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
The Ichioka Women - Part 1: The Story of Toshia Mori
July 7, 2022 • Greg Robinson
In the 1930s, the women of the Ichioka family in Los Angeles excelled in multiple walks of life, including medicine and the performing arts. The brightest light among them was Toshia Mori, who became one of the first Japanese Americans to shine in Hollywood during the sound era. Sadly, the family’s relations degenerated into divisions and ultimately protracted legal conflict. The head of the family was the physician and surgeon Dr. Toshio Ichioka. Born Toshio Sato in Hiroshima, Japan on …
Japanese Canadians: Race, Religion, and Confinement
June 22, 2022 • Greg Robinson
The current exhibition at the Japanese American National Museum, entitled Sutra and Bible: Faith and the Japanese American World War II Incarceration, centers on the role of religion in the wartime Japanese American experience. It follows on the work of scholars such as Duncan Ryuken Williams, Anne Blankenship, and Beth Hessel, who have shed light on such topics as religious workers in camp and religious affiliation as a means of community formation. In fact, religion also played an important and largely …
The Kai family: A Transnational Nisei Story - Part 2
June 2, 2022 • Greg Robinson
Read Part 1 >> An intriguing pendant to the life of Yoshio Kai is the story of his sister Miwa, six years his junior. Born in San Francisco in 1913, she moved to Japan with the Kai family, as mentioned. However, perhaps because of the damage done by the 1923 earthquake, Miya was desperate to leave her new Japanese home. Though she was only 11, she was able to secure her return from Japan to the United States, in the …
The Kai family: A Transnational Nisei Story - Part 1
June 1, 2022 • Greg Robinson
Two Nisei whose lives and career paths were strikingly uncommon were the siblings Miwa and Yoshio Kai. Miwa was a musical prodigy who starred as a classical pianist on the international stage in the years before World War II, then devoted herself afterwards to work as a skilled librarian—all of which no doubt included calling for quiet! Yoshio’s career was less spectacular than his sister’s, but he amassed a record of quiet heroism while in Asia during World War II, …
Tani Jôji: Chronicles of a Japanese Vagabond in America - Part 2
May 2, 2022 • Greg Robinson
Read Part 1 >> Having reflected on the life and work of Hasegawa Kaitarō, I now wish to discuss the new French edition, translated by Gérald Peloux, of the Tani Jôji Chronicles. The volume starts with a prologue, a kind of poem whose verses evoke, in impressionistic images, the different places the author visited overseas, such as Shanghai; Australia; Chicago; Elizabethtown, Kentucky; Dalian and Sujiatun, Manchuria; Montreal; Valparaiso, Chile; and finally New York. For example, among the author’s impressions of …
Tani Jôji: Chronicles of a Japanese Vagabond in America - Part 1
May 1, 2022 • Greg Robinson
Whenever I visit Paris, I love to spend time going through bookstores, looking for interesting French books for my library. On my last trip, I went to the Librarie Le Phénix, my favorite bookstore for works on Asia and Asian Americans. While browsing the shelves, I came across a paperback with the delightful title Chroniques d’un trimardeur japonais en Amérique. [Chronicles of a Japanese Vagabond in America]. The author was listed as Tani Jôji. I had never heard of either …
Otto and Iris Yamaoka: Asian Actors in 1930s Hollywood - Part 2
April 18, 2022 • Greg Robinson
Read Part 1 >> Iris Yamaoka actually started her film career before her older brother Otto. She was a less prolific performer than her elder brother, perhaps because as a Nisei woman she faced gender as well as racial stereotyping. Still, her film career was most interesting in its own right. Iris Yamaoka was born in Seattle in 1910—she was the second youngest and only daughter of the six Yamaoka siblings. She was still in her teens when she moved …
Otto and Iris Yamaoka: Asian Actors in 1930s Hollywood - Part 1
April 17, 2022 • Greg Robinson
As readers of this column know, I have done a great deal of research in recent years on the panoply of Asian American performers who worked in Hollywood in the generation before World War II. Theirs was not a simple life. Hollywood studios made frequent use of white actors in yellowface to portray Asians (many of these portrayals now seem cringeworthy to a current-day audience). Even such roles as ethnic Asian performers were given to play, whether servants, menial laborers, …
Leo Amino: Building a Brighter Art Through Plastics - Part 2
March 25, 2022 • Greg Robinson
Read Part 1 >> In 1946, on the initiative of the famed artist Josef Albers, Leo Amino was invited to teach a summer institute at Black Mountain College, the progressive arts school in North Carolina. There he mixed with such luminaries as Jacob Lawrence and Walter Gropius. He would teach another summer session there in 1950. In 1952, Amino joined the faculty at Cooper Union in New York City, where he taught sculpture for some 25 years. In the course …
Leo Amino: Building a Brighter Art Through Plastics - Part 1
March 24, 2022 • Greg Robinson
The modern sculptor Leo Amino, who achieved fame in the postwar artworld but then faded from view, has been experiencing a rebirth of public interest in recent years. Amid the new attention that Amino’s work is receiving, it is interesting to retrace the path that took him to his initial renown. He was born Ichiro Amino on June 26 1911. His birthplace was Taiwan (then part of Japan), where his father was on agricultural assignment for the Japanese government. Amino …
