An Issei Journalist in Japan Denounces Internment in 1943

[California and the Japanese] Kariforunia to nihonjin

Ebina, Kazuo

Notes: A very scarce wartime history of the Japanese in California that argues that the internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans was a symptom of the same pervasive anti-Japanese attitudes among Americans that had contributed to the Second World War.

The author, according to Yuji Ichioka writing in Before Internment (p. 263), was an "Issei who had lived in California for many years, working as a newspaperman for Japanese immigrant newspapers... The outbreak of the Pacific War found Ebina in Tokyo because he had returned to Japan in November 1941. At the beginning he was employed part-time by NHK Radio to write anti-American radio scripts and served as a commentator on the arrest and detention of Issei leaders and the eventual mass internment of the entire West Coast Japanese California." Ebina's December 1943 book, "Kariforunia to Nihonjin...rehashed the history of anti-Japanese racism in California and attributed the internment of the the West Coast Japanese population to this very same racism. Indeed, in chapter 9, entitled "Beikoku Kanken no Bogyaku" [Official American Atrocities], Ebina insisted that all the arrested and detained Issei leaders were 'innocent non-combatants' who were the victims of 'vicious revenge.'"

"A history of Japanese immigrants in California by a former Issei journalist. Reflecting the anti-Anglo-American doctrine of the time, the main focus is on the past anti-Japanese exclusion movement. Includes the wartime internment of Japanese Americans."—A Buried Past II, 1512.

OCLC: 49627122 (Hawaii, Berkeley), 672538907 (NDL)

Edition + Condition: First edition (first printing). A very good copy in tanned wrappers, with worn yapped edges.

Publication: Tokyo: Rokko Shuppanbu, 1943.

Item No: #362061

Price: $1,850