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255 13 Apple Pie and Makizushi Japanese American Women Sustaining Family and Community Valerie J. Matsumoto Family and Community In 1930s Los Angeles, Natsuye Fujimoto, a second-generation Japanese American teenager, compiled a booklet she entitled “Recipes (Japanese).” Carefully documenting the food her family enjoyed and considered Japanese, she included dishes ranging from “Nasu-Ni (Sautéed Eggplant)” and traditional New Year’s “Ozoni” soup, to “Shrimp Salad” and “Baked Flat Fish” with “Pesha Meru” (béchamel) sauce.1 The notation “Serves 5”—the number in the Fujimoto family —on many of the recipes suggests that these dishes constituted part of the family ’s regular diet. Fujimoto’s “Shrimp Salad” with pineapple and cucumber shows how Japanese immigrant families adapted the idea of the Western salad, dressing theirs with Japanese sweet wine, vinegar, ginger, and mustard. Her “Baked Flat Fish” recipe called not for baking the fish in an oven, with which many Japanese immigrants were unfamiliar, but frying it on a stove; and the “Pesha Meru” sauce served over the fish contained the butter, flour, and egg yolks of a classic French sauce. The recipe for “Chinese Steamed Castella” hinted at even earlier histories, referencing both a Chinese cooking technique and the “Castella” cake linked with the influence of Portuguese traders in Japan. The Fujimoto family’s culinary practices offer glimpses of the process by which women have transmitted, adopted, and combined elements of Japanese American culture. The food prepared by nisei (U.S.-born second-generation) women in the pre-World War II period reflects their efforts not only to sustain family and ethnic community but also to cross social and cultural boundaries. In chapter 19 of this book, Delores Phillips draws attention to such crossings in the 1999 cookbook Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian, which she examines as an endeavor to “transform space in ways that resist the customary boundaries of nation and culture.” Second-generation Japanese Americans grew up in an era of exclusion, when boundaries between racial groups in the U.S. West were defined by restrictive housing covenants, alien land laws, laws against Valerie J. Matsumoto 256 interracial marriage, and discrimination in the workplace and recreation. If Jaffrey’s cookbook “imagines the eater as a global citizen,” the nisei’s culinary activities in the 1920s and 1930s reaffirm their sense of themselves as American citizens with deep attachments to ethnic cultural practices. In the context of race relations before World War II, the second generation ’s preparation and consumption of Western dishes can be read as a sign of interest in new flavors and a way of claiming and demonstrating their Americanness . Their tastes also showed the influence of regional demographics and interactions with other minority groups in Southern California. At the same time, nisei women continued to prepare the traditional holiday food and experiment with familiar Japanese dishes. Drawing on both the ethnic press and oral history, I examine in this chapter young Japanese American women’s engagement with foodways, at home and in their clubs, with a focus on prewar Los Angeles.2 Given women’s primary culinary responsibilities, they played a creative role in shaping both the mundane and festive elements associated with ethnic culture. Japanese Americans before World War II Natsuye Fujimoto and her family were part of the growing Japanese American population on the West Coast in the early twentieth century. By the 1890s, the growing stream of Japanese laborers immigrating to Hawai‘i and the continental United States reflected elite dreams of Japanese colonial expansionism as well as the pragmatism of displaced farmers seeking economic opportunities and avoiding military service by going abroad.3 Although white nativists who had clamored for the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 now began to press for restrictions on Japanese immigration, Japan’s political clout as a rising world power at the turn of the century delayed these measures. The 1908 Gentlemen’s Agreement between Japan and the United States halted the influx of Japanese laborers, but a loophole permitted the entrance of the wives and family members of earlier residents. Their arrival before the 1924 Immigration Act steadily narrowed the gap in the sex ratio in the immigrant community. Indeed, due in part to the legal loophole facilitating family reunification and growth, the nisei became the biggest prewar group of second-generation Asian Americans. By 1910, Los Angeles County boasted the largest concentration of issei (first-generation immigrants) and nisei, numbering 8,641 in the continental United States, and...

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