The Hoover Institution Library & Archives at Stanford University and the Japanese Association for Migration Studies invite you to attend a lecture by Mire Koikari, Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. A chapter contributor to the Hoover Press publication Japanese America on the Eve of the Pacific War: An Untold Story of the 1930s, Koikari will speak about her research after short presentations on the publication and its broader agenda by editors Eiichiro Azuma, Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History, University of Pennsylvania; and Kay Ueda, Research Fellow and Curator of the Japanese Diaspora Collection, Hoover Institution.
This hybrid event was held on September 10, 2024, from 12:00–1:30 pm at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, as a precursor to the Third International Workshop on Japanese Diaspora. The public was welcome to attend virtually.
About the Lecture
Crafting Japanese Immigrant Nationalism in 1930s’ Hawai‘i
Prior to World War II, Japanese immigrant nationalism flourished in the US territory of Hawai‘i. At the center of this little-known phenomenon were imon bukuro (comfort bags), gendered artifacts embodying sekisei (sincere hearts) of immigrant women who were eager to gift their labors of love to Japanese soldiers—those aboard the navy training vessels visiting Hawai‘i as well as those deployed in the battlefields in mainland China. Far from a localized phenomenon, this grassroots campaign was part of the larger tale of Japan’s empire-building in which island and homeland, gunboat and sewing needle, and territorial conquest and seaborne expansion all played crucial roles. Showcasing three archival gems in the Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection of newspapers—Nippu Jiji, Hawaii Hochi, and Jitsugyo-no-Hawaii—the presentation explores how a seemingly innocuous story of women and handicraft presents a surprising opportunity to reconsider the intertwined history of Japan and Japanese America from a transpacific perspective.
About the Speakers
Mire Koikari is a professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Born and raised in Japan, she earned her MA and PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison prior to her relocation to Hawai‘i in 1997. Her research interests include gender, race, militarism, and transnationality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is the author of Pedagogy of Democracy: Feminism and the Cold War in the U.S. Occupation of Japan (Temple University Press, 2008), Cold War Encounters in US-Occupied Okinawa: Women, Militarized Domesticity, and Transnationalism in East Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and Gender, Culture, and Disaster in Post-3.11 Japan (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2020), which was translated into Russian (Academic Studies Press, 2024). Her current research project, Cultivating Masculinity for the Oceanic Empire: Manly Visions and Maritime Strategies in Japan’s Pelagic Frontier, examines the construction of oceanic masculinity in imperial Japan.
Eiichiro Azuma is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in Japanese American history; transpacific migration, diaspora, and settler colonialism; and interimperial relations between the United States and Japan. He is the author of the award-winning Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (Oxford, 2005) and coeditor of two anthologies, including the Oxford Handbook of Asian American History (2016). His latest research monograph, In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan’s Borderless Empire (University of California Press, 2019), received the 2020 John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History from the American Historical Association. Both of his monographs have been translated into Japanese. Azuma's third monograph, Brokering a Race War: Japanese Americans in the Pacific War and the Occupation of Japan, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. In the past, he served as a Harrington Visiting Faculty Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin and a Ministry of Science and Technology Visiting Professor at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. Since 2020, Azuma has been visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Kay Ueda
Kaoru (Kay) Ueda is the curator for the Hoover Institution Library & Archives’ Japan and Japanese Diaspora Collections at Stanford University and manages the endowed Japanese Diaspora Initiative. She acquires archival materials on Japan and overseas Japanese and promotes their use for educational and scholarly purposes. She also curates and develops the Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection, the world's most extensive online full-image open-access digital collection of prewar overseas Japanese newspapers. She edited On a Collision Course: The Dawn of Japanese Migration in the Nineteenth Century (authored by Yasuo Sakata in Japanese) (Hoover Institution Press, 2020) and Fanning the Flames: Propaganda in Modern Japan (Hoover Institution Press, 2021), and coedited, with Eiichiro Azuma, Japanese America on the Eve of the Pacific War: An Untold History of the 1930s (Hoover Institution Press, 2024).
