“All the World’s A-Fairs” Japanese Involvement in the 1939 Exposition from Personal, National, and International Perspectives, by Noah Barth

This project was initially inspired by Kaneji Domoto’s work in both the 1939 New York World’s Fair and 1939 International Exposition in San Francisco. These fairs came right before Japanese incarceration and WWII, so I decided to look at 1939 in depth instead of Japanese involvement across all international expositions.

I contextualize the fairs and the experiences of people there by the varied relationships that were happening at the time, like Japan’s battle with American Labor Unions and Japan’s strategic display of their own culture. I also contextualize Kaneji Domoto, a landscape architect, and Yasuo Matsui an architect within the fair, and the larger nation through the ways in which there were expectations placed upon them, why they were able to work at the Fairs, their battles for citizenship, their personal background and future trajectory.

The Fairs were further contextualized by the communities that attended them. Because West Coast traded with the Pacific States and had a large Nikkei community, the ways in which this fair engaged around Japan and Japanese identity were vastly different from New York. These are distinctions I make on the back page of the newsprint.

I think there is a lot of potential for a project like this. The goal would to to incorporate the newspaper into a larger public history project as something that learners could take home with them and continue to read and discover.