Growing Up Bicultural in the United States: The Case of Japanese Americans

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Fuji Collins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Growing Up

Japanese Reinvention of Self through Hawai‘i’s Japanese Americans

2012 ◽  
Vol 83 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yujin Yaguchi
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese History ◽  
Postwar Japan ◽  
Postwar Reconstruction ◽  
American Hegemony ◽  
Modern Japanese History ◽  
American Society

This article 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.

Camera Men: Techno-orientalism in Two Acts

2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 939-964 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANIEL MCKAY
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Cultural Texts ◽  
Bubble Economy

During the years of Japan's “bubble” economy, writers and artists in the United States became increasingly susceptible to “Japan-bashing,” a discourse that objectified Japanese for their trade practices, overseas purchases, and tourist presence. In the following article, I draw upon a range of cultural texts, from Truman Capote's novellaBreakfast at Tiffany'sto Michael Crichton's novelRising Sun, in order to investigate how the trope of the camera-toting Japanese expatriate encapsulated the fears of the era. I then move to explore the ways in which Japanese Americans negotiated these tropes in their writings, paying particular attention to Ruth Ozeki's novelMy Year of Meats. I hypothesize that Japanese Americans remained aware of the phenomenon of “Japan-bashing” throughout the era, yet did not confront it in a sustained fashion. Instead, tropes were either dismissed out of hand or, as in Ozeki's case, incorporated into a narrative before undergoing a process of gradual dismantlement.

Bonds and Barriers

2021 ◽  
pp. 260-294
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Guglielmo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
National Security ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
World War ◽  
Enlisted Personnel ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One

Chapter 7 follows nonblack minorities through their training and service in the United States. America’s World War II military, from its top leaders to its enlisted personnel, simultaneously built and blurred a white-nonwhite divide alongside its black-white one. On the one hand, the blurring stemmed from a host of factors, including the day-to-day intermingling of troops, the activism of nonblack minorities, and, paradoxically, the unifying power of the black-white divide among nonblacks. On the other hand, this blurring had its limits. White-nonwhite lines cropped up in some of the same places black-white ones did and in some different ones, too, especially those related to national security and Japanese Americans. In the end, these lines remained in place throughout the war years, despite continuous blurring. They did so in part because of these racialized national security concerns and because of the power of civilian racist practices and investments.

4. Crucibles of war

2016 ◽  
pp. 83-115
Author(s):  
Madeline Y. Hsu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Educational Attainment ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Economic Success ◽  
Racial Ideologies ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Postcolonial States

Hostilities lingered in the immediate aftermath of the war, but the onset of the Cold War dramatically improved the standing of Japanese Americans. “Crucibles of war” explains how the worldwide struggle against communism compelled the United States to cultivate friendships with Asian nations and peoples, including emergent postcolonial states such as India, Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, Malaysia, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Burma. The walls of Asian exclusion crumbled with the piecemeal abolishing of laws restricting immigration, citizenship, employment, residence, and miscegenation, underwritten by a reworking of racial ideologies and immigration controls that remade Asians into model immigrants and citizens, even as it positioned them as innately suited for educational attainment and economic success.

Psychology, Context, and the Risk of Genocide

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
George R. Mastroianni
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Pearl Harbor ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Psychological Conditions ◽  
Predisposing Conditions

Chapter 11 compares the attitudes of some Americans toward Japanese and Japanese Americans in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor with German attitudes toward Jews. Theories of genocide generally posit predisposing psychological conditions and then examine instances of genocide to confirm whether or not those predisposing conditions were present. The case of the Japanese American confinements offers an opportunity to examine a case in which at least some of the suspected predisposing conditions were present but genocide did not follow. This suggests that there were significant differences between America and Germany in the intensity and penetration of anti-Japanese and anti-Semitic attitudes, respectively, and also that important legal and political safeguards against minority mistreatment that were compromised in Germany remained at least partially intact in the United States.

In Defense of Justice

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eileen H. Tamura
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

As a leading dissident in the World War II concentration camps for Japanese Americans, Joseph Yoshisuke Kurihara stands out as an icon of Japanese American resistance. In this biography, Kurihara's life provides a window into the history of Japanese Americans during the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Hawaiʻi to Japanese parents who immigrated to work on the sugar plantations, Kurihara was transformed by the forced removal and incarceration of ethnic Japanese during World War II. As an inmate at Manzanar in California, Kurihara became one of the leaders of a dissident group within the camp and was implicated in “the Manzanar incident,” a serious civil disturbance that erupted on December 6, 1942. In 1945, after three years and seven months of incarceration, he renounced his U.S. citizenship and boarded a ship for Japan, never to return to the United States. Shedding light on the turmoil within the camps as well as the sensitive and formerly unspoken issue of citizenship renunciation among Japanese Americans, this book explores one man's struggles with the complexities of loyalty and dissent.

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