Arthur A. Hansen
@Art_HansenArt Hansen is Professor Emeritus of History and Asian American Studies at California State University, Fullerton, where he retired in 2008 as the director of the Center for Oral and Public History. Between 2001 and 2005, he served as Senior Historian at the Japanese American National Museum. Since 2018, he has authored or edited five books that focus on the topic of the resistance by Japanese Americans to their unjust World War II oppression by the US government.
Updated August 2024
Stories from This Author
Kuroki’s Life of “Patriotism, Courage, Teamwork, and Tolerance” and a “Lapse into Superpatriotism”
Jan. 12, 2025 • Nichi Bei News , Arthur A. Hansen
Although there are no such things as secular books that are definitive, Gregg Jones’ magisterial biography of Japanese American World War II hero Ben Kuroki, Most Honorable Son: A Forgotten Hero’s Fight Against Fascism and Hate During World War II, is certainly as close as possible to being defined by that adjective. This fact is assuredly testified to in full by the laudatory tributes paid to it by the 13 authoritative providers of promotional puffs for the volume that precede …
A Tribute to Salinas Valley’s Tenacious Issei
Nov. 17, 2024 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
I first became aware of the reverential esteem in which the Issei generation was held within the Japanese American community on the evening of March 31, 1984. On that date, an event was held at the South Coast Plaza Hotel in Costa Mesa, California, that was billed as “A Tribute to the Issei Pioneers in Orange County.” It attracted 660 people to honor the historical contributions of the first-generation Issei, 38 of whom were in attendance. Moreover, it raised more …
Illuminating Nikkei Women Artists’ Work and Their Connections
Sept. 30, 2024 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
In 2017, ShiPu Wang, the Coats Endowed Chair in the Arts and professor of art history at the University of California, Merced, authored a superb book, The Other American Moderns, in which he devoted critical attention to four American moderns artists of Japanese ancestry: Frank Matsura (1873-1913), Eitaro Ishigaki (1893-1958), Hideo Noda (1908-1939), and Miki Hayakawa (1899-1953). Wang’s overarching point in spotlighting the work of these Japan-born painters of U.S. repute (the first three men, the fourth a woman) was …
Anthology Pinpoints Japanese American Experience in the 1930s
Sept. 8, 2024 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
In London, rail passengers are warned by the phrase “mind the gap” to take proper caution when crossing between the train doorway and the station platform edge. Similarly, in the book under review, co-editors Eiichiro Azuma and Kaoru Ueda (both connected with the Japanese Diaspora Initiative at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution) counsel readers not to skip over the crucial developments of the 1930s when exploring the Japanese American historical experience extending from the pre-1924 exclusionary immigration policy to the mass …
An Extensive Analysis of Shin-Issei Lives
Aug. 21, 2024 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
In 2010, I was privileged to provide a peer evaluation of the late Lane Hirabayashi to support a step promotion for him as a full professor in the Asian American Studies Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. In my assessment, I emphasized his pervasive concern for “community,” both as a scholar and a teacher. So, I was not surprised to read in the acknowledgments section of Tritia Toyota’s ethnographic masterpiece, Intimate Strangers: Shin Issei Women and Contemporary Japanese …
Rich Heart Mountain personal narratives abound in Unforgotten Voices
Feb. 5, 2024 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
Although primarily a prolific author of children’s books, mostly fictional, Unforgotten Voices from Heart Mountain by Joanne Oppenheim (with Nancy Matsumoto) is her third non-fictional work treating assorted dimensions of the Japanese American World War II incarceration experience. The first of these was Dear Miss Breed: True Stories of the Japanese-American Incarceration during World War II and a Librarian Who Made a Difference (2006); the second was Stanley Hayami, Nisei Son: His Diary, Letters, and Story from an American Concentration …
EO9066’s ‘Coerced Prison Work(ers)’
Aug. 16, 2023 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
Although certainly not an American labor historian per se, I am profoundly abashed that, notwithstanding my having been researching, writing, and teaching about the unjust Japanese American World War II detention for five decades, I never until now paid more than fleeting attention to the predominant focus of the invaluable book under review here by Stephanie Hinnershitz: “the design and implementation of Japanese American incarceration and the centrality of labor to both of these undertakings” (p. 22). In addition to …
An In-Depth Examination of the WRA’s Legal System
Aug. 8, 2023 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
As someone who has taught both history and literature classes, I recently had my curiosity aroused by an article in The New Yorker magazine (April 24 and May 1, 2023) written by Louis Menand, an English professor at Harvard University noted for his seminal books in U.S. intellectual history. The article’s subject matter, “creative nonfiction,” according to Menand, is a relatively new genre that has emerged when biographers and historians “adopt a narrative style intended to make their books read …
An Inquiry into the Kibei-Nisei ‘Diasporic Experiences’
Aug. 1, 2023 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
I feel a close kinship with this remarkable book by Michael R. Jin. In 2013, I was privileged to read his pioneering UC Santa Cruz dissertation, which he completed under the able mentorship of Alice Yang and that became the basis for the 2022 Stanford University Press book here under review. It is included within the press’s Asian American series edited by Gordon Chang, the same series in which Yang (then Yang Murray) contributed her stunning 2008 work, Historical Memories …
Recollections from Jerome and Rohwer
Jan. 22, 2023 • Arthur A. Hansen , Nichi Bei News
In 2002-2004, I was honored to serve with two distinguished historical colleagues, the late Roger Daniels and the late Franklin Odo, as a co-consultant for the Life Interrupted Project, jointly sponsored by the Public History Program of the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, and the Japanese American National Museum. Funded chiefly by the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation, an organization dedicated to promoting statewide issues of economic, racial, and social justice, this project generated eight new exhibitions, initiated elementary- and secondary-level educational …
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