Hiroshima Immigrants in Canada, 1891-1941 is a fascinating investigation of Japanese migration to Canada prior to the Second World War. It makes Japanese-language scholarship on the subject available for the first time, and also draws on interviews, diaries, community histories, biographies, and the author's own family history. Starting with the history of the feudal fiefs of Aki and Bingo, which were merged into Hiroshima prefecture, Ayukawa describes the political, economic, and social circumstances that precipitated emigration between 1891 and 1941. She then examines the lives and experiences of those migrants who settled in western Canada. Interviews with three generations of community members, as well as with those who never emigrated, supplement research on immigrant labour, the central role of women, and the challenges Canadian-born children faced as they navigated life between two cultures. This book is a must-read for scholars of migrations, diaspora, and transnationalism, and will also be of great interest to general readers who wish to learn more about the lives and experiences of Japanese Canadians.

After emerging from the tumult of social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the field of Asian American studies has enjoyed rapid and extraordinary growth. Nonetheless, many aspects of Asian American history still remain open to debate. The Oxford Handbook of Asian American History offers the first comprehensive commentary on the state of the field, simultaneously assessing where Asian American studies came from and what the future holds. In this volume, thirty leading scholars offer original essays on a wide range of topics. The chapters trace Asian American history from the beginning of the migration flows toward the Pacific Islands and the American continent to Japanese American incarceration and Asian American participation in World War II, from the experience of exclusion, violence, and racism to the social and political activism of the late twentieth century. The authors explore many of the key aspects of the Asian American experience, including politics, economy, intellectual life, the arts, education, religion, labor, gender, family, urban development, and legal history. The Oxford Handbook of Asian American History demonstrates how the roots of Asian American history are linked to visions of a nation marked by justice and equity and to a deep effort to participate in a global project aimed at liberation. The contributors to this volume attest to the ongoing importance of these ideals, showing how the mass politics, creative expressions, and the imagination that emerged during the 1960s are still relevant today. It is an unprecedentedly detailed portrait of Asian Americans and how they have helped change the face of the United States.

This book tells the story of Japanese Canadian activist Mary Kitagawa. In the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor bombing, Mary was one of roughly 22,000 Nikkei uprooted from their homes on the Pacific coast and forbidden to return to western British Columbia until long after World War II had officially ended. In the decades that followed, Mary and her family navigated financial precarity and ostracism, but also found ways to pursue both economic stability and political engagement. Beginning with Mary's grandparents, who were among the earliest immigrants to Canada from Japan, this book tracks the family's experiences—and those of the larger Nikkei Canadian community—from the late 1800s to the present. Concentrating on the interpersonal and intergenerational bonds that shaped Kitagawa, Karen M. Inouye describes the increasingly activist sensibilities that arose from transformative relationships—with family members, other members of the Nikkei Canadian community, Doukhobors, First Nations peoples, and white allies—as well as in response to the anti-Asian racism that Kitagawa encountered in many forms throughout her life. Inouye presents the Nikkei Canadian experience not as a linear triumph over a single adversity, but as a continual process of identity formation in relation to obstacles and opportunities, suffering and joy, isolation and connection.

This book addresses oral history as a form of education for redress and reconciliation. It provides scholarship that troubles both the possibilities and limitations of oral history in relation to the pedagogical and curricular redress of historical harms. Contributing authors compel the reader to question what oral history calls them to do, as citizens, activists, teachers, or historians, in moving towards just relations. Highlighting the link between justice and public education through oral history, chapters explore how oral histories question pedagogical and curricular harms, and how they shed light on what is excluded or made invisible in public education. The authors speak to oral history as a hopeful and important pedagogy for addressing difficult knowledge, exploring significant questions such as: how do community-based oral history projects affect historical memory of the public? What do we learn from oral history in government systems of justice versus in the political struggles of non-governmental organizations? What is the burden of collective remembering and how does oral history implicate people in the past? How are oral histories about difficult knowledge represented in curriculum, from digital storytelling and literature to environmental and treaty education? This book presents oral history as a form of education that can facilitate redress and reconciliation in the face of challenges, and bring about an awareness of historical knowledge to support action that addresses legacies of harm. Furthering the field on oral history and education, this work will appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of social justice education, oral history, Indigenous education, curriculum studies, history of education, and social studies education.

Concerned with people called variously: eta, burakumin, buraku jumin, buraku people, outcastes, or "the lowest of the low", this book examines how their experience of caste/status-based discrimination in 19th century Japan affected their experience of race-based discrimination in the West of the US and Canada in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

For almost two centuries North America has been a major destination for international migrants, but from the late nineteenth century onward, governments began to regulate borders, set immigration quotas, and define categories of citizenship. To develop a more dimensional approach to migration studies, the contributors to this volume focus on people born in the United States and Canada who migrated to the other country, as well as Japanese, Chinese, German, and Mexican migrants who came to the United States and Canada. These case studies explore how people and ideas transcend geopolitical boundaries. By including local, national, and transnational perspectives, the editors emphasize the value of tracking connections over large spaces and political boundaries. Entangling Migration History ultimately contends that crucial issues in the United States and Canada, such as labor and economic growth and ideas about the racial or religious makeup of the nation, are shaped by the two countries’ connections to each other and the surrounding world.

When the federal government uprooted and interned Japanese Canadians en masse in 1942, Kishizo Kimura saw his life upended along with tens of thousands of others. But his story is also unique: as a member of two controversial committees that oversaw the forced sale of the property of Japanese Canadians in Vancouver during the Second World War, Kimura participated in the dispossession of his own community. In Witness to Loss Kimura's previously unknown memoir – written in the last years of his life – is translated from Japanese to English and published for the first time. This remarkable document chronicles a history of racism in British Columbia, describes the activities of the committees on which Kimura served, and seeks to defend his actions. Diverse reflections of leading historians, sociologists, and a community activist and educator who lived through this history give context to the memoir, inviting readers to grapple with a rich and contentious past. More complex than just hero or villain, oppressor or victim, Kimura raises important questions about the meaning of resistance and collaboration and the constraints faced by an entire generation. Illuminating the difficult, even impossible, circumstances that confronted the victims of racist state action in the mid-twentieth century, Witness to Loss reminds us that the challenge of understanding is greater than that of judgment.