The Issei

The Issei
Author: Yuji Ichioka
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1990
Genre: Japan
ISBN: 9780029324356

A portrait of the first Japanese immigrants, known as the Issei. Leaving behind a still-traditional, feudal society for the wide-open world of America, the Japanese were long barred from holding citizenship and regarded for many years as unassimilable. Their story is one of suffering and struggle that has produced a record of courage and perseverance.

Issei

Issei
Author: Yukiko Kimura
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 1992-05-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780824814816

Issei and Nisei

Issei and Nisei
Author: Rebecca Steoff
Publisher: Chelsea House Publications
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1994
Genre: Japanese Americans
ISBN: 9780791021798

In the late 1800s the United States government encouraged Japanese emigration. Conflict started between the first generation Japanese Americans and their American born children because of the cultural influences from the United States population.

Issei Baseball

Issei Baseball
Author: Robert K. Fitts
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2020-04-01
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1496220870

Baseball has been called America's true melting pot, a game that unites us as a people. Issei Baseball is the story of the pioneers of Japanese American baseball, Harry Saisho, Ken Kitsuse, Tom Uyeda, Tozan Masko, Kiichi Suzuki, and others--young men who came to the United States to start a new life but found bigotry and discrimination. In 1905 they formed a baseball club in Los Angeles and began playing local amateur teams. Inspired by the Waseda University baseball team's 1905 visit to the West Coast, they became the first Japanese professional baseball club on either side of the Pacific and barnstormed across the American Midwest in 1906 and 1911. Tens of thousands came to see "how the minions of the Mikado played the national pastime." As they played, the Japanese earned the respect of their opponents and fans, breaking down racial stereotypes. Baseball became a bridge between the two cultures, bringing Japanese and Americans together through the shared love of the game. Issei Baseball focuses on the small group of men who formed the first professional and semiprofessional Japanese baseball clubs. These players' story tells the history of early Japanese American baseball, including the placement of Saisho, Kitsuse, and their families in relocation camps during World War II and the Japanese immigrant experience.

Life Behind Barbed Wire

Life Behind Barbed Wire
Author: Yasutaro Soga
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2007-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0824863356

Yasutaro Soga’s Life behind Barbed Wire (Tessaku seikatsu) is an exceptional firsthand account of the incarceration of a Hawai‘i Japanese during World War II. On the evening of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Soga, the editor of a Japanese-language newspaper, was arrested along with several hundred other prominent Issei ( Japanese immigrants) in Hawai‘i. After being held for six months on Sand Island, Soga was transferred to an Army camp in Lordsburg, New Mexico, and later to a Justice Department camp in Santa Fe. He would spend just under four years in custody before returning to Hawai‘i in the months following the end of the war. Most of what has been written about the detention of Japanese Americans focuses on the Nisei experience of mass internment on the West Coast—largely because of the language barrier immigrant writers faced. This translation, therefore, presents us with a rare Issei voice on internment, and Soga’s opinions challenge many commonly held assumptions about Japanese Americans during the war regarding race relations, patriotism, and loyalty. Although centered on one man’s experience, Life behind Barbed Wire benefits greatly from Soga’s trained eye and instincts as a professional journalist, which allowed him to paint a larger picture of those extraordinary times and his place in them. The Introduction by Tetsuden Kashima of the University of Washington and Foreword by Dennis Ogawa of the University of Hawai‘i provide context for Soga’s recollections based on the most current scholarship on the Japanese American internment.

Issei, Nisei, War Bride

Issei, Nisei, War Bride
Author: Evelyn Nakano Glenn
Publisher: Temple University Press
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2010-04-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1439903506

A unique study of Japanese American women employed as domestic workers.

Personal Justice Denied

Personal Justice Denied
Author: United States. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians
Publisher:
Total Pages: 484
Release: 1983
Genre: Japanese Americans
ISBN:

Imprisoned Apart

Imprisoned Apart
Author: Louis Fiset
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2012-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0295801360

“Please don’t cry,” wrote Iwao Matsushita to his wife Hanaye, telling her he was to be interned for the duration of the war. He was imprisoned in Fort Missoula, Montana, and she was incarcerated at the Minidoka Relocation Center in southwestern Idaho. Their separation would continue for more than two years. Imprisoned Apart is the poignant story of a young teacher and his bride who came to Seattle from Japan in 1919 so that he might study English language and literature, and who stayed to make a home. On the night of December 7, 1941, the FBI knocked at the Matsushitas’ door and took Iwao away, first to jail at the Seattle Immigration Stateion and then, by special train, windows sealed and guards at the doors, to Montana. He was considered an enemy alien, “potentially dangerous to public safety,” because of his Japanese birth and professional associations. The story of Iwao Matsushita’s determination to clear his name and be reunited with his wife, and of Hanaye Matsushita’s growing confusion and despair, unfolds in their correspondence, presented here in full. Their cards and letters, most written in Japanese, some in English when censors insisted, provided us with the first look at life inside Fort Missoula, one of the Justice Department’s wartime camp for enemy aliens. Because Iwao was fluent in both English and Japanese, his communications are always articulate, even lyrical, if restrained. Hanaye communicated briefly and awkwardly in English, more fully and openly in Japanese. Fiset presents a most affecting human story and helps us to read between the lines, to understand what was happening to this gentle, sensitive pair. Hanaye suffered the emotional torment of disruption and displacement from everything safe and familiar. Iwao, a scholarly man who, despite his imprisonment, did not falter in his committment to his adopted country, suffered the ignominity of suspicion of being disloyal. After the war, he worked as a subject specialist at the University of Washington’s Far Eastern Library and served as principal of Seattle’s Japanese Language School, faithful to the Japanese American community until his death in 1979.

Nisei Daughter

Nisei Daughter
Author: Monica Itoi Sone
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1979
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780295956886

A Japanese-American's personal account of growing up in Seattle in the 1930s and of being subjected to relocation during World War II.