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A Giant of Journalism

Emi Kida was never paid a salary over $1 million. She was never interviewed on “Meet the Press” for her opinions on the Korean War, the Vietnam War or the impending war on Iraq. She worked for decades in the same city as the New York Times, but was probably never mentioned in its pages.

Kida-san, who passed away last week at age 93, was one of those unsung heroes of the community who kept us all connected — week by week, month by month, and year by year. She and her late husband, Isaku Kida (his original family name was Kawase), worked at, ran, and eventually owned the New York Nichibei. This mainstay of the New York Asian Pacific American community life from the 1940s through the early 1990s was a shining example of community journalism at its best.

New York today and New York in the 1940s are two completely different places. Today you can buy sushi at many grocery stores, and “wasabi” and “tofu” have entered the lexicon of Middle America. Back then, you could count the number of Japanese restaurants on one hand.

Fresh from their experiences in the internment camps or as soldiers in Europe, Japanese Americans who came to New York in the 1940s lived in all five boroughs and in Westchester County, Long Island and New Jersey. The heart of the community, however, was centered around 106th Street and Broadway — in the Upper West Side — where the Oyama family and others had stores, and where the Buddhist and Christian churches were located.

The New York Buddhist Church — founded in 1938 by Rev. Hozen Seki, his wife Satomi and concerned lay people — is still located on Riverside Drive just north of 105th Street. It is a temple of Jodoshinshu True Pure Land School Buddhism, whose head temple is Nishi-Hongwanji Temple in Kyoto, Japan. Shinran Shonin (1173-1262) is the founder of this school of Buddhism.

The earliest Japanese American Christian church in New York was founded in 1894, and was dedicated to Japanese seamen who had settled in Brooklyn. By the 1940s, there were three Japanese American Christian Churches (two Reformed and one Methodist). They formally merged as the Japanese American United Church (www.jauc.org) in 1953, and moved to a building on Seventh Avenue, just north of 24th Street, in 1970.

Both Christian and Buddhist churches originally had services in Japanese to serve the many pioneer issei, who had been born in Japan. Today they serve newly-arrived Japanese immigrants, Japanese college students, English-speaking nisei and sansei, and New Yorkers of other backgrounds who share an affinity with Japanese culture.

The Nichibei, like other community newspapers, was more than just a place to read community news. Depending on your interests, you could read about births, deaths and marriages, or you could read Gene Kubo and Yuri Kochiyama’s updates on the softball and bowling leagues. Kazu Iijima might write about why she and others were starting Asian Americans for Action, the first Asian Pacific American organization. Gifted artists such as photographer Steve Wada, writers Dyke Miyagawa and Tooru Kanazawa, and editors Taxie Kusunoki and Teru Kanazawa (Tooru’s daughter) worked for free or on salaries so low they sometimes had to take second jobs.

When the Asian American Movement got started in Chinatown in the late 1960s and ‘70s, activist-singer Chris Iijima wrote about it in the Nichibei. When the Asian American arts movement flourished at the Basement Workshop and other venues in the city, poets Fay Chiang and Richard Oyama, illustrator Tomie Arai and musician Jason Kao Hwang were there to document it in the Nichibei. When the redress movement blossomed in the 1970s and ‘80s, William Hohri, Ruby Schaar, Michi Weglyn and other important voices were found each week in the Nichibei.

The core of writers for the paper were progressives who supported groups such as the Japanese American Committee for Democracy (JACD) and causes such as the third party presidential campaign of Henry Agaard Wallace (FDR’s former vice president) in 1948. The pages of the Nichibei were gathering places for redress activists in the pre-Internet era. Civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights and other progressive causes were showcased in its pages.

The mechanics of producing the Nichibei each week represents a lost world in journalism. The six pages in Japanese were edited by Mr. Kida, with writers such as my grandfather (Misao Tajitsu) sending copy that dealt with issues in New York, the nation or the world. The two English pages were written by an English editor such as Penny Fujiko Willgerodt, with regular columns from people such as Tamio Spiegel and myself.

Mrs. Kida was the person who typeset the Japanese section by hand (!), and who also edited, kept the books, organized the mailings and kept the place running. With no Internet and email, writers had to hand-deliver or fax stories, which had to be re-typed by the editors.

Never a big money-maker, the Nichibei was subsidized by the hard work of the Kidas and volunteers, with an occasional windfall such as the holiday (New Year) issue bringing in needed advertising revenue. The drafty offices in a loft building in downtown Manhattan had stairs so old and rickety that I thought I might fall through them if I ran too fast. Mrs. Kida, who was not much over five feet tall and quite thin, carried the heavy bundles of papers down to the local post office each week in what can only be called a labor of love.

Services for Emi Kida will be held on Sun., Dec. 15 at the Japanese American United Church. For more information, call 212-242-9444. The entire collection of Nichibei issues are being microfilmed by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center library. For more information, contact Marjorie Lee at 310-825-2974.