Pacific Citizen

About Pacific Citizen

When 120,000 Japanese Americans were forced into wartime incarceration camps, one newspaper kept publishing — and became their voice. The Pacific Citizen, founded in 1929 as the Nikkei Shimin ("Japanese American Citizen") and adopted as the official organ of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) in the early 1930s, is the national newspaper of Asian Pacific America: an award-winning, English-language semi-monthly published from Los Angeles' Little Tokyo, now in its tenth decade of chronicling the community it serves. It was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1946 for its wartime journalism. It is, quite simply, the paper of record for Japanese America.

1929: the Nikkei Shimin

The Pacific Citizen was founded in 1929 as the bulletin of the San Francisco "New American Citizens League," under the name Nikkei Shimin — Japanese American Citizen. Three years later it was adopted as the official organ of the fledgling Japanese American Citizens League, the nation's oldest and largest Asian Pacific American civil rights organization, and renamed: the publication's name was officially changed to Pacific Citizen in 1931, chosen in a national contest. During the 1930s it was taken over by Seattle-based editor James Sakamoto as an adjunct of his newspaper, the Japanese American Courier. Though formally a monthly, in those years it appeared only sporadically, concentrating largely on JACL chapter news — a modest organizational newsletter, not yet the newspaper it would become.

World War II: a voice in the camps

The war changed everything. When World War II broke out and 120,000 Japanese Americans were interned, the publication suspended its San Francisco operations and was moved to Salt Lake City, Utah — safely outside the exclusion zone — where editors Guyo Tajiri and Larry Tajiri were hired to run the then-weekly newspaper. During the war years, the P.C. became a full-fledged newspaper: the most articulate voice of mainland Japanese Americans and the principal purveyor of news to a community scattered across ten remote camps. Its coverage chronicled everyday life at the camps and the heroism of the Nisei soldiers of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and 100th Infantry Battalion. The Friends of the American Way nominated the P.C. for a Pulitzer Prize in 1946 for its journalism coverage — an extraordinary recognition for a community newspaper published in exile.

The Tajiri era

Larry Tajiri, the paper's wartime editor, shaped the Pacific Citizen into a serious journalistic institution. Hired in Salt Lake City to keep the fragmented community informed, he built a weekly that reported on the camps, the battlefields where Nisei soldiers fought, and the legal and political struggles of Japanese Americans with a professionalism that earned national respect. On September 27, 1952, Tajiri put together his last P.C. newspaper as editor — but the standards he set defined the paper for decades. At war's end, in the early 1950s, the P.C. returned to the West Coast, settling in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo, where its operations remain based today at 123 Astronaut Ellison S. Onizuka Street.

The JACL's national organ

The Pacific Citizen is published by the Japanese American Citizens League, founded in 1929 — the oldest and largest Asian American civil rights organization in the United States. The JACL was formed by combining existing Nisei organizations in California and Washington state, initially to lobby Congress to amend the Cable Act of 1922 and to secure citizenship for World War I veterans; its mission has since grown to monitor and respond to issues affecting the civil and human rights of all Americans, particularly Asian Pacific Americans. The P.C. is the League's voice and its conscience — covering the organization's conventions, its advocacy, and its debates, including the wrenching internal reckonings over the JACL's own wartime record. It is considered the leading national newspaper for the Asian Pacific American community.

Redress and remembrance

No story has defined the Pacific Citizen's modern era more than redress. The paper chronicled the decades-long movement that culminated in the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 — the federal apology and reparations for the wartime incarceration — and it continues to cover the unfinished business of that history: the preservation of camp sites, the fight against their desecration, and the lessons of incarceration for contemporary civil liberties debates. Its pages have carried the community's arguments with itself: over the JACL's wartime cooperation with the government, over the meaning of loyalty, over how a community remembers its darkest chapter. The P.C.'s digital archives at PacificCitizen.org make nearly a century of that record freely available — one of the great documentary resources of Asian American history.

An award-winning APA newspaper

Described on its own site as "more than nine decades old" and "an award-winning Asian Pacific American semi-monthly national newspaper," the Pacific Citizen is committed to delivering incisive coverage of important APA stories often ignored by other media outlets. Its scope has broadened far beyond its Japanese American origins to encompass the full diversity of Asian Pacific America — in-depth investigations, entertainment, sports and late-breaking stories affecting Chinese, Korean, Filipino, South Asian, Southeast Asian and Pacific Islander communities. With a circulation of 30,000, it remains a print institution in an age of digital ephemera: a broadsheet that lands in mailboxes, carrying the community's news as it has since 1929.

The archives: a century of APA history

One of the Pacific Citizen's most valuable contributions is its archive. The free digital archives at PacificCitizen.org preserve nearly a century of the paper — from the Nikkei Shimin bulletins of 1929 through the wartime Salt Lake City weeklies to the modern semi-monthly — making the P.C. one of the great documentary resources of Asian American history. Scholars of the incarceration, the redress movement, and postwar Japanese American life all draw on its pages. A community newspaper that kept publishing through its community's darkest chapter became, almost incidentally, that chapter's most complete contemporary record.

Editorial standards

The paper holds itself to exacting standards. Its published corrections policy pledges "fact-based, fair, objective, truthful and accurate reporting," and invites readers to report demonstrable errors with the date, headline and explanation — with corrections published in an upcoming issue. It is the kind of accountability mechanism more often promised than practiced, and it reflects the P.C.'s self-conception: not a house organ or a public-relations sheet, but a real newspaper, answerable to its readers.

Ten decades and counting

Since September 1929, the print edition of the Pacific Citizen has been the leading national newspaper for the APA community — from the Nikkei Shimin of San Francisco to the wartime weekly of Salt Lake City to the semi-monthly of Los Angeles' Little Tokyo. It survived the incarceration that silenced so many Japanese American papers, earned a Pulitzer nomination for telling the truth about it, and kept publishing through ten decades of American history.

What the P.C. represents, finally, is the proposition that a community's story deserves a newspaper of its own — one published by the community's own civil rights organization, accountable to no one else. Through the camps, through redress, through the broadening of "Asian Pacific American" from a census category into a political identity, the Pacific Citizen has been there, in print, every step of the way. For Asian Pacific America, the P.C. is not just a newspaper; it is the community's memory. Its official website is pacificcitizen.org.