About the Contributors
Rent from DeepDyve- About the Contributors
Philip K. Ige is a former administrator for the University of Hawai'i and the Hawai'i State Department of Education. He received his doctorate from Columbia University in 1968. One of the first Hawai'i writers to use pidgin English in his writing, he is regarded as a pioneer in Asian American literature.
Mitsugu Sakihara (1928-2001) was born in Okinawa. Drafted into the Japanese army while a teenager, he fought in the 1945 Battle of Okinawa, was wounded, and was taken as a prisoner of war by the United States. After spending the next half year in detention camps in Hawai'i and California, he returned to Okinawa. Later, he attended the University of Oregon, where he received his bachelor's and master's degrees, and the University of Hawai'i, where he received his doctorate and taught for twenty-five years. In 1995, he became president of Hawai'i International College.
Jon Shirota was born on Maui. His father immigrated to Hawai'i from Ginoza Village, Okinawa, in 1907, and his mother immigrated from Kanna Village in 1910. Upon graduating from Brigham Young University in Utah, he worked as a U.S. Treasury agent. In 1963, he was invited to the Handy Writers' Colony, where he completed Lucky Come Hawaii, the first of his three published novels. His plays have been produced in Honolulu, Los Angeles, New York, and Tokyo. He has received awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, American College Theater Festival, Los Angeles Actors Theater Festival of One Acts, Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, and National Endowment for the Arts.
Wesley Iwao Ueunten is an Okinawan Sansei who was born on Kaua'i. He received his doctorate in comparative ethnic studies from the University of California at Berkeley and is assistant professor of Asian studies at San Francisco State University. He has published articles on Okinawan identity and is the co-founder of Genyukai Berkeley, a group that learns, practices, and performs traditional and contemporary Okinawan music.
Katsunori Yamazato received his doctorate from the University of California at Davis and is professor of American literature and culture at the University of the Ryukyus. His books include Great Earth Sangha: Dialogues between Gary Snyder and Sansei Yamao; Japanese translations of Snyder's A Place in Space and Mountains and Rivers without End; and Post-War Okinawa and America: Fifty Years of Cross-Cultural Contact, which he co-edited. He is the director of the American [End Page 208] Studies Center of the University of the Ryukyus and director of the Pacific and North/South American Research Project "Human Migration and the Twenty-first Century Global Society."
Kinuko Maehara Yamazato is a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Hawai'i. Her article "To Okinawa and Back Again: Life Stories of Okinawan Kibei Nisei in Hawai'i" was published in 2007 in Uchinaanchu Diaspora: Memories, Continuities, and Constructions, edited by Joyce N. Chinen for Social Process in Hawai'i. [End Page 209]
