Morning Glory Evening Shadow

This book has a dual purpose. The first is to present a biography of Yamato Ichihashi, a Stanford University professor who was one of the first academics of Asian ancestry in the United States. The second purpose is to present, through Ichihashi’s wartime writings, the only comprehensive first-person account of internment life by one of the 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry who, in 1942, were sent by the U.S. government to “relocation centers,” the euphemism for prison camps. Arriving in the United States from Japan in 1894, when he was sixteen, Ichihashi attended public school in San Francisco, graduated from Stanford University, and received a doctorate from Harvard University. He began teaching at Stanford in 1913, specializing in Japanese history and government, international relations, and the Japanese American experience. He remained at Stanford until he and his wife, Kei, were forced to leave their campus home for a series of internment camps, where they remained until the closing days of the war.

Pt. 1. Topaz, a literary hotbed -- After the bombs: the experience of Toyo Suyemoto -- Writing as resistance in Topaz: TREK and All Aboard -- Toshio Mori: a literary life derailed -- Miné Okubo: an aesthetic life launched -- Pt. 2. Writing elsewhere -- The Pulse of Amache/Granada -- Dispatches from tumultuous Tule Lake -- Internment novels: Toshio Mori's the Brothers Murata and Hiroshi Nakamura's treadmill -- Jerome's magnet -- Humiliation and hope in Rohwer's the Pen.

Truth commissions, apologies, and reparations are just some of the transitional justice mechanisms embraced by established democracies. This groundbreaking exploration of political theory explains how these forms of state redress repair the damage state wrongdoing inflicts upon political legitimacy.

In a stimulating interchange between feminist studies and biology, Banu Subramaniam explores how her dissertation on flower color variation in morning glories launched her on an intellectual odyssey that engaged the feminist studies of sciences in the experimental practices of science by tracing the central and critical idea of variation in biology. Subramaniam reveals the histories of eugenics and genetics and their impact on the metaphorical understandings of difference and diversity that permeate common understandings of differences among people exist in contexts that seem distant from the so-called objective hard sciences. Journeying into interdisciplinary areas that range from the social history of plants to speculative fiction, Subramaniam uncovers key relationships between the life sciences, women's studies, evolutionary and invasive biology, and the history of ecology, and how ideas of diversity and difference emerged and persist in each field.

This volume is the first to take a broad-ranging look at the engagement of Asian Americans with American politics. Its contributors come from a variety of disciplines—history, political science, sociology, and urban studies—and from the practical political realm.

Teaching Mikadoism is a dynamic and nuanced look at the Japanese language school controversy that originated in the Territory of Hawai‘i in 1919. At the time, ninety-eight percent of Hawai‘i’s Japanese American children attended Japanese language schools. Hawai‘i sugar plantation managers endorsed Japanese language schools but, after witnessing the assertive role of Japanese in the 1920 labor strike, they joined public school educators and the Office of Naval Intelligence in labeling them anti-American and urged their suppression. Thus the "Japanese language school problem" became a means of controlling Hawai‘i's largest ethnic group. The debate quickly surfaced in California and Washington, where powerful activists sought to curb Japanese immigration and economic advancement. Language schools were accused of indoctrinating Mikadoism to Japanese American children as part of Japan's plan to colonize the United States. Previously unexamined archival documents and oral history interviews highlight Japanese immigrants’ resistance and their efforts to foster traditional Japanese values in their American children. A comparative analysis of the Japanese communities in Hawai‘i, California, and Washington shows the history of the Japanese language school is central to the Japanese American struggle to secure fundamental rights in the United States.

In the years between 1940 and 2000, the American Far West went from being a relative backwater of the United States to a considerably more developed, modern, and prosperous region--one capable of influencing not just the nation but the world. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, the population of the West had multiplied more than four times since 1940, and western states had transitioned from rural to urban, becoming the most urbanized section of the country. Massive investment, both private and public, in the western economy had produced regional prosperity, and the tourism industry had undergone massive expansion, altering the ways Americans identified with the West. In The Mobilized American West, 1940-2000, John M. Findlay presents a historical overview of the American West in its decades of modern development. During the years of U.S. mobilization for World War II and the Cold War, the West remained a significant, distinct region even as its development accelerated rapidly and, in many ways, it became better integrated into the rest of the country. By examining events and trends that occurred in the West, Findlay argues that a distinctive, region-wide political culture developed in the western states from a commitment to direct democracy, the role played by the federal government in owning and managing such a large amount of land, and the way different groups of westerners identified with and defined the region. While illustrating western distinctiveness, Findlay also aims to show how, in its sustaining mobilization for war, the region became tethered to the entire nation more than ever before, but on its own terms. Findlay presents an innovative approach to viewing the American West as a region distinctive of the United States, one that occasionally stood ahead of, at odds with, and even in defiance of the nation.

Providing the most comprehensive examination to date of Asians in the Centennial State, William Wei addresses a wide range of experiences, from anti-Chinese riots in late nineteenth-century Denver to the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans at the Amache concentration camp to the more recent influx of Southeast Asian refugees and South Asian tech professionals. Drawing on a wealth of historical sources, Wei reconstructs what life was like for the early Chinese and Japanese pioneers, and he pays special attention to the different challenges faced by those in urban versus rural areas. The result is a groundbreaking approach that helps us better understand how Asians survived—and thrived—in an often hostile environment. Offering a fresh perspective on how cycles of persecution are repeated, Wei reveals how the treatment of Asian Americans resonates with the experiences of other marginalized groups in American society. His study sheds light not only on the Asian American experience but also on the development of Colorado and the greater American West.