Yale University Library Research Guides: Japanese Studies Primary Sources in Western Languages: Japanese Americans

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Nagata, S., & Millsap, W. The Japanese evacuation and the minority problem.
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University Library

Yale Special Collection

“Out of the Desert” exhibit by Cortney Sato. Website: https://outofthedesert.yale.edu/.

Yonekazu Satoda papers, photographs, and film (WA MSS S-2897) Box 1 - diary, 1942-1945, and materials related to US Army service, 1944-1947, Box 3 - correspondence and ephemera, circa 1943-circa 1948

Aito and Miyeko Takita Papers (WA MSS S-3211) Box 1, Box 2

Elizabeth Page Harris Papers (MS 771) Box 80, Box 81, Box 82 - correspondence with interned Japanese Americans and others and printed ephemera (including camp newspapers from Tulare, Gila River, and Heart Mountain) relating to Japanese American internment, 1942-1946

US War Relocation Authority, Poston, Arizona Relocation Center collection (MS 803) Box 1, Box 2, Box 3 - camp ephemera, yearbook, and scrapbooks, circa 1942-circa 1945, collected by Nathan Van Patten, a librarian at Stanford University
Charlotte B. DeForest Papers (Divinity Library Special Collections, RG 178), Series I, Box 2, folder 25: Letters of Kobe College alumnae affected by Japanese incarceration during WW II, circa 1940s.

Publications of Early Japanese in North America 初期在北米日本人の記録

This series consists of massive volumes of reprinted resources on various documents related to the Japanese settlement of North America. These publications include newspapers, journals, directories, reports and surveys, chronologies, and various other ephemera, such as postcards and court cases.

Publication List
List all the publications in the series. The list comes with English titles and a short explanation in Japanese.
Holdings at libraries in North Amercia
The list of holding volumes in the series in North America.

Japanese American Newspapers & Journals

The Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection by Hoover Institution
"The world's largest online, free-access full-image collection of newspapers published by overseas Japanese and their descendants... The collection contains about fifteen newspapers published in Hawaii and North America with a total of nearly 500,000 pages. Most publications contain a mix of Japanese and English."
Rafu Shimpo Digital Archive
The paper began in 1903 supporting the small but growing Japanese community in the Little Tokyo area of Las Angeles, California. It was the most widely circulated paper in the region by the 1940’s and included a weekly English section. The paper was forced to cease publication and its publisher was imprisoned by the government during World War II. The archive contains all obtainable published issues from 1914 through 2018.
日系アメリカ文学雑誌集成
Reprint collection of journals published by Japanese American
北米年鑑
Digitaized version at National Diet Library
From Camp to Campus
One of the Library of Congress's Story Maps series "by Megan Bauerle, 2022 Junior Fellow in the Connecting Communities Digital Initiative. This Story Map follows experiences of higher education for Japanese American students under WWII Incarceration. The Story Map focuses on articles from the Japanese American Internment Camp Newspaper collection to look at different individuals from the incarceration centers across the United States. This downloadable CSV file provides the mapped data in this Story Map."
Japanese-American relocation camp newspapers perspectives on day-to-day life
One of the darker chapters in American history and one of the lesser discussed events of World War II was the forced internment, during the war, of an important segment of the American population -- persons of Japanese descent. This collection, consisting of 25 individual titles, documents life in the internment camps.

Japanese American Internment Documents

Final Accountability Rosters of Evacuees at Japanese-American Relocation Centers, 1944-1946
Composed of U.S. Government War Relocation Authority rosters, this collection contains detailed demographic and personal information about Japanese and Japanese-Americans interned during World War II. The rosters are organized first by camp, then alphabetically by surname.
Japanese-American Relocation Camp Newspapers: Perspectives on Day-to-Day Life
This collection features 25 periodicals from Japanese-American internment camps. Some are official information bulletins, but a majority are publications produced by internees. These are divided by camp; most of the articles are bilingual or in English, with a small number in only Japanese.
Densho Encyclopedia: A free online resource about the history of the Japanese American WWII exclusion and incarceration experience
The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement: A Digital Archive
University of California, Berkeley
ProQuest History Vault
Includes various government documents related to internment documents.

Subject Headings

Search these terms in the SUBJECT field in ORBIS or use as keywords in database searches.

By ethnic group and country:

American literature--Asian American authors--History and Criticism
American literature--Japanese American authors
American literature--Chinese American authors--Ethnic identity
Chinese Americans--Literary collections
Chinese Americans in literature

By genre:

Korean American poetry
American drama--Asian American Authors
Asian Americans--Drama
East Indian Americans--Fiction

By individual author's name:

Kingston, Maxine Hong
Ozeki, Ruth L

By individual literary work:

Kingston, Maxine Hong. Woman warrior

By theme:

Multiculturalism in literature
Group identity in literature
Ethnicity in literature
Women in literature
Racism in literature
Race relations in literature

Background information:

Asian Americans--Intellectual Life
Japanese American women--Social conditions
Haitian American--Social conditions
Political refugees-United States--Social conditions
Chinese Americans--California--History
Korean Americans--20th century
Japanese Americans--Interviews
Korean Americans--Poetry
Asian Americans--Race identity
East Indian Americans--Assimilation

Contact

Haruko Nakamura

Email Me

Contact:

Sterling Memorial Library
120 High Street, New Haven, CT
Room 213A

203-432-1792

Subjects: East Asian Studies

Japanese Studies Primary Sources in Western Languages: Japanese Americans

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