Nisei In Uniform

Nisei ("second generation") is a Japanese language term used in countries in North America and South America to specify the ethnically Japanese children born in the new country to Japanese-born immigrants (who are called Issei). The Nisei are considered the second generation, and the grandchildren of the Japanese-born immigrants are called Sansei, or third generation.

Nisei Soldiers Break Their Silence is a compelling story of courage, community, endurance, and reparation. It shares the experiences of Japanese Americans (Nisei) who served in the U.S. Army during World War II, fighting on the front lines in Italy and France, serving as linguists in the South Pacific, and working as cooks and medics. The soldiers were from Hood River, Oregon, where their families were landowners and fruit growers. Town leaders, including veterans' groups, attempted to prevent their return after the war and stripped their names from the local war memorial. All of the soldiers were American citizens, but their parents were Japanese immigrants and had been imprisoned in camps as a consequence of Executive Order 9066. The racist homecoming that the Hood River Japanese American soldiers received was decried across the nation. Linda Tamura, who grew up in Hood River and whose father was a veteran of the war, conducted extensive oral histories with the veterans, their families, and members of the community. She had access to hundreds of recently uncovered letters and documents from private files of a local veterans' group that led the campaign against the Japanese American soldiers. This book also includes the little known story of local Nisei veterans who spent 40 years appealing their convictions for insubordination. Watch the book trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHMcFdmixLk

This thesis examines the application of battle command during the 100/442d Regimental Combat Team’s rescue of the First Battalion, 141st Infantry Regiment, 36th Infantry Division, the “Lost Battalion.” As background, this study presents a brief history of the Japanese in Hawaii and the United States, of the formation and record of the 100/442d RCT, and of the battle to rescue the Lost Battalion. The contemporary concept of battle command is defined as per Army Field Manual 3-0, Operations (June 2001) and Field Manual 22-100, Leadership; Be, Know, Do (August 1999) and shown to encompass the World War II-era concepts of command and leadership. This study examines how the tenets of battle command-visualize, describe, direct-were applied by the 36th Division and the 100/442d RCT during the operation. Specific examples from the battle will illustrate both the use and neglect of the precepts of battle command and illustrate the importance of sound command and leadership techniques as well as the value of unit cohesion in present-day operations.

The Color of Success tells of the astonishing transformation of Asians in the United States from the "yellow peril" to "model minorities"--peoples distinct from the white majority but lauded as well-assimilated, upwardly mobile, and exemplars of traditional family values--in the middle decades of the twentieth century. As Ellen Wu shows, liberals argued for the acceptance of these immigrant communities into the national fold, charging that the failure of America to live in accordance with its democratic ideals endangered the country's aspirations to world leadership. Weaving together myriad perspectives, Wu provides an unprecedented view of racial reform and the contradictions of national belonging in the civil rights era. She highlights the contests for power and authority within Japanese and Chinese America alongside the designs of those external to these populations, including government officials, social scientists, journalists, and others. And she demonstrates that the invention of the model minority took place in multiple arenas, such as battles over zoot suiters leaving wartime internment camps, the juvenile delinquency panic of the 1950s, Hawaii statehood, and the African American freedom movement. Together, these illuminate the impact of foreign relations on the domestic racial order and how the nation accepted Asians as legitimate citizens while continuing to perceive them as indelible outsiders. By charting the emergence of the model minority stereotype, The Color of Success reveals that this far-reaching, politically charged process continues to have profound implications for how Americans understand race, opportunity, and nationhood.

During the Great Depression and into the war years, the Roosevelt administration sought to transform the political, institutional, and social contours of the United States. One result of the New Deal was the emergence and deployment of a novel set of narratives—reflected in social scientific case studies, government documents, and popular media—meant to reorient relationships among gender, race, sexuality, and national political power. In Forgotten Men and Fallen Women, Holly Allen focuses on the interplay of popular and official narratives of forgotten manhood, fallen womanhood, and other social and moral archetypes. In doing so, she explores how federal officials used stories of collective civic identity to enlist popular support for the expansive New Deal state and, later, for the war effort.These stories, she argues, had practical consequences for federal relief politics. The "forgotten man," identified by Roosevelt in a fireside chat in 1932, for instance, was a compelling figure of collective civic identity and the counterpart to the white, male breadwinner who was the prime beneficiary of New Deal relief programs. He was also associated with women who were blamed either for not supporting their husbands and family at all (owing to laziness, shrewishness, or infidelity) or for supporting them too well by taking their husbands’ jobs, rather than staying at home and allowing the men to work.During World War II, Allen finds, federal policies and programs continued to be shaped by specific gendered stories—most centrally, the story of the heroic white civilian defender, which animated the Office of Civilian Defense, and the story of the sacrificial Nisei (Japanese-American) soldier, which was used by the War Relocation Authority. The Roosevelt administration’s engagement with such widely circulating narratives, Allen concludes, highlights the affective dimensions of U.S. citizenship and state formation.

The end of military heroism? The American Legion and "service" between the Wars / George Lewis -- GI Joe Nisei: The invention of World War II's iconic Japanese American soldier / Ellen D. Wu -- Instrument of subjugation or avenue for liberation? Black military heroism from World War II to the Vietnam War / Simon Wendt -- "Warriors in uniform": Race, masculinity, and martial valor among native American veterans from the Great War to Vietnam and beyond / Matthias Voigt -- My Lai: The crisis of American military heroism in the Vetnam War / Steve Estes -- Leonard Matlovich: From military hero to gay rights poster boy / Simon Hall -- Displaying heroism: Media images of the weary soldier in World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War / Amy Lucker -- "From louboutins to combat boots"? The negotiation of a twenty-first-century female warrior image in American popular culture and literature / Sarah Makeschin -- From warrior to soldier? Lakota veterans on military valor / Sonja John -- Virtual warfare: Video games, drones, and the reimagination of heroic -- Masculinity / Carrie Andersen

During times of conflict, Americans have worried that enemies within would twist freedom of speech into a weapon of propaganda and use freedom of assembly to unleash violent internal chaos. As a result, the government isolated and confined within federal communities groups that they deemed dangerous. Within these so-called cultural structures of realistic democracy, the government awkwardly attempted to protect citizens while curbing their rights and freedoms. ø It is no accident that the government?s enclosed worlds were most numerous in the American West, where abundant open space has long symbolized the glory of American freedom and progress. Heather Fryer looks at four of these inverse utopias in the American West: the Klamath Indian reservation; the community of nuclear scientists in Los Alamos; the Japanese internment camp in Topaz, Utah; and the wartime company town of Vanport, Oregon. Each community stripped freedoms from Americans based on beliefs about the treacherous tendencies of minorities, workers, and radicals. Although the differences of experience among the four populations were considerable, they shared the marginalization, repression, displacement, and disillusionment with the federal government that flourished within the confined spaces of America?s inverse utopias. Nor was their experience theirs alone; it is instead part of a patterned, national, wartime dynamic that makes enemies of citizens while fighting to extend American freedom to every corner of the globe.

This important book addresses the ways race has both helped and hindered Americans in determining national identity. Contributors consider race and American nationalism from a variety of historical and disciplinary vantage points. Beginning with the aftermath of the Civil War and unfolding chronologically through to the present, the essays examine a multitude of different groups-Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, Puerto Ricans, African Americans, whites, Jews, Irish Americans, German Americans-by examining race and nationalism represented in public memorials, photography, film, classic and minor literature, gender issues, legal studies, and more. The book offers rereadings of some of the pivotal figures in American culture and politics, including Herman Melville, Frances Harper, William James, Frederic Remington, Charles Francis Adams, W. E. B. DuBois, George Creel, Zora Neale Hurston, Louis Chu, and others. In the course of these essays, readers will learn how Americans in different periods and circumstances have grappled with the changing issues of defining race and of defining American as a race, as a nationality, or as both.