After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics

Chapter 5: The “New Nisei” and Identity Politics

85 5. The “New Nisei” and Identity Politics The mass removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans by the United States government during World War II brutalized its victims not only by stripping away their civil rights and causing them to lose most of their possessions but also by upsetting their psychological equilibrium. Before the war, the vast majority of Japanese Americans on the American continent lived on the West Coast, where they built close-knit ethnic communities around Japanese schools, churches, and sports teams. Large cities also boasted Japanese-language or bilingual newspapers, holiday processions, self-help groups, and ethnic associations. The U.S. government’s policy of forcible removal smashed Japanese communities, while the mass incarceration of their residents without charge or proof of guilt subverted the camp inmates’ ethnic identity and solidarity, leading to widespread trauma and interpersonal conflict within the camps. As the war went on, the government began to permit Japanese Americans to leave the camps and resettle in communities elsewhere, first outside the Pacific coast, later nationwide. The newcomers labored, amid unfamiliar and at times hostile surroundings, to rebuild their shattered lives and community structures. At the same time, the Nisei undergoing resettlement faced particular pressure, both from government agencies such as the War Relocation Authority (WRA) and from within their own communities , to “assimilate” in order to avoid being perceived as foreign or threatening . For many, that meant removing the most obvious signs of their racial and ethnic difference, such as speaking Japanese, using Asian first names, or wearing folk costumes. For others, that meant socializing with non-Asians and avoiding all-Nisei circles, although by and large they did not—and could not—totally avoid associating with other Japanese Americans . In the process, the Nisei were forced to wrestle with fundamental 86 / The Varieties of Assimilation questions of identity and community development: Was it possible to be American and Japanese? Was the assimilation prescribed by the government possible, or even desirable? Could the Nisei express a group identity that would be free of stigma? In this period of initial reconstruction and uncertainty, a group of Nisei writers in their twenties or early thirties, including Sam Hohri, Bill Hosokawa , Miné Okubo, Mary Oyama [Mittwer], Eddie Shimano, Ina Sugihara , and Larry Tajiri, emerged as spokespeople for the Nisei to the wider society, as well as counselors inside the community. They were part of a group of intellectuals that had been at the center of Nisei journalism and artistic life on the West Coast before the war. However, during those years they remained fairly marginal within the ethnic community, which was dominated by Issei and by conservative Nisei businessmen, and they were all but unknown outside it. It was mass confinement, paradoxically, that opened up a mainstream public forum for them. The public debate over the government’s actions, combined with the efforts of the WRA to publicize the inmates positively so as to ease mass resettlement, made the condition of Japanese Americans a matter of public interest and gave the West Coast Nisei their first, limited access to mainstream media. Their writings appeared in mass-market periodicals such as Liberty, Fortune, and the Saturday Review, liberal journals such as the Nation, the New Republic, and Common Ground, religious publications such as Commonweal , Christian Century, and the Christian Science Monitor, and the daily secular press (including African American journals). Through these media, the Nisei writers were able both to address a diverse audience on the state of Japanese Americans in the wake of confinement and to speak to other Japanese Americans about the shape of their community in the post-camp future. Although the Nisei writers had diverse experiences, certain common themes do appear in their writings. They all denounced the injustice of mass confinement and deplored conditions in the camps. Yet they generally represented the government’s policy of resettling “loyal” Nisei as a positive step toward destroying the subordinate status of Japanese Americans. As Eddie Shimano noted, “The hope is in resettlement. . . . Such dispersal resettlement, I am convinced, will go far to effect speedily and drastically, with surgical thoroughness and surgical disregard for sentiment, the integration of the Japanese into American life.”1 They each expressed the hope that Japanese Americans, wherever they resettled, would embrace assimilation and shed their defensive ghetto mentality. Nevertheless, they did not simply propose blending quietly into white society, as the government The “New Nisei” and Identity...