“A Cross-Fire between Minorities”

2018 ◽  
Vol 87 (4) ◽  
pp. 667-701
Author(s):  
Jane Hong
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Asian American ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Chinese Americans ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Immigrant Rights ◽  
Caribbean Community ◽  
Black Protest ◽  
Black Immigration

This article examines the Japanese American Citizens League’s (JACL) postwar campaign to secure U.S. citizenship eligibility for first-generation Japanese (Issei) as a civil rights effort that brought Japanese Americans into contention with African American and Afro-Caribbean community leaders during the height of the U.S. Cold War in East Asia. At the same time, JACL’s disagreements with Chinese Americans and Japanese American liberals precluded any coherent Japanese or Asian American position on postwar immigration policy. The resulting 1952 McCarran-Walter Act formally ended Asians’ exclusion from U.S. immigration and naturalization, even as a colonial quota in the law severely restricted black immigration from the Caribbean and galvanized black protest. This episode of black-Japanese tension complicates scholarly understandings of the liberalization of U.S. immigration and naturalization laws toward Asian peoples as analogous with or complementary to black civil rights gains in the postwar years. In so doing, it suggests the need to think more critically and historically about the cleavages between immigration and civil rights law, and between immigrant rights and civil rights.

Christianity, Social Justice, and the Japanese American Incarceration During World War II

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne M. Blankenship
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Religious Experiences ◽  
World War ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
The Impact

Anne M. Blankenship's study of Christianity in the infamous camps where Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II yields insights both far-reaching and timely. While most Japanese Americans maintained their traditional identities as Buddhists, a sizeable minority identified as Christian, and a number of church leaders sought to minister to them in the camps. Blankenship shows how church leaders were forced to assess the ethics and pragmatism of fighting against or acquiescing to what they clearly perceived, even in the midst of a national crisis, as an unjust social system. These religious activists became acutely aware of the impact of government, as well as church, policies that targeted ordinary Americans of diverse ethnicities. Going through the doors of the camp churches and delving deeply into the religious experiences of the incarcerated and the faithful who aided them, Blankenship argues that the incarceration period introduced new social and legal approaches for Christians of all stripes to challenge the constitutionality of government policies on race and civil rights. She also shows how the camp experience nourished the roots of an Asian American liberation theology that sprouted in the sixties and seventies.

Imperatives of Asian American Citizenship

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen D. Wu
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Chinese Americans ◽  
Asian Populations ◽  
Model Minorities ◽  
Asian American Identity ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Cold War

This introductory chapter describes the racial order in twentieth-century America—its evolution, consequences, and significance. Japanese and Chinese Americans, the largest ethnic Asian populations, and the two that figured most prominently in the public eye between the 1940s and 1960s, are central to this investigation. Their trajectories unfold separately in order to illuminate their distinct histories. Yet Japanese and Chinese Americans also appear in tandem to emphasize the many parallels that account for their concurrent emergence as model minorities. As a mix of cultural, social, and political history, the chapter highlights how the discursive and the material mattered for Japanese American, Chinese American, and ultimately Asian American identity formation from World War II through the “Cold War civil rights” years.

Politics in Other Ways

2019 ◽  
Vol 88 (2) ◽  
pp. 262-287
Author(s):  
Maki Smith
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Grassroots Politics ◽  
Racial Liberalism ◽  
Racial Harmony ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The City

This article explores the ways that Seattle’s Asian American—and in particular Japanese American—community negotiated the shifting terrain of racial politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. While Seattle’s city leaders—and indeed many in the civil rights establishment—heralded the city for its racial liberalism, a young cadre of activists organized across racial and ethnic boundaries and challenged established leadership to articulate a robust, anti-racist, working-class multiracial politics. Significantly, the rise of Black and Asian anti-racist solidarities exploded the city’s narrative of exceptional racial harmony in an age of social crisis. Activists adopted a capacious definition of community that could acknowledge specific identities while simultaneously coalescing around a shared sense of injury. They also practiced a form of grassroots politics that was flexible and improvisational, that was enacted both within and outside established organizations and channels, and that ultimately blurred the distinction between moderation and radicalism.

Modernism and Asian American Writers

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Audrey Wu Clark
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Literary Anthologies ◽  
Political Solidarity

In her pathbreaking book Asian American Panethnicity (1992), Yen Le Espiritu traces Asian American panethnicity to the Yellow Power movement of the civil rights era of the 1960s. Thereafter the political struggles of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, and Filipino Americans were documented in literature and studied in literary anthologies such as Frank Chin et al.’s Aiiieeeee! (1974) and David Hsin-Fu Wand’s Asian-American Heritage: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry (1974). However, early Asian American literature suggests that Asian American consciousness emerged earlier than the civil rights era. During the era of Chinese exclusion (1882–1943), Chinese American writers such as Lee Yan Phou, Sui Sin Far, and Onoto Watanna—Sui Sin Far’s sister, who wrote under a Japanese pseudonym—wrote about Chinese American and Japanese American experiences. The subsequent era of Japanese exclusion (1907–1945) brought about the modernist haiku poetry of Japanese American writers Yone Noguchi and Sadakichi Hartmann. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until the Popular Front era of the 1930s that various forms of panethnic and queer Asian American political consciousness emerged in the literature of Korean American writer Younghill Kang, Filipino American writers Carlos Bulosan (who mentions Kang in his novel, America Is In the Heart) and José García Villa, and Chinese American writer H. T. Tsiang. The politically progressive Popular Front of the 1930s, together with the influence of experimental literary forms of high modernism from just a decade before, set the stage for the Asian American panethnicity and queer consciousness that are described in the works of Kang and Bulosan, and Villa and Tsiang, respectively. Kang’s autobiographical novels The Grass Roof (1931) and East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee (1937) and Bulosan’s novel, America Is in the Heart (1943) exhibit important thematic influences by T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Likewise, Villa’s Have Come, Am Here (1942) and Tsiang’s novels The Hanging on Union Square (1935) and And China Has Hands (1937) demonstrate the influence of queer modernist Gertrude Stein. Just a few decades earlier, Yone Noguchi and Sadakichi Hartmann were both writing modernist haikus that responded to those of their friend Ezra Pound. However, without the language of political solidarity that the Popular Front provided, Noguchi’s and Hartmann’s politics, implicit in their poetry, remained overlooked by critics until the 1990s.

After the Storm

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lon Kurashige
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Japanese American Internment ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Popular Interest

This chapter examines the final end of formal anti-Asian policies in the Immigration Act of 1965, which gave Asian nations equal immigration quotas with all other nations in the world. An important part of this egalitarian context was Hawaii statehood because the new state’s large Asian American constituency boosted this group’s political influence in Congress. At the same time, the civil rights and anti-war movements and protests rooted in the Asian American movement during the long 1960s stirred scholarly and popular interest in the history of Asian exclusion and Japanese American internment that flowered throughout the late 20th and early 21st centuries into a robust cultural memory that, curiously, occluded the significance of the egalitarian opposition to anti-Asian racism. Instead, the picture of the past was stark, emphasizing racism, injustice, victimization, and white domination.

Nikkei Baseball

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel O. Regalado
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Historical Factors ◽  
Meiji Era ◽  
Asian American Identity

Nikkei Baseball examines baseball's evolving importance to the Japanese American community and the construction of Japanese American identity. Originally introduced in Japan in the late 1800s, baseball was played in the United States by Japanese immigrants first in Hawaii, then San Francisco and northern California, then in amateur leagues up and down the Pacific Coast. For Japanese American players, baseball was seen as a sport that encouraged healthy competition by imposing rules and standards of ethical behavior for both players and fans. The value of baseball as exercise and amusement quickly expanded into something even more important, a means for strengthening social ties within Japanese American communities and for linking their aspirations to America's pastimes and America's promise. Drawing from archival research, prior scholarship, and personal interviews, this book explores key historical factors such as Meiji-era modernization policies in Japan, American anti-Asian sentiments, internment during World War II, the postwar transition, economic and educational opportunities in the 1960s, the developing concept of a distinct “Asian American” identity, and Japanese Americans' rise to the major leagues with star players including Lenn Sakata and Kurt Suzuki and even managers such as the Seattle Mariners' Don Wakamatsu.

I am Chinese: The Politics of Chinese American Lapel Buttons in Los Angeles during World War II

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Gow
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Chinese Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
Oral History Interviews ◽  
Sociological Studies

Abstract This article examines the history of lapel buttons and stickers used by Chinese Americans to identify their ethnicity during World War II. Most of these buttons and stickers were produced by Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Associations (CCBAs) immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor to differentiate their members from Japanese Americans. In examining this history, this article focuses in particular on Los Angeles, the city with the largest Japanese American population on the West Coast. In Los Angeles, U.S.-born Chinese American and Japanese American youth attended many of the same schools and often formed close friendships with one another. As a result, the questions that the buttons and stickers posed for this generation of Chinese American youth were particularly fraught. Drawing on oral history interviews, sociological studies of the Southern California Chinese American community from the period, and archival newspaper reportage, this article approaches these lapel pins and stickers as items of cultural contestation through which a variety of historical actors—from Chinese consular representatives, to immigrant leaders in the CCBAs, to Chinese American youth—negotiated questions of ethnic and national identity after the U.S. entry into World War II. I argue that rather than reflecting the complex ways that most Chinese American youth understood their own identity, the buttons and stickers represented the official viewpoints of the Chinese consulates in the United States and their allies in the nation’s CCBAs.

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.

The Complexity of Generational Status and Ethnic Identity of Japanese Americans

2020 ◽  
pp. 106648072097751
Author(s):  
Lorine Erika Saito
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Intergenerational Ties ◽  
The Impact

Japanese Americans comprise multiple generations, with a first wave of immigrants entering the United States in the 1800s. The current generation of Japanese American descendants today includes over five generations. The purpose of this qualitative study is to explore the ethnic identity of fourth- and fifth-generation Japanese American adults. Forty participants were interviewed as part of a larger study and deemed exempt by institutional review board. Results indicate that ethnic identity for multigenerational Japanese American adults is complex, with factors that include the impact of historical and intergenerational ties to World War II, continuance of family and cultural traditions, and identity as American but perceived as “forever foreigner.” Family counselor recommendations include considering historical background of Asian American and minority groups, rethinking educational curriculum through transformative social and emotional learning.

scholarly journals Library Exclusion and the Rise of Japanese Bookstores in Prewar Honolulu

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew B. Wertheimer ◽  
Noriko Asato
Keyword(s):  
Print Culture ◽  
Limited English Proficiency ◽  
First Generation ◽  
East Coast ◽  
Public Library ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
The Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
European Immigration

Research on the history of print culture and library service to immigrants in America has almost exclusively focused on European immigration to the East Coast. Such a narrative sidelines the experience of Asian Americans, among others. This article explores how the Library of Hawaii, which was the main public library in prewar Hawaiʻi, ignored the needs of Japanese immigrants at a time when they made up the largest ethnic group. In 1940, there were 157,905 Japanese Americans in Hawaiʻi, including the first generation Issei, many of whom had limited English proficiency, as well as the Hawaiʻi-born Nisei or second generation. Excluded from the public library, the Issei created their own rich print culture, including at least 41 stores selling Japanese-language books. This paper is based on archival sources and published reports to cover the Library’s history. In addition, the forgotten history of Japanese bookstores and reading in Honolulu will be brought to light by mining articles and advertisements that appeared inHonolulu’s Japanese American newspapers between the late 1800s and the beginning of WorldWar II, when Japanese bookselling came to an abrupt end. The paper makes advances in terms of research approaches for the study of immigrant print culture and also offers insight for librarians today to reflect on, when they consider the challenge of serving immigrants.

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