Diasporicity and Japanese Americans

This chapter situates Japanese American cultural heritage and transnational ties to the ethnic homeland in a broader diasporic context and proposes the concept of diasporicity to address the relative strength of a geographically dispersed ethnic group’s transnational connections and identifications both with the ancestral homeland and to co-ethnics residing in other countries. Although Japanese Americans are members of the Japanese-descent (nikkei) diaspora, prominent national differences prevent them from identifying with other Japanese-descent nikkei as peoples with a common ethnic heritage. However, like other diasporic groups, they have much stronger social connections to their ethnic homeland than they do to other Japanese descent communities in the Americas.

Introduction

This introduction provides theoretical background for understanding ethnic heritage differences among different generations of Japanese Americans. It also addresses the importance of ethnic heritage for Asian American studies, as well as research on ethnic minorities, immigrants, and diasporas. The chapter interrogates the concept of generations and explores how ethnic heritage is relevant to analyses of homeland, assimilation, transnationalism, racialization, and multiculturalism. The research methodology section discusses the author’s fieldwork as a “native anthropologist” and argues that both native and non-native anthropologists are partial outsiders who are positioned at a relative distance from those they study in the field. Ultimately, the cultural differences anthropologists experience with “natives” are productive for fieldwork and essential for anthropological knowledge.

Ethnic Revival among Fourth-Generation Japanese Americans

This chapter examines how fourth-generation yonsei youth are attempting to recover their lost ethnic heritage and reconnect with their ancestral homeland, despite their complete assimilation and Americanization. Indeed, for them, assimilation has not so much obliterated their cultural heritage, as it has instigated an ethnic revival under conditions of racialized multiculturalism. As a result, the yonsei study Japanese, major in Asian studies, and forge transnational ties. However, even as this return to ethnic roots represents more than a symbolic ethnicity, it is also a result of the pressures of multicultural racialization and indicates that ethnicity remains involuntary for racialized minorities, even after four generations.

The Postwar Nisei

This chapter looks at the postwar second-generation shin-nisei, who are the children of post-1965 Japanese immigrants and came of age in a multicultural and increasingly globalized America at a time when Japan’s image had greatly improved and discrimination against Japanese had considerably lessened. Though culturally assimilated, the shin-nisei have also maintained the ethnic heritage of their parents, and are thus bicultural, as well as bilingual. They have developed transnational identifications with both the United States and Japan and are actively engaged in their ethnic homeland.

Conclusion

Returning to the various factors that cause some generations of Japanese Americans to emphasize ethnic heritage more than others, the concluding chapter reemphasizes that Japanese Americans have not experienced predictable, linear processes of progressive assimilation and loss of ethnic heritage over generations. Instead, each generation has negotiated its own ethnic positionality in response to a complex of historical and contemporary factors, which include racialization, the changing status of the ethnic homeland, and the prevalence of assimilation or multiculturalism. The concluding chapter ends with some thoughts about the future of the Japanese American community, including the experiences of biracial individuals, whose numbers will continue to increase in the coming decades.

Performative Authenticity and Fragmented Empowerment through Taiko

For Japanese Americans, taiko provides an authentic experience of ethnic heritage even though it is not an unchanged cultural tradition that provides a direct link to an ethnic homeland or an ancient past. The remaking of traditional taiko by Japanese Americans involves a performative authenticity that demonstrates how taiko resonates with their current lives, and allows them to display ethnic and gender identities in ways that challenge demeaning stereotypes of Asian Americans. Taiko can thereby be personally empowering. At the same time, however, taiko’s reception by American audiences reinscribes Orientalizing discourses that racially essentialize Japanese Americans as the exotic Other. Therefore, taiko can also be disempowering at the collective level.

Japanese American Taiko and the Remaking of Tradition

This chapter analyzes how later-generation Japanese Americans have enthusiastically embraced taiko in an attempt to recover their cultural heritage, as well as how they have remade and reinvented the form for contemporary ethnic purposes in their local communities. It interrogates the nature of “tradition” by examining how Japanese American taiko differs from taiko as practiced in Japan. The chapter also points out that Japanese American taiko is highly performative, allowing for improvised modifications and spontaneous innovations. Therefore, the desire to reclaim ethnic heritage involves not just the reenactment of ancient cultural traditions but their active recreation in the present to reflect the contemporary social conditions under which Japanese Americans live.

Assimilation and Loss of Ethnic Heritage among Third-Generation Japanese Americans

This chapter focuses on the third-generation sansei, who have followed the assimilative trajectory of their prewar nisei parents. Raised in white, middle-class suburbs, they are well integrated into mainstream American society and have experienced a considerable degree of socioeconomic success. Compared to the other generations, they have generally lost their ancestral heritage and have the least interest in developing transnational ties with Japan. However, they experienced the ethnic activism of the Asian American movement in the 1960s and 1970s, the gradual turn toward multiculturalism, and the emergence of Japan as a respected global economic power. As a result, the sansei claim to have inherited aspects of the ancestral Japanese culture and express greater pride in their ethnic identities as Japanese Americans than the prewar nisei.

The Prewar Nisei

This chapter focuses on the elderly prewar second-generation nisei, who grew up during a period of increasing American hostility toward Japan, were interned in concentration camps during World War II, and fought bravely as American soldiers in Europe in order to demonstrate their patriotism. As a result of their discriminatory racialization as well as the assimilationist pressures of the immediate postwar period, many of them developed nationalist identities as loyal Americans, distanced themselves from their Japanese heritage, and demanded racial citizenship in the nation. The contemporary ethnic experiences of the elderly prewar nisei continue to reflect this historical legacy, and they live completely Americanized lives with strong nationalist identities. Despite the current multicultural environment, they have shown no interest in exploring their Japanese ethnic heritage or developing transnational ties to their ethnic homeland.

The Struggle for Racial Citizenship among Later-Generation Japanese Americans

This chapter deals with the persistent racialization of Japanese Americans, which affects mostly third-generation sansei and fourth-generation yonsei. Although their families have been in the United States for generations, they continue to be racialized as foreigners in America, as well as being subject to essentialized assumptions that they are culturally “Japanese.” In response, the sansei, and to a lesser extent the yonsei, engage in everyday struggles for racial citizenship and demand inclusion in the national community as Americans despite their racial differences. It is still uncertain whether such attempts to contest their racialization will cause currently monoracial notions of American identity to be reconsidered in more inclusive and multiracial ways.