Brown Bag Biography with Mire Koikari

Enlarge image

The Center for Biographical Research presents: /“Crafting Japanese Immigrant Nationalism(s) in 1930s Hawai‘i” / Mire Koikari, Professor, Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa / Prior to WWII, Japanese immigrant nationalism flourished in Hawai‘i. At the center of this little-known phenomenon were imon bukuro (comfort bags), handmade by immigrant women and gifted to Japanese soldiers—those aboard the navy training vessels calling Hawai‘i as well as troops deployed in the distant battlefields in China. The gendered patriotic campaign was part of the larger tale of Japan’s empire-building in which island and homeland, gunboat and sewing needle, and territorial conquest and seaborne expansion all played crucial roles. / Mire Koikari is Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Born and raised in Yokohama, Japan, she spent a number of years in Madison, Wisconsin prior to her relocation to Hawai‘i in 1997. Her recent/major publications include Cold War Encounters in US-Occupied Okinawa: Women, Militarized Domesticity, and Transnationalism in East Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Gender, Culture, and Disaster in Post-3.11 Japan (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2020; currently translated into Russian), and “Race, Nutrition, and Empire: Domestic Reform and Japanese Immigrants in Territorial-Era Hawai‘i,” in Gender & History, “Special Issue: Food and Sovereignty” (vol. 34, no. 3, 2022). / Cosponsored by Hamilton Library, the Center for Oral History, Conflict and Peace Specialist, and the Departments of American Studies, English, Ethnic Studies, History, Political Science, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies / Thursday, February 29 / Kuykendall 410 / 12PM to 1:15PM HST

Event Sponsor
Center for Biographical Research, Mānoa Campus

More Information
(808) 956-3774

Tweet