This month marks my 10th year as an AsianWeek columnist and my 30th year as a regular contributor to Asian Pacific American community journalism. I have a yellowed cover from the June 8, 1978, New York Nichibei on my shelf, which represents the first time I wrote for that now-defunct Japanese American bilingual weekly. My article describes how many young Japanese Americans, including myself, were trying to fit into an American mainstream that had until recently categorized us as “other.”
In 1978, the American-born Sansei generation, many of whom had recently graduated or were still in school, was trying to move beyond the “quiet American” myth that had held back our Nisei parents after their release from the wartime camp experience. We also were faced with a model minority myth that had arisen in the mid-1960s to try to explain why all Asian Pacific Americans seemed to be so smart.
I, like most others at the time, did not know the bigger picture about the influx of star students from Asia into our elite academic institutions starting in the 1960s, or the ways that “laundry-to-Ivy-League” stories were being used to tell African American and Latino students that their lack of achievement was their own fault, not the fault of a broken system.
I cannot remember exactly how I got started in journalism. My grandfather, Misao Tajitsu, wrote a regular column on the Japanese-language side of the New York Nichibei for many years before his death in 1964. He also wrote a monthly column about life in America for his hometown, Kagoshima, paper, with the proceeds going toward the upkeep of his family burial plot.
My recollection is that Taxie Kusunoki, the editor of the English side of the Nichibei, saw me speak at a hearing and asked me to write up my findings into an article. With that simple request, I was off on a three-decade adventure that continues to this day.
The Nichibei, like AsianWeek and many other APA community papers, was a family affair. Isaku Kida, the editor of the Japanese section, scanned the Japanese- and English-language dailies for stories he could summarize for his weekly. His wife, Emi, accompanied him on the long A-train ride, from the northern tip of Manhattan near Dyckman Street, down to the bustling commercial center at Park Place near the World Trade Center.
Emi Kida handled the bills and the typesetting of the Japanese section (yes, metal characters had to be hand-loaded into a wooden frame). She also somehow managed to carry huge bundles of the papers down the rickety stairs to the local post office. Given how tiny she was, I still cannot figure out how she did that.
On the English side, we were lucky to have several exceptional editors and writers. During the time I was at the Nichibei, Taxie Kusunoki, Teru Kanazawa and Penny Fujiko Willgerodt served as editors, and the writers included Tamio Spiegel, Chris and Kazu Iijima, Stanley Kanzaki and many members of the Kochiyama family. Because most of us did not get paid, it truly was a labor of love and community solidarity.
Community journalism today is both easier and harder. On the easy side, it is a joy to be able to look things up on the Internet, send e-mails to people I want to quote, and send my article to the AsianWeek editors with a push of a button. What is more difficult, however, is keeping up with the avalanche of information that has been written by and about Asian Pacific Americans over the last 30 years.
The United States Census started taking the pulse of our community in a concerted way in 1970, and many federal and state agencies started holding hearings and issuing reports about us only after we made demands for services and attention in the late 1960s. Communities from Southeast and South Asia that were tiny before 1970 ballooned with the arrivals of graduate students, refugees and relatives of recent immigrants. Children of refugees in California and children of Asian immigrant scientists at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey started to write books about their experiences. Asian American studies courses were developed and taught from New York to Honolulu.
I am writing a book that pulls together my essays from the last three decades, titled Internet Immigrant: An Asian American’s Voyage From the Community to the Web. I hope to highlight some of the people I’ve met, remember some of the events I’ve seen, and pay tribute to a community that has come a long way in 30 years.