” this volume can lay equal claim to being a “history.” It is, in fact, the superlative fusion of these two genres that accounts for the most fundamental value and utility of this richly documented, exquisitely composed, and diversely illustrated work. Rather than a personal memoir, Neil Nakadate (an emeritus professor of English at Iowa State University) has fashioned a family memoir that conveys to readers the historical experience of his …
‘Masterpiece’ Traces Battles Nikkei Fought for Justice
April 15, 2014 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
On the dust jacket of this volume, I am quoted as pronouncing it to be “a substantial contribution to Japanese American historiography and collective memory.” That reserved opinion was based upon my reading of the penultimate manuscript draft that University of Hawai‘i Professor Eileen Tamura revised into In Defense of Justice. Having now read the published version of this work, I am prepared to proclaim it a masterpiece deserving of inclusion in the pantheon of books on Japanese American World …
Viewing Seattle's Nikkei Community through Multiple Lenses
April 8, 2014 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Seattle was the West Coast’s most populated Japanese American city. However, in the subsequent years prior to World War II, both Japanese San Francisco and Japanese Los Angeles not only surpassed the then-nicknamed Queen City in numbers, but also overshadowed it in geographical, commercial, and cultural importance. This situation remains intact today. Still, it could plausibly be argued that in terms of the historical representation in published books of these three …
A Stirring Memoir of Adolescent Manzanar Stories Weaved With Senior Hiking Adventures
Nov. 14, 2013 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
My first trip of many to the World War II Manzanar concentration camp site occurred in the spring of 1972. On that occasion I accompanied my California State University, Fullerton, Nisei colleague, Kinji Yada, on his personal pilgrimage to the place in eastern California’s Owens Valley where, as a young teenager in 1942, the U.S. government had imprisoned him and his family “for the duration” and to which he had not returned since his 1945 departure. Four decades later, in …
Asian American Movement Study Showcases U.S. Cultural Radicalism’s Robust Tradition
Oct. 30, 2013 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
At California State University, Fullerton, I taught history, Asian American studies and American studies courses. My favorite was an American studies offering developed in the mid-1970s: “American Cultural Radicalism.” If now teaching it, I assuredly would assign Daryl Maeda’s Chains of Babylon. The best study on the Asian American Movement’s origins and early ascent, it also brilliantly showcases U.S. cultural radicalism’s robust tradition. While cultural radicalism can be defined variably, “one of its central characteristics,” according to cultural historian Jesse …
A Historical Anthology on Redress
Oct. 18, 2013 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
In the 2011 PAN-JAPAN special issue NEGLECTED LEGACIES: Japanese American Women and the Redress/Reparations Movement, guest editor Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, an Asian American studies professor at UCLA (where he is also the George & Sakaye Aratani chair in Japanese American Incarceration, Redress, and Community), acknowledges that in (resourcefully) editing the papers comprising Neglected Legacies and in writing up his published (and very perceptive) introduction to them, he benefitted from his interactions with three notable Sansei activists. One of these third-generation …
Book Review: PRISONS AND PATRIOTS: Japanese American Wartime Citizenship, Civil Disobedience, and Historical Memory
April 3, 2012 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
Prisons and Patriots is Cherstin Lyon’s first book. Its publication catapults Professor Lyon, a historian at California State University, San Bernardino, into the ranks of the premier scholars of World War II Japanese American protest and dissent. Accordingly, this volume will now assume a place among seminal books like Roger Daniels’s Concentration Camps U.S.A. (1971), Michi Nishiura Weglyn’s Years of Infamy (1976), Richard Drinnon’s Keeper of Concentration Camps (1987), Eric Muller’s Free to Die for Their Country (2001), Frank Chin’s Born in the USA (2002); and …
