13 Facts About Keiho Soga

Yasutaro Soga was a Hawaiian Issei journalist, poet and activist.

Keiho Soga was a community leader among Hawaii's Japanese residents, serving as chief editor of the Nippu Jiji, then the largest Japanese-language newspaper in Hawaii and the mainland United States, and organizing efforts to foster positive Japan-US relations and address discriminatory legislation, labor rights and other issues facing Japanese Americans.

An accomplished news writer and tanka poet before the war, during his time in camp Soga authored one of the earliest memoirs of the wartime detention of Japanese Americans, Tessaku Seikatsu or Life Behind Barbed Wire.

Keiho Soga worked for plantation stores in Waianae, Waipahu and Moloka'i, and then moved to Honolulu in 1899, where he took a job as a reporter for the Hawaii Shimpo.

In 1908, Keiho Soga, Fred Kinzaburo Makino, Motoyuki Negoro, and Yoichi Tasaka formed the Higher Wage Association.

Related searches

In 1909, Keiho Soga used the Nippu Jiji to champion the cause of Japanese plantation workers then striking for higher wages.

Keiho Soga became one of the leaders of the territory-wide strike and was later arrested and convicted of conspiracy with the other founders of the Higher Wage Association.

Keiho Soga was arrested within hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7,1941, and, like many other Issei community leaders, spent the entire war confined in a series of detention centers run by the Army and the Justice Department.

Keiho Soga spent the first several months of the war at the Army-run Sand Island Internment Camp, located at the entrance to Honolulu Harbor, before being transferred to the mainland.

Keiho Soga arrived in San Francisco in August 1942 and was held at Fort McDowell for a month, after which he was again transferred to the Army internment camp at Lordsburg, New Mexico.

Keiho Soga returned to Hawai'i in November 1945 and published a memoir of his experiences in camp, first as a series of articles in the Hawaii Times and then as a book in 1948.

Keiho Soga continued to write poetry and publish articles for the Hawaii Times in the years after the war.

Keiho Soga published an autobiography, Gojunen no Hawaii Kaiko or Fifty Years of Hawaii Memories, in 1953.