Imagined Commonality: Rethinking "Ethnicity" through Personal Experience in Hawaii (original) (raw)
Related papers
Ethnic and Racial Studies
This article examines Japanese Americans in Japan to illuminate how 'Japanese American' - an ethnic minority identity in the US - is reconstructed in Japan as a racialized national identity. Based on fifty interviews with American citizens of Japanese ancestry conducted between 2004 and 2007, I demonstrate how interactions with Japanese in Japan shape Japanese Americans' racial and national understandings of themselves. After laying out a theoretical framework for understanding the shifting intersection of race, ethnicity, and nationality, I explore the interactive process of racial categorization and ethnic identity assertion for Japanese American transnationals in Japan. This process leads to what I call racialized national identities - the intersection of racial and national identities in an international context - and suggests that US racial minority identities are constructed not only within the US, but abroad as well.
Ethnic identity among Japanese-Americans in Hawaii
International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 1988
... Commentary 14 (1952), pp. 492–500. Hanson and Mullis, 1986. RA Hanson and RL Mullis ,Intergenerational transfer of normative parental attitudes. Psychological Reports 59 (1986), pp. 711–714. Herberg, 1955. W. Herberg , Protestant-Catholic-Jew. ...
American-Japanese Ethnic Identities: Individual Assertions and Social Reflections
Japan Journal of Multilingualism and Multiculturalism, 1997
This study explores the ethnic identity development that occurs during adolescence and early adulthood for persons of Japanese and American ancestry. It focuses on the process of assertion and reflection by analyzing what kinds of ethnic identities are asserted by individuals and how others receive or reflect these identity assertions. The paper begins with an outline of how developments in the sociocultural environments in Japan and the United States have influenced identity assertions. It then describes the particular kinds of ethnic identity choices that are made and the ways in which these identity assertions are responded to by others. The methodology utilized semistructured interviews with forty seven individuals with Japanese mothers and American fathers between the ages of 18 and 38 in Japan and the United States.
Morphing Race into Ethnicity: Asian Americans and Critical Transformations of Whiteness
boundary 2, 2001
Whiteness studies has focused primarily on the historical emergence of liminal European groups (the Irish and southern and eastern Europeans) My gratitude to Lauren Berlant for her close, incisive reading of an early version of this article, her generous encouragement, and wonderful collegiality. Among my colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Chris Newfield offered excellent suggestions; I am also grateful to my colleagues in the Department of Black Studies, who responded to a presentation based on this article with keen comments and enthusiastic support. I benefited greatly from the responses of audience members to a presentation based on this article at the Association for Asian American Studies Conference in Philadelphia in 1999. I owe a special debt to the two anonymous readers of the boundary 2 editorial collective for their careful reading and astute criticism. Finally, my greatest debt is to Paul
Diaspora as mind: making sense of the experiences of the Japanese in postwar Taiwan
This paper began as an inquiry into the plight of ethnic Japanese in postwar Taiwan. As a group, they have been an object of benign neglect. Despite the advent of " multiculturalism " (duoyuan wenhua zhuyi) in Taiwan, was marked by an " alien " (mainlander Chinese) KMT regime and led to the eventual liberation of opposition parties and indigenous ethnic groups, few have found it relevant to celebrate the cause of oppressed Japanese. The postwar ban on Taiwanese and Japanese culture was part of the same imperative of mono-cultural nationalism that endeavored to erase 50 years of Japanese colonialism in order to restore the legacy of Chinese civilization. At the same time, there is little recognition in the literature of any Japanese " diaspora " in Taiwan. It pales in comparison with the many Japanese orphans abandoned in Manchuria after the Second World War. The birth of a generation of children from mixed marriages making claims to Japanese " identity " has added other significant dimensions to the concept of diaspora and its definition as a social group or discursive construction.
Trans-Pacific Japanese American Studies: Conversations on Race and Racializations
2016
Edited by Yasuko Takezawa and Gary Y. Okihiro. Trans-Pacific Japanese American Studies is a unique collection of essays derived from a series of dialogues held in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Los Angeles on the issues of racializations, gender, communities, and the positionalities of scholars involved in Japanese American studies. The book brings together some of the most renowned scholars of the discipline in Japan and North America. It seeks to overcome past constraints of dialogues between Japan- and U.S.-based scholars by providing opportunities for candid, extended conversations among its contributors. While each contribution focuses on the field of “Japanese American” studies, approaches to the subject vary—ranging from national and village archives, community newspapers, personal letters, visual art, and personal interviews. Research papers are divided into six sections: Racializations, Communities, Intersections, Borderlands, Reorientations, and Teaching. Papers by one or two Japan-based scholar(s) are paired with a U.S.-based scholar, reflecting the book’s intention to promote dialogue and mutuality across national formations. The collection is also notable for featuring underrepresented communities in Japanese American studies, such as Okinawan “war brides,” Koreans, women, and multiracials. Essays on subject positions raise fundamental questions: Is it possible to engage in a truly equal dialogue when English is the language used in the conversation and in a field where English-language texts predominate? How can scholars foster a mutual respect when U.S.-centrism prevails in the subject matter and in the field’s scholarly hierarchy? Understanding foundational questions that are now frequently unstated assumptions will help to disrupt hierarchies in scholarship and work toward more equal engagements across national divides. Although the study of Japanese Americans has reached a stage of maturity, contributors to this volume recognize important historical and contemporary neglects in that historiography and literature. Japanese America and its scholarly representations, they declare, are much too deep, rich, and varied to contain in a singular narrative or subject position.
“Who’s Pitiful Now?”: Othering and Identity Shifts of Japanese Youth From California to Tokyo
Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, 2018
This study examines how intraethnic relationships and identities are understood, negotiated, and repositioned among Japanese students at Pearl High School (pseudonym) in California, within a transnational context. I utilize a 2year multisite ethnography and discourse analysis of follow-up interviews collected over the past 10 years. By focusing on their practices of intraethnic Othering using labels in association to social places, I show the multivocality and multilocality of their identity negotiation as follows: (a) Groups of seemingly homogeneous Japanese students differentiate each other by using labels (e.g. "Jap," "FOB" (fresh off the boat), "wannabe") and making territories within their school. (b) The Japanese university admission policy for returnees (kikoku) situates these students on their return to Japan to renegotiate their identity in between culturally kikoku and institutionally kikoku. (c) The transnational transition into kikoku, while reproducing the underlying ideologies, twists the participants' relationship and identity positioning, and influences their social, academic, and career paths in Japan. America-born or foreign-born, Asian students in the United States, regardless of nationality or length of stay, are often racialized as a homogeneous group haunted with a "model minority" image that they are academically and economically successful. In the past few decades, global mobility from, to, and within Asia is on the rise at a fast rate. According to the U.S. Census (2010), "Asian" is the fastest-growing population compared to the other racially categorized groups. Partly due to the general image of model minority and statistics showing high performance on standardized tests by Asian students, many scholars in Asian American Studies (e.g., Lee, 1996; Liu, 2017) point out that the struggles by and voices of Asian American and Asian students regarding their social identities and relationships with their peers at school tend to be overlooked. Moreover, given the transnational mobility of many of these Asian students and families, it is important to investigate the influence of the educational environment and systems overseas on these students' academic choices and social lives. Among the Asian population in the United States, Japanese are one of the oldest comers and largest groups. Since the late 1960s, under the high-growth economy in Japan, Japanese companies started to send their workers to stay overseas to develop their international market. Among these Japanese nationals, the largest population, 37%, resides in the United States (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan [MFAJ], 2016). Among Japanese residents in California, which hosts a quarter of the total Japanese population in the United States, 65% are classified as long-term visitors (MFAJ, 2016), which include Japanese nationals with student or work visas, Japanese-U.S. dual citizens (under 20), and permanent residents. More than half of these long-term visitors work at private companies such as Toyota, Japan Airlines, and Panasonic (MFAJ, 2016). Unlike children of Japanese American and