Byline: Tokyo
Kiyama, Yoshitaka died more than half a century ago, but he spoke to me directly with the help of Fred Schodt and Peter Goodman.
Kiyama san told me what it was like to be a young Japanese immigrant living in San Francisco from 1904 to 1924. My father and grandfather were there at the same time as Kiyama san, but they never communicated what it felt like to wander the streets of San Francisco after the earthquake of '06 while the city burned, to walk the fair grounds of the Pan Pacific Exhibition, to eat and gamble in Chinatown or to live as an earnest, hard working poor immigrant in the swamp of anti-Japanese hatred generated by San Francisco labor unions, local Progressives of his day and the yellow journalists at the major dailies.
That anti-Japanese hatred still lives, in the hearts of people who deny that they have it and have no sense of where it comes from. Japan bashing still comes from the mouths of people like Democrat former congressman Dick Gephardt. (Gephardt is still a respected spokesman in his party, as is Al Sharpton -- another notorious public bigot.)
Kiyama san, speaks in slight translation with the brilliant help of translator Fred Schodt in a book of manga: The Four Immigrants Manga, 1999, Stone Bridge Press. Kiyama san speaks candidly, with humor and without rancor. The man who brings these words and images to us is Peter Goodman, publisher of Stone Bridge Press. (Click on the images to enlarge them. Kiyama san is the short man on the left in the drawing.)
Peter Goodman teaches one simple Phillips lesson with the publication of this unknown book and with many other extraordinary books in the Stone Bridge Press back list. The lesson: a good businessman, which Peter certainly is, can make a greater contribution, running his business with genius and wisdom, than all the contributions of all the charitable foundations in the Bay Area can make in a decade.
I spent several years in the 1980s trying to create an American awareness of the roots of the Japanese internment and the enduring history of Japan bashing. I would have succeeded if I had the power, humor and vivid images that Kiyama san put in his private manuscript that he self published in obscurity.