Between Two Empires

Abstract

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.

Race, Nutrition and Empire: Domestic Reform and Japanese Immigrants in Territorial‐Era Hawaiʻi

“…16 Caught 'between two empires', Japanese immigrants combined '[e]lements of the racial ideologies from Anglo-American manifest destiny' and Japan's own racialising and expansionist impulses to position themselves as the purveyors of the Japanese and American empires. 17 However, this double strategy was significantly constrained, because 'their [Japanese immigrants'] daily physical existence was under the sovereign power of the US'. That is, 'their bodies were anchored in America, their interests rooted in its socioeconomic structure, and their activities disciplined by its politicolegal system'.…”

The War on Grant Avenue: Business Competition and Ethnic Rivalry in San Francisco’s Chinatown, 1937-1942

“…contemptuously of the Chinese and Filipinos." 25 The community elites who published the New World-Sun embraced imperial Japanese racial ideas with particular vigor. Journalists at the paper described the Grant Avenue business situation as a reflection of the international order, including the imagined racial order.…”

The Cultural Politics ofIsseiIdentity and Music Making in California, 1893–1941

“… Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 4.18Ichioka, The Issei,69, 71. 19 Azuma, Between Two Empires, 65.20 Ichioka, The Issei, 155.…”

“…Participants sang both versions of the song at patriotic gatherings. 69 A renewed identification with Japan was the Issei's psychological and political response to their rejection as members of American society and an ever-increasing anti-Japanese sentiment.…”

“…A bilingual booklet entitled Americanism included the Pledge of Allegiance, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and a statement of Issei and Nisei loyalty to the United States. 70 It was sent to Issei households in the entire region, yet a uniform shift could not occur because of individual degrees of loyalty to either Japan, the United States or both. Under such circumstances, the push to Americanize became more imperative, and the Japanese community's respectful outreach gestures to Americans in the past no longer capable of significant effect.…”