Fifty years ago, after Japanese-Americans and their children had endured the trauma of internment, they turned to newspapers such as Chicago Shimpo for leadership. As its causes and readers dwindle, the newspaper tries to reinvent itself.
Ryoichi Fuji was 40 years old and new to Chicago as World War II ended. Along with 120,000 other Japanese-Americans from the West Coast, he had been branded an enemy by the U.S. government after Pearl Harbor and spent two years of the war in a Wyoming detention camp.
A one-time communist who had studied for the ministry, Fuji seemed custom-made for a job as activist: someone to speak out for Chicago's burgeoning Japanese-American community and champion civil rights. And that's what he set out to do as creator of the Chicago Shimpo, the city's Japanese-American newspaper.
"Do not expect us . . . to be impartial when a Negro is lynched or when the National Association of Manufacturers tries to destroy Labor," Shimpo wrote in 1947, when the then-2-year-old Japanese-language newspaper added English pages.
Fifty years after the Chicago Shimpo ("Shimpo" means news report) was first published on Nov. 15, 1945, Fuji is no longer living and his newspaper's mission is no longer so obvious. Chicago's Japanese-American community is both shrinking and assimilating. There isn't nearly the urgency for community news and ethnic rallying that existed after thousands of Japanese-Americans left the camps to restart their lives in more hospitable cities such as Chicago.
And so, like so many other vestiges of Chicago's earlier eras, from the city's Scandinavian community to Soldier Field, Chicago Shimpo is struggling to survive.
Paradoxically, what has been good news for the Japanese-Americans the paper crusaded for has ultimately been bad news for the paper, which has written itself into near irrelevance.
Circulation is stagnant at 5,000 and finances have been tenuous for more than a decade. Akiko Sugano, who took over when her husband died last year, is 68 and dreaming of retirement, but she can't find a buyer. And although the second-in-command, Arthur Morimitsu, remains energetic, he's 83.
Readership is aging too. The biggest batch of Shimpo subscribers probably can be found in Heiwa Terrace, a North Side retirement home catering to Japanese.
"I read the obituaries because all my friends are dying one by one," laughed Betty Hasegawa, a 77-year-old Heiwa resident.
Rather than giving up, Shimpo is slowly trying to reinvent itself. And while its editors are at it, they figured they should celebrate surviving 50 years. On Sunday, the newspaper is throwing a banquet at a Lincolnwood Hotel.
"It's a struggle, but otherwise we have no way of communicating," said Morimitsu, who joined the Army out of an internment camp and served in Asia with military intelligence.
"I want more subscribers," said Sugano, whose English is limited.
To attract younger readers, including some of the thousands of Japanese nationals who work at Chicago-area companies, Sugano is trying to improve Shimpo's quality and timeliness. The paper, published twice weekly, had a habit of writing about events that happened several months ago. Now, the time lag is generally about a week.
Sugano is also trying to enliven Shimpo with more articles on current topics such as the Internet. A typical edition carries articles in Japanese and English chronicling the social and business goings-on of the Japanese community here. There also are wire service stories on topics such as the claims by children of wartime internees for monetary redress.
Morimitsu said one of the newspaper's proudest achievements was its extensive coverage of the 1980s debate over giving compensation to people interned in the camps. In another bit of enterprising work, Morimitsu wondered about an often-reproduced wartime photograph of an unidentified little girl sitting on a suitcase waiting to go to an internment camp. Morimitsu wrote about the photo and said he got a tip leading him to identify the little girl, now a college dean.
Still, the Shimpo of today isn't quite as hard-hitting as when Fuji was publishing editorials chastizing his readership for intellectual laziness. "Collecting articles and putting them together merely to titillate fancies is not our purpose," a Shimpo editorial once declared.
So Fuji probably wouldn't approve of one weekly feature in the modern Shimpo: a Japanese-language serialization of the life of Al Capone. One recent installment focused on Capone's three-fingered bodyguard.
Midori Fuji, Ryoichi Fuji's daughter, said her father, who came to Los Angeles from Japan in the 1930s, started Shimpo out of the same passion for community that inspired him to give lectures to other Japanese about Lincoln while interned at Heart Mountain, Wyo.
"This was a calling for him," Fuji said. "When he came to Chicago, he felt there was a strong need to communicate. He never said it to me, but it was a kind of ministry."