At the Association for Asian American Studies conference in Madison, Wisconsin, our new volume on John Okada was given an academic analysis in a panel titled “John Okada’s Unknown Works: Reassessing the (Un)governability of Japanese Americans in Mid-century America.”

We missed Vince Schleitwiler’s presence  on the panel, but moderator Floyd Cheung of Smith College did a great job presenting Vince’s paper on Okada’s satirical essays, “A Larger Capacity for Normalcy: Apparitions of the Non-Alien in Midcentury Empire” (download a PDF, also revised and published online as “The Bright Future  and Long Shadow of John Okada’s No-No Boy“).

John Streamas of Washington State University impressed with his own paper, “Street Lit: John Okada Ventures into the Proletarian” (download a PDF), a close reading of the Okada short story, “What Can I Do?”

And in the notes for his own presentation, “I Must Be Strong’: Awareness and Resistance in John Okada’s December 7th Poem” (download a PDF) Floyd Cheung investigates Okada’s prescience about dominant American racism and the need to self-govern Japanese American identity.

At the New Books Reception it was great to get the gang back together with the physical book available to share. Thanks to our editors at the University of Washington Press, Larin McLaughlin and Mike Baccam, for helping bring our book to life.

Thanks to Greg Robinson for organizing a panel revisiting the legacy of Conscience and the Constitution and Rabbit in the Moon on their 20th anniversary. Great to see Emiko and Chizu Omori again and to meet discussants Elena Creef, Chris Suh, Robert Hayashi, and Jonathan van Harmelen.

Finally, Professor Masumi Izumi of Doshisa University in Kyoto presented her translation of the Tule Lake Stockade Diary of Tatsuo Inouye. It’s a rare insight into the thoughts of the Issei and Kibei Nisei held in the prison within a prison camp for standing up for better living conditions for their families and community. It was a crucial guide in assuring the accuracy of our forthcoming graphic novel on camp resistance, and will likely have a place in our anthology of camp literature, which is also forthcoming. #AAAS2019