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
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 Camp to …
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 …
Recollections from Jerome and Rohwer
Jan. 22, 2023 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
In 2002-2004, I was honored to serve with two distinguished historical colleagues, the late Roger Daniels and the late Franklin Odo, as a co-consultant for the Life Interrupted Project, jointly sponsored by the Public History Program of the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, and the Japanese American National Museum. Funded chiefly by the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, an organization dedicated to promoting statewide issues of economic, racial, and social justice, this project generated eight new exhibitions, initiated elementary- and secondary-level educational …
'A Heuristic Model' for Historians to Emulate with Other Camps
Jan. 8, 2023 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
Having read in Saara Kekki’s Acknowledgements within the book under review that its contents had been favorably vetted by three historians of the Japanese American World War II experience that I greatly admire (Eric Muller, Greg Robinson, and Paul Spickard), and having observed that the latter two of these historical scholars had provided promotional comments on the book’s cover attesting to the work’s seminal significance, I was utterly thrilled with the fortuitous opportunity to read and review Japanese Americans at …
Life in the Tule Lake Stockade
Sept. 1, 2022 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
There now exists a richly diverse number of publications devoted to the World War II concentration camp for Japanese Americans generically called Tule Lake. This penal facility was initially known as the Tule Lake Relocation Center when it opened on May 27, 1942. However, in the wake of an ill-conceived so-called “loyalty questionnaire” imposed on all 10 of the “relocation centers” and administered by the War Relocation Center in early 1943, it alone—thanks to pressure applied jointly by the U.S. …
Bio of Issei Journo Shines
Aug. 25, 2022 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
Prior to reading this book, my knowledge about prominent Issei lawyer/journalist Sei Fujii derived from two starkly contrasting experiences. The first of these was co-authoring with Ronald Larson a forthcoming published essay entitled DOHO: The Japanese American “Communist” Press, 1937-1942. The second was my viewing of the 30-minute award-winning 2012 film Lil Tokyo Reporter directed by Jeffrey Chin (the co-publisher with Fumiko Carole Fujita of A Rebel’s Outcry) at the Nichi Bei Foundation’s 2016 Films of Remembrance. Whereas Doho roundly denounced …
‘Brilliant’ Work Relies on Oral Histories of Japanese American Hibakusha
Aug. 17, 2022 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
In 1974, Betty Mitson and I co-edited a modest and virtually self-published and crudely fabricated book titled Voices Long Silent: An Oral Inquiry into the Japanese American Evacuation. It was conceived and developed as a way to open up discussion about a World War II event that had heretofore largely been muted by the general U.S. public and even the Japanese American community: the Nikkei’s wholesale and unjust eviction by the U.S. government from their predominantly West Coast homes and …
A ‘Comprehensive Treatment’ of the Wartime Incarceration of Japanese Americans
Jan. 27, 2022 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
During the 1980s, I was privileged to co-direct the Honorable Stephen K. Tamura Orange County Japanese American Oral History Project (OCJAOHP), jointly sponsored by the Japanese American Council of the Historical and Cultural Foundation of Orange County and the Japanese American Project of the Oral History Program at California State University, Fullerton. In addition to producing 15 bilingual oral history volumes with pioneering Issei and Nisei, this project yielded a survey of Japanese American historical sites in Orange County and …
