Born: 24 February 1903, Japan
Died: 27 October 2002
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is republished from the Densho Encyclopedia, in line with the Creative Commons licensing. It was written by Brian Niiya.
Pioneering sociologist who wrote about Japanese and Okinawan Americans in Hawai’i during and after World War II. Born in Yokohama, Japan, in 1903, she came to the U.S. to study at Oberlin College in 1935, eventually earning an M.A. in religious education. She joined the staff of the International Institute of the Honolulu YWCA in February 1938, where she worked with the local Japanese American community. She left the YWCA in 1944 to do work for the Office of War Information in Honolulu. Subsequently, she studied at the University of Hawaii under Andrew Lind, drawing on her observations of the Issei in Hawai’i to complete her master’s thesis in 1947. She went on to the University of Chicago where she again drew on her wartime research in Hawai’i as well as research in resettlement era Chicago for her Ph.D. dissertation in 1952. She joined the Romanzo Adams Social Research Laboratory at the University of Hawai’i, where she wrote many articles on Japanese and Okinawan communities in Hawai’i. In 1988, the University of Hawai’i Press published her book Issei: Japanese Immigrants in Hawaii, which drew on her research over the past nearly fifty years. She passed away at age 99 in Honolulu in 2002.