The current exhibition at the Japanese American National Museum, entitled Sutra and Bible: Faith and the Japanese American World War II Incarceration, centers on the role of religion in the wartime Japanese American experience. It follows on the work of scholars such as Duncan Ryuken Williams, Anne Blankenship, and Beth Hessel, …
Two Nisei whose lives and career paths were strikingly uncommon were the siblings Miwa and Yoshio Kai. Miwa was a musical prodigy who starred as a classical pianist on the international stage in the years before World War II, then devoted herself afterwards to work as a skilled librarian—all of …
Whenever I visit Paris, I love to spend time going through bookstores, looking for interesting French books for my library. On my last trip, I went to the Librarie Le Phénix, my favorite bookstore for works on Asia and Asian Americans. While browsing the shelves, I came across a paperback …
As readers of this column know, I have done a great deal of research in recent years on the panoply of Asian American performers who worked in Hollywood in the generation before World War II. Theirs was not a simple life. Hollywood studios made frequent use of white actors in …
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