Yukiko Kimura

Name Yukiko Kimura
Born February 24 1903
Died October 27 2002
Birth Location Yokohama, Japan
Generational Identifier

Issei

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.

Authored by Brian Niiya , Densho

For More Information

Kimura, Yukiko. "Some Effects of the War Situation Upon the Alien Japanese in Hawaii." Social Process in Hawaii 8 (1943): 18-28.

———. "Rumor Among the Japanese." Social Process in Hawaii 11 (1947): 84-92.

———. "A Sociological Analysis of Types of Social Readjustment of Alien Japanese in Hawaii Since the War." M. A. thesis, University of Hawaii, 1947.

———. "A Comparative Study of Collective Adjustment of the Issei, the First Generation Japanese in Hawaii and in the Mainland United States Since Pearl Harbor." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1952.

———. "Sociological Significance of Japanese Language School Campaign in Hawaii." Social Process in Hawaii 20 (1956): 47-51.

———. "War Brides in Hawaii and Their In-Laws." American Journal of Sociology 63.1 (July 1957): 70–76

———. "Social-Historical Background of the Okinawans in Hawaii." In Uchinanchu: A History of the Okinawans in Hawaii . Edited by Ethnic Studies Oral History Project/United Okinawan Association of Hawaii. Honolulu: Ethnic Studies Program, University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1981. 51-71. Originally published as Romanzo Adams Research Laboratory Report No. 36 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1962).

———. "Religious Affiliation of War Brides in Hawaii and their Marital Adjustment." Social Process in Hawaii 26 (1963): 88–95.

———. "Locality Clubs as Basic Units of the Social Organization of the Okinawans in Hawaii." Phylon 29 (1968): 331-38. Reprinted in Uchinanchu: A History of Okinawans in Hawaii . 283-90.

———. "Okinawans and Hog Industry in Hawaii." In Uchinanchu: A History of Okinawans in Hawaii . 217-22.

———. Issei: Japanese Immigrants in Hawaii . Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988.

Yu, Henry. Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America . New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Last updated June 19, 2015, 3:01 a.m..