From DiscoverNikkei.org

Contents

Business & Work

  • Glenn Omatsu, "Asian Pacific American Labor Organizing: An Annotated Bibliography". University of California, Los Angeles - Asian American Studies Classweb (Winter 2002).
Part I: Historical Struggles, 1840s – 1960s
Part II: Contemporary Struggles from the 1960s
Excerpt: "Japanese companies owed their postwar success in the United States ... to those who preceded them there - the thousands of emigres who became Japanese-Americans, then served as linguistic and cultural translators during the companies' early forays across the Pacific."

Industries

See also Food & Agriculture

Landscaping & Gardening

See also Arts & Design -- Art Forms -- Landscape Architecture & Gardens
Photo by Shane Sato.
Photo by Shane Sato.
"Landscaping America reveals the personal stories, historical journeys, creativity, and community processes that underlie the surface of the 'Japanese garden.' This multimedia exhibition highlights how West Coast Japanese Americans drew upon their agricultural and ethnic backgrounds to carve out a viable vocational niche in gardening, and in the process, reinterpreted Japanese garden traditions, and contributed to the diversity of the American landscape."
"Photo and written/oral narrative about this community involving the stories of their creators and guardians. Its purpose is to document these gardens in order to bring a greater awareness and appreciation of their existence, their importance to the cultural history of California."
Press announcement made in conjunction with the exhibition's first display as part of the 2006 Obon festival at the West Los Angeles Buddhist Temple; includes historical background on Japanese gardens and gardeners in West Los Angeles.
"After World War II, large labor organizations tried to unionize gardeners and politicians considered regulating the field through licensing. In response, Japanese American gardeners pushed to preserve their independence by establishing the Southern California Gardeners' Federation in 1955."
Exhibition: For a Greener Tomorrow
Exhibition: For a Greener Tomorrow
Green Makers explores the little-known history of an enterprising group of men and women. Japanese American gardeners transformed the Southern California landscape for more than a century. Equipped with only pick-up trucks and lawnmowers, they faced discriminatory laws and even the forced removal from their homes during World War II. This volume includes original writings, photographs, historic summaries, and a timeline spanning a hundred years. Written in both English and Japanese.
Story on Japanese American gardeners (nisei, kibei, shin-issei) in Sacramento.
Founded in 1959, the organization has undertaken several large projects, documented at jgarden.org.
  • Stephanie Brown, "The Garden of Their Soul". View: The Magazine of California State University, Dominguez Hills (Winter 2004), 12-15. (PDF)
"Fresh out of World War II internment camps, the Japanese Americans of the Gardena Valley Gardeners Association built an incredible sense of civic commitment with little more than their own two hands. Today, their legacy of struggle and success lives on as the University Japanese Garden celebrates its silver anniversary on campus."
Obituary of William Shinichi Yorozu.
"His skillful, hardworking and fastidious approach made him one of Seattle's most respected Japanese gardeners. He was general contractor for the Japanese Garden in Washington Park and helped build Pioneer Square's Waterfall Garden Park. He was a founding member of the Seattle Japanese Gardeners Association."

Logging & Timber

  • Barneston (HistoryLink.org - The Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History). Profiles the history of a Washington logging town and its largely Japanese workforce.
Section of the web site From Camp to Community: Cowichan Forestry Life, about early British Columbia logging camps and the communities that grew up around them. Produced by the BC Forest Discovery Centre, and included in the Virtual Museum of Canada.
Excerpt: "Japanese immigrants began to arrive in earnest in BC in the 1890's. They came primarily for fishing, but also found work in other resource areas. In the Cowichan, in addition to fishing, Japanese worked in logging and mill positions. The official census records of 1911 count 86 Japanese residents in north and south Cowichan."
Describes archaeological excavations of a logging camp in British Columbia's Seymour Valley, tentatively identified as one of several logging operations owned by Eikichi Kagetsu.
"One of these men was Eikichi Kagetsu, who in 1920 purchased Lot 922, some 160 acres of privately owned land along the Seymour River. Kagetsu set up a logging camp that probably included a bunkhouse and mess hall, and employed other Japanese men as loggers. In 1921, Kagetsu purchased another 480 acres of land along the Seymour River and chartered a ship to carry cedar and fir logs and square-cut timber to Japan. He continued to log in the Seymour Valley until 1924."

Fishing & Pearling

Australia

Broome, on the Indian Ocean at the western edge of the Kimberley region of Western Australia, was a major source of pearls and mother-of-pearl by the early 20th century, supported by a strong community of Japanese and Japanese-Australians. The Nikkei community grew after the collapse of the pearling industry following World War I; by 1941, the Japanese outnumbered the Australians in Broome. The incarceration of Broome's entire Japanese community during World War II had a profound effect on the economy of this region, which only rebounded in the 1950s with the development of the cultured pearl industry.

Illustrated history documents the role of Japanese in the commercial development of Broome.
"By 1910, nearly 400 luggers and more than 3500 people were fishing for shell in waters around Broome, then the biggest pearling centre in the world. The divers were mostly Japanese from the Taiji province."
These two wall texts, from an exhibition of historical photographs documenting the Japanese in Australia, address the role of the Japanese in the pearling industry.
Web site compiled by students at St. Mary's College, Broome, Western Australia. Includes information about the Japanese-led pearling industry in Broome since the late 19th century.


Canada

"Leslie Budden realized history repeats itself as she pored over a book her grandfather (inset with his family) wrote in 1972, chronicling some of the racial policies that dominated the Fraser River fishery."
"All Japanese-Canadian fishermen from Steveston will be honoured Friday when a monument will be unveiled paying homage to the legacy left behind by the many Japanese-Canadian fishermen and their wives who worked in the canneries at the turn of the century."
Life history of Ryuichi Yoshida (b.1887), who emigrated to Canada and worked in the fishing and logging industries of British Columbia.
  • Bibliography (Japanese Canadian)
    • 山形孝夫　『失われた風景ー日系カナダ漁民の記録から』 (東京、未来社、1996年）
    • 新保満　『カナダ移民排斥史ー日本の漁業移民』 （東京、未来社、1996年）
"This book traces the immigration of Japanese into the Fraser River fishery from first entry in the 1870s, their immigrant surge in the late 1880s and their dominance by the 1900s."


United States

Estes was professor of history at San Diego City College.
Examines the legislative efforts of the California Assembly, in the 1930s, to make Japanese-born immigrants ineligible for commercial fishing licenses.
Describes the early history of commercial fishing in Southern California, and the role of pioneer Japanese immigrants such as Kondo Masaharu in establishing that industry.
"In 1901, 15 divers from Wakayama-ken prefecture in Western Japan established an abalone fishery a few miles northwest of San Pedro at White Point. Their first diving boats were large open rowboats with five-to-six men crews assisting. They used helmets of Japanese manufacture, and a hand pump to compress breathing air down to the diver. In addition to diving the White Point reefs, they also rowed to San Clemente Island, about 50 miles from White Point, seeking abalone."
Part of the museum's "20,000 Jobs Under the Sea" exhibit, documenting the founding of the Japanese community on then-deserted Terminal Island in 1901, and the establishment of successful sardine and mackerel fisheries shortly thereafter.


Chick Sexing

Report on the 41st Annual All-Japan Chick Sexing Championship, and the overall decline of chicken sexing as an occupation.
"In France, there are about 100 sexers, most of them of Japanese origin, and all of them Asian."
"Nearly all of the 90-odd people in Brazil who provide their vital services to chicken farmers, identifying the sex of day-old chicks, are of Japanese descent."

Restaurants

"With ancestral roots in Oroku, Okinawa, first-, second-, and third-generation participants/observers of family-run restaurants talk about their lives in the restaurant business. February 2004, 429 pages, 1 volume, photographs."
  • Thomas K. Walls, "Merchants and Restaurateurs". In: The Japanese Texans. (University of Texas at San Antonio, Institute of Texan Cultures, 2002)
Historical review of restaurant culture in Little Tokyo, with emphasis on the evolution of restaurants since the 1950's, when the city pushed out much of the neighborhood's businesses to construct the new headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department.
"We thought that it might be a good idea to look back on the ups and downs of the cooking of Little Tokyo, which is the foundation of the boom in Japanese cuisine today."


Photography

Toyo Miyatake (1895-1979)

Frank S. Matsura (d.1913)

Includes brief biography, along with searchable access to the 1,600 images in the archive.

Journalism

Article in tribute to The Southern Blue Page, a Depression-era weekly newspaper circulated in Southern California, and its role in creating a cohesive Nikkei community in the region.

Other

Rainbow Food Market. (1949)
Rainbow Food Market. (1949)
"Individuals directly involved with stores serving the sugar plantation communities of Pa‘ia and Pu‘unene recall the social and economic roles these stores played and how these roles changed over seventy years. June 1980, 1433 pages, 2 volumes, photographs."
Uwajimaya was founded in 1928 by Fujimatsu Moriguchi, who sold homemade fishcakes and other items to Japanese laborers working in logging and fishing camps in the Puget Sound area. Today, Uwajimaya operates one of the largest Japanese groceries in the Pacific Northwest.
Seminar held April 6, 2005, during the Bank's 2005 Annual Meeting, in Okinawa. The first session presents socio-economic profiles on Brazilians and Peruvians of Japanese descent currently working in Japan. The second part consists of panels examining the issues and policy implications of two key themes of Japanese migration: (1) inter-regional integration through migrants and their descendants and (2) challenges for countries / regions of origin and destination.
March 15, 2005, prior to the IDB 2005 Annual Meeting in Okinawa. Outlined the role that persons of Japanese descent have played in the economic development of the Central and South American region. The keynote address, "Historical Outline of the Loci of Japanese Immigration and their Role in the Economic Development Central and South American Region", was followed by panel discussions, including "The Role of Persons of Japanese Descent in the Economies of the Central and South American Region and their Present Potential".
Brief profile, with photograph, of the labor alliance formed in 1903 by sugarbeet farm laborers in Oxnard, California, in response to wage cuts by mill owners and bankers. Their alliance led to the first farmworker strike in California history, but when the Alliance later petitioned the AFL for recognition, they were refused due to the inclusion of Japanese in the union.
A lengthy and verbatim excerpt from "Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples At Home and Abroad 1876-1917" by Matthew Frye Jacobson (Hill & Wang, 2000). It begins with a description of the AFL's rejection of the Japanese-Mexical Labor Alliance, put into the larger context of American xenophobia against immigrant laborers.
"O NB traz histórias de profissionais bem-sucedidos que seguiram a carreira paterna. Vocação aliada à admiração são o segredo do sucesso desses filhos."
Article traces the stories of three father-son businesses in the Brazilian Nikkei community.
Report of a six-day seminar (Leiden, The Netherlands, March 8-15, 1994), led by Hirochika Nakamaki of the National Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku), that examined the corporate culture, social organization, and religious activities of Japanese firms, and their expression in Nikkei religious and business communities outside of Japan.
  • The Mt. Eden Floral Company was established by Zenjuro Shibata in Hayward, California, in the early 1900s. The company's web site describes its history, which is also detailed in Across Two Worlds, the biography of Zenjuro's son, Yoshimi Shibata.


Nihonmachi / Japantowns

Japanese Chambers of Commerce

(日本商工会議所）

Individuals

  • Sho Dozono, businessman and civic leader
Profile of Portland, Oregon businessman and civic leader Sho Dozono.
  • Toraichi Kono (1888-1971), chauffeur and personal assistant to Charlie Chaplin
  • William S. Naito (1925-1996), real estate developer and businessman in Portland, Oregon.
  • Aiko Nakane (1908-2004), the founder of Aiko's Art Materials / Japanese paper expert
Relates Nomura's experience as an internee at Manzanar, and as a farm laborer in Idaho during the Second World War.
  • Keith Yamashita, management consultant
Profile of Yamashita, whose consulting firm, Stone Yamashita Partners, approaches corporate management problems "through an unorthodox mix of analytics, branding, and design rather than a formula or a template."

Other

Kimihiko Inaba, general director of JETRO in Buenos Aires, Argentina gives a speech on Japanese business and foreign trade in Argentina at the 5th conference for Japanese business management held at the John F. Kennedy School of the Universidad Argentina.
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