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241 In 1969, Bill Hosokawa, an esteemed Nisei journalist and associate editor of the Denver Post, produced a popular historical study of Japanese Americans . His principal goal, as he described it, was to tell the inspiring tale of the Japanese community’s social ascension, despite the exceptional level of exclusion and discrimination its members had faced relative to other immigrants. As former U.S. Ambassador to Japan Edwin O. Reischauer stated in the book’s preface, the history of Japanese Americans was “the great American success story writ large—a Horatio Alger tale on an ethnic scale,” and a source of inspiration for other minorities seeking equality .1 Notably, to explain how Nisei had attained such success, in contrast to what he termed “the often unproductive struggles of other minorities to win social respect and economic security,” Hosokawa approvingly cited a 1966 New York Times Magazine article by University of California, Berkeley sociologist William Petersen, who found that Nisei, uniquely among nonwhite groups, absorbed cultural values of hard work and diligence from their immigrant parents, and this heritage of group pride allowed them to overcome obstacles.2 Even before its official publication, Hosokawa’s book was the subject of a series of bulletins in the Japanese American press. 3 The anticipation among community members was understandable. The work promised to be a landmark, as it was not only a rare full-length history of Japanese Americans but also the first one ever produced by a Nisei. In addition to the air of legitimacy conferred on the work by the author’s ethnic identity, the study bore a certain weight of official community patronage. The book had been formally commissioned by the Japanese American Research Project , and Hosokawa drew substantial material from the project’s files at the library of the University of California, Los Angeles. While Hosokawa Epilogue 242 / Epilogue insisted that he was entirely a free agent and not responsible to any organization for his views, he had long been a stalwart member of the Japanese American Citizens League, which had raised the funds to establish the Japanese American Research Project several years earlier, and was a regular columnist for the Pacific Citizen, the JACL newspaper. His status led many Nisei to assume that the book would reflect a typical JACL version of the group’s history. No doubt for this reason, when Hosokawa announced that the work’s original working title, Americans with Japanese Faces, had been changed to Nisei: The Quiet Americans (a play on the title of Graham Greene’s celebrated novel), the news ignited a firestorm of controversy in the Japanese vernacular press, one that persisted through publication of the book and crystallized the dissatisfaction with Hosokawa’s approach. Various individuals (implicitly belying the book’s title by their actions) wrote in community media to complain that Hosokawa sought to reproduce invidious ingrained stereotypes of Japanese Americans as conformist and passive . Among the first to protest was Rev. Roy Sano. The preceding year, in a set of public critiques of Petersen, Sano had strenuously rejected the notion that cultural values were responsible for promoting Nisei over other minorities. Far from forming a model of adaptation for other minorities, he maintained, Nisei success was chiefly a product of the actions of these other minorities, who had “opened the door” for inclusion of nonwhites through organized protest. Now Sano added that Hosokawa’s use of the phrase “quiet Americans” was both misleading and ideologically biased: “An accurate reading of our history will demonstrate how assertive we have been in our own way. . . . Have we forgotten all the vigils, protests, strikes, demonstrations, and even a few acts of violence in camp?”4 Amplifying Sano’s critique, activist Raymond Okamura accused Hosokawa of furnishing a “propaganda device” for the Nisei and denigrating other nonwhite groups, who had challenged discrimination more openly. “It may be historically accurate to describe the Nisei as quiet and docile, but to glorify this, as a matter of pride, in 1969 is absurd. Far too often, the nice little orientals have been used as an example for other minorities to follow.”5 Sano and Okamura’s writings reflected (and anticipated) the evolving critique of the “model minority” thesis by Asian American militants in the decades that followed. In a review article some months after the book’s publication, Yoshio Kishi attempted the audacious feat of synthesizing Hosokawa’s “quiet Americans ” image of the Nisei, the assumptions that underlay it, and the arguments of his critics...

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