The Death and Times of Myles Yutaka Fukunaga

October 6, 12:00pm - 1:15pm
Mānoa Campus, Center for Biographical Research, Henke Hall 325 Add to Calendar

“My life is nothing but worries and sufferings and chagrin”
The Death and Times of Myles Yutaka Fukunaga

On November 19, 1929, Myles Fukunaga, a twenty-year-old nisei, was hanged at Oahu Prison for the murder of ten-year-old George “Gill” Jamieson, a Punahou student from a prominent Mānoa family. In September of the previous year, Fukunaga, a former hotel worker in Waikīkī, had kidnapped and bludgeoned Jamieson to death in a crime then called the “most brutal murder in the history of Hawaii.” Despite his probable insanity, Fukunaga was tried, convicted and sentenced to death a little more than two weeks after his arrest because by killing Jamieson he had brazenly transgressed the dominant racial boundary in Hawai‘i separating Haoles and non-Haoles.

Speaker bio:
Jonathan Y. Okamura is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UH Mānoa. He is the author of Ethnicity and Inequality in Hawai‘i (2008), Imagining the Filipino American Diaspora (1998), and numerous journal articles and book chapters on race and ethnicity, including most recently “Barack Obama as the Postracial Candidate for a Postracial America.”

He is currently writing an overdue contracted book on Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i and plans to write a book on the Fukunaga case, which is tentatively titled, “Raced to Death: Myles Yutaka Fukunaga and the Anti-Japanese Movement.”


Event Sponsor
Center for Biographical Research, Mānoa Campus

More Information
808-956-3774, biograph@hawaii.edu, http://www.facebook.com/CBRHawaii

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