Japanese Americans

Japanese Americans

A MODEL MINORITY

INTERNMENT

REPARATIONS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

There may well be no other group that simultaneously represents and challenges the meaning of such terms as American dream, model minority, or reparations. These terms are essential to debates about immigration policies, racial politics, and economic opportunities in the United States. Like other immigrant groups, Japanese Americans (Nikkei ) embody the struggles, contradictions, and possibilities that are inherent in the promise of a new life in America. And like other nonwhite groups in the United States, the attempts of Japanese Americans to take advantage of what American life promised were met with racism. And like many other U.S. minority groups, racial or not, Japanese Americans have faced an enormous amount of overt and covert discrimination throughout their history. It is here, at the crossroads of U.S. immigration history, racial politics, civil rights struggles, and ideas about economic success, that Japanese Americans, past and present, stand out most starkly.

A MODEL MINORITY

There is no question that Japanese Americans, who began to come to the United States and Hawaii in the late nineteenth century as laborers in the vegetable and sugarcane fields of the Pacific and Western coastal states, could be collectively called an immigrant success story. As the first waves of men arrived, eventually followed by their wives and children, they immediately began to encounter blatant discrimination and exploitation from employers and neighbors, as well as from local, state, and federal governments. They were not alone. The first Japanese immigrants entered the United States at a time when xenophobia, racist nativism, jingoism, and labor struggles helped to create the realities of hardship and survival that give credibility to every American immigration success story. The first Japanese immigrants faced a configuration of the Asiatic Exclusion League, formed in 1908; the Alien Land Laws, passed in 1913 and 1922; the 1922 U.S. Supreme court ruling declaring Japanese ineligible to become naturalized citizens (Ozawa v. United States ); the bloody strikebreaking and lockouts in the Hawaiian cane fields during the 1920s and 1930s; and in 1942 the signing of Executive Order 9066, which began the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II (1939–1945).

When comparing this first generation (Issei ) and their children (Nisei ) to today’s fourth (Yonsei ) and fifth (Gosei ) generations, it is not difficult to see why Japanese Americans are considered to be a model minority. The differences between the first and subsequent generations are obvious. And because of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the comparison of the earliest Japanese immigrants to Japanese Americans living in the early twenty-first century is remarkable, and emotionally charged for many. This increasingly multiracial and multiethnic group of descendants, as well as a large number of people who do not claim Japanese ancestry, looks to the history of Japanese people in the United States as representing the best and the worst of what going to America for a better life has meant.

It is not just that Japanese men and women, through their diligence and hard work, laid the framework, both economically and culturally, for their descendants to achieve increasing success with each new generation. That story is part of the immigrant history for many American ethnic groups. Japanese Americans stand out because their history includes the experience of internment, and not only surviving but thriving after being released. As a group, they not only prospered in the postwar years, with a long list of notable and famous Japanese Americans, but they were able to mobilize and achieve redress and reparations in 1988 against a great deal of opposition from the U.S. government. But, like all immigrant histories, the Japanese American success story demands a closer look in order to understand the realities, as well as the images, that give it power and appeal.

Academic research on Japanese Americans has tended to focus on three subjects—the Issei generation, World War II (including internment and Nisei military service), and the redress movement of the 1980s. There are multiple ways of interpreting these episodes, and many stories that remain untold. As interest in the Japanese success story has increased, an attempt to build upon existing understandings and analyses of the varieties of Japanese American histories has unfolded, and with it a desire to expand the ways that Japanese Americans, as individuals and as a group, are seen as part of U.S. history. This effort has cut across disciplinary boundaries and generated a great deal of exciting and often controversial work.

Some scholars have challenged assumptions about who the men and women were that left Japan and what they brought with them as they faced a system of anti-Japanese laws and sentiment in the United States. The assumption that they came with no skills and little education and were able to achieve middle-class status in one (or less than one) generation encourages a look at culture and not economics for an explanation. This is especially important when Japanese Americans are set in stark contrast to other nonwhite and ostensibly nonachieving groups in the United States. Economist Masao Suzuki (2002) makes it clear that the story of Japanese Americans is much more complex than commonly imagined. Focusing on the large out-migration of Japanese back to Japan during the 1920s (the majority of immigrants left) and the ways that the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1908 regulated and thus changed the type of Japanese immigrant coming to the United States from Japan (the earliest Issei were unskilled farmers; later Issei came with more education and skills), Suzuki argues that the Japanese American immigration story demands contextualization. He argues that lateral mobility, not upward mobility, and selective immigration must be stressed when considering which Japanese Americans achieved economic success, and how they did so. Arguments like this challenge other widely held interpretations that focus on Japanese cultural values by calling attention to the gendered, classed, generational, and regional realities of Japanese Americans before World War II.

INTERNMENT

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) signed Executive Order 9066 in February, 1942, he did more than direct the removal of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans to desolate areas in the U.S. mainland interior. He helped to create one of the most symbolic moments in both U.S. and Japanese American history. The internment of Japanese Americans, like the Holocaust, the Great Migration, and the Trail of Tears, is a deservedly major event in U.S. history. Today, the internment is written about widely. This was not always the case, as the subject was not generally discussed in textbooks or in popular culture until the 1980s. This was due, in part, to the decision by many Japanese Americans, though not all, to downplay this injustice.

The removal and four-year incarceration of Japanese Americans led to more than economic hardship and emotional suffering. As they were rounded up and sent to assembly centers in California, Oregon, and Washington with little more than what they could carry—many Issei men were sent to federal prisons without trials or evidence—the meaning of Japanese American began to change. Most were American citizens and minors who were taken to places where their alleged allegiance to Japan would not be a threat to the U.S. war effort. And although such accounts of injustice factor into the ways that internment is useful in arguing that Japanese Americans were a model minority, the incarceration and eventual relocation of Japanese Americans helped to create a generation of Nisei who would never forget the racial injustice that they and their relatives faced during the war. In places like Tule Lake in California and Rowher, Arkansas, some Japanese Americans looked out from behind barbed wire in armed camps and began to rethink what it would mean to be Japanese in postwar America.

Some young Japanese men joined the U.S. military and won numerous medals during the war in an effort to prove their loyalty and make things easier for their relatives. Others, known as the No-No Boys, refused to pledge allegiance or serve in the U.S. military and thus were sent to jail. After the war, some moved as far away from their old lives and the internment camps as possible, creating large postwar Japanese populations in cities like Chicago, where they and their families became part of a new fabric of race, class, and civil rights struggles. During this period, the model minority and success labels began to be applied to Japanese Americans. Yet Japanese American responses to the incarceration indicate that there is a multiplicity of ways that their history can be conceived, both within and outside of the model minority and Japanese American success story images.

REPARATIONS

Beginning in 1970 and ending with the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, the struggles of Japanese Americans to achieve recognition and a token payment for what happened to them during World War II mark yet another moment where the contradictions of the Japanese American immigrant success story are laid bare. There were differing opinions on how to achieve redress, and, as the only racial or ethnic group to be granted an apology and cash settlement from the federal government, this hard-earned victory also helped cast Japanese Americans as a favored minority. As other minority groups, such as African Americans and Native Americans, continue to work for their own reparations, the Japanese American success is held up by a variety of interests who are either demanding or suppressing calls for further reparations acts. What is perhaps most interesting with regard to future claims by other groups was the way that the Japanese American redress initiative was cast—it was about citizenship, not race. Today, the Japanese American Citizen’s League (JACL) continues to frame itself as an organization committed to preventing a recurrence of the civil rights violations that led to the internment. The JACL has, for example, been a loud voice in post-9/11 debates over national security. The images and realities that Japanese Americans embody continue to be of major importance to how life in the United States is imagined and lived.

SEE ALSO African Americans; Citizenship; Discrimination; Immigrants, Asian; Incarceration, Japanese American; Migration; Mobility, Lateral; Model Minority; Native Americans; Race; Racism; Reparations; Whites; World War II

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Asakawa, Gil. 2004. Being Japanese American: A JA Sourcebook for Nikkei, Hapa … and their Friends. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge.

Kashima, Tetsuden. 2004. Judgment without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment during World War II. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Okihiro, Gary Y. 1992. Cane Fires: The Anti-Japanese Movement in Hawaii, 1865–1945. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Okubo, Miné. [1946] 1983. Citizen 13660. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Suzuki, Masao. 2002. Selective Immigration and Ethnic Economic Achievement: Japanese Americans before World War II. Explorations in Economic History 39 (3): 254–281.

Takaki, Ronald. 2000. Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

Yamamoto, Eric, Margaret Chon, Carol Izumi, et al., eds. 2001. Race, Rights, and Reparation: Law and the Japanese American Internment. Gaithersburg, MD: Aspen.

Jacalyn D. Harden