Japanese Americans and the Racial Uniform

Japanese Americans and the Racial Uniform PDF Author: Dana Y. Nakano
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479816396
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
How race continues to shape the citizenship and everyday lives of later-generation Japanese Americans Japanese Americans are seen as the “model minority,” a group that has fully assimilated and excelled within the US. Yet third- and fourth-generation Japanese Americans continue to report feeling marginalized within the predominantly white communities they call home. Japanese Americans and the Racial Uniform explores this apparent contradiction, challenging the way society understands the role of race in social and cultural integration. To explore race and the everyday practices of citizenship, Dana Y. Nakano begins at an unlikely site, Japanese Village and Deer Park, a now defunct Japan-themed amusement park in suburban Southern California. Drawing from extensive interviews with the park’s Japanese American employees as well as photographic imagery, Nakano shows how the employees' race acted as part of their work uniform and magnified their sense of alienation from their white peers and the park’s white visitors. While the racial perception of Japanese Americans as forever foreigners made them ideal employees for Deer Park, the same stigma continues to marginalizes Japanese Americans beyond the place and time of the amusement park. Into the present day, third and fourth generation Japanese Americans share feelings of racialized non-belonging and yearning for community. Japanese Americans and the Racial Uniform pushes us to rethink the persistent recognition of racial markers—the racial body as a visible, ever-present uniform—and how it continues to impact claims on an American identity and the lived experience of citizenship.

Japanese Americans and the Racial Uniform

Japanese Americans and the Racial Uniform PDF Author: Dana Y. Nakano
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479816396
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 159

Get Book Here

Book Description
How race continues to shape the citizenship and everyday lives of later-generation Japanese Americans Japanese Americans are seen as the “model minority,” a group that has fully assimilated and excelled within the US. Yet third- and fourth-generation Japanese Americans continue to report feeling marginalized within the predominantly white communities they call home. Japanese Americans and the Racial Uniform explores this apparent contradiction, challenging the way society understands the role of race in social and cultural integration. To explore race and the everyday practices of citizenship, Dana Y. Nakano begins at an unlikely site, Japanese Village and Deer Park, a now defunct Japan-themed amusement park in suburban Southern California. Drawing from extensive interviews with the park’s Japanese American employees as well as photographic imagery, Nakano shows how the employees' race acted as part of their work uniform and magnified their sense of alienation from their white peers and the park’s white visitors. While the racial perception of Japanese Americans as forever foreigners made them ideal employees for Deer Park, the same stigma continues to marginalizes Japanese Americans beyond the place and time of the amusement park. Into the present day, third and fourth generation Japanese Americans share feelings of racialized non-belonging and yearning for community. Japanese Americans and the Racial Uniform pushes us to rethink the persistent recognition of racial markers—the racial body as a visible, ever-present uniform—and how it continues to impact claims on an American identity and the lived experience of citizenship.

The Shifting Grounds of Race

The Shifting Grounds of Race PDF Author: Scott Kurashige
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400834007
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Los Angeles has attracted intense attention as a "world city" characterized by multiculturalism and globalization. Yet, little is known about the historical transformation of a place whose leaders proudly proclaimed themselves white supremacists less than a century ago. In The Shifting Grounds of Race, Scott Kurashige highlights the role African Americans and Japanese Americans played in the social and political struggles that remade twentieth-century Los Angeles. Linking paradigmatic events like Japanese American internment and the Black civil rights movement, Kurashige transcends the usual "black/white" dichotomy to explore the multiethnic dimensions of segregation and integration. Racism and sprawl shaped the dominant image of Los Angeles as a "white city." But they simultaneously fostered a shared oppositional consciousness among Black and Japanese Americans living as neighbors within diverse urban communities. Kurashige demonstrates why African Americans and Japanese Americans joined forces in the battle against discrimination and why the trajectories of the two groups diverged. Connecting local developments to national and international concerns, he reveals how critical shifts in postwar politics were shaped by a multiracial discourse that promoted the acceptance of Japanese Americans as a "model minority" while binding African Americans to the social ills underlying the 1965 Watts Rebellion. Multicultural Los Angeles ultimately encompassed both the new prosperity arising from transpacific commerce and the enduring problem of race and class divisions. This extraordinarily ambitious book adds new depth and complexity to our understanding of the "urban crisis" and offers a window into America's multiethnic future.

Honor Before Glory

Honor Before Glory PDF Author: Scott McGaugh
Publisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN: 0306824469
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
On October 24, 1944, more than two hundred American soldiers realized they were surrounded by German infantry deep in the mountain forest of eastern France. As their dwindling food, ammunition, and medical supplies ran out, the American commanding officer turned to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team to achieve what other units had failed to do. Honor Before Glory is the story of the 442nd, a segregated unit of Japanese American citizens, commanded by white officers, that finally rescued the "lost battalion." Their unmatched courage and sacrifice under fire became legend-all the more remarkable because many of the soldiers had volunteered from prison-like "internment" camps where sentries watched their mothers and fathers from the barbed-wire perimeter. In seven campaigns, these young Japanese American men earned more than 9,000 Purple Hearts, 6,000 Bronze and Silver Stars, and nearly two dozen Medals of Honor. The 442nd became the most decorated unit of its size in World War II: its soldiers earned 18,100 awards and decorations, more than one for every man. Honor Before Glory is their story-a story of a young generation's fight against both the enemy and American prejudice-a story of heroism, sacrifice, and the best America has to offer.

Redress

Redress PDF Author: John Tateishi
Publisher: Heyday Books
ISBN: 9781597144988
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This is the unlikely but true story of the Japanese American Citizens League's fight for an official government apology and compensation for the imprisonment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. Author John Tateishi, himself the leader of the JACL Redress Committee for many years, is first to admit that the task was herculean in scale. The campaign was seeking an unprecedented admission of wrongdoing from Congress. It depended on a unified effort but began with an acutely divided community: for many, the shame of "camp" was so deep that they could not even speak of it; money was a taboo subject; the question of the value of liberty was insulting. Besides internal discord, the American public was largely unaware that there had been concentration camps on US soil, and Tateishi knew that concessions from Congress would come only with mass education about the government's civil rights violations. Beyond the backroom politicking and verbal fisticuffs that make this book a swashbuckling read, Redress is the story of a community reckoning with what it means to be both culturally Japanese and American citizens; how to restore honor; and what duty it has to protect such harms from happening again. This book has powerful implications as the idea of reparations shapes our national conversation.

Japanese Americans

Japanese Americans PDF Author: Roger Daniels
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295801506
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
This revised and expanded edition of Japanese Americans: From Relocation to Redress presents the most complete and current published account of the Japanese American experience from the evacuation order of World War II to the public policy debate over redress and reparations. A chronology and comprehensive overview of the Japanese American experience by Roger Daniels are underscored by first person accounts of relocations by Bill Hosokawa, Toyo Suyemoto Kawakami, Barry Saiki, Take Uchida, and others, and previously undescribed events of the interment camps for “enemy aliens” by John Culley and Tetsuden Kashima. The essays bring us up to the U.S. government’s first redress payments, made forty eight years after the incarceration of Japanese Americans began. The combined vision of editors Roger Daniels, Sandra C. Taylor, and Harry H. L. Kitano in pulling together disparate aspects of the Japanese American experience results in a landmark volume in the wrenching experiment of American democracy.

Facing the Mountain

Facing the Mountain PDF Author: Daniel James Brown
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525557407
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 562

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Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER One of NPR's "Books We Love" of 2021 Longlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Winner of the Christopher Award “Masterly. An epic story of four Japanese-American families and their sons who volunteered for military service and displayed uncommon heroism… Propulsive and gripping, in part because of Mr. Brown’s ability to make us care deeply about the fates of these individual soldiers...a page-turner.” – Wall Street Journal From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Boys in the Boat, a gripping World War II saga of patriotism and resistance, focusing on four Japanese American men and their families, and the contributions and sacrifices that they made for the sake of the nation. In the days and months after Pearl Harbor, the lives of Japanese Americans across the continent and Hawaii were changed forever. In this unforgettable chronicle of war-time America and the battlefields of Europe, Daniel James Brown portrays the journey of Rudy Tokiwa, Fred Shiosaki, and Kats Miho, who volunteered for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and were deployed to France, Germany, and Italy, where they were asked to do the near impossible. Brown also tells the story of these soldiers' parents, immigrants who were forced to submit to life in concentration camps on U.S. soil. Woven throughout is the chronicle of Gordon Hirabayashi, one of a cadre of patriotic resisters who stood up against their government in defense of their own rights. Whether fighting on battlefields or in courtrooms, these were Americans under unprecedented strain, doing what Americans do best—striving, resisting, pushing back, rising up, standing on principle, laying down their lives, and enduring.

When Can We Go Back to America?

When Can We Go Back to America? PDF Author: Susan H. Kamei
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1481401459
Category : JUVENILE NONFICTION
Languages : en
Pages : 736

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Book Description
"An oral history about Japanese internment during World War II, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, from the perspective of children and young people affected"--

The Color of Success

The Color of Success PDF Author: Ellen D. Wu
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691168024
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
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.

Asian American Spies

Asian American Spies PDF Author: Brian Masaru Hayashi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190092866
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
A recovery of the vital role Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Americans played in US intelligence services in Asia during World War II. Spies deep behind enemy lines; double agents; a Chinese American James Bond; black propaganda radio broadcasters; guerrilla fighters; pirates; smugglers; prostitutes and dancers as spies; and Asian Americans collaborating with Axis Powers. All these colorful individuals form the story of Asian Americans in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of today's CIA. Brian Masaru Hayashi brings to light for the first time the role played by Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Americans in America's first centralized intelligence agency in its fight against the Imperial Japanese forces in east Asia during World War II. They served deep behind enemy lines gathering intelligence for American and Chinese troops locked in a desperate struggle against Imperial Japanese forces on the Asian continent. Other Asian Americans produced and disseminated statements by bogus peace groups inside the Japanese empire to weaken the fighting resolve of the Japanese. Still others served with guerrilla forces attacking enemy supply and communication lines behind enemy lines. Engaged in this deadly conflict, these Asian Americans agents encountered pirates, smugglers, prostitutes, and dancers serving as the enemy's spies, all the while being subverted from within the OSS by a double agent and without by co-ethnic collaborators in wartime Shanghai. Drawing on recently declassified documents, Asian American Spies challenges the romanticized and stereotyped image of these Chinese, Japanese, and Korean American agents--the Model Minority-while offering a fresh perspective on the Allied victory in the Pacific Theater of World War II.

Heartbeat of Struggle

Heartbeat of Struggle PDF Author: Diane Carol Fujino
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816645930
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
Presents the biography of the courageous Asian American activist who, on February 12, 1965, cradled Malcolm X in her arms as he died, although her role as a public servant and activist began much earlier than this pivotal public moment. Simultaneous.