The Citizenship Question: A Conversation

Masumi Izumi is a professor in the department of global and regional studies at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, where she teaches North American studies. Izumi researches Japanese American and Japanese Canadian wartime experiences as well as their post-internment communities and trans-Pacific migration and has written numerous articles on these topics in English and Japanese. She authored The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law: Civil Liberties Debates from the Internment to McCarthyism and the Radical 1960s and also contributed an article on a Japanese Canadian baseball team to an edited volume, The Subject(s) of Human Rights: Crises, Violations, and Asian/American Critique; both were published by Temple University Press in 2019.

Joy Kogawa’s most recent book is Gently to Nagasaki (Caitlin Press, 2017). Her 1981 novel Obasan, which tells the story of a Japanese Canadian family removed from their home during World War II, won the American Book Award, among many other literary honors, and is widely taught in Canadian schools and universities. Kogawa became a Member of the Order of Canada in 1986; in 2010, the Japanese government honored her with the Order of the Rising Sun “for her contribution to the understanding and preservation of Japanese-Canadian history.” She lives in Toronto and hopes to write a work on forgiveness.