Not long ago, I was in my old hometown of New York, and made a date to dine with friends in the neighborhood of Greenwich Village, where I grew up. As I had time on my hands before dinner, I decided to visit the New York Public Library’s Jefferson Market branch. Housed in a striking old faux-gothic courthouse, with a clock tower and winding staircases, it was a familiar hangout site for me in my younger days.
This time, on reaching the upstairs reading room, I was disappointed to find that all of the chairs there were occupied, and so I decided to head down to the basement in search of seating. There, in the magazine reading room, I found various open spots, and deposited myself in one forthwith. Once settled in my seat, I spotted some shelves nearby that held hardbound volumes of old magazines. It was not clear to me whether they were being highlighted for reading, or had been removed from the collection and were set to be sold off.
Among the magazines displayed on the shelf were some hardbound volumes of Mademoiselle from the 1940s. Mademoiselle, billed as the magazine for “the smart young woman,” was founded in the mid-1930s as a monthly by the publishers Street & Smith (it would later become part of the Condé Nast empire). It was a combination of fashion magazine and literary review. I took out the volume from 1947, thinking vaguely that perhaps there might be something in it connected to Japanese Americans, and started reading. With help from my dear friend Xiaolin Zhu, who accompanied me to the library, I made copies of several articles.
Sure enough, in the April 1947 issue of Mademoiselle, I came across an article, “The Nisei Discover a Larger America,” credited to an author named Sono Okamura. (A separate article in the same issue, titled “Campus Correspondence,” carried illustrations by another Nisei, designer Mary Suzuki). Okamura’s article discussed the resettlement of Japanese Americans, and spotlighted five Nisei women who were successfully pursuing careers in the arts in New York City. I had never heard of Okamura, but her article proved so interesting that I determined to learn more about the author, as well as to explore the text.
Sono Okamura was born Bessie Sonoko Okamura in 1919 or 1920 in Papaaloa, Hawaii, and grew up in Hilo. Her father Juichi Okamura, a Japanese immigrant, ran a grocery store and was principal of a Japanese school. Sonoko was one of four siblings. (Her older brother Ichiro Don Okamura would study medicine at University of Michigan, then go on to become one of the pioneers in the field of modern retina surgery.)
Sono Okamura attended Hilo High School, where she was a debater and a member of the Girls Booster Club. On her graduation in 1937, she was selected as class valedictorian. She then attended University of Hawaii, where she had the highest grades in her freshman class and played in tennis tournaments. In 1940, she won a scholarship to Smith College, and moved to Massachusetts to complete her final year.
In summer 1941, Sono Okamura moved to Boston to attend a summer program at Harvard University. She contributed an article to the Hilo News Herald about her experience in Massachusetts:
Whatever may be said against Boston, it has undeniable virtues that must be admitted. Incidentally, even though I have several close Boston friends whose intelligence and character I respect, I must confess that the typical Boston girl lacks sartorial chic. They are pitifully dowdy alongside of the depressingly sophisticated New Yorkers. But I do not mean to expand wearily on the subject of clothes. What I began to say was that, whatever may be lacking in Boston, cleanliness is not.
With assistance from another scholarship, Okamura undertook graduate study at Smith that fall. She received her MA in English Literature in 1942, with a thesis entitled “The Orientalism in Joseph Conrad.”
In 1943, Okamura moved to New York, where she began work as a copy editor and librarian at the Associated Press. She also joined the activist group Japanese American Committee for Democracy. In mid-1943, she attracted nationwide publicity for the JACD when she headed a group of 25 Nisei who appeared at the Chinese blood bank to donate blood for the Chinese army (Adet Lin, physician daughter of Lin Yutang, helped supervise the blood donors). At one point during the war, Okamura worked in an army program at Yale teaching American soldiers basic Japanese.
In 1945, Sono Okamura married Norman Rosenberg. In the years after the war she and her husband resided in New York. During this time, she broke into book publishing as a copy editor at Columbia University Press. In 1950, she was listed as working as a publisher in the Research Department at Columbia University (where her husband taught political science). The couple had two children, Linda and Mark.
“The Nisei Discover a Larger America” seems to have been Sono Okamura’s sole published writing after 1941. It began with a personal reflection about the ambiguous status of the Nisei and the paradoxical impact of the war on them:
“On the night of Pearl Harbor, when I was still attending a Massachusetts College, a member of the faculty sent me a huge bouquet of roses in token of her continued affection for me. On the same night my father was interned in Hawaii. A few months later college students, friends of mine who had made the unfortunate choice of studying on the West Coast instead of the East Coast, were forced to evacuate.”
The author went on to speak about Nisei on the prewar West Coast. While they grew up as Americans, and knew hardly anything about Japan, they were confronted with racial hostility once war came, and were popularly associated with the Japanese enemy. As a result, they were herded into bleak relocation camps.
As the author noted with sardonic understatement, “[C]amp…was not an American Buchenwald, but neither was it Utopia.” Paradoxically, she claimed that it was in the camps that the Nisei, crowded together with the Issei, first became aware of Japanese culture: “The Nisei became more tolerant of Japanese customs. It was not that they became less American; it was simply that they became more receptive to things Japanese.”
The author deplored the fact that too many Nisei, faced with the trauma of the camps, became listless and demoralized. Nevertheless, she stated, with help from the benevolent War Relocation Authority, many made the leap to resettle outside, and were now building new lives in the East.
Okamura presented short descriptions of a quintet of Nisei women who had settled in New York, with accompanying photographs of each: painter Mine Okubo, dancer Yuriko [Amemiya], poet and silversmith Kikuko Miyakawa Cusick, illustrator Amy Fukuba, and interior designer Mary Daté. In fact, only Okubo and Yuriko had resettled from camp—the others had come to New York before the war.
Perhaps because Okubo’s graphic wartime memoir Citizen 13660 had just been published by Okamura’s employer, Columbia University Press, the artist received the greatest coverage of the five figures in the article. Author Okamura recounted Okubo’s feat of winning an award at the San Francisco Art Association Annual for a drawing [“On Guard”], and cited a West Coast critic’s biting words on the subject: “America may be defined as a place where an inmate of a concentration camp makes a picture about her guards, sends it to an exhibition a thousand miles away and wins a prize with it.”
The author concluded her article on a hopeful note, not only about the accomplishments of Nisei (women) resettlers, but the positive impact of the experience in broadening their horizons. Like Pacific Citizen editor Larry Tajiri, Okamura called on Nisei to join in interracial coalitions, now that their war experience had taught them to see their group as a minority among other minorities:
“For the great bulk of the Nisei, relocation meant disillusionment and frustration. But it also liberated them from the narrow provincialism of certain communities, Many have become more aware of the problems of other minority groups; they have learned tolerance the hard way. Scattered all over the country, the Nisei are discovering America for the first time, and America is discovering them. Today the Nisei who were forced to leave the west coast are voluntarily migrating eastward, the healthy satisfactions of pioneering in new territory belong to the Nisei in their readjustment to American life.”
Sono Okamura Rosenberg went on to distinguish herself as a copy editor. In the late 1960s, she left Columbia and joined the Random House copy editing department, where she worked until her retirement in 1989. Among the authors whose works she edited include Maya Angelou, Martin Cruz Smith, Robert Ludlum, and James A. Michener. She also helped produce some Asian American books, such as Eric Liu’s The Accidental Asian and Lauren Kessler’s The Stubborn Twig. She was also listed as editor on The Columbia Viking Desk Encyclopedia. Sono Okamura Rosenberg died at her home in New York on March 12, 2019, at age 98.
In the early postwar period, at a time when Japanese Americans and their allies were invested in presenting the Nisei as good Americans so as to win social acceptance, Sono Okamura [Rosenberg] took to the pages of the popular magazine Mademoiselle to trumpet the achievements of Nisei women artists who settled in New York. Aged just 27 years herself, Okamura fit well the profile of the “smart young women” who were Mademoiselle’s target audience.
Charles Kikuchi (Yuriko’s husband) wrote in his diary that he had picked up the issue of Mademoiselle, which was full of ads for the latest fashions that only upper-income women could afford, and had read the Okamura article, which he found optimistic in nature. Kikuchi remarked that to him, “most of the article was a familiar repetition of what happened to the Nisei during the war, but I suppose new to the readers of this ‘slick’ magazine.”
Indeed, Okamura’s tone was optimistic. She presented Nisei women on the East Coast as triumphing over adversity and keeping a sense of humor about the conditions they faced. The clear goal of her article was to win support for resettlement. In this respect, her approach resembled that of Miné Okubo in the text of her book Citizen 13660. There Okubo portrayed mass confinement as a vaguely humorous predicament successfully overcome by loyal Japanese Americans. (It is charming to imagine Okubo, who lived just two blocks from the Jefferson Market building, stopping in and reading magazines there after the library opened in 1967). Okamura does not seem to have produced further articles after this impressive debut. It is unfortunate that Sono Rosenberg, who later helped polish the work of so many notable authors, did not publish more of her own words.
© 2025 Greg Robinson
