In the period following the outbreak of the Pacific War, newspapers played a leading role in fomenting racial prejudice against Japanese Americans by reporting baseless accounts of espionage and fifth-column activity. West Coast columnists such as Harry McLemore beat the drum for mass removal of ethnic Japanese. Outside the West …
A number of scholars, including Nancy Matsumoto, Jasmine Alinder, and Elena Tajima Creef among others, have discussed photographer Ansel Adams’s landmark 1944 volume Born Free and Equal. The story behind the book remains fairly obscure, especially Adams’s connection with Harold Ickes.
May 3, 2023 marks the 100th birthday of the late Bay Area scholar and advocate Paul Takagi. As professor at UC Berkeley, Paul helped shape the university’s School of Criminology, adopting the “crime and social justice” approach of Radical Criminology.
A tragic episode in the transnational history of Nikkei in the Americas is that of the Japanese colonists who settled in the Dominican Republic in the 1950s and their return after 1961.1 The story of postwar Dominican colonization has been extensively recounted in different ways (and languages), by scholars such as …
Yoshie (AKA Yosie) Fujiwara, a legendary tenor and impresario whose career spanned decades, was the biggest name in grand opera in Japan over the 20th century. For much of that period, he served as director of the Fujiwara Opera Company. Through his activities as singer, director, and teacher, Fujiwara “almost …
In a recent column, I described the detective work that I did to clear up a seemingly contradictory passage in a book by John Franklin Carter about Franklin Roosevelt's attitudes toward Japanese Americans. On another occasion, I had to deal with an even trickier piece of evidence that revealed FDR’s opinions …
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