
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

Kuroki’s Life of “Patriotism, Courage, Teamwork, and Tolerance” and a “Lapse into Superpatriotism”
Jan. 12, 2025 • Nichi Bei News , Arthur A. Hansen
Although there are no such things as secular books that are definitive, Gregg Jones’ magisterial biography of Japanese American World War II hero Ben Kuroki, Most Honorable Son: A Forgotten Hero’s Fight Against Fascism and Hate During World War II, is certainly as close as possible to being defined by that adjective. This fact is assuredly testified to in full by the laudatory tributes paid to it by the 13 authoritative providers of promotional puffs for the volume that precede …

A Tribute to Salinas Valley’s Tenacious Issei
Nov. 17, 2024 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
I first became aware of the reverential esteem in which the Issei generation was held within the Japanese American community on the evening of March 31, 1984. On that date, an event was held at the South Coast Plaza Hotel in Costa Mesa, California, that was billed as “A Tribute to the Issei Pioneers in Orange County.” It attracted 660 people to honor the historical contributions of the first-generation Issei, 38 of whom were in attendance. Moreover, it raised more …

Illuminating Nikkei Women Artists’ Work and Their Connections
Sept. 30, 2024 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
In 2017, ShiPu Wang, the Coats Endowed Chair in the Arts and professor of art history at the University of California, Merced, authored a superb book, The Other American Moderns, in which he devoted critical attention to four American moderns artists of Japanese ancestry: Frank Matsura (1873-1913), Eitaro Ishigaki (1893-1958), Hideo Noda (1908-1939), and Miki Hayakawa (1899-1953). Wang’s overarching point in spotlighting the work of these Japan-born painters of U.S. repute (the first three men, the fourth a woman) was …

Anthology Pinpoints Japanese American Experience in the 1930s
Sept. 8, 2024 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
In London, rail passengers are warned by the phrase “mind the gap” to take proper caution when crossing between the train doorway and the station platform edge. Similarly, in the book under review, co-editors Eiichiro Azuma and Kaoru Ueda (both connected with the Japanese Diaspora Initiative at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution) counsel readers not to skip over the crucial developments of the 1930s when exploring the Japanese American historical experience extending from the pre-1924 exclusionary immigration policy to the mass …

An Extensive Analysis of Shin-Issei Lives
Aug. 21, 2024 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
In 2010, I was privileged to provide a peer evaluation of the late Lane Hirabayashi to support a step promotion for him as a full professor in the Asian American Studies Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. In my assessment, I emphasized his pervasive concern for “community,” both as a scholar and a teacher. So, I was not surprised to read in the acknowledgments section of Tritia Toyota’s ethnographic masterpiece, Intimate Strangers: Shin Issei Women and Contemporary Japanese …

Gratitude for Art Hansen—“A Gifted Mentor and Inspiration”
March 18, 2024 • Greg Robinson , Nichi Bei News
Among specialists in Japanese American history, few have made such an enduring contribution as Arthur Hansen. While his work as a longtime scholar and activist is well known in the Nikkei community, I want to pay tribute to him in his role as a gifted mentor and inspiration, to me and so many others. (Some of this column is taken from my essay in a volume produced 15 years ago, on the occasion of Art’s retirement.) It is hard for …

Rich Heart Mountain personal narratives abound in Unforgotten Voices
Feb. 5, 2024 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
Although primarily a prolific author of children’s books, mostly fictional, Unforgotten Voices from Heart Mountain by Joanne Oppenheim (with Nancy Matsumoto) is her third non-fictional work treating assorted dimensions of the Japanese American World War II incarceration experience. The first of these was Dear Miss Breed: True Stories of the Japanese-American Incarceration during World War II and a Librarian Who Made a Difference (2006); the second was Stanley Hayami, Nisei Son: His Diary, Letters, and Story from an American Concentration …

EO9066’s ‘Coerced Prison Work(ers)’
Aug. 16, 2023 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
Although certainly not an American labor historian per se, I am profoundly abashed that, notwithstanding my having been researching, writing, and teaching about the unjust Japanese American World War II detention for five decades, I never until now paid more than fleeting attention to the predominant focus of the invaluable book under review here by Stephanie Hinnershitz: “the design and implementation of Japanese American incarceration and the centrality of labor to both of these undertakings” (p. 22). In addition to …

An In-Depth Examination of the WRA’s Legal System
Aug. 8, 2023 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
As someone who has taught both history and literature classes, I recently had my curiosity aroused by an article in The New Yorker magazine (April 24 and May 1, 2023) written by Louis Menand, an English professor at Harvard University noted for his seminal books in U.S. intellectual history. The article’s subject matter, “creative nonfiction,” according to Menand, is a relatively new genre that has emerged when biographers and historians “adopt a narrative style intended to make their books read …

An Inquiry into the Kibei-Nisei ‘Diasporic Experiences’
Aug. 1, 2023 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
I feel a close kinship with this remarkable book by Michael R. Jin. In 2013, I was privileged to read his pioneering UC Santa Cruz dissertation, which he completed under the able mentorship of Alice Yang and that became the basis for the 2022 Stanford University Press book here under review. It is included within the press’s Asian American series edited by Gordon Chang, the same series in which Yang (then Yang Murray) contributed her stunning 2008 work, Historical Memories …
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