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.

‘Bonded by reverence toward the Buddha’: Asian decolonization, Japanese Americans, and the making of the Buddhist world, 1947–1965

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-164
Author(s):  
Michael K. Masatsugu
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Religious Discrimination ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Global Movement ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Buddha

AbstractThis article examines Asian and Japanese American participation in a post-Second World War global movement for Buddhist revival. It looks at the role that Buddhism and the World Fellowship of Buddhists organization played in shaping transnational networks and the development of a global Buddhist perspective. It contextualizes the growth of a ‘Buddhist world’ within the history of decolonization and Japanese American struggles to reconstruct individual and community identities thoroughly disrupted by the war. The article considers Asian Buddhist approaches toward recognition as national and world citizens rather than colonial subjects and their influence on Japanese American Buddhists’ strategies for combating racial and religious discrimination in the United States. Finally, the article examines how Japanese Americans joined Asian efforts to formulate a distinctly Buddhist response to the Cold War. Buddhists hoped that Buddhism might serve as a ‘third power’ that would provide a critical check on a world increasingly polarized by Cold War politics and threatened by the prospects of nuclear war.

The Race Card

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tara Fickle
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Model Minority ◽  
Cultural Construction ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Chinese Exclusion ◽  
Japanese American Internment ◽  
Boundary Making ◽  
History Of ◽  
East West

This book uncovers popular games’ key role in the cultural construction of modern racial fictions. It argues that gaming provides the lens, language, and logic—in short, the authority—behind racial boundary making, reinforcing and at times subverting beliefs about where people racially and spatially belong. It focuses specifically on the experience of Asian Americans and the longer history of ludo-Orientalism, wherein play, the creation of games, and the use of game theory shape how East-West relations are imagined and reinforce notions of foreignness and perceptions of racial difference. Drawing from literary and critical texts, analog and digital games, journalistic accounts, marketing campaigns, and archival material, The Race Cardshows how ludo-Orientalism informs a range of historical events and social processes which readers may not even think of as related to play, from Chinese exclusion and the Japanese American internment to Cold War strategies, the model minority myth, and the globalization of Asian labor. Interrogating key moments in the formation of modern U.S. race relations, The Race Cardintroduces a new set of critical terms for engaging the literature as well as the legislation that emerged from these agonistic struggles.

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.

Cold War Hong Kong

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Priscilla Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Internal Dynamics ◽  
Major Powers ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Global Cold War

In Hong Kong the rules of the global Cold War were often suspended. Or perhaps it is fairer to say that the territory epitomized to the ultimate degree many of the ambiguities and contradictions of the Cold War, a confrontation that, however fierce its rhetoric, was usually characterized by pragmatic caution, at least where the major powers were concerned. The story of Hong Kong during the Cold War reinforces a growing body of scholarship on the period that suggests that, while situating the history of post-1945 Asia in “a globalized Cold War context,” one must also remember that Asia “had its own internal dynamics and trajectories, and it evolved in ways that were not entirely the making of the big powers.”

““Beyond This World of Transiency and Impermanence””: Japanese Americans, Dharma Bums, and the Making of American Buddhism during the Early Cold War Years

2008 ◽  
Vol 77 (3) ◽  
pp. 423-451 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael K. Masatsugu
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Pluralism ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
European American ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Study Group ◽  
Buddhist Study ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War

This article examines the growing interest in Buddhism in the United States during the Cold War, analyzing discussions and debates around the authenticity of various Buddhist teachings and practices that emerged in an interracial Buddhist study group and its related publications. Japanese American Buddhists had developed a modified form of Jōōdo Shinshūū devotional practice as a strategy for building ethnic community and countering racialization as religious and racial Others. The authenticity of these practices was challenged by European and European American scholars and artists, especially the Beats, who drew upon Orientalist representations of Buddhism as ancient, exotic, and mysterious. In response, Japanese American Buddhists crafted their own definition of ““tradition”” by drawing from institutional and devotional developments dating back to fourteenth-century Japan as well as more recent Japanese American history. The article contextualizes these debates within the broader discussion of cultural pluralism and race relations during the Cold War.

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.

The Americas, 1450–2000

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward J. Davies, II
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
World War ◽  
European Contact ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Global Cold War ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This article discusses the history of the Americas from 1450 to 2000. It describes the Americas before European contact; disease and death brought by the European arrival in 1492 due to new bacteria and viruses they carried; conquest, colonization, and settlement by the Europeans; the building of transatlantic economies; revolutions in the Americas from 1760 to 1830; revolutions and new republics that were formed; the rise of industrial economies in the Americas; migration and labor demands; the Great Depression and World War II; the global cold war from 1941 to 2000teh global economy; and globalization in the late twentieth century.

Dispersal, Resettlement, Return

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Connie Y. Chiang
Keyword(s):  
Environmental History ◽  
Pacific Coast ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Cultivated Land ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Housing Shortages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Environmental Process ◽  
Growing Conditions

It would be easy to conclude with the end of the war, the closing of the camps, and the departure of the last detainees. However, the environmental history of the incarceration extended into the postwar years. This chapter explores the postwar experiences of Japanese American farmers as they left the camps toward the end of the war. Some started anew in the inland West and cultivated land there, while other tried to pick up their lives back on the Pacific Coast. In both cases, they encountered numerous environmental challenges, from unfamiliar growing conditions to neglected, overgrown land. They also confronted hostile or suspicious neighbors and land and housing shortages. Postwar resettlement was yet another environmental process to which Japanese Americans had to adapt.

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.

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