Two wartime issues of the PACIFIC CITIZEN revealing the historical context and issues of discrimination related to the forced removal and incarceration of West Coast Japanese Americans

Item Details

Salt Lake City, Utah, Japanese American Citizens League, 1942, Newspaper

Two wartime issues of the Pacific Citizen revealing the historical context and issues of discrimination related to the forced removal and incarceration of West Coast Japanese Americans.

PACIFIC CITIZEN: Vol. 15, No. 13, August 22, 1942 and Vol. 15, No. 15, September 10, 1942. Published by the Japanese American Citizens League, Salt Lake City, Utah. Larry Tajiri, editor. First edition. Newspaper format, 17” x 12”, 8 pages, illustrated with b&w photographs. Both issues are in VERY GOOD CONDITION: folded in half as issued, one was mailed and has a mailing label and stamp, some edgewear, toning and they are touch tender, overall bright, clean and readable. Most issues of the Pacific Citizen were sent to the camps. Scarce.

The Pacific Citizen was the newspaper of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), the leading Japanese American civil rights organization. First published in San Francisco in the 1930s, that all changed with Pearl Harbor and the wartime shutdown of all the Japanese newspapers on the West Coast. The editor of the PC was able to escape to Salt Lake City, outside the restricted zone, during the brief “voluntary relocation” period and published the PC from June 4, 1942 to September 27, 1952. The relocated weekly newspaper was important for keeping the fragmented Japanese American community informed about the tragic events that were happening to them, it provided news from the internment camps and served as a key source of information for the more than 120,000 Japanese Americans after their forced removal and confinement during World War II. 

The confinement of Japanese Americans in concentration camps and Department of Justice internment camps by the US government is regarded by historians as a watershed moment in Asian American history, alongside the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 and foreseeably the Trump EO’s of 2025. The WWII Japanese American experience is an important lesson for the world. 

CLICK HERE TO VISIT OUR NEWEST LISTINGS