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.

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.

Contemporary Asian American Dance

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yutian Wong
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Chinese Text ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Wide Range

Contemporary Asian American dance includes a wide range of choreographic approaches, movement vocabularies, aesthetic traditions, and philosophies toward the body. Referencing either time or genre, the “contemporary” in contemporary Asian American dance can refer to work that includes high-art concert productions that utilize modern and postmodern movement vocabularies, reworkings of traditional Asian movement practices, or popular dance practices. Contemporary Asian American dance also encompasses work that is created by Asian American choreographers, choreography that addresses Asian American experiences or history, or work that is performed by Asian American dancers. As a field of study, Asian American dance studies is concerned with an analysis of how the critical reception of choreography by Asian American choreographers is entangled with the history of Orientalism in both American modern dance history and the racialization of Asian Americans in US history. Beginning in the early 20th century, choreographer Michio Ito (1892–1961) navigated his training in German expressionist dance with public expectations of performing recognizable Japaneseness in the face of growing anti-Japanese sentiments on the West Coast of the United States in the years before the United States officially entered World War II. In the later half of the 20th century, Mel Wong (1938–2003) faced similar issues after leaving the Merce Cunningham Dance Company to pursue his own choreography. While Merce Cunningham’s adoption of the Chinese text the I-Ching was considered a choreographic breakthrough in the development of chance procedure that would revolutionize the definition of what is considered dance, Mel Wong faced critics and funding organizations who found Wong’s own use of ritual and Asian philosophy to be incomprehensible or inauthentic. The question of authenticity in relationship to the use of traditional Asian vocabularies runs the gamut from the performance of depoliticized folk dance forms such as those performed by the San Francisco Chinese Folkdance Association to the purposeful invention of Japanese American taiko repertory by organizations such as San Jose Taiko during the 1960s Asian American movement. In contrast, choreographers such as Eiko (1952–present), Koma (1948–present), and Shen Wei (1968–present) are not concerned with the question of Asian American authenticity and have been creating work that stakes a claim in universal themes of humanity and the environment or the relationship between movement and visual art. Understanding the work of choreographers such as Eiko & Koma and Shen Wei as contemporary Asian American dance is enabled by the transnational turn in Asian American studies to include work by choreographers whose work does not directly represent traditional understandings of the Asian American experience rooted in themes such as the trauma of immigration, intergenerational conflict, or national belonging.

“A Living Artist with Open Eyes”: the Transnational Journey of Mitsu Yashima

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 71-91
Author(s):  
Valerie J. Matsumoto
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Government ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
The Us ◽  
Asian American Movement

Mitsu Yashima (1908–1988) was a political dissident and artist in two countries. In prewar Japan, she became a proletarian rights activist; during World War ii she continued to oppose Japanese militarism by working for the United States government. In her later years, she opposed US militarism during the Vietnam War. In San Francisco, she became an admired cultural worker in the Asian American movement. Examining her life offers rare glimpses of a woman’s efforts to forge a career in the male-dominated art worlds of twentieth-century Japan and the US. Her transnational life expands the boundaries of Japanese American history, which has long focused on late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century immigration to the US West and Hawaiʻi. Her activism also challenges the perception that only third-generation Japanese Americans joined the Asian American movement of the 1960s-1970s. Yashima’s concern for human rights and peace fueled her art, political engagement, and community building.

Location, Positionality, and Community

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yoko Tsukuda
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Ethnic Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
State University ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University

Issues surrounding the differences between U.S.-based and Japan-based Japanese American studies have been important to me as a person who has pursued degrees at graduate schools in both countries. I first became interested in the history of Japanese Americans in my junior year of college when a visiting white professor from Seattle told me the story of how her father helped his Japanese American friends during World War II. Because I was unaware of what the “camps” meant, I was shocked to learn about the internment experience of Japanese Americans. After writing my senior thesis based on a month of fieldwork in Los Angeles’s Japanese American community, I enrolled in an ethnic studies master’s course at San Francisco State University. Later, I returned to Japan and completed an American studies PhD in the Area Studies Department at the University of Tokyo. Presently, I teach at a Japanese university. My experiences in both the United States and Japan have often led me to questions surrounding my positionality as a Japan-based scholar who engages in Japanese American studies....

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.

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.

Surviving the Bomb in America

2017 ◽  
Vol 86 (3) ◽  
pp. 472-509 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naoko Wake
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Asian America ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Costs ◽  
Asian American Identity ◽  
And Gender

This article explores the little-known history of Japanese American survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. By focusing on this particular group of survivors with a careful attention to their layered citizenship, national belonging, and gender identity, the article makes important connections between the history of the bomb and the history of immigration across the Pacific. U.S. survivors were both American citizens and immigrants with deep ties to Japan. Their stories expand our understanding of the bomb by taking it out of the context of the clash between nations and placing it in the lives of people who were not within a victors-or-victims dichotomy. Using oral histories with U.S. survivors, their families, and their supporters, the article reveals experiences, memories, and activism that have connected U.S. survivors to both Japan and the United States in person-centered, relatable ways. Moreover, the article brings to light under-explored aspects of Asian America, namely, significant intersections of former internees’ and bomb survivors’ experiences and the role of older women’s agency in the making of Asian American identity. In so doing, the article destabilizes the rigidly nation-bound understanding of the bomb and its human costs that has prevailed in the Pacific region.

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.

Asian American Children’s Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Park Dahlen
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Children's Book ◽  
Asian Diaspora

Asian American children’s literature includes books of many different genres that depict some aspect of the Asian diaspora. In total, the books should depict the breadth and depth of Asian diasporic experiences. Children’s books published in the early 20th century include mostly folktales, while books published after the 1965 Immigration Act tend to include contemporary fiction, poetry, and biographies. They address topics such as immigration and acculturation as well as capture landmark moments and experiences in Asian American history, such as the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and the transnational, transracial adoption of Asian children to the United States. Books published at the turn of the 20th century have broached newer topics, such as mixed-race identities, and are written in a variety of genres including fantasy. As noted by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, the number of books by and/or about Asian Americans published is disproportionate to the total number of books published each year and to the population of Asians in the Americas. Also some Asian American writers continue to publish on topics unrelated to their identities. Academic researchers, practitioners, and writers have addressed various aspects of how this body of literature represents Asian Americans, mostly noting distortions and erasure and offering suggestions for improvement, emerging topics, and engagement with young people.

Japantown and the Fillmore District

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clement Lai
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Small Businesses ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
Community Institutions ◽  
American Experience ◽  
White Collar Workers ◽  
Two Phases

Many Asian American neighborhoods faced displacement after World War II because of urban renewal or redevelopment under the 1949 Housing Act. In the name of blight removal and slum clearance this Act allowed local elites to procure federal money to seize land designated as blighted, clear it of its structures, and sell this land to private developers—in the process displacing thousands of residents, small businesses, and community institutions. San Francisco’s Fillmore District, a multiracial neighborhood that housed the city’s largest Japanese American and African American communities, experienced this postwar redevelopment. Like many Asian American neighborhoods that shared space with other communities of color, the Fillmore formed at the intersection of class inequality and racism, and it was this intersection of structural factors that led to substandard urban conditions. Rather than recognize the root causes of urban decline, San Francisco urban and regional elites argued that the Fillmore was among the city’s most blighted neighborhoods and advocated for the neighborhood’s destruction in the name of the public good. They also targeted the Fillmore because their postwar plans for remaking the city’s political economy envisioned the Fillmore as (1) a space to house white- collar workers in the postwar economy and (2) as an Asian-themed space for tourism that connected the city symbolically and economically to Japan, an important U.S. postwar ally. For over four decades these elite-directed plans for the Fillmore displaced more than 20,000 residents in two phases, severely damaging the community. The Fillmore’s redevelopment, then, provides a window into other cases of redevelopment and aids further investigations of the connection between Asian Americans and urban crisis. It also sheds light on the deeper history of displacement in the Asian American experience and contextualizes contemporary gentrification in Asian American neighborhoods.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document