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This chapter examines the meanings of Japanese immigrant nationalism. The origin of modern Issei nationalism can be traced to the rise of Japanese militarism in Manchuria in the early 1930s, which drastically transformed the hitherto estranged relationship between the empire and the immigrant community after 1924. For policy makers in Japan, Japanese residents in the United States became politically relevant at this time in the context of the growing tension with Anglo-American powers. The rise of Japanese immigrant patriotism and Japan's attempt to exploit it for geopolitical purposes, did not result in the metamorphosis of the Issei into a replica of the Japanese militarist or the ultranationalist extremist, as anti-Japanese agitators often claimed. Instead, Issei patriotism inaugurated another phase of the immigrant-state partnership where immigrant dreams and Japan's state mandate converged in complex ways.

The related themes of the Issei as pioneers and the Nisei (second generation) as carrying on Japanese development in the United States were central discourses in the upbringing of many American-born youths. However, neither the Issei pioneer thesis nor its interpretation by Nisei orators provided a concrete picture of what the future might hold for the new generation of Japanese Americans. How did Issei leaders expect the American-born to carry on Japanese development in the face of racial subordination? In what ways did immigrant parents attempt to enable their children to do this? What did Nisei “duty” really mean? The answers to these questions are to be found not so much in the intellectual productions of immigrant historians as in their social practices. This chapter explores some of the key community-wide efforts made by immigrant leaders and parents to promote a positive prospect for the Japanese minority in America in the postexclusion era.

This chapter explores how immigrants' identity and nationalism developed out of the conflict between Japanese and Filipinos in the San Joaquin River delta during the 1930s. Focusing on the local expression of immigrant nationalism, it is argued that their “Japanese consciousness” was primarily a product of American social relations, which shaped their interests and directly affected their daily livelihoods. The Issei's ethnic nationalism resulted as much from an image of a collective enemy and a sense of shared interests in the delta, as from events in Asia or anger against racist society.

This chapter deals with the impact of American racism on the Issei, which contributed to the development of a distinct racial identity among them in relation to other borderland residents. This process occurred at the level of their daily struggle as a racial(ized) minority — self-consciously identified as “the Japanese in America [zaibei doho]” — on the basis of shared interests in and concerns with power relations in the American West. Examining the critical linkages between white exclusionist politics and immigrant counterstruggles, the chapter explores the grassroots level of community formation, which coincided with the partial consolidation of immigrant leadership during the first two decades of the twentieth century.

This chapter explores how history writing helped forge an undifferentiated memory that would guide the Issei through the years preceding their wartime internment. The success of the Japanese exclusion movement led many Issei to grope for something in which to take pride and for which to hope, albeit under the general principle of acquiescence. Writing a common history was the Issei historians' attempt to replace the group's crisis of racial subordination with a shared memory of their “glorious” past in the post-1924 years.

This introductory chapter lays out the theoretical foundations of the book, which examines the development of transnational ideas, practices, and politics among Japanese immigrants (Issei) in the American West prior to the Pacific War. To a more complete picture of the Issei's transnational past, a so-called “inter-National perspective” is used, one that stresses the interstitial (not transcendental) nature of their lives between the two nation-states. An overview of the succeeding chapters is also presented.

This chapter examines the decision of Japanese immigrant parents and leaders to send their children to school abroad. Issei found many advantages in transnational education, including the improvement of the Nisei's employment opportunities and the narrowing of cultural and linguistic gaps between the first and second generations. Many also saw the purposes of study abroad in terms similar to community-based language instruction at home. Immigrant parents anticipated that attending school in Japan would enhance their childreni's appreciation of a moral and dignified lifestyle based on Japanese ethics.

Focusing on the arrival of the first Japanese immigrants in the Santa Clara Valley at the turn of the twentieth century, this chapter takes up their establishment in agriculture and shows how they quickly entered economic niches already established by Chinese farmers and farm laborers. While white promoters and settlers placed a higher cultural premium on orchard fruit growing, setting it apart from the variety of horticultural production in the region and envisioning a labor system divided along the lines of race, gender, and crop, the Japanese, like their Chinese counterparts, engaged in all types of horticulture and were essential to the Valley's agricultural landscape. In the period of transition from Chinese to Japanese labor, interethnic relations flourished as well, reflecting the presence of an ethnic economy in the Valley that was not wholly dependent on whites.

This chapter examines how in sharp contrast to the experience of Chinese immigrants in the Santa Clara Valley, tensions within Japanese immigrant society stemming from gender imbalance were quite widespread during the early period of settlement, when the Issei community found itself mired in intra-ethnic conflict and occasionally violent episodes. Recovered from county coroner and court records along with an array of Japanese and English language sources, the complexity of Issei gender relations, encompassing marriage, desertions, divorce, attempted rape, murder, and suicide, reflected the unique conditions of immigrant life in rural California.

The scholarship on the “Yellow Peril” looks at Japanese immigrants (Issei) as an object of anti-Asian racialization in domestic politics or as a distraction in U.S.-Japanese bilateral diplomacy. Seldom do historians consider its ramifications outside those contexts. They also lack perspective on the impact of Issei practice on the geopolitics of Yellow Peril, which spread from California to the U.S.-Mexican borderlands and beyond. This chapter examines the role of Issei settler colonialism, as well as its unintended consequences, in the formation of discourse on the transborder Yellow Peril. That discourse propelled white America to reaffirm its commitment to the Monroe Doctrine, shifting the nature of U.S. diplomacy from the endeavor to keep European rivals out of the Western Hemisphere to one that sought to exclude the Japanese racial enemy from America’s “backyard.” It culminated in the construction of a hemispheric national security regime after early 1942.

Background to emigration of Japanese workers in 1880s, including expansion of Japan into Asia and US acquisition of Hawai`i and other territories in the Pacific. Oppression of Native Hawaiians and need for large numbers of cheap labor for burgeoning sugar industry. Significance of women among Japanese workers.

This book examines the confluence of race, sexuality, gender, and nation in the intimate relationships of Yone Noguchi. From his expression of impassioned love to Charles Warren Stoddard to his affairs with Léonie Gilmour and Ethel Armes, the book shows how Noguchi maneuvered through cultural and linguistic differences and managed to exist peaceably within prevailing moral mandates. Noguchi's intimacies illuminate how Japanese immigrants negotiated America's literary and arts community and achieved romantic fulfillment at the turn of the century—a period characterized by historians as a moment of extreme sexual deprivation and discrimination for Asians, particularly in California. Building on biographies of Yone Noguchi and studies of sexuality in turn-of-the-century America and late Meiji Japan, combined with debates about queer cultures and Western imperialism, this book reveals how Noguchi was able to articulate same-sex love and interracial marriage even in the face of racism.

This chapter explores the changing ethnocultural identities of Japanese-Americans in Hawaiʻi (JAHs). Originally arriving as contract laborers in 1885, succeeding generations of the Japanese in Hawaiʻi would find themselves confronting tensions between their stay in Hawaiʻi and their connections to their homeland in Japan. World War II would later usher in profound changes on the Japanese identity in Hawaiʻi. After briefly examining the historical forces that have continued to shape the JAHs' identities, the chapter lays out the ethnocultural profiles of the JAHs, both past and present, in tracing their evolution from a largely homogenous society to a more heterogeneous and diverse mixture of values, beliefs, and behaviors.