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Nisei Voices documents and celebrates the lives of the first Japanese American valedictorians of California public schools in the 1930s. The students are called Nisei (pronounced "nee-say") which means second-generation children of Japanese immigrants. In the 1930s Paul T. Hirohata first published the valedictorians' speeches in a book called Orations and Essays. Seventy years later, Hirohata's granddaughter, Joyce Hirohata, has updated and expanded her grandfather's work. In this new edition, she documents the valedictorians' lives and adds a collection of poignant photographs to the original 1930s material. The fifty manuscripts of the valedictorians' orations give a rare glimpse into the words and thoughts of Japanese Americans in the period between World Wars. Over 160 images bring to life the history of the Nisei students and their generation. Through interviews with the valedictorians, as well as their families and friends, Nisei Voices creates a collage of the students' lives, forged in hope but tested by the adversity of incarceration during World War II. An epic story of triumph, Nisei Voices lends a powerful, personal perspective of Japanese Americans before, during and after World War II, and the decades that followed. Visit www.niseivoices.com for more information.
Nisei Soldiers Break Their Silence is a compelling story of courage, community, endurance, and reparation. It shares the experiences of Japanese Americans (Nisei) who served in the U.S. Army during World War II, fighting on the front lines in Italy and France, serving as linguists in the South Pacific, and working as cooks and medics. The soldiers were from Hood River, Oregon, where their families were landowners and fruit growers. Town leaders, including veterans' groups, attempted to prevent their return after the war and stripped their names from the local war memorial. All of the soldiers were American citizens, but their parents were Japanese immigrants and had been imprisoned in camps as a consequence of Executive Order 9066. The racist homecoming that the Hood River Japanese American soldiers received was decried across the nation. Linda Tamura, who grew up in Hood River and whose father was a veteran of the war, conducted extensive oral histories with the veterans, their families, and members of the community. She had access to hundreds of recently uncovered letters and documents from private files of a local veterans' group that led the campaign against the Japanese American soldiers. This book also includes the little known story of local Nisei veterans who spent 40 years appealing their convictions for insubordination. Watch the book trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHMcFdmixLk
Holehole bushi, folk songs of Japanese workers in Hawaii's plantations, describe the experiences of this particular group caught in the global movements of capital, empire, and labor during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this book author Franklin Odo situates over two hundred of these songs, in translation, in a hitherto largely unexplored historical context.
In this timely book, Stephanie Bangarth studies the efforts and discourse of anti-internment advocates, and discusses the various cases they brought before the courts, as well as the arguements Japanese Canadains raised in their own defence. These critiques of the governement's removal and deportation policies were seminal examples of a growing general interest in civil rights, and would provide a foundation for rights activism in subsequent years. This book offers valuable perspective for today's debates over ethnic and racial profiling, treatment of "enemy combatants," and tensions between civil-liberty and security imperatives.
When Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Bilingual Education Act of 1968, language learning became a touchstone in the emerging culture wars. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Los Angeles, where elected officials from both political parties had supported the legislation, and where the most disruptive protests over it occurred. The city, with its diverse population of Latinos and Asian Americans, is the ideal locus for Zevi Gutfreund’s study of how language instruction informed the social construction of American citizenship. Combining the history of language instruction, school desegregation, and civil rights activism as it unfolded in Japanese American and Mexican American communities in L.A., this timely book clarifies the critical and evolving role of language instruction in twentieth-century American politics. Speaking American reveals how, for generations, language instruction offered a forum for Angelino educators to articulate their responses to policies that racialized access to citizenship—from the “national origins” immigration quotas of the Progressive Era through Congress’s removal of race from these quotas in 1965. Meanwhile, immigrant communities designed language experiments to counter efforts to limit their liberties. Gutfreund’s book is the first to place the experiences of Mexican Americans and Japanese Americans side by side as they navigated debates over Americanization programs, intercultural education, school desegregation, and bilingual education. In the process, the book shows, these language experiments helped Angelino immigrants introduce competing concepts of citizenship that were tied to their actions and deeds rather than to the English language itself. Complicating the usual top-down approach to the history of racial politics in education, Speaking American recognizes the ways in which immigrant and ethnic activists, as well as white progressives and conservatives, have been deeply invested in controlling public and private aspects of language instruction in Los Angeles. The book brings compelling analytic depth and breadth to its examination of the social and political landscape in a city still at the epicenter of American immigration politics.
An oral-history-based biography of a seminal Asian-American activist. The book traces Embrey's life from her youth in the Little Tokyo section of Los Angeles, to her harrowing experiences in the Japanese internment camps, to her many decades of passionate advocacy on behalf of her fellow internees.
The place occupied by Japanese Americans within the annals of United States history often begins and ends with their cameo appearance as victims of incarceration after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In this provocative work, David K. Yoo broadens the scope of Japanese American history to examine how the second generation—the Nisei—shaped its identity and negotiated its place within American society. Tracing the emergence of a dynamic Nisei subculture, Yoo shows how the foundations laid during the 1920s and 1930s helped many Nisei adjust to the upheaval of the concentration camps. Schools, racial-ethnic churches, and the immigrant press served not merely as waystations to assimilation but as tools by which Nisei affirmed their identity in connection with both Japanese and American culture. The Nisei who came of age during World War II formed identities while negotiating complexities of race, gender, class, generation, economics, politics, and international relations. A thoughtful consideration of the gray area between accommodation and resistance, Growing Up Nisei reveals the struggles and humanity of a forgotten generation of Japanese Americans.
Japanese Eyes... American Heart is a rare and powerful collection of personal thoughts written by the soldiers themselves, reflections of the men's thoughts as recorded in diaries and letters sent home to family members and friends, and other expressions about an episode that marked a turning point in the lives of many.
Barbed Voices is an engaging anthology of the most significant published articles written by the well-known and highly respected historian of Japanese American history Arthur Hansen, updated and annotated for contemporary context. Featuring selected inmates and camp groups who spearheaded resistance movements in the ten War Relocation Authority–administered compounds in the United States during World War II, Hansen’s writing provides a basis for understanding why, when, where, and how some of the 120,000 incarcerated Japanese Americans opposed the threats to themselves, their families, their reference groups, and their racial-ethnic community. What historically was benignly termed the “Japanese American Evacuation” was in fact a social disaster, which, unlike a natural disaster, is man-made. Examining the emotional implications of targeted systemic incarceration, Hansen highlights the psychological traumas that transformed Japanese American identity and culture for generations after the war. While many accounts of Japanese American incarceration rely heavily on government documents and analytic texts, Hansen’s focus on first-person Nikkei testimonies gathered through powerful oral history interviews gives expression to the resistance to this social disaster. Analyzing the evolving historical memory of the effects of wartime incarceration, Barbed Voices presents a new scholarly framework of enduring value. It will be of interest to students and scholars of oral history, US history, public history, and ethnic studies as well as the general public interested in the WWII experience and civil rights.
"An oral history about Japanese internment during World War II, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, from the perspective of children and young people affected"--