Greg Robinson

Greg

Greg Robinson, a native New Yorker, is Professor of History at l'Université du Québec À Montréal, a French-language institution in Montreal, Canada. He is the author of the books By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Harvard University Press, 2001), A Tragedy of Democracy; Japanese Confinement in North America (Columbia University Press, 2009), After Camp: Portraits in Postwar Japanese Life and Politics (University of California Press, 2012), Pacific Citizens: Larry and Guyo Tajiri and Japanese American Journalism in the World War II Era (University of Illinois Press, 2012), and The Great Unknown: Japanese American Sketches (University Press of Colorado, 2016), as well as coeditor of the anthology Miné Okubo: Following Her Own Road (University of Washington Press, 2008). Robinson is also coeditor of the volume John Okada - The Life & Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy (University of Washington Press, 2018).

His historical column “The Great Unknown and the Unknown Great,” is a well-known feature of the Nichi Bei Weekly newspaper. Robinson’s latest book is an anthology of his Nichi Bei columns and stories published on Discover Nikkei, The Unsung Great: Portraits of Extraordinary Japanese Americans (University of Washington Press, 2020). It was recognized with an Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for Outstanding Achievement in History Honorable Mention in 2022. He can be reached at robinson.greg@uqam.ca.

Updated March 2022

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Paul Takagi: A Centenary Remembrance

By Greg Robinson
3 May 2023

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. In Fall 1969, he taught the first course in Asian American Studies at Berkeley, helping usher in a new field of study nationwide. Meanwhile, Paul and his wife Mary Ann Takagi, together with Raymond Okamura, helped lead the fight to repeal Title II of the 1950 McCarran Internal Security Act, and provided support for Japanese Am…

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Of Inomatas and Kingis: The Story of a Remarkable Family

By Greg Robinson
30 Mar 2023

If ever there was an award offered for the most remarkable Japanese American family saga, one formidable contender would be that of the Inomata clan, as revealed in the book Pure Winds, Bright Moon, by Kinji Inomata, as well as supplementary documents. Their history defies simple-minded ideas about Japanese Americans, their lives, and their interactions with other groups. The family story starts with a Japanese boy named Kenji Inomata. He was born in 1885 in Kashiwazaki, Niigata, Japan, the son of Tuna Kuga-Inomata and Usuke Inomata. Kenji’s father died suddenly while on a trip in 18…

migration en

Postwar Japanese Emigration to the Dominican Republic — Part 2: The Japanese American Response

By Greg Robinson
13 Mar 2023

Read Part 1 >> As mentioned, the Japanese government’s postwar project to resettle Japanese citizens in the Dominican Republic, which was troubled from the outset, collapsed in mid-1961 after the assassination of Dominican strongman Rafael Trujillo. Within a year, more than half the people involved returned to Japan, while the largest fraction of the others moved to Brazil or other countries. One of the few shining elements of the story is that of the impressive mobilization of the Japanese American community to assist the refugees. In October 1961, as ships arrived in th…

migration en

Postwar Japanese Emigration to the Dominican Republic — Part 1: A Tragic Tale

By Greg Robinson
12 Mar 2023

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 Valentina Peguero, Toake Endoh, Alberto Despradel, and Chutaro Kobayashi, but it is useful to offer here some larger context, and then to speak of a rare positive aspect of these events: the mobilization by Japanese American communities to provide aid for the refugees. The st…

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Yoshie Fujiwara and Japanese Americans II: A Day at the (Olympic) Races

By Greg Robinson
24 Feb 2023

Read Part 1 >> In the period after 1932, Yoshie Fujiwara made Japan his primary residence. In these years, he founded the Fujiwara Opera company, which thereafter remained central to his artistic and business activity. He later asserted that in its first years, the new company suffered annual losses of $240,000, as Japanese audiences were hesitant to buy tickets for opera performances, so he had to take outside singing gigs to help make up deficits. Meanwhile, amidst the Japanese military buildup and expansion in Asia, he became engaged as a semiofficial cultural ambassador for Japa…

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Japanese migrants and their descendants

Greg Robinson

Series this author contributes to

Nikkei Chronicles #3—Nikkei Names: Taro, John, Juan, João?

The Child of a Thousand Generations

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Postwar Japanese Emigration to the Dominican Republic — Part 1: A Tragic Tale

Nikkei Chronicles #5—Nikkei-go: The Language of Family, Community, and Culture

The Chuo Gakuen School: The Seeds of Prestige for the Japanese Community in Mexico

The Ironies of the Japanese Canadian Internment History: Part 2—Discovering Japanese Canadian History

“Postales nikkei”: correspondencia generacional

The Ironies of the Japanese Canadian Internment History: Part 1—My Family’s Life in Greenwood

Choices for Japanese People Living in America

41年前に駐在員として渡米後永住権取得・近く日本に永久帰国予定の宮田慎也さん

10th Annual Imagine Little Tokyo Short Story Contest

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書評：和泉真澄『日系カナダ人の移動と運動―知られざる日本人の越境生活史』

1992年渡米、目標は「アカデミー賞」— 俳優の井上英治さん

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