scholarly journals Aging of a Model Minority: A Diachronic Analysis of Two Quantitative Research Studies on Aging of Japanese in New York

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 232-232
Author(s):  
Itsuko Toyama ◽  
Taeko Nakashima
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Quantitative Research ◽  
Model Minority ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Academic Qualification ◽  
Diachronic Analysis ◽  
Research Studies

Abstract This is a diachronic analysis of two quantitative research studies on the aging of Japanese and Japanese Americans living in Greater New York. How have older Japanese individuals, who once have been referred as “model minority,” lived and aged in Greater New York? All the data in this paper are based on the first research study conducted in 2006 and the second in 2018 (Ethical approval reference number 6, 2018). This paper reveals both the social transitoriness and the cultural immutability of the Japanese elderly community in Greater New York. The following is a summary of the findings: (1) a growing Japanese American community with US citizenship, higher academic qualification, and better communication competency has been observed. (2) The allowable range of private expense to hire personal caregivers has been widened. (3) Not only the concerns and anxieties for later lives but also the plans and preparations for aging are much the same. (4) The elderly are provided with culturally specific care (with regard to language, food, and concept of care)—even allowed to live with other Japanese people—and the needs of caregivers who can understand Japanese culture are satiated. (5) Almost half of those in the community find it difficult to eliminate the possibility of returning to Japan, and some of them have already chosen to migrate back to Japan.

Jim and Jap Crow

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew M. Briones
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Atomic Bomb ◽  
Civil Liberty ◽  
Chicago School ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Internment Camps ◽  
The Military

Following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. government rounded up more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans and sent them to internment camps. One of those internees was Charles Kikuchi. In thousands of diary pages, he documented his experiences in the camps, his resettlement in Chicago and drafting into the army on the eve of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and his postwar life as a social worker in New York City. Kikuchi's diaries bear witness to a watershed era in American race relations, and expose both the promise and the hypocrisy of American democracy. This book follows Kikuchi's personal odyssey among fellow Japanese American intellectuals, immigrant activists, Chicago School social scientists, everyday people on Chicago's South Side, and psychologically scarred veterans in the hospitals of New York. The book chronicles a remarkable moment in America's history in which interracial alliances challenged the limits of the elusive democratic ideal, and in which the nation was forced to choose between civil liberty and the fearful politics of racial hysteria. It was an era of world war and the atomic bomb, desegregation in the military but Jim and Jap Crow elsewhere in America, and a hopeful progressivism that gave way to Cold War paranoia. The book looks at Kikuchi's life and diaries as a lens through which to observe the possibilities, failures, and key conversations in a dynamic multiracial America.

Cold War Activism and Japanese American Exceptionalism

2018 ◽  
Vol 87 (2) ◽  
pp. 264-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane C. Fujino
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Model Minority ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Empire Building ◽  
History Of ◽  
Freedom Movement ◽  
Global Cold War

This study contrasts Japanese American activism, centering on citizenship struggles surrounding the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, to show alternatives to the emergence of the model minority trope. This complexity of activity worked to create and contest the making of a “successful” minority and ideas about U.S. democracy and equality at mid-century. Through a nuanced interpretation, this article reveals how certain narratives relied on a social progress framework and shifting global Cold War politics to create a “Japanese American Exceptionalism.” The little-known history of Japanese American Cold War progressivism shows the forging of deep solidarities and the refusal to promote domestic rights based on empire building. By inserting Japanese Americans into the “Long” freedom movement historiography, this article further examines intergenerational continuities and ruptures.

scholarly journals Reassessing Japanese American Collective Memory Through Gene Oishi’s Internment Narratives

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolangelo Becce
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
Model Minority ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
True Self ◽  
Direct Response ◽  
Model Minority Stereotype ◽  
Second World

Seven decades after Japanese Americans were interned during the Second World War, former journalist and internment survivor Gene Oishi published Fox Drum Bebop (2014). The protagonist, Hiroshi, had been introduced in Oishi’s previous memoir, In Search of Hiroshi (1988), as “quasi-fictional” and “neither American nor Japanese, but simply me”. Yet, in the same memoir, Oishi had also described his inability to write about ‘Hiroshi’, thus settling on ‘Gene’ as a main character and waiting 28 more years before publishing a book about his true self. A comparison between the two books highlights that In Search of Hiroshi was written as an attempt at telling a story that would implicitly support the ‘model minority’ myth by offering an account of the internment experience as a direct response to the sociopolitical constraints related to the request by Japanese Americans for redress from the U.S. government. On the other hand, the more recent Fox Drum Bebop represents a fictional retelling of Oishi’s memoir which reveals the limits of the collective memory of the internment as developed during the redress years by openly defying the ‘model minority’ stereotype while at the same time once more denouncing the injustices suffered by the Japanese American community during the war. This essay focuses on Oishi’s double narrative as a reassessment of the collective memory of the internment experience and of its lasting effects on Japanese Americans.

The Japanese American Citizens League, Los Angeles Politics, and the Thomas Noguchi Case

2020 ◽  
Vol 102 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-192
Author(s):  
Anne Soon Choi
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Model Minority ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Grassroots Organizing ◽  
Political Alliances ◽  
Political Narrative ◽  
The Media ◽  
Redress Movement

This article examines the political mobilization of Japanese Americans by the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) against the 1969 firing of Los Angeles County Coroner Thomas Noguchi. By challenging the racism in the Noguchi case, the JACL opened a public discussion of the racism behind wartime incarceration, rejecting the quiescence that had marked Japanese Americans as the “model minority.” Activism in the Noguchi case proved the potential of grassroots organizing and built experience in forming cross-racial political alliances, effectively shaping political narrative in the media, and exercising clout in city politics. For Japanese Americans and the JACL, these experiences shaped a new political sensibility that underscored civil rights and served as a precursor to the later redress movement.

A Further Test of the Model Minority Thesis

1987 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 266-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phylis Cancilla Martinelli ◽  
Richard Nagasawa
Keyword(s):  
Asian Americans ◽  
Census Data ◽  
Model Minority ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
White Males ◽  
Managerial Positions

This article examines data on Japanese Americans in Arizona in terms of the model minority thesis and addresses the question of whether or not this image is a myth. Occupation and income return from education, based on the 1980 census data, are examined for Japanese American males in Arizona. The findings suggest that the model minority thesis does not apply for the Japanese Americans in Arizona; for example, white males are more than two times as likely to be in managerial positions as Japanese American males, and the latter receive less return from education than the former. It is suggested that further studies explore in depth cultural and structural factors in relation to mobility, income, and occupation for Japanese Americans and other Asian Americans.

scholarly journals El judo llega a California: judo vs. lucha en el oeste de los Estados Unidos, 1900-1920

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 8
Author(s):  
Matt Hlinak
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Martial Arts ◽  
American West ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
European American ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
European Americans

<p>This essay analyzes Japanese-American immigration into the American West through the prism of athletics, specifically by examining a series of contests between judoka and wrestlers from 1900 to 1920 in California. The popularity of these matches demonstrates the complex relationship between Japanese-Americans and the dominant European-American culture of the western states during this period. This complexity will be shown first by looking at the way in which martial arts are closely linked to national and ethnic identity. The strong barnstorming tradition in both judo and wrestling led to a number of matches of great interest to European-Americans of the period. These matches appealed to an interest in Japanese culture, a desire to see stereotypes reinforced, and nationalist tendencies during an age of uncertainty.</p>

scholarly journals Mapping Gentrification in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles: Using Geographic Information System (GIS) Analytical Tools

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Saki Nakashima
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Quantitative Research ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Symbolic Space ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Little Tokyo ◽  
Analytical Tools ◽  
Civic Center ◽  
Second World

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> From the time when its roots traced back all the way back in 1886, Little Tokyo has overcome numerous obstacles including the Great Depression, Japanese American internments in the Second World War, racial discrimination, transition into Bronxville, multinational redevelopment projects, and the demographic/ geographic dispersion of the Nikkei communities. Despite these numerous development, Little Tokyo remains the major historical, cultural, and civic center for Japanese Americans living in Southern California and has continued to be a historically and a culturally symbolic space for many.</p><p> This research strives to identify the trends of gentrification in the study area; Little Tokyo, through indicators or variables in 5 domains: (A) Housing, (B) Demography, (C) Income, (D) Education Level, and (E) Public Safety with the central focus on housing. To analyze the occurrence of these elements between the year 1990 and 2013, quantitative research including GIS groundworks were delivered. This research is aimed at becoming a tool to measure and potentially assist communities to make more robust development intervention and implementation by identifying the trends that emerge socio-economic problems like gentrification facing local communities around the world.</p>

Nisei in Gotham: The JACD and Japanese Americans in 1940s New York

Prospects ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 581-595
Author(s):  
Greg Robinson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Political Action ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Transient Nature ◽  
Activist Group ◽  
History Of ◽  
Residential Pattern

The resettlement and activism of Japanese Americans in New York City during the 1940s represents a notable chapter within the large and complex history of the city's Nikkei (ethnic Japanese) community. Throughout the 20th century, the New York community has been distinctive among those in the United States. Like the larger city itself, New York's Nikkei population has been notable for demographic and occupational diversity, extraordinary cosmopolitanism, and political and artistic effervescence. At the same time, in stark contrast to its Pacific Coast counterparts, the New York community has long been marked by a lack of group cohesion, which the scattered residential pattern and transient nature of many of its members did nothing to reduce.Both these salient community characteristics — political/artistic self-assertion and dispersion — were accentuated with the coming of World War II. The impending conflict between Washington and Tokyo led to the abrupt departure of a large proportion of the city's Nikkei residents back to Japan. However, in the weeks after Pearl Harbor, a new group of anti-Fascist Japanese Americans, largely first generation, assumed community leadership. Their group was subsequently reinforced with the arrival of second-generation intellectuals and artists from the West Coast, who had been incarcerated en masse in camps and elected to resettle in the city afterward. Although the newcomers experienced discrimination and difficulties, they joined with the city's established Japanese population to form a truly cohesive community, with its nucleus the popular activist group Japanese American Committee for Democracy. Yet this group, because of its connections with the Communist Party, demonstrated the limitations as well as the force of Japanese-American political action.

Toward More Equal Dialogue

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasuko Takezawa
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Graduate Program ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Japanese Student ◽  
Cultural Baggage

For the benefit of young scholars in both countries, I would like to present one more story following Professor Noriko Ishii, about the experience of a Japanese student studying Japanese Americans in the United States during the 1980s. First, I have to confess that when I embarked on my path as a scholar in the United States, I was rather naïve, with my approach to Japanese American studies being shaped by the cultural baggage I had carried from Japan. After spending my undergraduate years there majoring in comparative culture and cultural anthropology, I had hoped to continue and deepen my studies by focusing on Japanese American acculturation and ethnic identity in an American graduate program. Through the fieldwork, however, I came to realize that such an approach positioned Japanese Americans on a continuum linking the two poles of “American” and “Japanese” culture—precisely the framework critiqued in the introduction to this volume....

US Multicultural Pathways

2005 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-304
Author(s):  
A. ROBERT LEE
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Vice President ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Immigrant Community ◽  
White House ◽  
American Memory

Emily S. Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003, £18.95). Pp. 248. ISBN 0 8223 3206.Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003, £12.95). Pp. 322. ISBN 0 674 01118 X.Tetsuden Kashima, Judgment without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment during World War II (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003, $35.00). Pp. 336. ISBN 0 295 98299 3.Gerald Early, This Is Where I Came in: Black America in the 1960s (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, Abraham Lincoln Lecture Series, 2003, £11. 50). Pp. 144. ISBN 0 80302 1823 0.Deborah Davis Jackson, Our Elders Lived It: American Indian Identity in the City (DeKalb, IL: University of Northern Illinois Press, 2002, $20.00). Pp. 191. ISBN 0 87580 591 4.Yen Le Espiritu, Home Bound: Filipino American Lives across Cultures, Communities, and Countries (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2003, $21.95). Pp. 271. ISBN 0 520 23527 4.Elizabeth Boosahda, Arab-American Faces and Voices: The Origins of an Immigrant Community (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2003, £18.95). Pp. 288. ISBN 0 292 70919 6.John Kerry, patrician Massachusetts liberal, war hero, and yet dissident from the Vietnam era, vies for the 2004 presidency against George Bush, White House dynastic Republican, self-nominated caring conservative, and yet hard-edged ideologue. Notwithstanding Kerry's Catholicism, or his Jewish family line, both candidates hold sway as heirs to WASP cultural style bolstered by considerable personal fortunes. Howard Dean, New York MD and former Vermont governor, and like Kerry and Bush a Yale graduate, storms the early polls by his activist left-liberal agenda and Internet fundraising. John Edwards, North Carolina senator, personal injuries lawyer, and up-from-the-ranks millionaire, his father a textile factory worker and his mother a postal office employee, conducts a widely agreed good race for the Democratic Party nomination before joining the ticket as would-be Vice President. Had multiculturalism led to any shift of paradigm in connection with canonical whiteness? Or, to put matters more plainly, were not the front-runners once again executive white men, whatever their respective merits or social origins?

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