Kikuchi, Charles

Kikuchi was born in 1917 in the San Francisco Bay Area; his father was an Issei barbershop owner; he was placed in an orphanage when he was 8 years old; in 1934 he headed for San Francisco; BA, San Francisco State College, 1939; anonymously published an autobiographical essay, A young American with a Japanese face, in Louis Adamic's anthology titled, From many lands (1939); worked for the CA State Employment Service, surveying Nisei occupations; attended School of Social Welfare, UC Berkeley, and received certificate in social work in 1942; recruited by Berkeley sociologist Dorothy Swaine Thomas for the Japanese Evacuation and Relocation Study (JERS); Kikuchi began to keep a diary and completed field surveys at the Tanforan Assembly Center in Northern CA and at the Gila River Relocation Center in AZ; began chronicling camp resident settlement in Chicago, 1943; he was drafted into the US Army just before the bombing of Hiroshima; received master's degree in social work, NYU, 1947; worked as a social worker with the Veterans Administration, NY; married Yuriko Amemiya, a professional dancer, in 1946; died Sept. 25, 1988.

Biography

Kikuchi was born in 1917 in the San Francisco Bay Area; his father was an Issei barbershop owner; he was placed in an orphanage when he was 8 years old; in 1934 he headed for San Francisco; BA, San Francisco State College, 1939; anonymously published an autobiographical essay, A Young American with a Japanese Face, in Louis Adamic's anthology titled, From Many Lands (1939); worked for the California State Employment Service, surveying Nisei occupations; attended School of Social Welfare, University of California, Berkeley, and received certificate in social work in 1942; recruited by Berkeley sociologist Dorothy Swaine Thomas for the Japanese Evacuation and Relocation Study (JERS); Kikuchi began to keep a diary and completed field surveys at the Tanforan Assembly Center in Northern California and at the Gila River Relocation Center in Arizona; began chronicling camp resident settlement in Chicago, 1943; he was drafted into the United States Army just before the bombing of Hiroshima; received master's degree in social work, New York University (NYU), 1947; worked as a social worker with the Veterans Administration, New York; married Yuriko Amemiya, a professional dancer, in 1946; died September 25, 1988.