3 color pictorial postcards, 2 unused, 1 with USS California postmark, March 1912: “Chinese Children, Hawaii”, “Japanese Children, Hawaii” and “Japanese Immigrants landing at Honolulu”; Printed and handwritten receipt, for Nichibei Candy. Honolulu, May 31, 1916. English and Japanese text; Honolulu Mercury (magazine) Vol. 1, No. 2, July 1929. Original wrappers, 96 pages; Color postcard of “Hula Dancers, Hawaii Islands”, postally used, with Jan. 15, 1942 postmark and handwritten note, signed Kiyoko Yamagushi, Maui. Large censorship rubberstamp, “RELEASED BY I.C.B.” [Information Control Board]; printed pictorial menu (soiled on rear panel) for Honolulu Chinese restaurant Lau Yee Chai, ca. 1942. 4.5 x 10”, expanding to 10 x 17”; 1956 Directory for 4th Annual Cherry Blossom Festival, Honolulu, sponsored by the Japanese Chamber of Commerce, 76 pp. Extensively illustrated.
The pre-World War I pictorial postcards, printed in Honolulu, laud Hawaiian-born Japanese children as “peculiarly attractive and beautiful…bright and cheerful and adopt American manners and dress without exception”, their parents being “some of the wealthiest planters and merchants” of the islands. The Chinese were the “staple farming class” of the Islands, as well as being public school teachers and prominent merchants, were “noted for their steadiness, morality, and honesty… ambitious and have the highest regard for education and progress.” The scarce literary and artistic magazine Honolulu Mercury, which only survived for only a year, includes articles on Hawaiian Filipinos and Japanese, and a striking Art Deco frontispiece by Teikichi Hikoyama, “the first Japanese woodblock printing artist” in California, who lived in San Francisco from 1901 to 1933 before returning to Japan. The 1942 postcard was one of the earliest instances of censorship of a Japanese-American resident of the Islands after Pearl Harbor. The menu of P.Y. Chong’s Chinese restaurant, the most popular in Honolulu during World War II, includes a biography of Chong and text partially written in his famous Pidgin English; the highlight of the annual Hawaiian Cherry-Blossom Festival was the “coronation” of the Festival “Queen” – possibly the first Japanese-American beauty contest.