Digital Museum of the History of Japanese in New York

投稿者:

Issei

ISSEI Portraits Of The First-Generation Japanese New Yorkers Created in 1980 by Japanese photographer Hiroyuki “Tora” Inoue, these portraits capture New York’s Issei, the first generation of Japanese immigrants whose lives helped shape the city’s Japanese community but often remained unseen. Nearly forty-five years later, most of this remarkable body of work is now brought together in this digital exhibition. Hiroyuki Inoue (left) and Teruho Saito (right) at the original ISSEI exhibition at JAA in 1980 Inoue passed away in 2024, and many of the individuals in these photographs remain unidentified. By exhibiting the portraits and interview notes together, this ongoing participatory project invites family members, descendants, community members, researchers, […]

Lecture on Exhibiting Japan in Mid-Century New York by Dr. Angus Lockyer, Rhode Island School of Design

In this lecture, historian Angus Lockyer examines Japan’s participation in the 1939–40 and 1964–65 New York World’s Fairs. He explores how Japan’s pavilions and exhibitions combined traditional culture with modern achievement while responding to the very different diplomatic circumstances of the prewar and postwar periods. Placing the Japanese exhibits within the broader history of international expositions, Flushing Meadows, and New York City, Lockyer shows how government officials, exhibitors, and the Japanese community used the fairs to present Japan to Western audiences and navigate a turbulent century. Angus Lockyer is a historian of Japan, East Asia, and global history. He is the author of Exhibitionist Japan: The Spectacle of Modern Development […]

Kōsaku Yamada at Carnegie Hall

Kōsaku Yamada The First Japanese Conductor at Carnegie Hall This digital exhibit, presented by the Digital Museum of the History of Japanese in New York (DMHJNY) in collaboration with Carnegie Hall, revisits Yamada’s time in New York and his pivotal Carnegie Hall appearances of 1918–1919. This event forms part of Carnegie Hall’s Spotlight on Japan. Prelude In November 1918, composer Kōsaku Yamada (1886–1965) (山田耕筰) arrived in New York City—then emerging as the cultural capital of a new postwar world. Within months, he made history as the first Japanese musician to conduct and perform his own works at Carnegie Hall, introducing American audiences to a distinctly modern vision of Japanese music. […]

Witness and Memory: A-Bomb and WWII Testimonies in New York

WITNESS AND MEMORY A-Bomb and WWII Testimonies in New York This exhibit brings together the voices of Japanese and Japanese American individuals whose lives were forever altered by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan and by the broader experience of World War II as residents of New York. Some were survivors of the a-bombs, or  hibakusha, who later made their way to the United States. Others experienced growing up in the internment camps and migrating to the east coast. All joined the Japanese diaspora in New York and New Jersey and have carried those histories forward. Each story shared here is a personal one, shaped by war, […]