Greg Robinson
@GregGreg Robinson, a native New Yorker, is Professor of History at l'Université du Québec À Montréal, a French-language institution in Montreal, Canada. He is the author of the books By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Harvard University Press, 2001), A Tragedy of Democracy; Japanese Confinement in North America (Columbia University Press, 2009), After Camp: Portraits in Postwar Japanese Life and Politics (University of California Press, 2012), Pacific Citizens: Larry and Guyo Tajiri and Japanese American Journalism in the World War II Era (University of Illinois Press, 2012), and The Great Unknown: Japanese American Sketches (University Press of Colorado, 2016), as well as coeditor of the anthology Miné Okubo: Following Her Own Road (University of Washington Press, 2008). Robinson is also coeditor of the volume John Okada - The Life & Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy (University of Washington Press, 2018).
His historical column “The Great Unknown and the Unknown Great,” is a well-known feature of the Nichi Bei Weekly newspaper. Robinson’s latest book is an anthology of his Nichi Bei columns and stories published on Discover Nikkei, The Unsung Great: Portraits of Extraordinary Japanese Americans (University of Washington Press, 2020). It was recognized with an Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for Outstanding Achievement in History Honorable Mention in 2022. He can be reached at robinson.greg@uqam.ca.
Updated March 2022
Stories from This Author
Pulling a Fast one? E.V. Cunningham and the Masuto Mysteries
Dec. 5, 2024 • Greg Robinson
Some time ago, I published a column in Nichi Bei News discussing writer Len Zinberg, who wrote a short story sympathetic to Japanese Americans during the World War II era. Zinberg, I noted, went on to write crime and detective novels under the name Ed Lacy, including the 1957 novel Room to Swing. That book introduced the private investigator Toussaint “Touie” Marcus Moore, one of the first African American detectives in mainstream popular fiction. Today I wish to discuss Howard …
Greg Robinson’s Take on Jonathan’s 100th Column
Nov. 6, 2024 • Greg Robinson
Now that my friend and collaborator Jonathan van Harmelen is publishing his 100th column for Discover Nikkei, he has expressed his intention to take stock of his achievement. In light of this, I thought I would share the origin story of our partnership and how Jonathan came to write for Discover Nikkei—first together with me, then as columnist in his own right. I first met Jonathan in July 2018, in the reading room of the National Archives’s downtown Washington, DC …
Kazuo Tashiro and Mitsuko Tashiro Laforet: Brother and Sister Doctors
Sept. 24, 2024 • Greg Robinson
This is the final instalment of my series of articles on the remarkable Tashiro family. Today I will speak about Kazuo and Mitsuko Tashiro, who stemmed from the Cincinnati branch of the family. Like their father Shiro and their elder brother Kiyo, Kazuo and Mitsuko both studied medicine, and distinguished themselves as physicians. The elder of the two, Kazuo Tashiro, was born in Chicago, Illinois on November 12, 1918. As a small child, he moved to Cincinnati, where he attended …
Part 8: Kiyo Tashiro—Physician and Athlete
Aug. 28, 2024 • Greg Robinson
This is the latest installment of my series on the remarkable Tashiro family. In my next columns, I will discuss the children of the eminent biochemist Shiro Tashiro, who themselves became physicians. As mentioned previously, in 1915 Dr. Shiro Tashiro travelled to Hawaii to do research. While in Honolulu, he became acquainted with a local hotel owner named Kawasaki, who arranged for the young doctor to marry his teenage Nisei daughter Shizuka Kawasaki. According to Shizuka’s granddaughter Cathy Tashiro, her …
Gene Oishi—A Memoir of a Friend
Aug. 15, 2024 • Greg Robinson
Gene Oishi’s passing draws the curtain on a unique Japanese American life. I will leave it to others to write his life story. For myself, I wish to speak about my friend Gene, a man who embodied wisdom, courage, profound curiosity about the world, and a wicked sense of humor. I can’t recall precisely when I first heard of Gene Oishi. I knew and admired his book In Search of Hiroshi. However, I didn’t actually meet Gene until fall 2007. …
Part 7 (2): Shiro Tashiro—Groundbreaking Biologist
July 25, 2024 • Greg Robinson
Read Part 1 Throughout the prewar years, Dr. Shiro Tashiro ranked among the most renowned Americans. In a sign of his prominence as author and educator, he was included in the Who’s Who in America directory in 1936-1937, the only Japanese American to be so honored. His research was in contention for the Nobel Prize in different fields. Yet following the outbreak of the Pacific War, Shiro Tashiro became an enemy alien, and was thereby restricted in his movements and …
Part 7 (1): Shiro Tashiro—Groundbreaking Biologist
July 11, 2024 • Greg Robinson
In previous Discover Nikkei columns, I have told the story of Aijiro and Nao Tashiro and their five remarkable children. In these next installments, I wish to explore the career of Aijiro’s younger brother Shiro Tashiro, a brilliant biochemist, and his three children. Shirosuke Tashiro was born on February 12, 1882 in Satsumasendai, Kagoshima, Japan. (He was thus still a young boy when Aijiro, 16 years his senior, left Japan). As Shiro later described it, his family was marginalized in …
Part IV—After Pearl Harbor
June 2, 2024 • Greg Robinson
Read Part 3 >> Ken Nakazawa was arrested by FBI agents on December 7, 1941, in the wake of Japan’s raid on Pearl Harbor. Presumably his name had already been marked down on the Justice Department’s prewar “ABC list” of potentially dangerous aliens to be rounded up in case of war. At first, he was placed in detention on Terminal Island, and was then sent on to internment at the Justice Department Camp at Fort Missoula in Montana. In August …
Part III—the 1930s
May 26, 2024 • Greg Robinson
Read Part II >> Ken Nakazawa would have defined himself as an internationalist. Throughout his career, he advocated international understanding through study of foreign cultures. At an Institute of International Relations in Riverside in November 1927, he gave a speech proposing that differences between East and West be composed through “positive differences,” as had been the case in art and literature. Yet in the years before 1931, he hardly touched on international politics in his public statements and writings. A …
Part II—Prewar Cultural Arbiter
May 19, 2024 • Greg Robinson
Read Part I >> Although Ken Nakazawa achieved a modicum of public fame in the 1920s from his plays and his writings, he achieved his greatest renown as a public figure in the following decade. A watershed moment for Nakazawa was his selection as an essayist by the Boston-based Atlantic Monthly magazine. His first contribution, which appeared in the Atlantic’s February 1929 issue, was “The Spirit of Japanese Poetry.” Nakazawa provided an atmospheric, almost Lafcadio Hearnesque reading of Japanese poetry—one …
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