Imagined Commonality: Rethinking "Ethnicity" through Personal Experience in Hawaii (original) (raw)

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

Telling the Right Story: Narrative as a Mechanism for Japanese American Ethnic Boundary Maintenance

Sociological Inquiry, 2017

This study conceptualizes ethnic grand narrative, a comprehensive story of a people, as a mechanism for maintaining and policing ethnic community boundaries. Such symbolic boundaries are shaped through relational processes of negotiation and contestation: boundary work. Taking the case of Japanese Americans, I demonstrate that legitimate claim on community membership relies on more than common ancestry, as ethnicity usually implies. Through an examination of the newspaper discourse surrounding two Japanese American men, Scott Fujita and Lt. Ehren Watada, I find that the collective ethnic narrative serves to define ethnic community boundaries and is used as a reference point for individual narratives. Depending on the alignment between personal narratives and collective ethnic narratives, in terms of content and structure, determines an individual's legitimate claim on ethnic membership. Notwithstanding the continued value placed on perceived shared biological heritage, ethnic membership is better conceived of as a combination of both common ancestry and strong fit between personal and community narratives. Ethnic narratives tell the story of "we" forming a symbolic boundary between how we talk about "us" and how we talk about "them" (Cornell 2000). As narratives, they are deployed as sequentially linked, event-centered conceptions of ethnic community. As symbolic boundaries, ethnic narratives are conceptual distinctions constructed to define reality or categorizations and shaped through relational processes of negotiation and contestation: boundary work

Identity and Post-Colonial Discourse: Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese

Cairo Studies in English

Psychologists and social psychologists have long discussed the process of identity formation and the conflicts associated with it, especially in adolescents. While it was Erik H. Erikson who first set the broad lines for a theoretical framework of ego identity formation, it was James E. Marcia who developed Erikson's work into an identity formation model. Similar specific models were then developed for adolescents from different ethnic minorities with different names for the various developmental stages. For example, Jean Kim and S. Sue and Sue suggested ethnic identity development models for Asian Americans. Identity is a wide concept that includes several dimensions such as race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class, religion, profession, interests, and roles in life. James E. Marcia operationalized Erikson's two stage egoidentity development into a four-stage model. Marcia speaks first of the identity diffusion subject who does not show any specific commitments in life. He has no ideological or occupational interests. In the foreclosed identity stage, the individual expresses commitment based on his parents' rather than his own choices, so it is a commitment not stemming from any source of self-exploration. The moratorium subject, in contrast, is one who is in a state of crisis, trying to reach a compromise with what his parents want for him, what society demands, and what he is capable of. After going through this stage, the individual realizes an achieved ego-identity. He has a higher self-esteem and a realistic set of expectations (552-57). While ethnic identity might be more inclusive than racial identity as the latter is marked by distinct physical features and the former includes traditions and cultural heritage (Kim 139; Phinney and Rosenthal 147), this paper will use both interchangeably. Jean Kim came up with a model for the psychological theory of Asian American Racial Identity Development (AARID) that divides ethnic identity formation into five stages: ethnic awareness, white identification, awakening to social political consciousness, redirection to an Asian American consciousness, and finally incorporation (Kim 145). They are quite similar to Marcia's ego identity development and D.W. Sue and Sue's five stage