UPDATING
HISTORIOGRAPHY ON JAPANESE AMERICANS
Nisei: The Quiet Americans. Revised edition.
By Bill Hosokawa. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2002. xvii +
570 pp. Illustrations, afterword 2002, and index. $27.95.
Greg Robinson
Universite du Quebec a Montreal
The recent republication of Bill Hosokawa's Nisei: The Quiet Americans
is of particular interest to specialists in Ethnic Studies and Asian American
history. When Nisei was first published in 1969–the same year that the
first Ethnic Studies programs were created at UC Berkeley and at San Francisco
State University–Asian American History was in its infancy. The extant
historical literature on Japanese Americans consisted of a few out-of-print
texts by immigrant writers such as Yamato Ichihashi and Karl Kawakami,
plus a smattering of postwar books by Caucasians, notably Bradford Smith's
Americans From Japan. In particular, there were no more than a handful
of studies of the government's wartime incarceration of the Nikkei (United
States citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry), generally known as
the internment. Although the author, who remains an active and generous
scholar/journalist and energetic partisan in his eighty-sixth year, has
included new chapters in order to update his work, the new edition retains
the original's text and spirit. Thus, not only does the new edition bring
this pioneering chronicle of Japanese Americans back into print, but its
appearance also offers scholars the opportunity to measure how drastically
the field has changed since its initial publication, both in the size
of the historical literature and the nature of dominant interpretations.
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