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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.

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 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.

This introductory chapter draws on Charles Kikuchi's diaries in presenting a trail guide for a reconstructive study of why the various schools of American democracy—including Nisei intellectuals at Berkeley, pluralist advocates, Chicago School sociologists, and African American progressives, among other types—ultimately failed in part and, not insignificantly, of how some of their ideas managed to survive the larger society's capitulation to Orwellian, Cold War ideology in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Kikuchi's preservation of the time's key moments and meaning makers allows for a restaging of historical actors and events. Most importantly, through Kikuchi's narrative, historical actors reenact their earnest but fallible efforts at progressively redefining the idea of American democracy on a stage not quite prepared for the glare of klieg lights.

This chapter looks at how Kikuchi found army life somewhat of a rude awakening after having spent two years living in Chicago, working on his master's degree in social work, and conducting research for JERS. It proved to be as much a mental challenge as a physical one: the bureaucracy of the military hierarchy and its conservative ideology were most surprising to Kikuchi. He discovered that deep-seated racism directed toward African American soldiers and civilians pervaded the army ranks, a difficult pill to swallow given his own position as a recently imprisoned Nisei. Nevertheless, he managed to retain an intense faith and belief in the power and potential of America's democracy, hoping that his individual service would, in some small measure, reflect the commitment of the Nisei as a whole.

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.

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 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.

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.

Chapter 4 describes Rusch’s experience from the time of his repatriation to the United States to his service as a personnel officer for the Military Intelligence Service Language School. Rusch’s task was to recruit Japanese Americans for the U.S. Army, where they would learn Japanese to serve the war effort. Rusch was also part of a speaker’s bureau, through which he would appear at public functions to discuss Japan’s military capabilities. On some occasions, before audiences of the Protestant Episcopal Church, Rusch spoke against America’s policy of interning Japanese Americans. But more often than not, Rusch’s remarks mirrored American policy and sentiments of the day, calling for the fiery destruction of Japan’s militarist regime, which he acknowledged would require the killing of Japanese civilians. At other times, Rusch used his position to implore army officers to treat Nisei soldiers as individuals, not as members of another race. Occasionally, Rusch spoke of World War II in terms of a race war, of Japanese leaders bent on expelling Caucasians from Asia, casting Americans in the role of the fearless pioneers who fought off Native Americans to secure their westward expansion. Rusch remained committed to returning to help Japan rebuild after the war.

The Nisei [second-generation Japanese Brazilians], who were born in the 1930s and 1940s, received Brazilian primary education in the countryside. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Nisei established and participated in their own Nisei clubs in São Paulo City, which were exclusive to Japanese descendants and divided by class, and they practiced ethnic-class endogamy among themselves. With the power of higher education, elite Nisei men quickly moved up on the social ladder. Many college-educated Niseis in this generation tend to position themselves as Brazilians/Westerners over the Japanese and other Asians. Yet, when the time came for their children to choose their marriage partners, some still wanted to keep their families “Japanese,” without having any “Brazilian” in-laws. This is a clear example of one’s multiple identity in conflict. Having distanced themselves from the general Japanese Brazilian population for many years, some of the elite Nisei “returned” to major ethnic Japanese organizations and associations after the turn of the twentieth-first century.

With Marshall’s permission, Almond reorganized the 92nd Infantry Division, keeping all the “best” soldiers in one regiment, while farming out the other three regiments for training and other duties. Almond gained a white infantry and the 442nd Infantry (Nisei) Regiment, whose combat performance was already legendary. This made the 92nd Infantry Division the most racially integrated division in the Army, and it acquitted itself well. The elation Almond felt at finally seeing his unit succeed, however, could not assuage a crushing sadness: his son was killed in combat. His letters home to Margaret reveal a father’s anguish, his seething anger, and his love for and devotion to his only grandson, and his steadfast intent to carry on with the mission. Almond’s tremendous work ethic and dynamic personality helped him push past his personal grief and focus on his mission.

This chapter describes the proliferation of Nisei baseball in California at the turn of the century. As the second-generation Nisei came of age, their world tugged at them from two ends: their Japanese heritage and American nationality. Gaukueans (Japanese-language schools) were among the institutions employed by the Issei to help maintain the Japanese culture among their children. Athletics, above all, was the enclave's most popular activity, with baseball usually dominating. This chapter tracks the growth of Nikkei baseball within this region as the Nisei sought to forge their identities in this new cultural milieu. Nisei baseball in California throughout the 1930s had thus become a vibrant activity that had developed from the strong roots planted by the earlier generation.

This book explores how Japanese Americans in Hawaiʻi turned to consumer culture to demonstrate their fitness for citizenship, and in the process reinforced class and racial hierarchies that had been in the making since the 1920s. Building on recent scholarship that considers ethnic communities within a trans-Pacific context, the book investigates how the Nisei rose to prominence and preeminence in Hawaiʻi. More specifically, it explains how specific patterns of leisure and consumption allowed the Nisei to deliberately act out their whiteness, thereby enabling them to further their economic and political goals. It shows that the creation of Nisei identity was not only a process internal to the Japanese American community, but also a part of the economic and political formation of Hawaiʻi as a whole. The book also discusses the ways in which the adoption of class-based notions of whiteness as a standard of feminine beauty proved to be both empowering and limiting for Japanese Americans.

This chapter examines how Japanese Americans used the meaning and enactment of whiteness as a cultural marker of difference to rework the definition of “mainstream,” allowing them to claim their place in Hawaiʻi's racial hierarchy. More specifically, it chronicles the geographical and racial dislocation experienced by Nisei students who attended Honolulu's high schools and universities in the interwar years as they grappled with and internalized matters of race, ethnicity, class, and gender peculiar to Hawaiʻi. Drawing on the accounts provided in William C. Smith's survey, the book highlights the important role played by the material culture of the home in defining what it meant to be urban, modern, and “white.” The book first considers the demography of Nisei students in Hawaiʻi before discussing their early home life, gender expectations and generational conflict, and race relations. It also describes the Nisei's visions of the ideal home life that drew on images from mainstream America.

This chapter examines how Nisei women, by virtue of their liminality, took advantage of the emerging culture of personality in Hawaiʻi and invested it with subcultural values consistent with Japanese American ideals of whiteness and East-West hybridity. It considers how American consumer culture became liberating and limiting for Honolulu's Nisei youths, and especially young women who cultivated ideal personality traits engendered by the values of neatness, cleanliness, and feminine respectability. It discusses the ways in which Nisei attitudes toward race and class reflected and shaped Honolulu's Nisei consumer culture by focusing on the experiences of Nisei students at two high schools, McKinley and Farrington. It also describes the Department of Public Instruction's efforts to promote consumer culture through health education. Finally, it explains how Nisei women used their knowledge of fashion and beauty to carve a niche in the emerging businesses that catered to women—the cosmetology and retail markets.

Pre-war child immigrants who arrived in Brazil in the 1920s and 1930s grew up as Japanese in the Brazilian countryside, where the Japanese formed various ethnic associations and built Japanese language schools. Counted on for agricultural labor and as caretakers of their younger siblings, prewar child immigrants had little or no Brazilian formal education, but many learned the Japanese language in accordance with their parents’ plan of going home after making a sizable fortune. Young daughters’ sexual honor was defined in relation to family honor, and gender subordination was strengthened for ethnic endogamy. By 1970, prewar child immigrants with fluency in Japanese had come to occupy the important positions in their Japanese Brazilian community in the city and by identifying themselves as quasi-Niseis, they eventually redefined themselves as more Japanese than the Issei and even than the Japanese in Japan.

Born in the city during the 1950s and 1960s, Niseis and Sanseis [third-generation Japanese Brazilians] were expected to succeed as urban professionals, following the path of the older elite Nisei generation, who had advanced themselves as “special Japanese” in Brazilian society. By 1980, interracial marriage had become a norm among Japanese Brazilians, especially among men. They attempted to define themselves on their own terms, through the choice of careers, choice of marriage partners, and for certain political ideologies. While some educated Niseis, especially men, rigorously resisted what was expected of them as “Japanese” under the patriarchal rule for the family and “community,” many educated Nisei and Sansei women chose to remain single to become their parents’ caretakers and/or chose to work in Japan for dekassegui for the financial needs of their families. Meanwhile, the gendered pattern of Japanese Brazilians’ intermarriage has been reversed, with more women marrying out.