Yoshio Kishi Papers

Yoshio Kishi (1932-2012) was born in New York City to Eikichi and Haru Kishi, both of whom emigrated from Japan to the United States. Kishi grew up in a largely Irish and Italian tenement neighborhood and during World War II, to avoid being labeled enemy aliens, his parents stopped speaking Japanese and joined a local Lutheran Church. He later went on to become an award-winning New York City-based film and sound editor working on notable films such as Martin Scorcese’s Raging Bull (1980) and Wayne Wang’s Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart (1985). When not working on films, and in an effort to reclaim his ethnic heritage, Kishi avidly collected materials that depicted Asian Americans in US intellectual and popular culture, as well as materials produced by Asian American activists to counter stereotypical imagery of Asian peoples. Kishi eventually amassed over 10,000 items, resulting in the Yoshio Kishi and Irene Yah-Ling Sun Collection at NYU’s Fales Library & Special Collections. In addition to that collection, Kishi dedicated time to tracing his own family lineage, documenting his family through correspondence, photographs, and personal research notes.

The Yoshio Kishi Papers roughly span from 1892 to 2011, with the bulk of the materials dating between the 1950s to the mid-2000s. The collection documents various aspects of Kishi’s professional and private life, as well as his contributions as a collector of Asian American materials. It contains correspondence, photographs, personal notes, photocopied articles, filmography lists, pamphlets, and interview videos with Kishi that discuss his career as an artist, his family, and his collection of Asian American materials.

To learn more about the contents of the Yoshio Kishi Papers, located at the NYU Fales Library & Special Collections, view the collection’s finding aid.

Photograph by Amy Yee. Yoshio Kishi at home, undated; Yoshio Kishi Papers; MSS 351; box 6, folder 11; Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University Libraries.