Report from Tokyo

New York: Nichi-Bei Minshu Linkai, by permission from Simon and Schuster, 1943. Very good.. 95,[1]pp. Original pictorial wrappers. Minor wear and soiling to covers. An interesting work with an even more interesting provenance. Report from Tokyo: A Message to the American People was written by Joseph Grew, the United States Ambassador to Japan from 1932 to 1941. It was first published in English by Simon and Schuster in 1942, and in the next year in the present form - translated into Japanese for the Nichi-Bei Minshu Linkai, known in English as the Japanese American Committee for Democracy (JACD) in New York. The JACD was an anti-fascist group founded by Issei and Nisei activists and those sympathetic to their cause in New York City. The group was closely aligned with the Communist Party, and its early board members included the Executive Director of the ACLU, Roger Baldwin, and NAACP co-founder John Haynes Holmes. The work itself was written by Ambassador Grew to inform the American public of the seriousness of the threat presented by Japan in the coming war, with chapters such as "The Extent of the Japanese Challenge," "Why We Can No Longer Do Business With Japan," and "Is This a Racial War?" The work also includes President Franklin Roosevelt's famous message to Congress on December 8, 1941 calling for war with Japan (which opened, "Yesterday, December 7, 1941 -- a date which will live in infamy..."). The title of the book translates from Japanese as Back from Japan.

The present copy was owned by Kujoshi Abe, a Japanese American from Monterey, California who was born in 1921 and interned at Poston in Arizona during World War II. Abe's ownership of the book as well as his presence at Poston are confirmed in the ownership inscription written on the back cover of the present work: "Showa 18 (1943), September 10th; at Poston; Owned by Kujoshi Abe." We could locate no other information about Abe readily available in war or ancestry records. This is the first book we've encountered that was owned by a Japanese American internee at the time of their incarceration during the Second World War. OCLC locates just eleven copies of this English translation of Grew's work, but as far as we can tell, none of them were owned by internees.