Karl Ichiro Akiya

Karl Ichiro Akiya was a Japanese-American writer and activist for numerous political and social causes. A labor activist in both the United States and Japan, Akiya was also an intellectual figure in the Japanese-American community.

Biography Akiya was born in 1909 in San Francisco, California, to Protestant Christian Japanese immigrants. Akiya spent the early years of his life in Japan, where he was first sent to receive an education between the ages of 6 and 23 as a kibei. He graduated Kwansei Gakuin University, and protesting against compulsory military service for university students. Akiya is believed to have begun a romantic relationship with Mieth in 1933, after the death of Mieth's child with Hagel, which laster until 1936 or 1937. Akiya and Yoneda both took up work at Doho, a Japanese-language newspaper in San Francisco between 1941 and 1942. Both swore allegiance to the United States in opposition to Japanese fascism following the attack on Pearl Harbor. and later Manzanar in California. Akiya and Yoneda gained early release in exchange for providing interpreter services for military intelligence. Akiya taught Japanese to US Army soldiers at the University of Michigan. Both remained under observation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation during the Second Red Scare due to their continued communist leanings.

A member of the Japanese American Citizens League, the Communist Party USA, and the United Furniture Workers of America, Akiya wrote for a variety of both American and Japanese periodicals and contributed to the Hokubei Shimpo, a Japanese-language newspaper in the United States.