Translation, Technology, and the Digital Archive: Preserving a Historic Japanese-Language Newspaper

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Notes

The newspaper explains on its website that it uses the term Nikkei to refer to people of Japanese heritage.

The newspaper will be referred to as the North American Post from here forward instead of referred to by its English and Japanese names. The University of Washington Libraries also lists the newspaper with the Kanji characters: 北米報知.

I extend my thank you to the two primary people organizing the Nikkei Newspaper Digital Archive Project for their roles in explaining the project: Elaine Ikoma Ko, the foundation's executive director, and Glenda Pearson, head of the library's Microform and Newspaper Collections, for their efforts in describing the intricacies of the project and processes. Ko started the Hokubei Hochi Foundation and serves as its executive director. Pearson is head of one of largest microform and newspaper library collections in North America.

Pearson and other experts in the library—including Anne Graham, a senior computer specialist with the library's Digital Initiatives Program; Theodore Gerontakos, a metadata/ cataloging librarian; Melanie Bolla, a graduate student in computational linguistics; and consultants in the East Asian Library—work together to coordinate newspaper scans, conduct metadata analysis, and more. The publisher of the North American Post and Soy Source, Tomio Moriguchi, also serves as the foundation's board president. Yohji Kameoka, another board member, helps with translation. Maiya Gessling is a NNDAP staff member and Hokubei Hochi Foundation student intern.

KJ Hiramoto and Rena Kawasaki were the first undergraduate researchers to join the project from the University of Washington-Bothell's School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences.

The Library of Congress, “Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers,” Chronicling America, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/. These numbers get updated continually on the website. The program's “historically significant newspapers” include those published in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.

Office of the Secretary of State, “Newspapers at the Washington State Library,” Washington State Library, http://www.sos.wa.gov/library/newspapers_wsl.aspx. The Washington State Library began a pilot project to create a digital collection of the Pioneer Newspaper collections in 2005. Laura Robinson, “The Evolution of Newspaper Digitization at the Washington State Library,” Microform & Imaging Review 39, no. 1 (March 2010): 24–27. This effort preceded the library involvement with the National Digital Newspaper Program beginning in 2008.

Ingrid Pharris, “Chronicling Washington: WSL Receives Additional Funding for Newspaper Digitization Project,” Our Corner: Washington Secretary of State Blogs, August 17, 2012, http://blogs.sos.wa.gov/FromOurCorner/index.php/2012/08/chronicling-washington-wsl-receives-additional-funding-for-newspaper-digitization-project/.

Kanji are Chinese characters, and Hiragana and Katakana are syllabaries, or sets of written symbols for syllables. Hiragana are used to help readers understand the Kanji and to write words for which there is no Kanji equivalent. Katakana are used primarily to write foreign words and to create emphasis. I thank Rena Kawasaki for helping me understand these distinctions.

The newspaper, as mentioned earlier, was not published during World War II when Japanese Americans were interned.

It is identified in many sources as a Japanese-language newspaper. However, it should be noted that the newspaper contains some English-language content as well, including the introduction of an “English Section” in the January 1, 1947, issue, and the newspaper's contemporary bilingual Japanese- and English-language content. In an editorial in the January 1, 1947, issue, Sadahiko Ikoma, the editor and publisher, said that the English Section was making its “initial bow,” and that the hope was “to enlarge its English Section and finally [publish] ‘all in English’ ” as the new generation of Japanese Americans comes of age. That English-language page followed eleven pages in Japanese language in a twelve-page issue.

In 2012, the North American Post purchased a Japanese-language newspaper competitor called the Soy Source and publishes this newspaper alongside its own.

The aim was to include a year's worth of publishing. Some recent materials discussing the project now describe the goal of digitizing 1946 and the year 1947 is not included.

Elaine Ikoma Ko was the InterIm Community Development Association's executive director and operations director, the founding director of the International District Housing Alliance, the director of the City of Seattle's Office for Women's Rights, and the coordinator for the King County Women's Program. René Brogan, “Elaine Ikoma Ko: Challenging Careers in Civic Activism,” University of Washington Department of Communication Alumni News, August 9, 2012, http://www.com.washington.edu/2012/08/elaine-ikoma-ko-challenging-careers-in-civic-activism/. Amanda Ma, “Alumni Hall of Fame: Advocate for Social Justice Elaine Ikoma Ko,” University of Washington Department of Communication Alumni Profile, October 18, 2012, http://www.com.washington.edu/2012/10/alumni-hall-of-fame-advocate-for-social-justice-elaine-ikoma-ko/.

Kirsten Johnson, “Bilingual North American Post to Be Digitized at UW Libraries,” University of Washington Department of Communication Alumni News, November 13, 2012, http://www.com.washington.edu/2012/11/bilingual-north-american-post-to-be-digitized-at-uw-libraries/.

Ibid.

Tomio Moriguchi, the publisher of the North American Post and Soy Source, is the son of Fujimatsu Moriguchi, who founded Seattle's Uwajimaya Asian Grocery & Gift Markets, a local and family-owned specialty supermarket chain.

Pearson and the Digital Initiatives Program worked with the Hokubei Hochi Foundation from the beginning.

Glenda Pearson, personal communication to author, February 28, 2013.

Ko stopped by the office during interviews for a separate research project.

Kirsten Johnson, “Bilingual North American Post to Be Digitized at UW Libraries,” University of Washington Department of Communication Alumni News, November 13, 2012, http://www.com.washington.edu/2012/11/bilingual-north-american-post-to-be-digitized-at-uw-libraries/.

Bob Nicholson, “The Digital Turn: Exploring the Methodological Possibilities of Digital Newspaper Archives,” Media History 19, no. 1 (2013): 59–73.

Ibid., 63.

Ibid., 63.

Laurel Brake, “The Longevity of ‘Ephemera,’ ” Media History 18, no. 1 (2012): 7–20.

Patrick Leary, “Googling the Victorians,” Journal of Victorian Culture 10, no. 1 (2005): 72–86.

James Mussell, “Ownership, Institutions, and Methodology,” Journal of Victorian Culture 13, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 94–100.

Lynn Copeland, “Exposing Canada's Histrical Ethnic Newspapers through the Multicultural Canada Project,” World Library and Information Congress: 76th IFLA General Conference and Assembly, August 10–15, 2010, http://conference.ifla.org/past/2010/102-copeland-en.pdf.

Nicholson, 65.

Ibid., 61.

Nicholson.

Adrian Bingham, “The Digitization of Newspaper Archives: Opportunities and Challenges for Historians,” Twentieth Century British History 21, no. 2 (April 2010): 225–231, 229.

According to their respective websites, the Seattle Foundation gave the Hokubei Hochi Foundation $24,000 in 2011, a portion of which went to the NNDAP, and 4Culture gave the foundation $2,600 in 2012 for the “Hokubei Hochi Newspaper Preservation Project.”

University of Washington Libraries, “Digital Initiatives Program,” http://www.lib.washington.edu/digital/.

The Seattle Foundation, “Nonprofit Organization Profiles: Hokubei Hochi Foundation,” http://www.seattlefoundation.org/npos/Pages/HokubeiHochi.aspx.

The site became active in February 2014.

This process of organizing subject headings is not beyond critique. Sanford Berman was among the first to critique biases embedded in the listings. He worked as a head cataloger for Hennepin County Library in Minnesota. Sanford Berman, Prejudices and Antipathies: A Tract on the LC Subject Heads Concerning People (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1971).

Glenda Pearson, personal communication to author, December 4, 2013.

I thank Rena Kawasaki for explaining this process in greater detail.

Joan M. Reitz, “Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science,” CLIO, http://www.abc-clio.com/ODLIS/odlis_A.aspx. Descriptive metadata is intended to facilitate the “discovery, identification, and selection” of an information resource (oftentimes to aid usability); structural metadata is intended to describe “internal organizing” of that information resource (such as tying together various components); and administrative metadata is intended to facilitate management of an information resource (such as identifying restrictions to access or when a document was created).

Ibid. A keyword index is a “type of subject index in which significant words, usually from the titles of the works indexed, are used as headings.” A subject index alphabetically arranges the list of headings selected by an “indexer” to represent subject content and can include names, geography, and authors.

Ibid. A controlled vocabulary provides an “established list of preferred terms from which a cataloger or indexer must select when assigning subject headings or descriptors in a bibliographic record, to indicate the content of the work in a library catalog, index, or bibliographic database.” The LOC Authorities described in this essay provide standards, which are a controlled vocabulary.

Again, Rena Kawasaki provided help in explaining the process. One solution considered for building the Japanese-language thesaurus was to use a Japanese-language history book as a reference. However, most of these focus on Japan's history, whereas the newspaper's content centered on US history or Japanese history as seen from the lens of Japanese Americans. Another solution offered by Azusa Tanaka, who is a Japanese Studies Librarian from the University of Washington Libraries East Asia Library and consulted on the NNDAP project, might be to use a Japanese-language book of US history. This is one example of the kind of decisions that digitizing archives requires for creating metadata.

Marha P. Y. Cheung, “The Mediated Nature of Knowledge and the Pushing-Hands Approach to Research on Translation History,” Translation Studies 5, no. 2 (2012): 156–171, 156.

Lucille M. Schultz, “Foreword,” in Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process, ed. Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), vii.

Ibid.

Ibid.

David L. Altheide, Qualitative Media Analysis: Qualitative Research Methods (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996), 4.

Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966). Norman Fairclough, Discourse and Social Change (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 1992). Stuart Hall, “Culture, the Media and the ‘Ideological Effect,’ ” in Mass Communication and Society, ed. James Curran, Michael Gurevitch, and Janet Woollacott (London: Open University Press, 1977), 315–347.

James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (New York: Routledge, 1989 [reprinted 1992]), 20, 23.

Ibid., 20, 23.

Glenda Pearson, personal communication to author, December 4, 2013.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Simon Tanner, Trevor Muñoz, and Pich Hemy Ros, “Measuring Mass Text Digitization Quality and Usefulness: Lessons Learned from Accessing the OCR Accuracy of the British Library's 19th Century Online Newspaper Archive,” D-Lib Magazine 15, no. 7/8 (2009), http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july09/munoz/07munoz.html. Tanner et al. point to Schantz's scholarship on reading aids to the blind, which were patented in 1809. Herbert F. Schantz, The History of OCR, Optical Character Recognition (Manchester Center, VT: Recognition Technologies Users Association, 1982).

Nicholson, 64.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Glenda Pearson, personal communication to author, December 4, 2013. Pearson suggests that these challenges support an argument for digital image databases, which would make the entire published page viewable and readable, “thus allowing for more serendipity, browsing, and almost demanding that the context of a particular article be considered, or at least making it easily possible to consider.”

Ibid.

Marha P. Y. Cheung, “The Mediated Nature of Knowledge and the Pushing-Hands Approach to Research on Translation History,” Translation Studies 5, no. 2 (2012): 156–171, 158.

Ibid., 157.

Rena Kawasaki, “How Language Use Indicates Acculturation and Enculturation Processes of Native Japanese and Japanese Americans: Examples from the 1946 Issues of Hokubei Hochi,” unpublished work (2013).

Kawasaki explained that in an October 23, 1946, North American Post article, the first version of the word “consumed” was written as 盡 in its old form of Kanji and 尽 in the new. She deconstructed the old Kanji. The older form is composed from 筆, which means brush, and 皿, which means plate. The literal meaning, therefore, is to brush off whatever is on the plate until it is empty. This notion of void or nothingness is central to “Zen,” a branch of Japanese philosophy. However, in the second form of the word “consumed,” this ideology is entirely omitted. When the Kanji is simplified to 尽, the character still possesses the meaning of “corpse,” which partly shares the meaning of nothingness, but has lost its totality. Kawasaki cited the Kanji dictionary as her guide in understanding this translation: Tadashi Kamada and Torataro Yoneyama, Kangorin (Tokyo: Taishūkan Shoten, 1987).

 These changes occurred in the time frame when the language transformation movement took place in Japan. “After the Language Reform Policy, certain parts of Kanji characters were simply omitted in some Kanjis. In others, they were replaced by simplified components that often do not portray the meanings of the original characters,” Kawasaki, 2013, 7.

Again, I thank Rena Kawasaki for explaining this process in greater detail.

James D. Startt and Wm. David Sloan, Historical Methods in Mass Communication (Northport, AL: Vision Press, 2003), 51.

Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Trying to determine how to translate the metadata for a contemporary audience without losing the rich meaning of the past takes time. At an early stage in the project, two undergraduate researchers worked together to capture nuances in language. One person took the Kanji character and translated what it meant literally; the second person tried to make the translation make sense in the context of 2013. For example, the term for refrigerator was written in Kanji as “cold-container” in 1946, explained Rena Kawasaki. It would have been translated to the modern Kanji term of “cold-storage” to make sense for a contemporary audience using the metadata. Kawasaki, 2013.

Sebastian Jobs and Alf Lüdtke, “Unsettling History: Introduction,” in Unsettling History: Archiving and Narrating in Historiography, ed. Sebastian Jobs and Alf Lüdtke (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2010), 7–25. Italics in original.

US Census “Characteristics of the Population” reported these numbers. Bureau of the Census, “Population: Volume II Characteristics of the Population,” in Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1943), 304.

Doug Chin, Seattle's International District: The Making of a Pan-Asian American Community (Seattle, WA: International Examiner Press, 2001).

There is no indication of which newspapers. The Seattle Ministerial Federation, Report of the Committee on Orientals (Seattle, WA: Seattle Ministerial Federation, June 4, 1917).

Chin, 32.

David A. Takami, Divided Destiny: A History of Japanese Americans in Seattle (Seattle: University of Washington Press and Wing Luke Asian Museum, 1998).

Ibid.

Chin, 69.

Ronald Bishop, “‘Little More Than Minutes’: How Two Wyoming Community Newspapers Covered the Construction of Heart Mountain Internment Camp,” American Journalism 26, no. 3 (Summer 2009): 7–32. Patricia A. Curtin, “Press Coverage of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team (Separate Nisei): A Case Study on Agenda Building,” American Journalism 12, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 225–241. Bradley J. Hamm, “Redefining Racism: Newspaper Justification for the 1924 Exclusion of Japanese Immigrants,” American Journalism 16, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 53–69.

Thomas B. Christie and Andrew M. Clark, “Framing Two Enemies in Mass Media: A Content Analysis of US Government Influence in American Film during World War II,” American Journalism 25, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 55–72; Betty Houchin Winfield and Janice Hume, “Shhh, Do Tell! World War II and Press-Government Scholarship,” American Journalism 12, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 367–383.

Thomas H. Heuterman, “‘We Have the Same Rights as Other Citizens’: Coverage of Yakima Valley Japanese Americans in the ‘Missing Decades’ of the 1920s and 1930s,” Journalism History 14, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 94–103.

Lauren Kessler, “Fettered Freedoms: The Journalism of World War II Japanese Internment Camps,” Journalism History 15, no. 2–3 (Summer/Autumn 1988): 70–79; Catherine A. Luther, “Reflections of Cultural Identities in Conflict: Japanese American Internment Camp Newspapers during World War II,” Journalism History 29, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 69–81; Takeya Mizuno, “The Federal Government's Decisions in Suppressing the Japanese-Language Press, 1941–42,” Journalism History 33, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 14–23; Takeya Mizuno, “Journalism under Military Guards and Searchlights: Newspaper Censorship at Japanese American Assembly Campus during World War II,” Journalism History 29, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 98–106; Takeya Mizuno, “Self-Censorship by Coercion: The Federal Government and the California Japanese-Language Newspapers from Pearl Harbor to Internment,” American Journalism 17, no. 3 (Summer 2000): 31–57; John D. Stevens, “From Behind the Barbed Wires: Freedom of the Press in World War II Japanese Centers,” Journalism Quarterly 48 (Summer 1971): 279–287.

Four of the newspapers were listed with variations in the name in a 1920 report of Seattle businesses by Phillip Tindall and the Seattle City Council: Great Northern, North American Times, Ashi News, and Japanese American Review. US Congress, “Part 4: Hearings at Seattle and Tacoma, Wash.; Appendix; Index,” The Committee on Immigration and Naturalization House of Representatives, Sixty-Sixth Congress, Second Session, July 26, 27, 28, 29; August 2 and 3, 1920 (Washington, DC: Washington Government Printing Office, 1921), 1119.

Greg Lang, “Seattle's First Japanese Newspaper, The Report, Is Issued in 1899,” History Link: The Free Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History, June 10, 2001, http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file_id=3352.

Washington Secretary of State Wikis, “WA State National Digital Newspaper Program Wiki,” http://wiki.secstate.wa.gov/ndnp/MainPage.ashx.

The 2005 and 2007 awards were for years 1880–1910. In 2008, the focus was 1880–1922. In 2009, the years were 1860–1922. And in 2010, 2011, and 2012, the years were 1836–1922. The Library of Congress, “Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers,” Chronicling America, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/.

The Library of Congress, “Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers,” Chronicling America, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/.

National Endowment for the Humanities, “Funded Projects Query Form,” https://securegrants.neh.gov/publicquery/main.aspx. Grant period: 7/1/2008–8/31/2014. The original grant in 2008 was $341,424, and supplement grant in 2010 was $284,000 and in 2012 was $310,000.

The expectation is that program participants “digitize primarily from microfilm holdings for reasons of efficiency and cost, encouraging selection of technically-suitable film, bibliographic completeness, diversity and ‘orphaned’ newspapers (newspapers that have ceased publication and lack active ownership) in order to decrease the likelihood of duplicative digitization by other organizations.” The Library of Congress, “Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers,” Chronicling America, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/.

Continued efforts of the University of Washington Libraries to secure a complete run of the newspapers have proven unsuccessful. There are several gaps in the Hokubei Jiji's publication record that would fit the pre-1922 publication criteria of the National Digital Newspaper program. The library is missing record of all of the issues from 1902 to October 14, 1916, and then most of the 1920s issues (with the exception of January–March 1920).

Glenda Pearson points out that it was not until Lucy Maynard Salmon's The Newspaper and the Historian in 1923 “that historians, at least in the US, really began to see newspaper content as significant resources to studying history.” Librarians have worked to preserve “a diversity of publications, almost none of which would have ‘qualified’ for preservation if more conservative voices had prevailed,” Pearson says. Lucy Maynard Salmon, The Newspaper and the Historian (New York: Oxford University Press, 1923). Glenda Pearson, personal communication to author, December 4, 2013.

KJ Hiramoto, “My Discovery with Nikkei Heritage,” North American Post (Seattle, WA), June 27, 2013, http://www.napost.com/2013/06/27/my-discovery-with-nikkei-heritage/.

Jobs and Lüdtke.

Philipp Müller, “Ranke in the Lobby of the Archive: Metaphors and Conditions of Historical Research,” in Unsettling History: Archiving and Narrating in Historiography, ed. Sebastian Jobs and Alf Lüdtke (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2010), 109–125.