Search Results

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 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.

Theories of identity fail to recognize the flexibility of identity within its social context, a conceptualization that is particularly relevant for Japanese-Americans. This chapter is about understanding how Japanese-American individuals create and negotiate identities as multiple categories, rather than a single category. Japanese-Americans are those who have been exposed to and have internalized two cultures, requiring the synthesis of cultural norms from two groups into one behavioral repertoire. As a consequence, the sense of identity among Japanese-Americans is both individualistic and collectivistic. The Japanese self is coded to participate in both extremes, but the self must be able to switch. The contradictions that these oppositions present are managed by contextualization in place, time, and social group. The chapter explores what it means to be Japanese-American, living at the juncture of two cultures and belonging to two cultures, either by being born of mixed racial heritage or born in one culture and raised in another. Based on recent personal interviews with bicultural Japanese-Americans, the author proposes a model of ethnic identity development The discussion focuses on how Japanese-Americans have negotiated the development of their identity in the United States according to the generation of their birth and relates how this experience is uniquely Japanese-American.

In her Gaijin (1980), Tizuka Yamasaki (b. 1949) narrates a story of a young woman who marries her older brother’s best friend for the sake of their immigration to Brazil in 1908, and eventually becomes an independent working single mother in the city. Even though the story is loosely based on her maternal grandmother’s life, Yamasaki uses the movie to express her own identity as an educated Brazilian woman, who was involved in women’s movement during Brazil’s military regime. The movie received international acclaim but has not been widely appreciated among the Japanese in Brazil, mainly because it challenges the essentialization of Japanese Brazilian identity, which obscures gender and class. Inspired by Gaijin, which gives a voice to the historical “voiceless,” this book employs life history/story as its main methodology, in combination with substantial archival research. Each informant narrates his/her story and reveals his/her complex identity in relation to the Japanese-born but US-based author, based on their “shared” Japanese ancestry.

The upper-middle-class Sasei and Yonseis [fourth-generation Japanese Brazilians] were born during the 1970s and 1980s and grew up in the city among “Brazilians.” In their childhood they all shared the experience of being bullied for their “(Japanese) face” and “slanted eyes” as a racial minority. They have struggled to find their positions under Brazil’s fluid racial formation, despite their educated parents’ individual “whitening.” Many have continued to resort to intermarriage with white Brazilians fueled by the desire to further “whiten” themselves. Becoming proud of Japan’s economic prosperity, some others, including racially mixed ones, have chosen to affirm their cultural identity collectively as the self-identified Nikkei [Japanese descendants]. Some began to learn the Japanese language in college and studied in Japan on fellowships. They socialize and date among themselves and eventually practice ethnic-class endogamy, even though their definition of Nikkeiness varies individually, except for their “face.”

This chapter examines the universal nature of the critical log-periodic precursory signature of stock market crashes. It considers the crash of October 1987 and of October 1929; the Hong Kong crashes of 1987, 1994, and 1997; the crash of October 1997 and its resonance on the U.S. market; currency crashes; and the crash of August 1998. It also discusses a nonparametric test of log-periodicity, the slow crash of 1962 ending the so-called “tronics boom,” and the Nasdaq crash of April 2000. Finally, it looks at “antibubbles,” taking into account the “bearish” regime on the Nikkei starting from January 1, 1990, the price of gold after the burst of the bubble in 1980. The chapter shows that large stock market crashes are analogous to critical points studied in the statistical physics community in relation to magnetism, melting, and similar phenomena.

This study examines how orthodox narratives of Japanese American experience in popular and academic discourse have contributed to the skewed way in which the membership of Japanese America has been defined and its boundaries cemented since the 1910s. That process entails glorification and demonization of certain types of Japanese Americans as well as exclusion of other individuals from the race history. Based on the accumulated effects of such discursive contrivances, the established notions of community, identity, history, and indeed race in contemporary Japanese America have affirmed and even encouraged the marginalization of anomalous historical agents—like Kibei—while rendering others—like postwar immigrants—as perpetual co-ethnic foreigners.

This chapter investigates the relationship between Asian American and modern Japanese history by analyzing the image of Japanese Americans in postwar Japan. Based on a book of photographs featuring Japanese immigrants in Hawai‘i published in 1956, it analyzes how their image was appropriated and redefined in Japan to promote as well as reinforce the nation’s political and cultural alliance with the United States. The photographs showed the successful acculturation of Japanese in Hawai‘i to the larger American society and urged the Japanese audience to see that their nation’s postwar reconstruction would come through the power and protection of the United States. Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i served as a lens through which the Japanese in Japan could imagine their position under American hegemony in the age of Cold War.

This chapter explores the representation of Asian American females in Asian media (particularly in contrast to American portrayals), and the processes and images of their representation. It addresses these issues through one case study: a 2002 Japanese soap opera, Sakura, whose main character is a young female Nikkei (person with Japanese ancestry but no Japanese citizenship/nationality) from Hawai‘i. In this drama the main character, Elizabeth Sakura Matsushita, travels to Japan, where she spends one year teaching English at a private middle school in the countryside. In the process, she proves herself “more Japanese than Japanese.” In analyzing this drama, this chapter considers what this portrayal of a young female Nikkei intends; how gender ineluctably shapes the portrait; and how Nikkei, as prodigal Japanese, become exemplars of what Japan has lost.

This chapter describes the development of Shin ministries in Hawaii and on the mainland. In Nikkei communities, ministers’ roles and responsibilities increased when immigrants saw Buddhism as one of their collective ties with Japan. With the expansion of a ministry, however, the acculturation of “faith” appeared on an individual level. As the background of Issei ministers differed from the spiritual interests of Nisei and Euro-American Buddhists, the Honpa Honganji Mission of Hawaii (HHMH) and the Buddhist Mission of North America (BMNA) diverged from conventional practices when bishops ordained members of the latter two groups. However, since the majority of Caucasian Buddhists were not necessarily interested in Shinran’s teachings but found Śākyamuni’s philosophy rational and logical, problems arose in the process of admitting non-Nikkei ministers.

This chapter turns to gender and family relationships among Okinawan-Bolivians, which often underwent drastic transformations during their migrations between Colonia Okinawa and urban Japan. In Colonia Okinawa, gender relationships among Okinawan-Bolivians were defined and practiced in the public, communal, and domestic spheres through subtly yet strictly defined male and female gender roles and codes of behaviors at workplaces, in community functions, and in homes. The gender division was further complicated by sociospatial segregation of Okinawan-Bolivians and non-Nikkei Bolivian men and women coexisting in these settings. Once Okinawan-Bolivians moved to a Japanese city, the gender divergence among Okinawan-Bolivians was often challenged by the radically different economic and social responsibilities assigned to the migrants in these urban settings, where both men and women worked as manual laborers and often earned a comparable amount of income. The chapter also sheds light on intermarriages between Okinawan-Bolivians and non-Nikkei Bolivians, and between Okinawan-Bolivians and Japanese Naichi-jin. These couples not only faced changing gender roles and codes of behavior in Colonia Okinawa and urban Japan, but also dealt with highly racialized and sexualized stereotypes of “Bolivians” held by other Okinawan-Bolivians and of “South Americans” held by Japanese Naichi-jin in-laws.

This chapter explains the significance of baseball among the Nikkei, or the Japanese diaspora, in the United States. Throughout the history of their people in the United States, the national pastime resonated strongly among the Japanese from the time that its sojourners, the Issei, came to America to that of the Yonsei, the fourth generation. And, much more than a recreational activity, the game commanded respect as it grew to become part of their heritage. Baseball, as they organized and played it, also crossed geographical and generation boundaries. Rooted in the land of their forefathers, the Nikkei resurrected it in the American communities where they landed. “Their baseball” was metropolitan and rural and employed as a means to network with kin in other regions, and also shaped and demonstrated the Japanese American identity in profound ways.

This chapter describes the uncertain fate of the Nikkei baseball community at the onset of World War II. During this time the Nikkei community was the portrait of a dual existence: an isolated enclave that struggled to find balance between the Japanese spirit drawn from its past and an unconditional duty to display its loyalty to the United States. Japanese American baseball in this period exemplified the Nikkei conundrum. Designed to give its youth an opportunity to play the national pastime in a secure and controlled environment, leaders of their leagues rarely omitted any display that spoke to American patriotism. Yet, apart from a few teams and players, the entire structure of Nikkei baseball existed in virtual isolation from the very group with whom they hoped to someday fuse.

This chapter examines the scope of Nikkei baseball in the aftermath of the Second World War. Re-entry into mainstream society proved challenging for much of the Nikkei community, particularly as anti-Japanese sentiments were still smoldering in the wake of the conflict. For a time Nikkei baseball came to a virtual halt as the Japanese American community attempted to rebuild their lives. Yet both the sport and the Nikkei community would undergo a dramatic shift as the postwar years wore on, such as Jackie Robinson's entry into the Major League as its first black player. Nikkei baseball would soon thrive again, and with its revival came several prominent Nikkei baseball players who would finally build that longed-for bridge between the Japanese American community and the rest of the nation.

This chapter examines the forced removal and incarceration of the Nikkei. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. With a stroke of his pen, and without regard for the U.S. Constitution, the president set in motion the process of forced removal and incarceration of an entire people charged with no crime. This episode was “a historical moment when the cultural, racial, and national Otherness of the Asian was most lucidly articulated, most undisputed, and most resolutely dealt with by the American citizenry and state.” The executive order gave the Western Defense Commander, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, the power to exclude from designated “military areas” “any or all persons.” As such, Nikkei living within DeWitt's exclusion zone were then herded into temporary detention centers, officially called “Assembly Centers,” managed by the Wartime Civilian Control Administration (WCCA), an agency of the army's Western Defense Command (WDC).

This chapter details Kurihara's incarceration. Kurihara was among the Nikkei assigned to Manzanar, one of ten concentration camps for Nikkei, citizens and alien residents alike. Located at the base of the Sierra Nevada in eastern California, Manzanar was in a desert land of extreme temperatures, high winds, and harsh climate. On June 1, 1942, the army's WCCA, which had been running Manzanar, turned over its administration of the camp to a civilian agency, the War Relocation Authority (WRA). Six months after the WRA took control of Manzanar, the camp experienced a revolt that ended in the death of two innocent young men, shaking the confidence of administrators and the sense of security of the inmates. But long before that explosion of hostility, there had been strong undercurrents of resentment at Manzanar that went back ultimately to the frustrations of Nikkei rooted in the long history of discrimination they had endured, especially in California.

This chapter focuses on the men with whom Kurihara clashed at Manzanar. These include Tokie Nishimura Slocum, Togo Tanaka, and Karl Yoneda. Like Kurihara, Slocum was a veteran of World War I and a member of the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. As war between Japan and the United States grew imminent, Slocum gained the reputation of being an informer for the FBI and Naval Intelligence. As such, he was thoroughly despised by most Nikkei at Manzanar. Similarly, because of his role as a WRA documentary historian, Togo Tanaka was targeted by Nikkei dissidents as an informer and included him on their death list. On the other hand, Karl Yoneda refused to speak out against DeWitt's removal orders. Yoneda and other Nikkei Communists felt that they had no choice but to “accept the racist U.S. dictum” of incarceration “over Hitler's ovens and Japan's military rapists of Nanking.”