Second Son Rising

"Second Son Rising" is the biography of Kanekichi Yamamoto. Kanekichi was a Japanese Nationalist living in the United States during the early 20th century priory to World War II. He ran a large organized crime network from Alaska to Mexico. He levered this illicit organization into espionage and sabotage for Japan prior to World War II. It's a nearly unbelievable story leading up to Japan's attack of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. It's a controversial story -- a counter-narrative to the common Japanese American perspective that, rightfully, objects to the incarceration of over 110,000 Japanese in America resulting from Executive Order 9066.

Kanekichi is the grandfather of Wayne Yamamoto, a principal at the Institute for Computational History. Wayne has been working in the department of American Ethnic Studies to research this story. His goal is to publish this biography and perhaps make a feature length movie about this epic story. An early draft of this work can be found at www.secondsonrising.com.

Wayne's research into grandfather has been the impetus for the Institute for Computational History. He first explored how do to historical research (in the context of American Ethnic Studies). After some initial exploration (including examining declassified FBI reports, Office of Naval Intelligence records, and documents at the National Archive), Wayne surmised that finding, reading, and note taking notes by hand to effectively analyze the information would be difficult. After some additional thinking, he concluded that using "machines" -- computation -- would be a more effective approach. From this conclusion, he embarked on a handful of projects using computation, data science, and artificial intelligence to aid in his research.

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