My new book, The Unknown Great: Stories of Japanese Americans at the Margins of History, cowritten with Jonathan van Harmelen, is a collection of short pieces on remarkable people and things in Japanese American history. Beyond being interesting in themselves, when put together, the stories constitute a counter-history of ethnic Japanese in North America, refuting received ideas about the group.

When it came time to think about potential covers for the book, I was not sure what to propose. As the partner of a graphic designer, I long ago learned that producing an acceptable book cover is one of the most difficult aspects of book publishing. The designer must be able to come up with something that will please the author, the press’s marketing department and—one hopes—themself. The design must immediately express the idea of the work and attract the potential reader into choosing it (the old saw notwithstanding, many many people do in fact judge books by their covers!). The author can be as much a hindrance as a help. If an author proposes images for which the rights cannot be obtained or which are not sufficiently clear or high-resolution, it just makes life difficult for the designer.

Especially tricky is producing a cover for a book like The Unknown Great that revolves around a variety of themes. Whether such a cover is typographical or illustrative in nature, the same problem remains: How can the cover designer choose just one aspect of the book to express? How can the contrasting themes be dramatized in a way that leads to a unified presentation? To be sure, my previous collection with University of Washington Press, The Unsung Great, had a cover featuring a mosaic of portraits, and I found it most satisfying. Still, I did not want a cover that looked too similar to that one. On the other hand, none of the photos that I had found to illustrate the individual articles was powerful enough to carry the weight of the entire book’s meaning by itself.

It was then that I hit on the idea of proposing for the cover a striking image that I had just come across. In 2021, my collaborator Jonathan van Harmelen and I wrote a two-part article on the great photographer Toge Fujihira, and in the process of research we interviewed Fujihira’s two children. Toge’s daughter Kay Bromberg graciously invited us to visit the extensive archive that she maintained of her father’s work.

Sometime later, I accepted Kay’s invitation and visited the archive. I was bowled over by the variety and depth of Fujihira’s photography. While reviewing his work from the wartime period, which he had spent in New York City, I discovered a set of snapshots he took in the mid-1940s, at a beach on what looked like Long Island. In the snaps were a number of Nisei men and women in bathing suits; he photographed them alone and in teams—even one with them all together, piled on each other in a pyramid. While the majority of the images were of women, my eye was caught by one that featured a pair of smiling Japanese American men in bathing suits, happily embracing. Their affection for each other and the obvious ease they felt in holding their (shirtless) bodies against each other shined through.

The photographs did not list any of the names of the people involved, and neither Kay nor I was able to identify the men in the picture. It was unclear whether they were friends, colleagues, or brothers, or whether they were romantic partners (though homosexuality would have generally been considered taboo in the United States at that time, and an openly gay couple shocking). The very mystery of their identities and connection to each other heightened the both the power and ambiguity of the image: Was it homoerotic, homosocial, or fraternal? Whichever the case, it was clear that in an era when Nisei, like other American men, were conditioned to restrain their emotions, at least in public, an image showing such open warmth between them was exceptional.

Kay generously gifted me a duplicate print of the image and agreed to let me publish it. At first, I wasn’t sure in what context I should present it. While it was unlikely that the men in the photo were still alive, some seventy-five years later, I worried whether they might have descendants who would criticize me for misrepresenting them. When I had the opportunity to propose a cover image for The Unknown Great, I realized that the image of the men from Fujihira’s photo would be perfect. It expressed so many of the “marginal” stories and themes I had discovered in Japanese American history: Nisei outside the West Coast; the postwar lives that Japanese Americans built following their wartime incarceration; the presence of creative artists, including photographers, in their communities; and yes, Japanese American sexuality. Yet it evoked these themes in symbolic, not representative, fashion.

In the end, it worked out superbly. Heng Wee Tan, the cover designer, agreed to incorporate the Fujihira photo into his design. Meanwhile, he had the happy idea of putting the type on a slant, which makes it appear that the image is in motion, passing from the margin toward the center. The color is an unusual shade of orange, marking the unorthodox nature of the contents. All these elements work together to highlight the book’s examination of the margins of Japanese American history.

Author’s Note: After writing this post, I received a message from the writer Susan Kiyo Ito, who identified the two men in the photo used on my book cover. They are, respectively, Kiyoshi and Asao Inouye, two native New Yorkers who were the older and younger brothers of Susan’s mother, Kikuko Inouye Ito. Toge Fujihira was a friend and basketball teammate of both Inouyes. Susan also identified the location of the photo as Lake George, New York. Susan believes that her father, Masaji Ito, who was a photographer, may have taken the photo in question. I found the image amid a series of photos in Fujihira’s archive, but I am unable to state definitively that it was his work. If it was not, I regret any unintentional misattribution.

Greg Robinson is professor of history at l’Université du Québec à Montréal and author of several books, including The Unsung Great: Stories of Extraordinary Japanese Americans and After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life.

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