Book Review: Pacific Citizens: Larry and Guyo Tajiri and Japanese American Journalism in the World War II Era, by Greg Robinson

Abstract

Pacific Citizens: Larry and Guyo Tajiri and Japanese American Journalism in the World War II Era. Greg Robinson, ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. 344 pp. $60 hbk.Studies of the Japanese American press during the war have tended to focus on news- papers published in the concentration camps set up by President Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066, which forcibly evacuated citizens of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast. Greg Robinson's book fills a gap in the historical record by examining the main Japanese American newspaper published outside the camps. Thriving Japanese American papers along the West Coast, home to 90% of Japanese Americans, shut down as relocation took away subscribers and staffs. Four papers continued to publish during the war in the Rocky Mountains, east of the exclusion zone. Of those, the Pacific Citizen, with its national circulation base of 7,000, was by far the largest. It moved from California, where it began as the newsletter of the Japanese American Citizens League, to Salt Lake City, Utah. Journalist Larry Tajiri and his wife, Guyo, agreed to put out a real newspaper, starting at first as a weekly and converting to biweekly. They worked on a shoestring budget, operating as the paper's sole journal- ists. They reported on issues of interest to Japanese Americans, including military service, camp riots, and civil liberties. In so doing, they earned high praise from Office of War Information Director Elmer Davis, who called Pacific Citizen the best weekly in America.Historians interested in the mainstream Japanese American journalism of the war can thank University of Quebec history professor Robinson for compiling and editing significant works of the Tajiris and opening a window to an American minority's response to troubled times. The newspaper remains the best single source for news for and about Japanese Americans during World War II.That this newspaper, or any Japanese publication, could exist during World War II remained an open question for several months after December 1941. Federal officials fretted about the possible security threats posed by newspapers published by citizens whose ancestors came from Axis countries. One option was to shutter them for the duration, another was to keep them open but impose censorship, and a third was to let them publish but monitor their content. Larry Tajiri argued for the third case in a 1942 letter to Alan Cranston, a bureaucrat in the Office of Facts and Figures and, much later in life, a U.S. senator from California. Japanese Americans needed their own press, Tajiri said. People left in the dark are less likely to maintain a proper perspective and hence are more susceptible to be influenced by rumor and inimical gossip, he said in the letter, which the book reprints. In addition, the educational function of the press could prepare Japanese Americans to support democratic and liberal ideas.Chapters cover Larry Tajiri's prewar writings, wartime columns and editorials, writings that appeared in mainstream publications, wartime letters, postwar writings, and selections from his career after leaving Pacific Citizen in 1952. …