Jonathan van Harmelen

jonathan

Jonathan van Harmelen is currently a Ph.D student in history at UC Santa Cruz specializing in the history of Japanese-American incarceration. He holds a BA in history and French from Pomona College and an MA from Georgetown University. He can be reached at jvanharm@ucsc.edu.

Updated February 2020

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culture en

A Heart to Heart: Carlos Bulosan and Japanese Americans - Part 2

By Jonathan van Harmelen, Greg Robinson
23 Sep 2022

Read Part 1>> In our previous section, we discussed Carlos Bulosan’s biography and his rise to success as an Asian American writer during the war years. While Bulsan wrote as a representative of Philippine Americans and centered his discussion on the experience of Pinoy workers, he showed a deep interest in other Asian American groups, particularly Japanese Americans. At a time when tensions were high between Filipino and Japanese Americans due to the Pacific War, Bulosan expressed feelings of friendship, empathy and admiration for the Nisei. In return, several Japanese Americ…

culture en

A Heart to Heart: Carlos Bulosan and Japanese Americans - Part 1

By Jonathan van Harmelen, Greg Robinson
22 Sep 2022

One of the first and most gifted writers to express an Asian American consciousness was Carlos Bulosan. Bulosan’s experience as a migrant laborer from the Philippines to the U.S. and his travels along the California coast during the era of the Great Depression inspired his work, most notably his autobiographical novel America is in the Heart (1946). The novel introduced the experience of Filipino migrants to American audiences. Bulosan’s incisive portraits of migrant farmworkers provided one of the first accounts for a mainstream audience of the prejudice and hardships that Fili…

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Kamisama of the Club — Jazz Player James Araki and Bebop in Japan

By Jonathan van Harmelen
13 Sep 2022

If there was a sound that defined United States history, it would be jazz. As Amiri Baraka stated in his landmark book Blues People, jazz’s history is intertwined with the black experience from enslavement, emancipation, segregation, and eventually on to migration to cities. Rooted in the Blues and the African American gospel, and drawing from European classical music and other musical traditions, jazz emerged at the beginning of the 20th century as a cornerstone of American identity at home and abroad. Within this larger history is the story of the Asian American musicians and fans wh…

war en

A Day at the Racetrack: Kenneth Rexroth’s Support for Japanese Americans During World War II

By Jonathan van Harmelen
28 Aug 2022

Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982) is, in many ways, California’s poet. Although born in Indiana and having spent most of his young adult years in Chicago, Rexroth left for California at age 22, and spent the remainder of his life there. During those subsequent fifty-five years, Rexroth embarked on an ambitious career as a poet, painter, and political activist, living the first half of his California years in San Francisco and his later years in Santa Barbara, where he was a professor of English at University of California, Santa Barbara. As poet Donald Hall described Rexroth in a 198…

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Teiko Ishida – A Woman of Conviction in the JACL — Part 2

By Jonathan van Harmelen
11 Aug 2022

Read Part 1 >> In September 1943, the Japanese American Citizens League announced that Mike Masaoka, George Inagaki, JACL membership director, and Joe Kanazawa, the JACL’s Eastern Representative, had enlisted in the U.S. Army and left their JACL positions. The JACL then selected Ishida as acting National Secretary for the east, and sent her to open a new office at 299 Madison Ave. in New York City. (For a time Ishida, along with the Tajiris, was the JACL’s only paid employee). During her tenure as acting national secretary, Ishida undertook several further initiatives to…

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Japanese migrants and their descendants

Jonathan van Harmelen

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書評：和泉真澄『日系カナダ人の移動と運動―知られざる日本人の越境生活史』

1992年渡米、目標は「アカデミー賞」— 俳優の井上英治さん

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Tiempos pandémicos: teletrabajo y koden digital

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第３部：金子正則知事の南米訪問とその主な見解

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Journal Entry #Lesson 3450: "Sharpen Your Pencils!"

Narumi Ogusuku Ubiquitous Nikkei Artist

Herald Salutes – Staff Sergeant Higuchi

The Morgenthau Diaries and FDR's Troubling Views of Minorities

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