The problem of biculturalism: Japanese American identity and festival before World War II

Journal of American History

Volumn 86, Issue 4, 2000, Pages 1632-1654

  Kurashige, Lon ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0003904246     PISSN: 00218723     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2567581     Document Type: Article

References (135)

1. Kashu Mainichi (Jpn.), May 23, 1934.
2. Kashu Mainichi and its rival Rafu Shimpo were the two leading newspapers within the southern California Japanese American community. Each was bilingual and maintained separate staffs to report in Japanese and English. See Togo Tanaka, "The Vernacular Newspapers," manuscript, n.d., folder W 1.95 Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records (Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley) (numbers in later references to this collection designate folders);
3. and David Yoo, "'Read All About It': Race, Generation, and the Japanese American Ethnic Press, 1925-1941," Amerasia Journal, 19 (no.1, 1993), 69-92. Citations for vernacular periodicals, unless labeled as "Jpn.," are from English-language sections.
4. Kashu Mainichi, May 23, 1934.
5. For a chronology of the competition over Nisei Week's sponsorship, see Rafu Shimpo, June 26, 1934;
6. and Rafu Shimpo (Jpn.), June 25, 1934.
7. Rafu Shimpo, July 1, 1934.
8. Kashu Mainichi, June 24, 10, 1934;
9. Rafu Shimpo (Jpn.), July 28, 1934;
10. Kasha Mainichi (Jpn.), July 20, 1934.
11. Writings predicated on the master narrative include Roger Daniels, Concentration Camps, USA: Japanese Americans and World War II (New York, 1971);
12. Michi Weglyn, Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America's Concentration Camps (New York, 1976);
13. Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (Washington, 1982);
14. and Paul R. Spickard, "Nisei Assume Power: The Japanese American Citizens League, 1941-1942," Pacific Historical Review, 52 (May 1983), 147-74.
15. Brian Masaru Hayashi, "For the Sake of Our Japanese Brethren": Assimilation, Nationalism, and Protestantism among the Japanese of Los Angeles, 1895-1942 (Stanford, 1995), 119-26;
16. Jere Takahashi, Nisei/Sansei: Shifting Japanese American Identities and Politics (Philadelphia, 1998), 48-84;
17. Yuji Ichioka, "A Study of Dualism: James Yoshinori Sakamoto and the Japanese American Courier, 1928-1942," Amerasia Journal, 13 (no. 2, 1986-1987), 49-81;
18. other works that contradict the view of Japanese American assimilation before World War II include John J. Stephan, Hawaii under the Rising Sun: Japan's Plan for Conquest after Pearl Harbor (Honolulu, 1984);
19. Yuji Ichioka, "Japanese Immigrant Nationalism: The Issei and the Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1941," California History, 69 (Fall 1990), 260-75, 310-11;
20. Eiichiro Azuma, "Racial Struggle, Immigrant Nationalism, and Ethnic Identity: Japanese and Filipinos in the California Delta," Pacific Historical Review, 67 (May 1998), 163-99;
21. and David Yoo, Growing Up Nisei: Race, Generation, and Culture among Japanese Americans of California, 1924-1949 (Urbana, 2000).
22. Brian Hayashi's latest book connects the biculturalism of the 1930s and the internment experience: Brian Masaru Hayashi, Governing Japanese: Internees, Social Scientists, and Administrators in the Making of America's Concentration Camps, 1942-1945 (Princeton, forthcoming).
23. For a broader study of Nisei Week and the formation of Japanese American identity throughout the twentieth century, see Lon Kurashige, The Contested Kimono: Ethnic Orthodoxy, Options, and Festival (Berkeley, forthcoming).
24. Historical studies of American festivals have informed my investigation of ethnic identity formation. They include Robert Anthony Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (New Haven, 1985);
25. April Schultz, "'The Pride of the Race Had Been Touched': The 1925 Norse-American Immigration Centennial and Ethnic Identity," Journal of American History, 77 (March 1991), 1265-95;
26. and Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1986).
27. On festivals in American history, see also Matthew Frye Jacobson, Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (Cambridge, Mass., 1995);
28. George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis, 1990);
29. and John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 1992).
30. The distinction between "race" and "ethnicity" is the subject of much discussion but little agreement. By "race" or "racial identity," I refer to publicly recognized groups - black, white, red, brown, and yellow - that constitute what David Hollinger calls the ethno-racial pentagon. I use "ethnicity" or "ethnic identity" to denote the self-representations of persons who share an ancestral heritage, whether real or imagined. The word "identity" is a less-than-ideal way to characterize ethnicity because, as Hollinger suggests, it implies "fixity and givenness." On "race" and "ethnicity" in American social theories, see Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (New York, 1986), 14-24.
31. The case for replacing "identity" with "affiliation" is made in David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York, 1995), 6-7.
32. For a historian's etymology of "identity," see Philip Gleason, "Identifying Identity: A Semantic History," Journal of American History, 69 (March 1983), 910-31.
33. My understanding of ethnic and racial identity is grounded in Omi and Winant's understanding of race as an "unstable and 'decentered' complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle": Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 68.
34. Social and textual constructions of race are also discussed in David Theo Goldberg, ed., The Anatomy of Racism (Minneapolis, 1990);
35. Dominick La Capra, ed., The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance (Ithaca, 1991);
36. Dana Y. Takagi, The Retreat from Race: Asian-American Admissions and Racial Politics (New Brunswick, 1992);
37. Sylvia Junko Yanagisako, Transforming the Past: Tradition and Kinship among Japanese Americans (Stanford, 1985);
38. and Yasuko I. Takezawa, Breaking the Silence: Redress and Japanese American Ethnicity (Ithaca, 1995).
39. On the construction of ethnic and racial identities by insiders, see Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, "African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," Signs, 17 (Winter 1992), 251-74;
40. Lisa Lowe, "Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences," Diaspora, 1 (Spring 1991), 24-44;
41. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, 1996);
42. Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, 1996);
43. and Cornel West, Race Matters (Boston, 1993), 23-32.
44. For a masterly explication of the relevance of rhetorical and linguistic analysis for American historiography, see Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, Mass., 1995).
45. On Nisei purchasing power, see Kashu Mainichi (Jpn.), May 23, 1934;
46. Kashu Mainichi, July 12, 1935.
47. For concerns about Nisei conspicuous consumption, see Kashu Mainichi, ibid., Aug. 4, 1934, Aug. 16, 1939.
48. Kashu Mainichi, Aug. 4, July 20, 1934.
49. Togo Tanaka, "History of the JACL," manuscript, n.d., chap. 2, p. 1, T 6.25, Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records. For the early history of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) see chapters 2-4.
50. A more celebratory account is Bill Hosokawa, JACL in Quest of Justice: The History of the Japanese American Citizens League (New York, 1982).
51. Lon Kurashige derived this social profile of JACLers from a sample of 183 members of the organization in 1941. The sample was created by matching the JACL's membership list, published in its newspaper, the Pacific Citizen, with records contained in "WRA Form 26," a machine-readable dataset containing censuslike records for the over 110,000 Japanese Americans interned in the Department of the Interior's concentration camps during World War II. Among JACLers, 28% had attended college and 14% were "retail managers," while only 16% of the Nisei in their age cohort (born before 1917) had gone to college and 7% worked in management. Pacific Citizen, May 1941; "WRA Form 26: Evacuee Summary Data ('Locator Index')," electronic dataset, 1942, U.S. Department of the Interior, War Relocation Authority, RG 210 (National Archives, Washington, D.C.).
52. Kay Sugahara interview in Nisei Week souvenir booklet, 1983, official publication of the Nisei Week Japanese Festival, Los Angeles, California (in Lon Kurashige's possession); Kay Sugahara personal record, "WRA Form 26."
53. Rafu Shimpo, Aug. 10, 1934;
54. Kashu Mainichi, Aug. 5, 1934, Aug. 18, 1939.
55. John Modell claims that the low rate of unemployment for Japanese Americans in the retail and sales trade reported by the 1940 census was deceptive. Only two-thirds of these workers were employed for the full year in 1939, and many unskilled Japanese Americans found no work at all. Yet the Japanese compared favorably to members of "other races" in the retail and sales trade, whose unemployment rate was more than twice theirs. See John Modell, The Economics and Politics of Racial Accommodation: The Japanese of Los Angeles, 1900-1942 (Urbana, 1977), 138-39.
56. The four most common occupations for Issei in 1941 were gardener, retail manager, truck farmer, and farm hand; for Nisei they were sales clerk, farm hand, retail manager, and gardener. "WRA Form 26."
57. Not much is known about this employment bureau, except that it was informally connected to the JACL and was criticized for bias toward members of that organization. See Rafu Shimpo, Aug. 19, 1934, Aug. 7, 1938.
58. Kashu Mainichi, Aug. 5, 1934, Aug. 28, 1938.
59. Rafu Shimpo, Aug. 29, 1938;
60. Kashu Mainichi, Aug. 28, 1938, Aug. 5, 1934.
61. Kashu Mainichi, Aug. 12, 1934.
62. Kashu Mainichi, Ibid., Aug. 12, 1935. For evidence of the Nisei's lack of interest in shopping in Little Tokyo, see the internee newspaper at the Manzanar concentration camp for Japanese Americans: Manzanar Free Press, Nov. 30, 1942, Banc fD 769.8 A6 U567 (Bancroft Library).
63. Kashu Mainichi, Aug. 12, 1935, Aug. 15, 1937.
64. Nisei Week souvenir booklet, 1936, n.p. (in Kurashige's possession); Kashu Mainichi, July 24, 1937.
65. Kashu Mainichi, July 11, 1940; Nisei Week souvenir booklet, 1941, n.p. (in Kurashige's possession).
66. Rafu Shimpo, Aug. 27, 1939.
67. Yoshiko Mori (pseudonym) interview by Lon Kurashige, May 20, 1993, audiotape (in Kurashige's possession).
68. Kashu Mainichi, Aug. 4, 1934;
69. Kashu Mainichi (Jpn.), Aug. 19, 1934;
70. Rafu Shimpo, Aug. 19, 1934.
71. Rafu Shimpo, Aug. 16, 1935;
72. Kashu Mainichi, July 19, 9, 1935;
73. Rafu Shimpo, June 17, 1934, Aug. 3, 1941; Nisei Week souvenir booklet, 1940, n.p. (in Kurashige's possession). See also Tsuyoshi Matsumoto, "History of the Resident Japanese in Southern California," manuscript (in English and Japanese), 1941, "Togo Tanaka Journal," folder 3, A 17.06, Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records.
74. Doho, June 10, 1938;
75. James Sakoda, "Personal Adjustment," manuscript, Jan. 12, 1943, pp. 11-12, 17-18, file 11, James Sakoda Reports on Tule Lake, R 20.86, Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records; Doho, July 1, 1939.
76. For other criticisms of Nisei Week, see Kashu Mainichi, Aug. 8, 1937;
77. and Rafu Shimpo, Aug. 18, July 28, 1935.
78. Doho, June 10, 1938; Togo Tanaka, "Report on the Manzanar Riot," 1-5, O 10.12, Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records.
79. Kashu Mainichi, Aug. 18, 1936.
80. Data from "WRA Form 26" show occupations other than homemaker for 63% of Japanese American women age 16 and older. Yet employment outside the home did not diminish gender differences - in the workplace Issei women clustered in domestic service and agricultural labor, while the Nisei, because of their English-language skills, became typists, secretaries, and general office clerks. Managerial jobs were the almost exclusive domain of Japanese American men. "WRA Form 26." This sexual division of labor reflects Sylvia Yanagisako's findings in interviews with Issei in Seattle: women were responsible for "things inside the home" (uchi no koto); men tended to "things outdoors" (soto no koto). Yanagisako, Transforming the Past, 98.
81. May Sakurai response to questionnaire administered by Lon Kurashige, c. April 1993 (in Kurashige's possession).
82. For women's consumption and the feminization of public space in post-World War II suburbia, see Lizabeth Cohen, "From Town Center to Shopping Center: The Reconfiguration of Community Marketplaces in Postwar America," American Historical Review, 101 (Oct. 1996), 1072-77.
83. Rafu Shimpo, June 26, 1938, Aug. 17, 1941;
84. Kashu Mainichi, Aug. 11, 1940.
85. The leftist newspaper Doho was one of the few voices in Little Tokyo to argue that gender roles were unfair to women, who were "relegated to the lowest and hardest work." Doho, March 15, 1941.
86. Sandra Sekai (pseudonym) interview by Kurashige, Jan. 28, 1993, audiotape (in Kurashige's possession). Rafu Shimpo, Aug. 31, 1938.
87. Nisei Week souvenir booklet, 1936, n.p. (in Kurashige's possession). For the history of the flora-dora (as it was properly spelled) number, see Lois W. Banner, American Beauty (New York, 1982), 181-82.
88. Patrick Kiyoshi Okura phone interview by Kurashige, Sept. 3, 1997, notes (in Kurashige's possession). For biographical information on Okura, see JACL Reporter, 4 (Sept. 1948), fF 870 J3 J222 (Bancroft Library).
89. John J. MacAloon, "Introduction: Cultural Performances, Cultural Theory," in Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals toward a Theory of Cultural Performance, ed. John J. MacAloon (Philadelphia, 1984), 1.
90. Roger D. Abrahams, "Toward an Enactment-Centered Theory of Folklore," in Frontiers of Folklore, ed. William R. Bascom (Boulder, 1977), 79-120;
91. and Roger D. Abrahams, "Shouting Match at the Border: The Folklore of Display Events," in "And Other Neighborly Names ": Social Process and Cultural Image in Texas Folklore, ed. Richard Bauman and Roger D. Abrahams (Austin, 1981), 319-20;
92. Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York, 1992), 74, 197-223;
93. M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass., 1968);
94. and Victor Turner, ed., Celebration, Studies in Festivity and Ritual (Washington, 1982).
95. Modell, Economics and Politics of Racial Accommodation, 174;
96. Togo Tanaka, "Pre-evacuation Pressure Group Activity in Southern California: Personality Sketches," May 30, 1943, pp. 6-8, A 16.260, Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records.
97. Rafu Shimpo, July 25, 1940;
98. Kashu Mainichi, Aug. 18, 1940;
99. Rafu Shimpo, Aug. 19, 1934.
100. This permissiveness, the Folklorist Roger Abrahams maintains, makes festivals potentially subversive: They "bring us together in celebration but let each of us 'do our own thing,'" and they "write our script of progress within the events." Thus these "mad moments in the margins of time continue to provide us with models of revolution": Abrahams, "Shouting Match at the Border," 319-20.
101. Sakoda, "Personal Adjustment." For a description of a street fight, see Isami Arifuku Waugh, "Hidden Crimes and Deviance in the Japanese-American Community" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1978), 134-35.
102. Waugh, "Hidden Crimes and Deviance in the Japanese-American Community," 148, 135-43.
103. Sangyo Nippo, July 18, 1940;
104. Kashu Mainichi, Aug. 4, 1940, Aug. 24, 1941;
105. Waugh, "Hidden Crimes and Deviance in the Japanese-American Community," 152.
106. H. K. Misaki, "Delinquency and Crime," in Vocational Attitudes of Second-Generation Japanese in the United States, ed. Edward K. Strong Jr. (Stanford, 1933), 160-61.
107. Rafu Shimpo, July 27, 1941;
108. Louise Suski interview by Kurashige, Oct. 5, 1992, audiotape (in Kurashige's possession). On Suski's father, see Louise Suski, "Biography of Father," Aug. 25, 1945, T 1.8682, Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records.
109. Waugh, "Hidden Crimes and Deviance in the Japanese-American Community," 135.
110. Nisei Week souvenir booklet, 1936, n.p.; Kashu Mainichi, Aug. 10, 1936; John Maeno interview by Kurashige, Sept. 2, 1991, audiotape (in Kurashige's possession).
111. Rafu Shimpo, Aug. 20, 1934.
112. Kashu Mainichi, Aug. 11, 1936; Nisei Week souvenir booklet, 1936.
113. Kashu Mainichi, Sept. 11, 1938.
114. Tanaka, "Vernacular Newspapers," 18-19, 38.
115. On Japanese nationalism among Japanese Americans in Los Angeles at this time, see Hayashi, "For the Sake of Our Japanese Brethren";
116. Ichioka, "Japanese Immigrant Nationalism," 260-75, 310-11;
117. and Sakoda, Reports on Tule Lake, 11. Tanaka, "History of the JACL," chap. 3, p. 5.
118. Tanaka, "Pre-evacuation Pressure Group Activity in Southern California," 10-11;
119. Richard S. Nishimoto, "Personal Service and Urban Trade," manuscript, n.d., 73-74, 38-39, W 1.90, Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records;
120. Tanaka, "History of the JACL," chap. 3, p. 12.
121. Tanaka, "History of the JACL," chap. 3, p. 17.
122. Togo Tanaka, "Political Organizations," manuscript, n.d., pp. 6-7, W 1.94, Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records;
123. Tanaka, "Vernacular Newspapers," 38-39, 8, 9, 17; Minutes of Rafu Shimpo's Board of Editorial Counsellors Meeting, July 14, 1941, folder 2, Togo Tanaka "Journal," A 17.06, Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records.
124. Kashu Mainichi, Aug. 4, 1940.
125. Rafu Shimpo, Aug. 10, 1941.
126. The "official attire" of the festival's parade in 1941 was made out of cotton, not the usual silk, to conform with concerns about national defense. Sangyo Nippo, July 30, 1941. Nisei Week souvenir booklet, 1990, p. 62 (in Kurashige's possession).
127. Lieutenant Commander Ringle's Confidential Intelligence Report to Chief of Naval Operations [c. Jan. 20-March 27, 1942], A 5.01, Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records; Los Angeles Times as quoted in Kashu Mainichi, Aug. 25, 1941;
128. Rafu Shimpo, Aug. 25, 1941.
129. Fletcher Bowron, radio address on KECA (Los Angeles), transcript, Feb. 5, 1942 (6:30 p.m.), Fletcher Bowron correspondence, A 15.14, Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records. Ringle's Report to Chief of Naval Operations. For analysis of Ringle's and other intelligence reports, see Bob Kumamoto, "The Search for Spies: American Counterintelligence and the Japanese American Community, 1931-1942," Amerasia Journal, 6 (no. 2, 1979), 45-75;
130. Weglyn, Years of Infamy, 33-53.
131. See Weglyn, Years of Infamy;
132. Daniels, Concentration Camps USA;
133. and Richard Drinnon, Keeper of Concentration Camps: Dillon S. Myer and American Racism (Berkeley, 1987).
134. On conflicts and resistance inside specific internment camps, see Arthur A. Hansen and David A. Hacker, "The Manzanar Riot: An Ethnic Perspective," Amerasia Journal, 2 (no. 2, 1974), 112-57;
135. and Richard S. Nishimoto, Inside an American Concentration Camp: Japanese American Resistance at Poston, Arizona, ed. Lane Ryo Hirabayashi (Tucson, 1995).