Nisei Radicals

Demanding liberation, advocating for the oppressed, and organizing for justice, siblings Mitsuye Yamada (1923–) and Michael Yasutake (1920–2001) rebelled against respectability and assimilation, charting their own paths for what it means to be Nisei. Raised in Seattle and then forcibly removed and detained in the Minidoka concentration camp, their early lives mirrored those of many second-generation Japanese Americans. Yasutake’s pacifism endured even with immense pressure to enlist during his confinement and in the years following World War II. His faith-based activism guided him in condemning imperialism and inequality, and he worked tirelessly to free political prisoners and defend human rights. Yamada became an internationally acclaimed feminist poet, professor, and activist who continues to speak out against racism and patriarchy. Weaving together the stories of two distinct but intrinsically connected political lives, Nisei Radicals examines the siblings’ half century of dedication to global movements, including multicultural feminism, Puerto Rican independence, Japanese American redress, Indigenous sovereignty, and more. From displacement and invisibility to insurgent mobilization, Yamada and Yasutake rejected stereotypes and fought to dismantle systems of injustice.

Following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. government rounded up more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans and sent them to internment camps. One of those internees was Charles Kikuchi. In thousands of diary pages, he documented his experiences in the camps, his resettlement in Chicago and drafting into the Army on the eve of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and his postwar life as a social worker in New York City. Kikuchi's diaries bear witness to a watershed era in American race relations, and expose both the promise and the hypocrisy of American democracy. Jim and Jap Crow follows Kikuchi's personal odyssey among fellow Japanese American intellectuals, immigrant activists, Chicago School social scientists, everyday people on Chicago's South Side, and psychologically scarred veterans in the hospitals of New York. The book chronicles a remarkable moment in America's history in which interracial alliances challenged the limits of the elusive democratic ideal, and in which the nation was forced to choose between civil liberty and the fearful politics of racial hysteria. It was an era of world war and the atomic bomb, desegregation in the military but Jim and Jap Crow elsewhere in America, and a hopeful progressivism that gave way to Cold War paranoia. Jim and Jap Crow looks at Kikuchi's life and diaries as a lens through which to observe the possibilities, failures, and key conversations in a dynamic multiracial America.

''How can we fight fascism,'' wrote Charles Kikuchi in June, 1942, ''if we allow its doctrines to become part of government policies?'' Kikuchi was one of the American-born majority of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans who were moved from Pacific Coast states to government relocation centers in 1942 out of declared ''military necessity.'' Presented here is the absorbing diary Kikuchi kept from December 7, 1941, to September, 1942, shortly before and during the time he and his family were forced to live in a converted horse stall at Tanforan Race Track. Kikuchi was a twenty-six-year-old graduate student in social welfare at the University of California when war broke out, and his wry observations provide an alternative to both the official view of relocation and the uninformed outrage of many of its present-day critics.''For anyone interested in the significance of ethnicity, the role of social marginality, and the insidiousness of racialism in American history, The Kikuchi Diary is indispensable reading.''--History: Review of New Books ''A powerful human document. . . . Kikuchi is an extraordinary person. He is also a gifted diarist.''--Choice

To talk about "political style" is to acknowledge a dynamic and somewhat improvisational approach to politics; it is to acknowledge the need to work within the limits presented by tradition, resources, and social context. To speak of "political style" in relation to a particular ethnic group is to recognize their agency in shaping their history.In Nisei/Sansei: Shifting Japanese American Identities and Politics, Jere Takahashi challenges studies that describe the Japanese American community's essentially linear process toward assimilation into U.S. society. As he develops a complex and nuanced account of Japanese American life, he shows that a diversity of opinion and debate about effective political strategy characterized each generation of Japanese Americans. As he investigates the ways in which each generation attempted to advance its interests and concerns, he uncovers the struggles over key issues and introduces the community activists whose voices have been muffled by assimilation narratives.Takahashi's approach to political style includes the ways that Japanese Americans mustered and managed political resources, but also encompasses their on-going efforts at self-definition. His focus, then, is on personal and social action; on individual activists, power, and ideological shifts within the community, and generational change. In telling the story of the community's complex and dynamic relationship to the larger society, he highlights individuals who contributed to the struggles and debates that paved the way for the emergence of a distinct Japanese American identity. Author note: Jere Takahashi teaches Asian American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

This is the most comprehensive and up-to-date reference work on Asian Americans, comprising three volumes that address a broad range of topics on various Asian and Pacific Islander American groups from 1848 to the present day. This three-volume work represents a leading reference resource for Asian American studies that gives students, researchers, librarians, teachers, and other interested readers the ability to easily locate accurate, up-to-date information about Asian ethnic groups, historical and contemporary events, important policies, and notable individuals. Written by leading scholars in their fields of expertise and authorities in diverse professions, the entries devote attention to diverse Asian and Pacific Islander American groups as well as the roles of women, distinct socioeconomic classes, Asian American political and social movements, and race relations involving Asian Americans.

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.

This book addresses the forced removal and confinement of Japanese Americans during World War II—a topic significant to all Americans, regardless of race or color. The internment of Japanese Americans was a violation of the Constitution and its guarantee of equal protection under the law—yet it was authorized by a presidential order, given substance by an act of Congress, and affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Japanese internment is a topic that we as Americans cannot afford to forget or be ignorant of. This work spotlights an important subject that is often only described in a cursory fashion in general textbooks. It provides a comprehensive, accessible treatment of the events of Japanese American internment that includes topical, event, and biographical entries; a chronology and comprehensive bibliography; and primary documents that help bring the event to life for readers and promote inquiry and critical thinking.

The essays in this collection start with the premise that although race, like class and gender, is socially constructed, all three categories have been shaped profoundly by their context in a capitalist society. Race, in other words, is a historical category that develops not only in dialectical relation to class and gender but also in relation to the material conditions in which all three are forged. In addition to discussing and analyzing various dimensions of the African American experience, contributors also consider the ways in which race plays itself out in the experience of Asian Americans and in the very different geopolitical environments of the British Empire and postcolonial Africa. Contributors are Pedro Caban, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, David Crockett, Theodore Koditschek, Scott Kurashige, Clarence Lang, Minkah Makalani, Helen A. Neville, Ibitola O. Pearce, David Roediger, Monica M. White, and Jeffrey Williams.