Greg Robinson
@GregGreg 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
Stories from This Author
Japanese Americans and the Federal Writers Project: Part II—The New York Project
Feb. 27, 2025 • James Sun , Greg Robinson
Read Part I Beyond making the WPA guidebooks, FWP workers in various places were hired to do special assignments, notably interviewing ordinary Americans and collecting folklore. The most famous and valuable aspect of the oral history project was the large-scale series of interviews that FWP researchers conducted with elderly African Americans about their experiences under slavery in the antebellum South. Some oral history projects included Asian Americans. The Northern California unit produced anonymous oral histories of Asian immigrants (including the …
Japanese Americans and the Federal Writers Project: Part I—The Western WPA Guides
Feb. 26, 2025 • James Sun , Greg Robinson
The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was a short-lived but historically significant federal agency. Founded in 1935 as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and directed by Harry L. Hopkins, its goal was to create and finance public-sector jobs to give work to millions of unemployed Americans during the Great Depression. While most of these jobs were unskilled, there were divisions created for skilled workers, including artists and intellectuals—“they are workers, too,” FDR is said to have remarked. To give …
Nisei Women in New York: The View from Mademoiselle
Feb. 6, 2025 • Greg Robinson
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 …
Kitaro Shirayamadani: Master Craftsman
Jan. 17, 2025 • Greg Robinson
In the late 19th century the nascent modernist movements in American art, like similar movements in France and elsewhere in the West, were shaped in central ways by Japanese models. The Prairie School architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and others, the Art Nouveau design movement, and the vogue for Japanese prints among modernist painters such as Whistler, Mary Cassatt and Thomas Eakins all testified to the powerful influence of “Japonisme.” Still, these partisans of Japanese art most often lived far …
The Great Connector: Shirley Geok-Lin Lim’s Contributions to Japanese American Life
Dec. 26, 2024 • Greg Robinson
This week, Professor Shirley Geok-Lin Lim is celebrating a big birthday. She has not only distinguished herself equally as writer, teacher, and critic, but has also played a significant role in Japanese American life as champion of Nisei women writers. I wish to explore her career and pay tribute to her for all she has done for me. As detailed in her wonderful memoir Among the White Moon Faces, Shirley was born to an ethnic Chinese family in Malaysia (then …
Pulling a Fast one? E.V. Cunningham and the Masuto Mysteries
Dec. 5, 2024 • Greg Robinson
Some time ago, I published a column in Nichi Bei News discussing writer Len Zinberg, who wrote a short story sympathetic to Japanese Americans during the World War II era. Zinberg, I noted, went on to write crime and detective novels under the name Ed Lacy, including the 1957 novel Room to Swing. That book introduced the private investigator Toussaint “Touie” Marcus Moore, one of the first African American detectives in mainstream popular fiction. Today I wish to discuss Howard …
Greg Robinson’s Take on Jonathan’s 100th Column
Nov. 6, 2024 • Greg Robinson
Now that my friend and collaborator Jonathan van Harmelen is publishing his 100th column for Discover Nikkei, he has expressed his intention to take stock of his achievement. In light of this, I thought I would share the origin story of our partnership and how Jonathan came to write for Discover Nikkei—first together with me, then as columnist in his own right. I first met Jonathan in July 2018, in the reading room of the National Archives’s downtown Washington, DC …
Kazuo Tashiro and Mitsuko Tashiro Laforet: Brother and Sister Doctors
Sept. 24, 2024 • Greg Robinson
This is the final instalment of my series of articles on the remarkable Tashiro family. Today I will speak about Kazuo and Mitsuko Tashiro, who stemmed from the Cincinnati branch of the family. Like their father Shiro and their elder brother Kiyo, Kazuo and Mitsuko both studied medicine, and distinguished themselves as physicians. The elder of the two, Kazuo Tashiro, was born in Chicago, Illinois on November 12, 1918. As a small child, he moved to Cincinnati, where he attended …
Part 8: Kiyo Tashiro—Physician and Athlete
Aug. 28, 2024 • Greg Robinson
This is the latest installment of my series on the remarkable Tashiro family. In my next columns, I will discuss the children of the eminent biochemist Shiro Tashiro, who themselves became physicians. As mentioned previously, in 1915 Dr. Shiro Tashiro travelled to Hawaii to do research. While in Honolulu, he became acquainted with a local hotel owner named Kawasaki, who arranged for the young doctor to marry his teenage Nisei daughter Shizuka Kawasaki. According to Shizuka’s granddaughter Cathy Tashiro, her …
Gene Oishi—A Memoir of a Friend
Aug. 15, 2024 • Greg Robinson
Gene Oishi’s passing draws the curtain on a unique Japanese American life. I will leave it to others to write his life story. For myself, I wish to speak about my friend Gene, a man who embodied wisdom, courage, profound curiosity about the world, and a wicked sense of humor. I can’t recall precisely when I first heard of Gene Oishi. I knew and admired his book In Search of Hiroshi. However, I didn’t actually meet Gene until fall 2007. …
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