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Charles Kikuchi (1916-1988) was an author best known for his diaries,  the Kikuchi Diary: Chronicle from an American Concentration Camp  (1973). Which contained his nine months at the Gila River Relocation Center. His work was contributed to the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettelement Study. Kikuchi was an instrumental analyst, alongside the other Nisei intellectual group that included Tamotsu Shibutani, James Sakoda, and Tamie Tsuchiyama.

Early Life
Charles Kikuchi was born on January 18, 1916, in Vallejo California, he was orphaned in 1924 by his Issei parents at the age of eight years old. He grew up working as a migratory farm laborer, fish scaler, art store clerk, along with other low-end jobs that were available at the time to Japanese men. After graduating from San Francisco State College in 1939, he attented the School of Social Welfare at the University of California. He majored and pursed his passion in becoming a soical worker which was looked down upon by his Nisei peers who viewed the profession as feminine and unintellectual. Despite this Kikuchi moved on to gain his master's at the New York School of Social Work. Working during the postwar era, and coupled with a twenty-four-year career as a psychiatric social worker in Veterans' Administration Hospitals, he worked with predominantly counseled African American veterans of the Viet Nam War.

== The Kikuchi Diaries == Kikuchi was considered a minor celebrity in California Nisei society, as he had been known as the "Anonymous" author of " A Young American with a Japanese Face, " a narrative incorporated into From Many Lands (1940), a collection of essays edited by the Slovenian American writer and immigrant activist Louis Adamic. Due to his friendship with Adamic, Kikuchi was able to meet and briefly interact with luminaries of the 1940s, such as future editors of the Nation Carey McWilliams, novelists John Fante and William Saroyan, and journalist Herb Caen. Kikuchi was encouraged by his fellow writers to write his own story, as a symbol of the "new Americans".

Furthermore, during the evacuation and resettlement itself, Kikuchi joined a few of the Nisei to work under the demographer Dorothy Swaine Thomas and her heavily funded study of the internment. Here, Kikuchi became not only a member of the Nisei team on the ground but also a protege of Swaine's husband W.I Thomas. Before Kikuchi could write anything of consequence, however, he was forced to rejoin his family in the concentration camps at Tanforan, (San Bruno, California) and Gila River , (Rivers, Arizona). Kikuchi worked for the California State Employment Service, surveying Nisei occupations. He was recruited by Berkeley sociologist Dorothy Swaine Thomas for the Japanese Evacuation and Relocation Study (JERS). He wrote in his diary during this time. He completed field surveys at the Tanforan Assembly Center in Northern California as well as the Gila River Relocation Center in Arizona when he was with his family; and in 1943 chronicled camp resident settlement in Chicago. Kikuchi worked as the "head of household" after his father had been severely debilitated, Kikuchi got his broken family through the trauma of imprisonment over an eleven-month period. While holding his family together, he continued work on Thomas' JERS team, which ultimately allowed Kikuchi (and two of his younger sisters) the opportunity to leave Gila River and resettle in Chicago to continue his own graduate work (and his sisters their own high school and college studies). he was able to work more directly with principals of the Chicago School of Sociology, most notably Dorothy Thomas' husband, W.I. Thomas, Kikuchi started to become an expert in the methods of both "participant observation" and the recording of  "life histories." Tutored by W.I. in the taking of "life histories," Kikuchi was able to document the lives of sixty-four Japanese Americans who had "resettled" to Chicago during the war. Fifteen of these interviews were notable enough to make Dorothy Thomas' The Salvage (1952), the second of three volumes associated with JERS.Just before the bombing of Hiroshima he was drafted into the United States Army. The collection consists of Charles Kikuchi's diaries, correspondence, and related printed material about Japanese Americans and their relocation during World War II. Many of his diaries include clippings and programs related to the career of Kikuchi's wife, Yuriko Amemiya, who was a professional dancer and a member of Martha Graham's dance group.

Additionally, Kikuchi made ties and friendships with many African American South Siders when he lived on the eastern edge of St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, which is known as, "the Black Metropolis." Kikuchi was not a stranger to first to interracial interactions (he often worked alongside Mexican American and Filipino American migratory laborers throughout the San Joaquin Valley in his early twenties), he grew to have an unshakable strong affinity and respect for African Americans who dealt with the democratic struggle diagnosed by sociologist Gunnar Myrdal as "an American dilemma," or the failure of white America to live up to its creed and afford its African American population the human rights of equality and justice. Through his diaries, interviews with other Japanese Americans, and his close contact with African Americans in wartime Chicago, he also has some when he worked in postwar New York City as a VA counselor, Kikuchi believed and demonstrated this intellectual and emotional investment in African Americans as the "model minority" for other racialized and ethnic minorities in America. He saw African American inclusion in the American family as the key to fulfilling his own vision of a multiracial American democracy, but he also knew that it was nearly but not impossibly intractable structural, cultural, and social forces fighting against such an ideal of this society.

Kikuchi was hardly alone in his support of African American causes (other wartime Nisei intellectuals like Mary Oyama Mittwer, Ina Sugihara, and Larry Tajiri ). However, Kikuchi was certainly unique in his experiences and close relationships with African Americans, from his time in San Francisco, to his studies in Chicago, to his decades-long work with African American veterans during the 1960s and early 1970s.

Activism
During a reexcavation of the Kikuchi diaries there was revealed to be avenues of information and unexamined layers in the history of “democratic interracialism” at a time when America’s democracy was hardly a foregone conclusion. Due to the historical set of dynamics and processes in the 1940s allowed for, even actively provoked, the instability of defining key terms such as, “race,” “democracy,” and “citizenship.” Along with the multiple factors of the war, the internment, the ongoing civil rights movement, labor shortages and agitation, among other causes, encouraged an unprecedented set of overlapping counterpublics to interact and seek common cause, politically and ideologically. In the formation of such alliances, and preconceived notions of “how the races get along” were proved entirely contingent or, more, fluid. Charles Kikuchi stands at the center of these intersecting counterpublics. Under the influence of Adamic and his band of ethnic writers, the Thomases, fellow Nisei, and African American thinkers, Kikuchi enjoyed connecting with different ethnic groups during his analysis beyond only of black and white, incorporating the ideas and experiences of Asians, Jews, Mexicans, white ethnics, and indigenous people, as well as that of fellow travelers, migrant laborers, urban workers, and marginalized intellectuals in a fully globalized context.

Kikuchi focused this philosophy into practice when counseling traumatized African American veterans of the Vietnam War later in life: Kikuchi was able to recognize each man’s individual problems, describe consciously structural and systemic barriers to Black progress, and tried his best to provide aid and proper employment for these young men. Tragically, due to its level of unprofessionalism, the Veterans Administration hospital where Kikuchi worked assumed that the psychotic tendencies of all Black soldiers were a issue against policy. This caused for more Black vets to be systematically committed more and more to psychiatric wards without taking any in-depth case histories or spending measurable face-to-face time with the patients. Kikuchi retired from his position in the early 1970s. Before this he purposely took many of those African American men under his supervision in order to give them proper and professional treatment as individuals. His coworkers eventually left him alone with his Black patients or immediately referred them to him, but by his midfifties, Kikuchi decided he was done working, and retired in 1973. Before doing so he needed to make one last point: he stood outside the hospital where he had previously worked, he strategically positioned himself on the public sidewalk across from the building’s private property, and protested the Vietnam War in plain sight, with a homemade placard.