Read Part 1 >> The boiling point came in February 1942 during meetings of the Bay Region Council for Unity (BRCU). Omura urged this progressive Nisei group’s membership to form a coalition with the JACL on an equal partnership basis and pitched resistance to the prospective mass eviction policy. The BRCU …
It galled many long-standing Japanese American Citizen League (JACL) members who read the “Millennium New Year’s Edition” of the Pacific Citizen (PC), the League’s newspaper, to encounter “Influential JA Journalist: James Omura” in an issue commemorating outstanding twentieth-century Nisei.1 Perhaps no other Nikkei name could so predictably have nettled Old …
Imprisoned in Paradise is a magnificent microstudy of the World War II Japanese internment experience. This is due to the creative vision of its author, the historian Priscilla Wegars. In addition to writing the present book—a decade-long process—Wegars curates the University of Idaho’s Asian American Comparative Collection and edits the …
Editor’s Note: The following is the keynote address delivered at the 39th Annual Manzanar Pilgrimage at Manzanar National Historic Site, Independence, California on Saturday, April 26, 2008, by Dr. Arthur A. Hansen. I would like to thank the Manzanar Committee for extending to me this invitation to be the keynote speaker …
Prisons and Patriots is Cherstin Lyon’s first book. Its publication catapults Professor Lyon, a historian at California State University, San Bernardino, into the ranks of the premier scholars of World War II Japanese American protest and dissent. Accordingly, this volume will now assume a place among seminal books like Roger Daniels’s …
>> Part 5 This essay has thus far examined how scholars from varying disciplines have, in recent years, supported a deeper exploration of the Interior West Nikkei experience from pioneering days through World War II. Let us now briefly explore recent scholarship pertaining to the post-World War II experience of …
>> Part 4 The Japanese Arizona World War II experience has been assayed by two historians, both working at Arizona universities: Charles Ynfante at Northern Arizona University and Andrew Russell at Arizona State University. Their work on this topic has in common the fact that both consider it within the …
>> Page 3 Unlike Armendariz, who chiefly builds her account of El Paso’s early Nikkei community from local newspaper articles, Miyasato relies heavily upon oral history interviews to construct her community narrative. Because these life stories provide a window through which to apprehend the special character of the Japanese El …
>> Part 2 The two-pronged cause prompting the mass exodus of Issei railroad and mining gang laborers from Wyoming and Montana was their desire to pursue agricultural employment as well as the comparative paucity of opportunities to do so within these neighboring states. Wyoming suffered the most dismal agricultural scenario; …
>> Part 1 The Nishizu family’s story of “relocation” and “resettlement” is only one among thousands of parallel versions involving other Japanese American mainlanders—truly a “people in motion”—during the World War II era. It is of particular value, however, because it spotlights and invites strategic exploration of a largely neglected …
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