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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817922061 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Hoover Institution Press |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 52 |
| Sales rank: | 1,018,475 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
The Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection
Kaoru "Kay" Ueda
The Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection has received tremendous enthusiasm from both the academic and nonacademic communities since its launch in the spring of 2017. It is remarkable that the digital collection has already helped produce research papers concerning the history of the Japanese and their descendants in the United States. Andrew Way Leong's paper (which became this book), titled "How Did the Issei Become the 'Issei'? The Emergence of Generational Terms in Japanese American Newspapers," was originally presented at the first Japanese Diaspora Initiative (JDI) workshop held at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University on November 13–15, 2017. His innovative research method, ability to tie the information collected from the newspapers to high-level research questions, and extensive use of the Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection distinguished his paper among those presented at the workshop. With much enthusiasm, both the 2017 Selection Committee and the largest number of participants' votes supported the nomination of the JDI award to his paper. Leong's research indicates the promising prospects of scholarship using the digital collection.
The Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection is the world's largest open-access, full- image, and searchable online digital collection of Japanese American newspapers. This project is supported by a generous $9 million anonymous gift to create the endowed Japanese Diaspora Initiative at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives. It is also the product of the collaboration of a strong team of institutions that contributed their Japanese American newspapers to the digital collection. Together with Hoover's rich archival and rare book collections on Japan and Japanese Americans, the digital collection promises to inspire fresh perspectives and uncover previously buried historical data from both sides of the Pacific. Emerging digital scholarship helps Hoover fulfill the goal of being a leading research institution concerning the historical study of the Japanese diaspora during the Empire of Japan period.
The digital collection features the oldest Japanese newspapers in Hawaii that survive today, the Nihon Shuho (Japanese Weekly News), published in 1892. Remarkably, this Japanese-language newspaper emerged only seven years after the arrival of the first kan'yaku imin (government contract laborers) in Hawaii in 1885. The newspaper was a lifeline to the newly arrived Japanese, supplying practical information on how to live on the island. It provided essential local news, such as the arrival of Japanese Navy training ships in Honolulu and the 1893 coup in Hawaii. It also advertised newly arrived shipments from Japan: shoyu, miso, tea, seaweed, dried fish, and Japanese paper and ink, as seen in the issue of February 6, 1893, from the Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection (figure 1). The tradition of the editorial had already begun appearing in the Nihon Shuho by then. The landscape of Japanese newspaper publishing in Hawaii soon became competitive and fluid with the birth of many — unfortunately short-lived — newspapers. Among those, two newspapers based in Honolulu emerged as powerhouses and influential opinion leaders in the Japanese Hawaii community: the Nippu Jiji published in 1906 and the Hawai Hochi (Hawaii Hochi) in 1912. These two newspapers were allowed to continue publishing during the Pacific War (World War II) under the US government's censorship.
The early development of Japanese newspapers on the West Coast was somewhat different from Hawaii. San Francisco became a birthplace for early Japanese newspapers in the continental United States. Many newspapers targeted the Japanese community for readership in the new country, while some took advantage of freedom of speech, attempting to influence a democratic movement in Japan. The Daijukyuseiki (The Nineteenth Century) was the first paper of Nihonjin Aikoku Yushi Domei (later renamed Nihonjin Aikoku Domei, Japanese Patriotic League), an organization formed by a group of young Japanese men in San Francisco in 1888. The league and the Meiji government played a cat-and-mouse game: the league changed the title of newspapers multiple times for distribution in Japan after the older titles were banned by the Japanese government. The Ensei, initially issued in 1891, on the other hand, looked to the world for intellectual and practical opportunities that opened up to Japanese outside the country during the early Meiji period (figure 2). Considering the destruction caused by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and subsequent fire, it is fortunate that these papers have been preserved at the University of Tokyo, Faculty of Law, Meiji Shinbun Zasshi Bunko.
These types of Japanese newspapers were eventually replaced by those targeting Japanese readership in the United States. San Francisco was packed with many small rival newspaper publishers. Among them, two are particularly noteworthy: the Nichibei Shinbun (the Japanese American News in English) founded by Kyutaro Abiko in 1899 and the Shin Sekai established in 1894. These early Japanese newspapers were published exclusively in Japanese, but English sections started appearing in some Sunday editions as early as the 1910s. One of the early English-language contributors to the Nichibei Shinbun was Yamato Ichihashi, a Stanford alumnus who returned to campus to become professor of Japanese history and government in 1913. His articles appeared in the English section starting from 1912, discussing issues such as "America and Japan" and "The Alien Land Bills Discussed by Eminent Local Men." These articles targeted Euro-American readership to help gain their understanding of the Japanese in the United States and Japan in general.
The prewar Japanese American newspapers demonstrate a complex and nuanced picture of the community, challenged by racial prejudice, anti-Japanese immigration laws, and alien land bills, among other things. The first generation was shut out from US citizenship, having no choice but to remain Japanese nationals. Many Issei hearts straddled their birth country and their current resident country. Many welcomed Japanese Navy training expeditions with cheer, and various Japanese community groups in the United States were engaged in fundraising campaigns and sending imon bukuro (comfort bags) that contained care kits to Japanese soldiers in China (figure 3).
Despite this adversarial situation in their host country, many Issei established families here (figure 4). Raising children in a new country had its own set of challenges. The American-born second generation (Nisei) continued to face multiple issues such as racial discrimination, limited upward social mobility, cultural and linguistic gaps with their parents, and worsening US-Japan relations. Advertisements reflected the dynamics and fluidity of Japanese and Japanese American communities. Racial tensions and hierarchy, assimilation and permanent settlement, and the maintenance of Japanese values and traditions were some of the frequently discussed topics (figures 5 and 6).
The worlds of the Japanese in America and the Nisei were turned upside down after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 (figure 7). Japanese nationals residing in the United States became enemy aliens overnight. Even more detrimental was Executive Order 9066, issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, which led to the forceful removal of both Japanese and US citizens of Japanese ancestry from the area designated as Military Area I in California, Arizona, Oregon, and Washington. Japanese newspaper publishers in the affected areas at least temporarily closed down their businesses. The Nichibei Shinbun, permitted by US authorities to publish after the outbreak of the Pacific War in order to disseminate US government orders in the nikkei community, was the last major Japanese newspaper on the West Coast to temporarily close after the publisher failed to obtain permission from authorities to continue publishing at a new location (figure 8). The publisher announced the temporary closure on May 16, 1942, after the order to remove Japanese and Japanese Americans in San Francisco was announced.
A short summary of the development of Japanese newspapers in the United States by a few titles does not do justice to the diversity of Japanese newspapers. The Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection now contains more than half a million pages and seventy titles digitized since its official debut in the spring of 2017. The titles are currently concentrated in North America and Hawaii, but we plan to expand the collections to include Japanese newspapers published in Asia and Latin America to provide intimate insight from a global perspective into the lives and agendas of Japanese and their descendants living overseas during the Empire of Japan period.
The Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection is so far the only open-access digital collection of Japanese American newspapers of this scale with full optical character recognition (OCR) texts. Its search capabilities allow for the extraction of key information from newspapers, an exhaustive task that has kept many researchers from fully utilizing these resources in the past. Leong's paper explores ways to take advantage of the technology in an area traditionally regarded as beyond computers. The marriage of the analysis of Japanese written records and the use of computers was inconceivable until recent advancements in technology. The Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages, known as CJK, present distinct challenges to computer processing. The Japanese language in particular can be difficult for computers to cope with, due to the frequent use of furigana reading aids (phonetic hiragana in small font to help read kanji), the decorative layout of newspaper articles, and the multidirectional text orientations used by newspaper publishers. As pointed out in Leong's paper, the accuracy of OCR texts is not perfect, particularly in the Japanese section. Nonetheless, the amount of time required to conduct the initial research is considerably shorter using digital technology.
The digital collection uses cutting-edge technology and concepts, allowing user participation in creating metadata. For example, registered users can edit OCR texts manually and contribute to their accuracy. Some users have significantly contributed to this effort, demonstrating the high level of web-based community engagement in improving the digital collection's metadata and search capabilities. Of course, we periodically monitor the web-based community activities and can revert any excessive or erroneous editing. Users can also create their own lists and tagging records, helping to enhance their research efficiency.
The Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection continues to evolve technologically and presents opportunities that exist beyond simple search and retrieval. We have worked to enhance the value of metadata and present new data-mining capabilities to the academic community. The front-page headlines of the selected papers — the Nippu Jiji, the Rafu Shinpo (Rafu Shimpo), and the Hawai Hochi — have already been manually corrected. We are also exploring ways to create structured metadata for the academic community to conduct in-depth analyses using a vast amount of digital data.
Newspapers are not the only resources to be made available in the digital collection. The Nippu Jiji Photo Archive Collection, digitized by Densho and consisting of about 23,000 photos with original catalog information, will be launched courtesy of the Hawaii Times Photo Archives Foundation. Users will be able to search and view both the photographs and the related newspaper articles at a single site and gain insight into the publisher's choices and decisions in publishing articles and photographs. These photographs offer an intriguing glimpse into the dynamics of Japanese and Japanese American worldviews, agendas, and perspectives in Hawaii. The collection consists of not only rare photographs of Hawaii, Japanese businesses, organizations, and activities on the islands, but also political, economic, and social events in Japan and Japanese military expansion in Asia. In collaboration with the National Museum of Japanese History in Japan, we will be offering transcriptions of the original captions, dates of creation, geographic locations, and objects and people identified on the photographs in both English and Japanese. The Nippu Jiji Photo Archive Collection will also allow community participation in metadata creation. Registered users will be able to help identify what is featured on the photographs in note columns.
The Japanese Diaspora Initiative continues to explore ways to enhance the value of our collections. We seek to further develop the Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection to augment its research potential through engagement with both academic and nonacademic communities, expansion of geographic coverage, the filling of missing issues and titles, and the availability of cutting-edge digital technology. The next phase of the initiative is the expansion of geographical coverage of Japanese newspapers beyond North America and Hawaii. By extending our global reach we will aid researchers to bring fresh perspectives, innovative research methods, and new discoveries to the field of the Japanese diaspora. The newspapers allow much closer contact with the day-to-day lives of Japanese who embarked on global expansion in the Meiji era and thereafter than ever before.
Kaoru "Kay" Ueda Curator of the Japanese Diaspora Collection, Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford University, Stanford, California
CHAPTER 2ROOTS OF THE ISSEI
Exploring Early Japanese American Newspapers
Andrew Way Leong
The generational terms Issei, Nisei, and Sansei — or first-, second-, and third- generation — have long served as axiomatic modes for organizing Japanese American historical narratives. A partial chronological list of narratives that have foregrounded the terms Issei, Nisei, or Sansei in their titles includes Monica Sone's Nisei Daughter (1953), Daisuke Kitagawa's Issei and Nisei: The Internment Years (1967), Bill Hosokawa's Nisei: The Quiet Americans (1969), Kazuo Ito's Issei: A History of Japanese Immigrants in the United States (1973), Yuji Ichioka's The Issei: The World of First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885–1924 (1988), Evelyn Nakano Glenn's Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service (1988), Yukiko Kimura's Issei: Japanese Immigrants in Hawaii (1988), Jere Takahashi's Nisei-Sansei: Shifting Japanese American Identities and Politics (1997), and David Yoo's Growing Up Nisei: Race, Generation, and Culture among Japanese Americans of California, 1924–1949 (2000). This list illustrates a remarkable consistency in the usage of generational terms despite divergences in the authors' professional and disciplinary backgrounds. Memoirists (Sone and Kitagawa), journalists (Hosokawa and Ito), historians (Ichioka and Yoo), and sociologists (Nakano Glenn, Kimura, and Takahashi) have all foregrounded generational terms and concepts.
A few scholars have raised questions about the axiomaticity of generational concepts within Japanese American studies. In Democratizing the Enemy, historian Brian Masaru Hayashi (2004, 43) notes that during the 1910s, the Nichibei Shinbun (a San Francisco-based newspaper owned by Kyutaro Abiko) did not "propagate the generational concept." "In 1912," Hayashi writes, the "newspaper used the term shijo or 'children' rather than nisei or 'second-generation.'" According to Hayashi (2004, 44), the generational concept did not appear until the 1920s, when Abiko and other leaders of the Japanese Association "used the generational concept to reinforce their ideas of permanent settlement." Hayashi's claim that the concept of generation only began to emerge in the 1920s is echoed by sociologist Jane Yamashiro's (2017, 28) more general observation that "it is not until there is a US-born second-generation that a first-generation 'Japanese' is re-defined as an issei." In a more polemical vein, historian Eiichiro Azuma (2016, 259) has issued a bracing critique of how Issei/Nisei generational frameworks "have inadvertently helped perpetuate a historical 'unconsciousness' about actual regional and demographic diversities in Japanese America." In Azuma's account, Issei/Nisei frameworks have contributed to a lack of serious study of postwar Japanese immigrants (the so-called shin issei or "new first-generation") and reinforced a regional bias that "automatically binds the Japanese American experience to the Pacific Coast states, especially California, and Hawai'i" (Azuma 2016, 257–58).
Although I am sympathetic to Azuma's critique of the Issei/Nisei generational framework, my aims in this article are not as polemical. I am not interested in making a prescriptive argument about whether one should use generational terms. I am more interested in describing how these generational terms emerged during the 1910s and 1920s. My descriptive mode of analysis follows the immediate examples of recent work by anthropologist Yasuo Takezawa (2016) on shifts in the usage of Japanese-language terms for "race" and "class" as well as historian Shigeru Kojima's (2017) analysis of the emergence of the term nikkeijin, or "person of Japanese descent." My hope is that these descriptions will help readers make their own informed choices regarding uses of generational terms and their associated concepts.
My descriptive analysis would not have been possible without the digitized and searchable corpus of Japanese American newspapers in the recently formed Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives. In what follows, I will first unpack the problems and questions of generation in greater depth, assessing how laypersons and scholars can mean many different things when they use the same generational words. After a brief reflection on how scholars from my own disciplinary orientation (comparative literary studies) approach the qualitative study of word usage, I will then turn to a more quantitative analysis of frequencies of usage of the generational terms Issei and Nisei in Japanese-language and English-language sections of the Hoji Shinbun corpus from 1910 to 1930.
The Problem of Generations
Thinking about axiomatic and commonsensical terms requires asking basic or fundamental questions. What do we mean when we use a word like "Issei"? What are we talking about when we talk about the Issei as the first generation? Do writers in different disciplines, or from different language backgrounds, mean the same things when they use this same word, Issei?
The basic problem with the word Issei is that different people mean different things when they use this generational term. The meanings attached to a generational term like Issei shift depending upon the historical, linguistic, or disciplinary perspectives of the speaker or writer. In 1928, Hungarian sociologist Karl Mannheim (1972) helpfully outlined some of the problems with the concept of "generation" in his aptly titled essay, "The Problem of Generations." In this essay, Mannheim wrote a statement that rings as true in the early twenty-first century as it did in the early twentieth:
The present status of the problem of generations [...] affords a striking illustration of the anarchy in the social and cultural sciences, where everyone starts out afresh from [their] own point of view, [...] never pausing to consider the various aspects as part of a single, general problem, so that the contributions of the various disciplines to the collective solution could be planned. (Mannheim 1972, 287)
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Table of Contents
Foreword
The Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection: Possibilities and Limitations Eiichiro Azuma vii
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction
The Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection Kaoru "Kay" Ueda xvii
Essay
Roots of the Issei: Exploring Early Japanese American Newspapers Andrew Way Leong 1
References 17
About The Author 19