Colorado Times (newspaper)


Denver-based Japanese American newspaper that published from the 1910s to 1962 that was notable as one of only four Japanese American papers that published through the war years due to being based outside the West Coast restricted area.

The paper formed as the Santo Jiji in the 1910s through the merger of two existing papers and became the Kakushi Jiji / Colorado Times in 1917. By the 1930s, it was engaged in a sometimes heated rivalry with the Rocky Nippon , with the Times under bilingual Issei editor Fred Kaihara being more Christian oriented versus the more Buddhist orientation of the "Nippon . [1]

The outbreak of war and the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans led to increases in circulation for the Times and other inland Japanese American newspapers. According to historian Arthur Hansen, the Times and its more assimilationist editorial stance enjoyed particular popularity among Nikkei who left the concentration camps to resettle in areas outside the West Coast. Kaihara claimed a peak circulation of 12,000 copies in January 1946, with 90% of those subscribers residing outside of Colorado, many of them in Chicago . The paper tried to build on that base, adding columns by Minoru Yasui and the Chicago-based Togo Tanaka after the war. But with the re-establishment of Japanese American papers on the West Coast as well as new papers in Chicago, the Colorado Times circulation inevitably declined before shutting its doors in 1962. [2]

Authored by Brian Niiya , Densho

For More Information

Hansen, Arthur A. "Peculiar Odyssey: Newsman Jimmie Omura's Removal from and Regeneration within Nikkei Society, History, and Memory." In Nikkei in the Pacific Northwest: Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians in the Twentieth Century . Edited by Louis Fiset and Gail M. Nomura. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005. 278–307.

Hosokawa, Bill. Colorado's Japanese Americans: From 1886 to the Present Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2005.

Hiraga, Shyoko, interview by Art Hansen and Frank Abe, September 28, 2012. Densho Digital Repository.

Footnotes

  1. Bill Hosokawa, Colorado's Japanese Americans: From 1886 to the Present (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2005), 125–27; Toshio Yatsushiro, "Native Issei Farmer, Hatasaka Family," report #116, Oct. 25, 1946, The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement: A Digital Archive, Bancroft Library, University of California, call number BANC MSS 67/14 c, folder W 2.08:3, accessed on June 5, 2015 at http://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/jarda/ucb/text/cubanc6714_b314w02_0008_3.pdf
  2. Arthur A. Hansen, "Peculiar Odyssey: Newsman Jimmie Omura's Removal from and Regeneration within Nikkei Society, History, and Memory," in Nikkei in the Pacific Northwest: Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians in the Twentieth Century , edited by Louis Fiset and Gail M. Nomura (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 279–80; Toshio Yatsushiro, "Japanese Newspaper, Colorado Times Editor," report #66, Oct. 5, 1946, The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement: A Digital Archive, Bancroft Library, University of California, call number BANC MSS 67/14 c, folder W 2.08:3, accessed on June 5, 2015 at http://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/jarda/ucb/text/cubanc6714_b314w02_0008_2.pdf ; Hosokawa, Colorado's Japanese American , 135.

Last updated Dec. 16, 2023, 11:58 p.m..