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
Peculiar Odyssey: Newsman Jimmie Omura’s Removal from and Regeneration within Nikkei Society, History, and Memory - Part 6 of 7
Sept. 21, 2012 • Arthur A. Hansen
Read Part 5 >> Between Hosokawa’s Nisei in 1969 and his East to America in 1980, American society and culture, including the Nikkei community, underwent a tumultuous upheaval. As the mounting protests against the Vietnam War, racism, and sexism evinced, passivity and obedience to authority had ceased being admired. Historians were drawn to outspoken individuals and activist groups who had stood up for social justice and enlarged democratic rights. Moreover, they used this tradition of dissent to promote contemporary developments and …
Peculiar Odyssey: Newsman Jimmie Omura’s Removal from and Regeneration within Nikkei Society, History, and Memory - Part 5 of 7
Sept. 14, 2012 • Arthur A. Hansen
Read Part 4 >> Omura’s retreat eliminated a formidable counterweight to the JACL’s hegemonic hold over Japanese Denver’s public life. The existence of a large, active JACL chapter, along with a favorable press to promote its agenda and social gospel, ensured that the organization would prevail. How the immediate Japanese American past would be configured within (and outside of) Denver’s Nikkei community was also discernible. The basic lesson for Nikkei to learn from their wartime history, as adumbrated by Yasui, was …
Peculiar Odyssey: Newsman Jimmie Omura’s Removal from and Regeneration within Nikkei Society, History, and Memory - Part 4 of 7
Sept. 7, 2012 • Arthur A. Hansen
Read Part 3 >> During the last half of 1947, Omura did take another stab at editing the Rocky Shimpo. But his postwar editorial mission to expose and stop the JACL occurred when their leadership controlled the community, enjoyed the full support of the U.S. government, and was promoting measures resonate within their community and mainstream America. This story deserves extended treatment,1 but only one sidebar, Omura’s clash of words and worldviews with Minoru Yasui will be broached here. It is …
Peculiar Odyssey: Newsman Jimmie Omura’s Removal from and Regeneration within Nikkei Society, History, and Memory - Part 3 of 7
Aug. 31, 2012 • Arthur A. Hansen
Read Part 2 >> The April 2 Rocky Nippon was dedicated to Omura and his Pacific Coast Evacuee Placement Bureau, whose doors had just closed. Other Denver doors were slamming in Omura’s face. In the April 10 Times, Kaz Oka of Poston, Arizona, denounced Omura. In “Why I Disagree with Mr. Omura,” Oka dismissed Omura’s recent lecture “on his favorite topic” as more of his rantings. He mocked Omura for devoting half his talk to his placement bureau. “I fail to …
Peculiar Odyssey: Newsman Jimmie Omura’s Removal from and Regeneration within Nikkei Society, History, and Memory - Part 2 of 7
Aug. 24, 2012 • Arthur A. Hansen
Read Part 1 >> The boiling point came in February 1942 during meetings of the Bay Region Council for Unity (BRCU). Omura urged this progressive Nisei group’s membership to form a coalition with the JACL on an equal partnership basis and pitched resistance to the prospective mass eviction policy. The BRCU chair, Larry Tajiri, unsuccessfully sought Omura’s expulsion, but argued successfully that the BRCU affiliate as a “Sounding Board” with JACL. This meant BRCU would support JACL Executive Secretary Mike Masaoka’s …
Peculiar Odyssey: Newsman Jimmie Omura’s Removal from and Regeneration within Nikkei Society, History, and Memory - Part 1 of 7
Aug. 17, 2012 • Arthur A. Hansen
It galled many long-standing Japanese American Citizen League (JACL) members who read the “Millennium New Year’s Edition” of the Pacific Citizen (PC), the League’s newspaper, to encounter “Influential JA Journalist: James Omura” in an issue commemorating outstanding twentieth-century Nisei.1 Perhaps no other Nikkei name could so predictably have nettled Old Guard JACLers as Jimmie Omura, born on Bainbridge Island, Washington, in 1912 and died in Denver, Colorado, in 1994. Thus, JACL pioneer Fred Hirasuna wrote in the PC: Who named …
Book Review -- Imprisoned in Paradise: Japanese Internee Road Workers at the World War II Kooskia Internment Camp by Priscilla Wegars
July 20, 2012 • Arthur A. Hansen
Imprisoned in Paradise is a magnificent microstudy of the World War II Japanese internment experience. This is due to the creative vision of its author, the historian Priscilla Wegars. In addition to writing the present book—a decade-long process—Wegars curates the University of Idaho’s Asian American Comparative Collection and edits the collections’s research reports series, in which Imprisoned in Paradise is the third volume. The paradoxical title prefigures the work’s central interpretive message that the heretofore largely overlooked Department of Justice-operated …
The Manzanar Pilgrimage, Redressing Japanese America, and Repairing the USA
June 18, 2012 • Arthur A. Hansen
Editor’s Note: The following is the keynote address delivered at the 39th Annual Manzanar Pilgrimage at Manzanar National Historic Site, Independence, California on Saturday, April 26, 2008, by Dr. Arthur A. Hansen. I would like to thank the Manzanar Committee for extending to me this invitation to be the keynote speaker at the 39th annual Manzanar Pilgrimage. I am particularly indebted for this high honor to three members of the Manzanar Committee: Cory Shiozaki, historian; Darrell Kunitomi, the chair for today’s …
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 …
Japanese Americans in the Interior West: A Regional Perspective on the Enduring Nikkei Historical Experience in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah (and Beyond): Part 6
Nov. 20, 2009 • Arthur A. Hansen
>> Part 5 This essay has thus far examined how scholars from varying disciplines have, in recent years, supported a deeper exploration of the Interior West Nikkei experience from pioneering days through World War II. Let us now briefly explore recent scholarship pertaining to the post-World War II experience of Interior West Nikkei. A strategic starting point is a 2006 study done by Joel Tadao Miyasaki.1 The larger and direct concern of Miyasaki—who describes himself as “the son of a …
