By Lon Kurashige
Do racial minorities within the usa assimilate to American values and associations, or do they preserve ethnic ties and cultures? In exploring the japanese American adventure, Lon Kurashige recasts this tangled debate by way of studying what assimilation and ethnic retention have intended to a selected group over an extended time period. this can be an internal historical past, during which the crowd identification of 1 of America's so much noteworthy racial minorities takes form. From the Thirties, while eastern immigrants managed good sized ethnic enclaves, to the tragic wartime internment and postwar a long time punctuated via dramatic classification mobility, racial protest, and the inflow of monetary funding from Japan, the tale is fraught with conflict.The narrative facilities on Nisei Week in la, the biggest annual eastern get together within the usa. The occasion is a severe website of political clash, and the methods it has replaced through the years replicate the continuing pageant over what it has intended to be jap American. Kurashige finds, subtly and with recognition to gender concerns, the tensions that emerged at diversified moments, not just among those that emphasised jap ethnicity and those that under pressure American orientation, but in addition among generations and sessions during this advanced neighborhood.
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Extra resources for Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival, 1934-1990 (American Crossroads, 8)
Sample text
How these JACLers sought to use the festival to stimulate the depression-weary ethnic enclave is the subject of chapter 2. To drum up business, the Nisei were told that buying in Little 10 Introduction Tokyo was a litmus test of an authentic Japanese American, while, at the same time, whites were informed that shopping in the ethnic enclave offered them a true-to-life Japanese adventure. Yet outsiders were assured that underneath the exotic image of Japanese Americans was a safe community committed to the nation and its moral and cultural norms.
It is true that Japanese immigrants were victimized by structures of white supremacy and that this in turn distinguished their experience from most of the nation’s immigrants. But the system of racial prejudice that the Issei confronted prevented neither the accumulation of wealth nor the rising class status that normally denotes social mobility. Clearly, anti-Japanese racism never reached the level of the institutions that had enslaved blacks or colonized Native Americans. 11 Such spaces were especially prevalent and lucrative in regions experiencing a rapid commercial and population growth, like southern California.
Issei merchants fantasized about a loyal bloc of secondgeneration shoppers spending half a million dollars a year in Little Tokyo. But how could they ensure that successive generations of Japanese Americans would “buy in Lil’ Tokio”? 21 SECOND CHANCES In spring 1934 a group of Little Tokyo merchants pitched the idea of a second-generation festival to the Los Angeles chapter of the JACL, a promising ethnic welfare organization that linked Nisei throughout the West Coast region. The merchants took it upon themselves to do something about the depression-weary enclave, but to their chagrin, they were not the only ones to stand up for Little Tokyo businesses.