Before World War II, Japanese immigrants, or Issei, forged a unique transnational identity between their native land and the United States. Whether merchants, community leaders, or rural farmers, Japanese immigrants shared a collective racial identity as aliens ineligible for American citizenship, even as they worked to form communities in the American West. At the same time, Imperial Japan considered Issei and their descendents part of its racial expansion abroad and enlisted them to further their nationalist goals. This book shows how Japanese immigrants negotiated their racial and class positions alongside white Americans, Chinese, and Filipinos at a time when Japan was fighting their countries of origin. Utilizing rare Japanese and English language sources, the book stresses the tight grips, as well as the clashing influences, the Japanese and American states exercised over Japanese immigrants and how they created identities that diverged from either national narrative.
In 1927 Toga Yoichi, a Japanese immigrant in Oakland, California, published a chronological history of what he characterized as "Japanese development in America." He explicated the meaning of that history thus: A great nation/race [minzoku] has a [proper] historical background; a nation/race disrespectful of history is doomed to self-destruction. It has been already 70 years since we, the Japanese, marked the first step on American soil. . . . Now Issei [Japanese immigrants] are advancing in years, and the Nisei [the American-born Japanese] era is coming. . . . I believe that it is worthy of having [the second generation] inherit the record of our [immigrant] struggle against oppression and hardships, despite which we have raised our children well and reached the point at which we are now. . . . But, alas, we have very few treatises of our history [to leave behind].Thirteen years later, a thirteen hundred-page masterpiece entitled Zaibei Nihonjinshi-Toga himself spearheaded the editing-completed that project of history writing. 1 Not the work of trained academicians, this synthesis represented the collaboration of many Japanese immigrants, including the self-proclaimed historians who authored it, community leaders who provided subventions, and ordinary Issei residents who offered necessary information or purchased the product. In this instance, moreover, history writing was synonymous with history making, for the former entailed not only the privileging of specific self-images over others but even
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.