Airborne Dreams: "Nisei" Stewardesses and Pan American World Airways (review)

Airborne Dreams provides an exciting and little-known account of Japanese American flight attendants who worked on Pan American World Airways in the wake of the postwar Jet Age. In 1955, the airline created a "Japanese-language position" for its Tokyo-bound and eventually round-the-world flights. Pan Am's "Nisei" stewardesses, as they were commonly called, were mostly Honolulu-based Japanese American women—not necessarily second generation—whose personal dreams for upper mobility dovetailed with the era's corporate and national aspirations of an empire. Christine Yano artfully weaves in the recollections of former "Nisei" stewardesses into her analysis of the airline's marketing practices, which intertwined exotic cosmopolitanism with a uniquely American frontier spirit.

The high visibility of "Nisei" stewardesses in relation to other racial groups was a product of the Cold War culture of containment. Pan Am's hiring of Japanese Americans was not a matter of acknowledging the civil rights of racial minorities. Rather, it tapped into the cultural capital of Japanese Americans as the hard working and assimilable "model minority," an image juxtaposed with African Americans in the early years of the civil rights movement. The historically constructed stereotype of "geisha girls" that these women represented further served to reinforce a Euro-American sexual ideology and nostalgized femininity.

From her interviews with former "Nisei" stewardesses, however, Yano reveals that these women rarely saw themselves as victims of racial exploitation. Many of them came from politically conservative middle-class families; they equated their dreams with the Japanese American community's aspirations of achievement in mainstream (white) society after the traumatic wartime experience of being labeled as enemy aliens. Their jobs took them to new worldly destinations, as they borrowed the "prestige" of the airline and the customers they served. In short, "Nisei" stewardesses transgressed gender, racial, and class boundaries through their personal visions of upward mobility and cosmopolitanism. Most stewardesses saw their jobs as "temporary" dreams, however, while some unexpectedly made them into life long careers.

As an anthropologist, the strength of Yano's work lies mainly in her cultural and historical analysis of the Japanese American community and her research subjects. Yet her research also provides important insights to those interested in the cultural and social aspects of marketing and branding, especially in the context of globalization. Pan Am's racial hiring during the 1950s to the 1970s was an example of America's "soft power" imperialism at work in the fields of culture and leisure—along with the global expansion of McDonald's, Disneyland, and rock and roll. Through corporate magazines and pamphlets, training manuals, and the personal collections of its founder, Juan Tripp, at the National Air and Space Museum, Yano pieces together the corporate image that Pan Am sought to create.

To whom was the airline selling the Jet Age dreams of "frontiers," "mobilities," and "post-colonial cosmopolitanisms" (p. 15)? For one, there was the newly emerging Japan Air Lines, with whom Pan Am directly competed for trans-Pacific flights. There were also other American airlines that opened international routes after the war. Whether Pan Am and other U.S. airlines were in direct competition with Soviet airlines for international flights in Asia is unclear from the information provided in the book, although Yano emphasizes the Cold War mentality that shaped and influenced many of the corporate discourses and decisions. More importantly, however, Yano's cultural analysis highlights that Pan Am's hiring of "Nisei" stewardesses was meant to benefit white middle-class American passengers, who were brought into closer contact with non white exotic destinations and peoples through the democratization of global air travel.

Race was both visible and invisible in Pan Am's marketing strategy to promote the image of ethnic cosmopolitanism. Theirs was not an early indication of segmented marketing along racial lines, a strategy more commonly used since the mid-1970s. "Nisei...