About the Author

Daniel H. Inouye is a Ph.D. historian and an attorney who specializes in analytical narrative history writing, public history, Asian/Pacific American history, and jazz history.  He has taught courses at Columbia University, Queens College of the City University of New York, and New York University.
 

Reviews

"educational and entertaining. . . . worth a read."
—Nichi Bei Weekly
 

"Daniel H. Inouye’s Distant Islands is an important intervention as the first book on Japanese Americans in New York."
—The Journal of American History

"Distant Islands. . .  a rare and thought-provoking book, challenges conventional understanding of Japanese American history."
—American Historical Review

"This is an exciting and important new work for New York urban history, Japanese American history, and Asian American studies."
—New York History 

“Distant Islands is important for Asian American studies. . . . His very detailed portrait of some of the key Japanese leaders in New York City. . . . carries us beyond the mere socioeconomic classification of them as ‘immigrants’ (laborers) and ‘non-immigrants’ (merchants, professionals, and students).”
—Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

“An exemplary work of social history research. Dr. Inouye makes the world(s) of the Nikkei in inter-war New York come alive.”
—Mae Ngai, Columbia University

"Daniel Inouye's Distant Islands is an important, foundational, and nuanced history of the Nikkei diaspora in the NYC region. In this Empire metropolis Japanese migrants with different backgrounds gain distinctive relations to European Protestant Atlantic World money, status, and elite culture while also grappling with different degrees of class-inflected American othering of Japanese and Asians. Inouye weaves an insightful, urban story of lives impacted by conflicted social-cultural cleavages pulled from his many interviews and meticulous archival research."
—John Kuo Wei Tchen, Inaugural Clement Price Chair of Public History & Humanities, Rutgers University-Newark

"A deeply researched and well-written study of a community that has been an outlier in the field of immigration and ethnic history. . . . The book uses unusual material to uncover the history of a small community, providing an interesting way of thinking about the field."
—Hasia R. Diner, Paul And Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History, New York University