Japanese American Ethnicity

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takeyuki Tsuda
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Bona Fide ◽  
Ethnic Heritage ◽  
Taiko Drumming ◽  
American Society ◽  
New Generation ◽  
American Ethnicity

This book explores the contemporary ethnic experiences of Japanese Americans from the second to the fourth generations and the extent to which they remain connected to their ancestral cultural heritage. As one of the oldest groups of Asian Americans in the United States, most Japanese Americans are culturally assimilated and well-integrated in mainstream American society. However, they continue to be racialized as culturally “Japanese” foreigners simply because of their Asian appearance in a multicultural America where racial minorities are expected to remain ethnically distinct. Different generations of Japanese Americans have responded to such pressures in ways that range from demands that their racial citizenship as bona fide Americans be recognized to a desire to maintain or recover their ethnic heritage and reconnect with their ancestral homeland. This ethnographic study argues that the ethnicity of immigrant-descent minorities does not simply follow a linear trajectory in which increasing assimilation gradually erodes the significance of ethnic heritage and identity over generations. While inheriting the assimilative patterns of previous generations, each new generation of Japanese Americans has also negotiated its own ethnic positionality in response to a confluence of various historical and contemporary factors. In addition, this book analyzes the performance of ethnic heritage through taiko drumming ensembles, as well as placing Japanese Americans in transnational and diasporic contexts.

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.

Ballad for Incarcerated Americans: Second Generation Japanese American Musicking in World War II Camps

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 284-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARTA ROBERTSON
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Government ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
American Popular Music

AbstractDuring World War II, the United States government imprisoned approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were American-born citizens, half of whom were children. Through ethnographic interviews I explore how fragile youthful memories, trauma, and the soundscape of the War Relocation Authority (WRA) Incarceration Camps shaped the artistic trajectories of three such former “enemy alien” youth: two pianists and a koto player. Counterintuitively, Japanese traditional arts flourished in the hostile environment of dislocation through the high number ofnisei(second generation) participants, who later contributed to increasing transculturalism in American music following resettlement out of camp. Synthesizing Japanese and Euro-American classical music, white American popular music, and African American jazz, manyniseiparadoxically asserted their dual cultural commitment to both traditional Japanese and home front patriotic American principles. A performance of Earl Robinson and John Latouche's patriotic cantata,Ballad for Americans(1939), by the high school choir at Manzanar Incarceration Camp demonstrates the hybridity of these Japanese American cultural practices. Marked by Popular Front ideals,Ballad for Americansallowedniseito construct identities through a complicated mixture of ethnic pride, chauvinistic white Americanism allied with Bing Crosby's recordings of theBallad, and affiliation with black racial struggle through Paul Robeson's iconicBalladperformances.

Existential Crisis of the Japanese American Woman: A Study of Post War Japanese American Fiction

Ensemble ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 51-56
Author(s):  
Nitusmita Bhattacharyya ◽  
Keyword(s):  
American Woman ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Native Community ◽  
American Women ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Existential Crisis ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Post War

The Japanese American women, during the Second World War, suffered from subjugation at different levels of their existence. They had been subjected to marginalization based on their sexual identity within their native community. They were further made to experience discrimination on the basis of their racial status while living as a member of the Japanese diaspora in the United States during the War. The objectification and marginalization of the women had led them to the realization of their existence as a non -entity within and outside their community. However, the internment of Japanese Americans followed by the declaration of Executive Order 9066 by President Roosevelt and the consequent experience of living behind the barbed wire fences left them to struggle with questions raised on their claim to existence and their identity within a space where race and gender contested each other. In my research paper, I have made a humble attempt at studying the existential crisis of the Japanese American women in America during the War.

““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.

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.

Japanese Americans at Dachau: Intercultural Exchange in the US Tour of The Gate of Heaven

2002 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-212
Author(s):  
Emily Colborn
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
50Th Anniversary ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Holocaust Survivor ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Us ◽  
Globe Theatre

The Gate of Heaven, which toured the United States for two years marking the 50th anniversary of the Dachau concentration camp liberation and commemorating the heroism of Japanese-American soldiers in World War II, imagines the friendship between a Japanese-American veteran and the Holocaust survivor he saves at the gates of Dachau in 1945. While the playwright-performers set out simply to celebrate their family histories – Lane Nishikawa is a third-generation Japanese American and Victor Talmadge lost many relatives in the Holocaust – the commemorative politics they encountered at each stop on the tour transformed the meaning of their play. A reconstruction of the social framework the play encountered at four venues, including the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Old Globe Theatre in southern California, demonstrates the malleable nature of race relations in America and the instability of Holocaust representation.

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.

American Ethnic Geography

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence E. Estaville ◽  
Susan W. Hardwick
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ethnic Identification ◽  
Population Geography ◽  
Complex Concept ◽  
American Society ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
American Ethnicity ◽  
Ethnic Geography

Because the American Ethnic Geography Specialty Group was established in 1992 and was, therefore, not a part of the original Geography in America anthology in 1989, we think it is beneficial to present briefly the development and context of American ethnic geography into which we can place more current work. In 2000 the American Ethnic Geography Specialty Group changed its name to the Ethnic Geography Specialty Group; but because almost the whole of this report deals with the decade of the 1990s, we use the specialty group’s original name throughout. American ethnic geography encompasses the geographic dimensions and experiences of ethnic groups in the United States and Canada. Its roots are in cultural-historical and population geography. As such, American ethnic geography reflects the epistemologies and methodologies of human geography. Like geographers in general, most American ethnic geographers are empirical and inductive in their research. Because ethnicity is a complex concept, scholars who research ethnicity have been troubled over the years by definitional conundrums. Although in his 1974 study Isajiw determined that most ethnic researchers never explicitly define the meaning of ethnicity, he examined twenty-seven characteristics of ethnicity to construct a definition of North American ethnicity as “an involuntary group of people who share the same culture or . . . descendants of such people who identify themselves and/or are identified by others as belonging to the same involuntary group” (ibid. 122). To Isajiw, then, a person is either born into an ethnic group and is therefore socialized as Anglo, Chinese, French, Polish, etc., or can decide at some point in her/his life which ethnic identity fits best, or other people can perceive a person’s ethnicity. As underscored in the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (1980), these latter internal/external modes of ethnic identification have become increasingly more significant in North America. Paradoxically, in today’s multiethnic American society, many ethnic groups are celebrating their heritages with renewed vigor, while, simultaneously, many people are less bound by past ethnic loyalties and have either used innovative terms of self-identification to describe their multiethnicity or simply refused to be categorized ethnically.

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.

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