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C Ch ha ap pt te er r 2 22 2 Little Tokyo: Historical and Contemporary Japanese American Identities JAMES M. SMITH INTRODUCTION This chapter considers processes that have provided a classic framework of constraints and opportunities for Japanese Americans in Los Angeles. These processes include market capitalism and technological change, racism, and cultural practices. In particular, geographers are interested in how these kinds of economic, social, and cultural processes produce landscapes in various kinds of places. In this case study, we consider Little Tokyo, in Los Angeles, California. This district is a traditional urban ethnic enclave, an area that has many landscape and cultural features of Japanese-American life, ranging from Japanese signage to architectural features . We are especially interested in how the social practices and cultural forms have been etched onto the landscape of this special place, how the enclave has reinforced a sense of being Japanese American, and how Little Tokyo has changed over the last one-hundred years. Although no longer the largest concentration of Japanese-American residences, Little Tokyo has been revived as a center for voluntary cultural, religious, and political practices that have reinforced JapaneseAmerican identities in the post WWII-postwar era. Like other ethnic groups, Japanese Americans build and use places to maintain businesses, create ethnic residences such as senior homes, and reinforce their identities through a sense of place. Although these places are no longer the enclave ghettos of old, and no longer spatially constrained, the residential pattern of a racially-defined people, the three remaining California Nihonmachi (Japantowns), are still socially significant as places of ethnic boundary maintenance (Barth, 1998) and survival in the face of structural and cultural assimilation. EARLY GEOGRAPHIES OF JAPANESE-AMERICAN MIGRATION Push Factors for Japanese Migrants The onset of the Meiji Era in Japan (1868–1912), with its nationalist projects of industrialization, militarization and empire-building, provided the context for Japanese emigration to the Americas and Hawai‘i. The Japanese elites were determined to transform a mostly feudal society into a modern powerful nation-state with an effective military, overseas colonies and a strong urban-industrial economy. This proved to be a difficult shift for certain groups. For example, a combination of legislative inducements and coercion effectively removed possible threats to the Meiji regime from the samurai or warrior class, many of whom were unhappy with Western influence over their country and a loss of social status due to the reforms of the new government. Even more troublesome was the issue of the peasantry, and how they would be brought into the new order. 302 James M. Smith Despite promises to the contrary, the Meiji regime had no intention of large-scale land redistribution or relief of heavy tax burdens on farmers. To the Meiji leadership, industrialization meant squeezing the agricultural sector. This was done through the initiation of cash economies in the rural areas, and the establishment of a land tax, to be paid in cash (Halliday, 1975; Hane, 1990). The result for rural families was even greater hardship than they had known before, as the peasants now depended on the sale of rice to pay the tax. Fluctuations in agricultural commodities prices were determined largely by financial policies set in Tokyo, which generally favored deflation and high interest rates, particularly in periods of crisis. When crops failed and debts came due, hunger and occasional famine resulted, and peasants migrated to the cities and overseas, most of the latter group to Hawai‘i and the west coast of the U.S. and Canada (Halliday, 1975; Hane, 1990, 1982; Takahashi, 1997). These changing conditions in the Japanese countryside were the key push factors in the migration of the Nikkei, a term that refers to the overseas Japanese. Approximately 275,000 Japanese entered the United States between 1861 and 1924, with 245,000 of them migrating from 1900 to 1924. Most were young and male, fitting the profile of long-distance migration that is typical for this specific historical period. Given the nature of the work that labor contractors sought to fill, and conditions in peasant villages, most were rural farmers. The predominant source region for intra-Japanese rural to urban movement, as well as international migration, was southern Japan, particularly productive riceproducing areas such as Yamaguchi, Hiroshima and Okayama prefectures in southwestern Honshu, where the peasants bore a harsh burden of land taxes (Takahashi, 1997; Hane, 1990, 1982; Takaki, 1989). Most of the Issei (those who came and stayed) had clear economic motives to leave Japan...

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