Positions In-Between

In reflecting on my positionality vis-à-vis Japanese American studies, one of the first things that come to mind is the multiplicity of positions that make up my identity. I am neither fully Japanese nor American nor Japanese American. Given that my father is British and my mother Japanese, my heritage is at least dual. Given that I was born and brought up in Japan initially as a British citizen with an alien registration card and then as a dual citizen from fifteen to twenty years old, and since twenty, as solely a Japanese citizen, it is sometimes hard to know how to define my position to Japanese America. Yes, I have lived and worked in the United States on various visas, and more recently, with a green card for the past twenty-five years. So I suppose that as a person with a Japanese passport who has permanent residency in the United States, I am technically an Issei, a first-generation Japanese immigrant to the United States....

Americanization and Beika

The Americanization movement in the early twentieth century tried to redefine the qualifications for full membership within the nation. In the same period, the anti-Asian movement flourished. Responding actively to the discourses of anti-Japanese (and Asian) movements, Japanese immigrants tried to prove their eligibility for full membership in the U.S. nation by following their own interpretation of Americanization, or Beika (米化‎) in Japanese. The ideas of Beika were based on idealized Japanese virtues, as well as on what was required by the Americanization movement. Even though they used the parallel terms in ideas of Beika, however, the gender discourses such as virtues of Yamatonadeshiko and the definition of family highlighted the difference between the views of Americanization and those of Beika despite their similar intention. This gap in perception might have reinforced the racialized and gendered stereotypes on both sides and hindered mutual understanding before World War II.

Shifting Grounds in Japanese American Studies

By taking the examples of translations associated with “race” and “class” used in early Japanese American history, this chapter calls attention to the changes of the meaning and associated epistemological transformations through the translation of these terms from Japanese to English. It also provides the historical context in which Japanese American studies developed in Japan and discusses the strength and weakness of the field in Japan and in the United States with focus given to such issues as subject matter, production of knowledge, and socio-political context.

Teaching Asian American Studies in Japan

This chapter juxtaposes Asian American scholarship in Japan and the United States, and explores ways in which the field can be pedagogically useful for deconstructing hegemonic social discourses on race, culture, ethnicity and justice both for Japanese and American university students and scholars. Teaching the history of Japanese emigration to the Pan-Pacific region not only helps Japanese students to overcome the historical amnesia about their country’s imperial past, but also helps American students to contextualize the migration from Japan to the US within the overall Japanese emigration history. Structural analyses of race lead to students’ better understanding of different ways in which race has historically created, naturalized and perpetuated social and economic hierarchy within the United States and Japan. Furthermore, learning about the social protest and cultural movements that led to the birth of Asian American studies can promote positive views among university students toward political engagement and social activism.

Reorienting Asian American Studies in Asia and the Pacific

This chapter explores the possibilities of an Asian American studies which is more transpacific and inter-Asia oriented, with a specific focus on Japan and East Asia. Inviting U.S.- and Canada-based Asian Americanists to interrogate the discipline’s embedded North America-centrism in their perceptions towards Asia, this reoriented Asian American studies asks Asia-based Asian practitioners to reflect upon ethnoracial violences in our own lands, including those related to intra-Asian imperialisms and militarized violence. In this way, Asian American studies can become a place for mutual learning. The chapter underscores the usefulness of our disparate positions (however arbitrary) to look at ourselves from the perspectives of others and examine our complicities with the dominant groups rather than simply viewing ourselves in alignment with the oppressed. It is my hope that the reoriented transpacific, and inter-Asia, Asian American studies will help us expand our horizon and engage in conversations across Asia and across the Pacific.

Nakayoshi Group

This chapter is based on participant observations and interviews with Okinawan women who immigrated to the U.S. after World War II as wives of Americans men who had been stationed in Okinawa as part of the U.S. military presence there. The women, most in their 70s and 80s, were part of a small social group that gathered monthly to sing Okinawan and Japanese karaoke. The focus of the study is the agency of the women to recover and define their Okinawan identity in opposition to their marginalized positions within the context of Okinawa’s dual geopolitical subordination to Japan and the U.S.

Negotiating the Boundaries of Race, Caste, and Mibun

Cultural attitudes rooted in the Tokugawa-era status system (mibunsei) provided an interpretive framework for the race-based hostility Meiji-era Japanese encountered in the United States and Canada, informing the discursive strategies of Meiji diplomats who sought to refute the claims of anti-Japanese exclusionists by distinguishing Japanese labor migrants from themselves, aiding in the reproduction of Japanese as an excludable category when anti-Japanese elements turned their arguments against all Japanese. Concerns about social hierarchy and the significance of historical status categories (mibun), including cultural taboos associated with outcaste status, also mediated the responses of Meiji immigrants to conditions they encountered on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border, including white racism and job opportunities. Japanese immigrant negotiations of race and identity in the North American West can be fully understood only by also considering mibun, in addition to more the familiar paradigms of race, class, and gender, in analyzing Meiji-era Japanese immigration history.

Japanese Americans in Academia and Political Discourse in Japan

I am a political scientist specializing in Asian American politics. Although I earned my PhD in the United States, my initial interest was in the U.S. Congress and not in Japanese American studies or Asian American studies. What shifted my interest toward Asian American studies was that I had witnessed firsthand a campus sit-in at the Princeton University president’s office, where students were fighting for the establishment of an Asian American studies program. Witnessing such an incident, I realized that Asian Americans were an understudied topic in the field of political science. There is also a tendency for scholars from Japan to focus exclusively on Japanese Americans and to disregard other Asian American ethnic groups. Since I did not start out my study on Asian Americans in a graduate school in Japan with an interest in Japanese Americans, I have been able to avoid taking that kind of path....

Introduction

The Introduction explains how the book was generated through a series of dialogues between Japan- and US-based scholars held in Japan and the US. Those engagements highlighted what the contributors considered to be the subject matters and issues at stake in the field called “Japanese American studies.” While tracing the field’s literature and its past achievements in each country, the authors point out the field’s neglect in accounting for the subject positions, political commitments, and historical and social contexts of scholars and their consequences for their choice of subject matters and approaches to Japanese American studies. Finally, the Introduction describes the book’s structure and offers a brief summary of each chapter.

Toward More Equal Dialogue

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....