Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA) — The Hoover Institution Press, in partnership with Hoover Library & Archives, has released Japanese America on the Eve of the Pacific War: An Untold History of the 1930s, an anthology of essays exploring the life of Japanese American communities and US-Japan relations in the 1930s, a vital history largely obscured by events occurring before and after that decade.
Edited by Research Fellow Kaoru (Kay) Ueda, curator of Hoover’s Japanese Diaspora Collection, and Visiting Fellow Eiichiro Azuma, the anthology examines a period of Japanese American history that has been largely untouched by scholarly texts published to date. The book contains, translated from Japanese to English for the first time (by Ueda), renowned historian Yasuo Sakata’s seminal 1995 essay arguing that the 1930s was a chronological and conceptual “missing link” in historical scholarship between the pre-1924 exclusionary immigration policy and the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.
Building upon Sakata’s scholarship, essayists in this anthology, representing a new generation of scholars, chronicle this missing-link period largely supported by primary sources from Hoover’s Japanese Diaspora Collection.
Essayists tackle issues including diplomacy, geopolitics, and trade that defined the US-Japanese relationship in that era. They also examine topics including the surveillance of Japanese American communities in Hawaiʻi, immigrant and ethnic nationalism, education, citizenship, and the experience of Kibei—American-born Japanese who returned to the United States after completing their education in Japan.
About the Editors:
Kaoru (Kay) Ueda is a Hoover research fellow and the curator of the Japanese Diaspora Collection at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives. She has made available a large trove of archival Japanese newspaper material, has written about the Dutch settler experience in Indonesia and Japan, and has edited anthologies on the use of propaganda in modern Japan and the start of Japanese migration to the United States in the nineteenth century.
Eiichiro Azuma is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History and Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published or edited several books about topics including the Japanese experience in America, Asian-American history, transpacific migration, and US-Japan rivalries. He is currently researching for a book about the experiences of Japanese American US soldiers stationed in occupied Japan between 1945 and 1952.
Contributors:
Rashaad Eshack, Brian Masaru Hayashi, Masako Iino, Michael R. Jin, Masato Kimura, Toshihiko Kishi, Mire Koikari, Teruko Kumei, Tosh Minohara, Yasuo Sakata
Click here to order Japanese America on the Eve of the Pacific War: An Untold Story of the 1930s.
For coverage opportunities, contact Jeffrey Marschner, 202-760-3187, jmarsch@stanford.edu.
