Keiho Soga

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Yasutaro (Keiho) Soga (相賀安太郎 渓芳, March 18, 1873 Tokyo - March 7, 1957) was a Hawaiian Issei journalist, poet and activist. He was a community leader among Hawaii's Japanese residents, serving as chief editor of the Nippu Jiji, then the largest Japanese-language newspaper in Hawaii and the mainland United States, and organizing efforts to foster positive Japan-U.S. relations and address discriminatory legislation, labor rights and other issues facing Japanese Americans.[1] An accomplished news writer and tanka poet before the war, during his time in camp Soga authored one of the earliest memoirs of the wartime detention of Japanese Americans, Tessaku Seikatsu or Life Behind Barbed Wire.

Life

Born Yasutaro Soga to a relatively wealthy family in

Moloka'i, and then moved to Honolulu in 1899, where he took a job as a reporter for the Hawaii Shimpo. In 1905, after leaving the Shimpo over a dispute with its editors, he became editor of the Yamato Shimbun, which he renamed the Nippu Jiji in November of the following year.[2]

In 1908, Soga, Fred Kinzaburo Makino, Motoyuki Negoro, and Yoichi Tasaka formed the Higher Wage Association (Zokyu Kisei Kai). Together, they protested the low wages that Japanese plantation workers were making relative to other ethnic groups.[3] In 1909, Soga used the Nippu Jiji to champion the cause of Japanese plantation workers then striking for higher wages. He became one of the leaders of the territory-wide strike and was later arrested and convicted of conspiracy with the other founders of the Higher Wage Association. His wife, Kozue Sugino, fell ill while Soga was in prison, and died soon after his release.[1] He married Sei Tanizawa in 1911.[4]

Soga was arrested within hours of the

Lordsburg, New Mexico. In June 1943 he was moved to the DOJ camp at Santa Fe, where he would remain until October 1945.[5] Soga returned to Hawai'i in November 1945 and published a memoir of his experiences in camp, first as a series of articles in the Hawaii Times (the Nippu Jiji's new title) and then as a book in 1948.[1]

He continued to write poetry and publish articles for the Hawaii Times in the years after the war. In 1952, after the

Walter-McCarren Act
removed race-based restrictions on citizenship, Soga became a naturalized U.S. citizen. He published an autobiography, Gojunen no Hawaii Kaiko or Fifty Years of Hawaii Memories, in 1953. He died March 7, 1957.

Awards

  • 1985
    American Book Award
    for Poets Behind Barbed Wire

Works

Memoir

Anthologies

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c Niiya, Brian. "Yasutaro Soga," Densho Encyclopedia. Retrieved July 31, 2014.
  2. . Keiho Soga.
  3. ^ "Hawai'i Labor History Biographies". www.hawaii.edu. Retrieved 2019-01-03.
  4. OCLC 11030010.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link
    )
  5. ^ "Soga, Yasutaro (Keiho) | Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii". interneedirectory.jcch.com. Retrieved 2019-11-05.