Kuniko Muramatsu Terasawa was a community leader and newspaper publisher who spent her life helping Japanese Americans in Utah and across the United States.
In Short
Kuniko Muramatsu Terasawa was a newspaper publisher in Salt Lake City who dedicated her life to helping her community stay connected and informed. Alongside her husband, she helped to write, edit, and print a bilingual newspaper in Japanese and English that ran for 77 years.
More of the Story
Terasawa immigrated from Japan to the United States in the early 1900s. In 1921, she married Uneo (pronouced oo-neh-yoh) Terasawa, who created one of Salt Lake City’s Japanese American newspapers. It was called The Utah Nippo (pronounced nee-poh, Nippo means “Japanese people”). Terasawa helped her husband publish the newspaper. After her husband died in 1939, Terasawa took on the full responsibility of keeping the paper running. She worked hard to write and report stories, edit, typeset, and publish the paper.
A Newspaper Woman
Newspapers were an important part of life before the invention of the internet. Newspapers were how people learned about news and events. Creating and printing a newspaper was a lot of work. Terasawa helped to write and edit all of the stories, and she also typeset the paper by hand. Typesetting was how newspapers were printed before computers were invented. Instead of typing an article and printing it out, typesetters had big trays with lots of blocks with letters on them. The individual blocks had to be arranged into words and sentences in a special frame that held them all together. The frame would then be placed inside a printing press that would then put ink on the metal letters and then press them onto paper like a large stamp.
Articles in the Utah Nippo were printed in both Japanese and English so that everyone in the Japanese American community could read it, whether they were born in Japan or born in the United States. In this way, the newspaper helped the entire community stay informed. In addition to English letters, Terasawa used about 5,000 Japanese characters to print the articles in the Japanese language. Terasawa printed a new newspaper every day for the first thirty years. Later, the newspaper came out once or twice a week. It was a lot of hard work!
Importance of current events
Running a newspaper was not the only challenge Terasawa faced. In 1924, shortly after she immigrated to the United States, Japanese immigrants were banned from coming to America. Then, the start of World War II brought many other discriminatory laws and practices against Japanese Americans, including the forced relocation of 120,000 people from their homes in California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawai’i. The government also banned almost all Japanese newspapers. However, The Utah Nippo was one of three newspapers in America that were allowed to publish during the war. Terasawa continued to publish important information about the wartime relocation, curfews, and other information the Japanese American community needed to know. During the war, the number of people who subscribed to The Utah Nippo increased from 2,500 to over 10,000.
Dedicated to Her Community
Terasawa dedicated her life to helping the Japanese American community in Utah and across the country. After World War II, she helped Japanese government officials understand how to plan and organize their visits to America, which was a tricky job to do. After the war, the two countries had to work hard to rebuild their relationship and trust each other again.
Japanese officials honored Terasawa with many awards for her hard work helping people both in Japan and in Utah. Terasawa continued to publish The Utah Nippo until she died in 1991 at the age of 95. Her children and grandchildren also helped to run the paper, making it a multigenerational effort.
Terasawa’s hard work and dedication helped to bridge many cultural gaps and helped the Japanese American community in Utah and across the country for more than 70 years.
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