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How does a country repair its harm to a vulnerable minority targeted during times of national fear because of race? How did the United States redress its then popular yet unconstitutional WWII incarceration of 120,000 innocent Japanese Americans in desolate barbed wire prisons without charges, hearings, or bona fide evidence of military necessity? In response to a Congressional inquiry, political lobbying, and lawsuits, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 directed the President to apologize and authorized over one billion dollars in reparations. Congress also created a fund to educate the public about the government’s false assertion of “national security” to restrict civil liberties. Some considered redress a tremendous victory — rewriting history and personal healing. Others questioned reparations for one U.S. group but not others. Japanese American Redress served as a catalyst for reparations movements worldwide. This paper examines its genesis, legal implementation, and apparent effects. It also explores wide-ranging political mobilization and social meanings of redress and “unfinished business”. Reparations cannot be measured by laws alone. Diverse communities must engage contested questions of history, justice, and belonging. Reparations claims face often unforeseen benefits and limitations. The paper concludes with these “lessons learned” to date.

This introductory chapter describes the racial order in twentieth-century America—its evolution, consequences, and significance. Japanese and Chinese Americans, the largest ethnic Asian populations, and the two that figured most prominently in the public eye between the 1940s and 1960s, are central to this investigation. Their trajectories unfold separately in order to illuminate their distinct histories. Yet Japanese and Chinese Americans also appear in tandem to emphasize the many parallels that account for their concurrent emergence as model minorities. As a mix of cultural, social, and political history, the chapter highlights how the discursive and the material mattered for Japanese American, Chinese American, and ultimately Asian American identity formation from World War II through the “Cold War civil rights” years.

This chapter discusses how Kikuchi's diary and papers provide substantive evidence of interracial alliances and conflicts at a time when the theory and practice of democracy itself were rigorously being tested and redefined. During the first stage of this period, or the early years of the internment (1942–1943), Japanese Americans experienced an extreme form of prejudice, oppression, and segregation, while fellow minorities initially feared for their own welfare, understandably hewing to shibboleths of unqualified patriotism. Eventually, though, the absurd arbitrariness of the evacuation compelled other American minorities to consider their own possible futures. In the second stage—the resettlement of Japanese Americans, circa 1943–1945—growing populations of job-seeking minorities struggled over and negotiated the restricted urban spaces they were now forced to share with recently freed Japanese.

This chapter examines how the resettlement of West Coast Japanese Americans in the Midwest and Northeast after internment irrevocably transformed the population of Japanese Chicagoans. As both Allan Austin and Gary Okihiro have demonstrated, many young Nisei managed to leave the camps earlier than expected by filing education waivers. They matriculated predominantly at midwestern and East Coast schools, and some of their campmates were recruited for Japanese-language immersion at the Military Intelligence Service Language School, based at Camp Savage, Minnesota. Yet residual delinquency among Nisei bachelors and the lack of children's playgrounds still made the North Side area less than appealing to Nisei families; hence, another critical mass of Japanese Americans congregated on the South Side.

1950s mass media representations of D.T. Suzuki and the American “Zen Boom” are the focus of this chapter. The specific way that Suzuki is portrayed—as engaging, yet ineffable Oriental—and the medium in which these depictions first appear—the fashion magazine—mark Eastern spirituality as a “stylized religion” and consumable object. The various “characters” that emerge in the unfolding of Zen Buddhism mid-century are explored: Alan Watts and Jack Kerouac as Suzuki’s most famous pupils and spiritual heirs; Arthur Koestler as Zen’s skeptical critic and; Mihoko Okamura, Suzuki’s long-time assistant, who figures the problematic representation of Asian Americans in the scheme of American conceptions of Asian religions. These real-life personalities and the debates and drama that ensue over Zen’s legitimacy and significance prefigure and establish a Virtual Orientalist narrative that is still popular today.

This chapter discusses the ways in which Nisei zoot-suiters became a lightning rod for the prescriptions of resettlement's stakeholders, and how this illuminates critical features of wartime culture that operated to reset the terms of Japanese American citizenship after Exclusion. A professed political loyalty to the United States overshadowed the reimagining of Nikkei as assimilable Others. Gender and sexuality especially figured prominently in determining the contours of postcamp social standing. Scattered evidence indicates that community members tagged Nisei women regarded as morally wayward as yogore—derived from the Japanese verb yogoreru (to get dirty). The chapter shows how yogore expressed an alternative masculinity that deviated manifestly from dominant expectations of male citizens during wartime.

This chapter illustrates how the experience of World War II was very different for Japanese and Chinese Americans. Configured as enemy aliens, Nikkei endured mass removal, internment, the effective nullification of their citizenship, and a coercive dispersal. Whereas the Chinese enjoyed sounder social footing as a result of their real and presumed ties to China, the United States' partner in the Pacific War against Japan. For all these disparities, however, war mobilization impacted Japanese and Chinese American lives in comparable ways. Most fundamentally for both groups, geopolitical forces opened up novel opportunities for national belonging. Encouraged by the outpouring of wartime racial liberal sentiment, Chinese Americans, especially the native-born cohorts just coming of age, asked new questions and desired new answers about life in the United States.

This chapter talks about how the Nisei soldier, the Japanese American Citizens League's (JACL) brainchild, answered various race and citizenship imperatives in the 1940s and 1950s. For all Japanese Americans, Nisei fighters guaranteed their claims to assimilability and national belonging by responding to the call to arms, recasting them from enemy aliens to loyal citizens in the process. As the pinnacle of wartime masculinity, soldiering allowed Japanese American men in particular to rebut deep-rooted popular beliefs that the gender identities of “Oriental” men were feminized, ambiguous, or deviant. For JACL, the ascendance of the warrior persona, recognized and lauded by the public and policymakers, offered reassurance that its orientation was indeed the righteous path to redemption for both itself and the ethnic community.

This chapter examines how, in seeking to produce new envisagements about Japanese Americans, Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) spoke to mid-twentieth-century liberals' confidence in the ability of educational campaigns and social science to transform existing ideas about race and alter the country's racial order. Constituents of the era's race relations complex identified Nikkei citizenship as an American dilemma to be repaired in order to prove the nation's capacity for righting its wrongs, thereby protecting the United States' global position. The celebration of Japanese Americans as model minorities seemed to vindicate the assimilationist approach to rehabilitating Nikkei citizenship as espoused by JACL and its allies. Yet at the same moment, the emergence of this image undermined the league's dominant position within the Nikkei community.

This chapter explores the wartime and post-war phases of Japanese American history. The Pacific War led to the demise of transnational immigrant history. The collective world view that inspired Issei to search for a pioneer past and strive for a better future vanished with the collapse of the Japanese settlement communities and industries in the American West — tangible markers of racial development. The post-war phase of Japanese American history diverged from the Issei's original designs. Under the War Relocation Authority (WRA) policy, the leadership of the community fell into the hands of the second generation, notably senior members of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL). Along the line of the WRA-JACL collaboration, integration into mainstream society, rather than racial development, became the central concern of the ethnic community in the wake of internment.

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 concluding chapter discusses how, by the twilight of the civil rights era, the success stories of Japanese and Chinese America had themselves become success stories. The cross pressures of exigencies and desires both within and beyond the ethnic communities had effectively midwifed the rebirth of the Asiatic as the model minority. Since then, the model minority has remained a fixture of the nation's racial landscape, ever present yet constantly evolving to speak to a host of new imperatives in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first. Recent iterations depart from the original in notable ways, but retain many of the themes that first coalesced in the postwar period: self-reliance, valorization of family, reverence for education, and political moderation.

This chapter shows how the State Department succeeded in stopping the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) initiative at the United Nations designed to bring the position of African Americans to international attention. It also examines three ways in which the narrative of American nationhood continues to unfold in a non-teleological fashion shaped by historically formed group divisions and government institutions. First, the way in which the American nation absorbs new members reveals how pivotal group categories and communities to this process are. Second, how the legacies of earlier injustices perpetrated upon some citizens enter the politics of nation-building is discussed with examples drawn from the experiences of American Indians and Japanese Americans. And lastly, the way in which government policies and institutions, such as the Census, structure public discourse in terms of group identities based on race, ethnicity, and national background is reviewed.

Although Japanese and Japanese Americans believe in and rely on the efficacy of modern medical practices and pharmacology, their cultural traditions are important resources for health maintenance, healing, aging, dying, death, and grieving. In an attempt to reconcile its traditional culture with its modern American experience, the Japanese American community of San Francisco, California initiated a unique experiment in community-based education for elder care as part of the newly built Kokoro Assisted Living Facility. In envisioning a seamless blend of modern medicine and spirituality in caring for Japanese American elders in a multicultural and multifaith setting, the Japanese America Religious Federation of San Francisco (JARF) commissioned the design and implementation of a graduate course called “Spirituality and Aging in the Japanese Experience”, offered through the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley in partnership with Sanford Geriatric Education Center in Palo Alto. This chapter describes the context, conceptual framework, implementation, and outcomes of the course. It traces the history of JARF and its role in responding to the housing needs of the Japanese community.