Author: Mishio

“Inasaku to jinshu: 20 seiki shoto no amerika nanbu ni okeru nihonjin” [Race and Rice Farming: Japanese Settlers in the American South at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century]

Amerika kenkyu [The American Review] 58 (2024): 169-88.

My recently published article examined the Japanese migration to the Texas Gulf Coast at the beginning of the twentieth century. Using both Japanese and English primary sources, I argued how anti-Black and anti-Chinese racism shaped the patterns of the Japanese settlement in the Jim Crow South.

The e-version of this article is available through J-STAGE. In the meantime, if you would like a copy, you may also contact me, too. (myamanaka@sophia.ac.jp).

Amerika kenkyu is the flagship journal of the Japanese Association for American Studies.

“A College Town in Black and White: The Color Line and Fumiko Seki’s Days in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1955-1957”

North Carolina Historical Review 100 no. 1 (2023): 1-28.

My recently published article examines the memoir compiled and published by Fumiko Seki in 1966. She spent two years at Chapel Hill as a wife, a mother, and an international student of the University of North Carolina.

Seki’s memoir poses a series of important questions that complicates our understanding of the Jim Crow system and the civil rights movement in the 1950s.

• Why did Southern universities accept non-European international students while refusing to admit Black students?
• How did non-European international students understand the Jim Crow system and navigate the color line in the post-WWII American South?
• How did Seki’s Chapel Hill experience have an impact on her life back home in Japan?

Please check out my recent article in the North Carolina Historical Review.

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Image credit: “United Nations Day, 24 October 1956,” in the Roland Giduz Photographic Collection P0033, North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.