Roots of the Issei: Exploring Early Japanese Newspapers

By Andrew Way Leong

Roots of the Issei presents a complex and nuanced picture of the Japanese American community in the early twentieth century: a people challenged by racial prejudice and anti-Japanese immigration laws trying to gain a foothold in a new land while remaining connected to Japan. Against this backdrop, Andrew Way Leong examines the emergence of generational terms that have long been used to organize Japanese American narratives: issei (first generation), nisei (second generation), and sansei (third generation). In the process, he suggests these widely-used generational concepts are in fact a recent construct. Leong's illuminating research is made possible by the Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection, the world's largest open-access, full-image, and searchable online digital collection of Japanese American newspapers. With this technology, Leong is able to analyze materials that until recently were regarded as beyond computer-aided analysis, due to difficulties presented by the complexity of Japanese language. With access to these primary sources, Leong is able to upend several scholarly assumptions and beliefs and present a never-before-seen picture of Japanese American struggles—both with an adversarial host country and among themselves—backed by the authority of primary sources.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Aug 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9780817922061

Book preview

Roots of the Issei

Exploring Early Japanese American Newspapers

Roots of the Issei

Exploring Early Japanese American Newspapers

Andrew Way Leong

Foreword by

Eiichiro Azuma

An essay published under the auspices of the

Japanese Diaspora Initiative,

Hoover Institution Library & Archives

Kaoru Ueda, curator

HOOVER INSTITUTION PRESS

Stanford University

Stanford, California

www.hoover.org

Hoover Institution Press Publication No. 694

Hoover Institution at Leland Stanford Junior University, Stanford, California 94305-6003

Copyright © 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher and copyright holders. For permission to reuse material from Roots of the Issei: Exploring Early Japanese American Newspapers, by Andrew Way Leong, ISBN 978-0-8179-2205-4, please access www.copyright.com or contact the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone]. CCC is a not-for-profit organization that provides licenses and registration for a variety of uses.

Efforts have been made to locate original sources, determine the current rights holders, and, if needed, obtain reproduction permissions. On verification of any such claims to rights in the articles reproduced in this book, any required corrections or clarifications will be made in subsequent printings/editions.

About the cover photograph: Flower vendor on street in front of D. Ogawa Barber at No. 103 Honmachi Road, Yokohama, on June 3, 1906. The Yokohama port was a starting point of the journey for many Japanese in the United States. Source: Paul N. Woolf photograph collection, Envelope A, Hoover Institution Archives.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8179-2205-4 (paperback)

ISBN-13: 978-0-8179-2206-1 (EPUB)

ISBN-13: 978-0-8179-2207-8 (Mobipocket)

ISBN-13: 978-0-8179-2208-5 (PDF)

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

The Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection: Possibilities and Limitations

by Eiichiro Azuma

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

The Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection

by Kaoru Kay Ueda

ESSAY

Roots of the Issei: Exploring Early Japanese American Newspapers

by Andrew Way Leong

REFERENCES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

FOREWORD

The Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection: Possibilities and Limitations

Eiichiro Azuma

From the vantage point of researchers who are interested in the lived experiences and raw perspectives of Japanese immigrants (Issei) and their second-generation (Nisei) children in North America and beyond, the Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection is a godsend. Since the emergence of Asian American studies in the early 1970s, researchers have struggled to salvage the voices of Issei and the traces of their activities beyond what has been recorded and told by white intellectuals and pundits—exclusionist and anti-exclusionist alike—in English-language source materials. The language gap and academic orientalism, as well as the lack of central