City Girls: The Nisei Social World in Los Angeles, 1920–1950 by Valerie J. Matsumoto (review)

In her long-awaited book, Valerie Matsumoto explores the ethnocultural networks of young Japanese American women in California that served as a bulwark against the harsh racial climate characterizing the decades before and after World War II. Drawing on oral history interviews and the English language pages of the ethnic press, Matsumoto brings to life the ways in which the American-born Nisei, or second generation, honed their social skills and leadership potential through a variety of youth organizations at a time when they were mostly excluded from high school clubs and college fraternities and sororities. By 1940, there were nearly four hundred active Nisei organizations, including the likes of the Tartanettes, a Girl Reserve affiliated with Little Tokyo’s Union Church. Set against the backdrop of nativist restrictions and tense US-Japanese diplomatic relations, the book makes visible how these women’s social lives were at once similar and yet distinct from those of other racial groups. What is more, their stories help uncover and reconstruct a once-vibrant ethnic community that was lost to wartime uprooting and incarceration.

Matsumoto is careful to place the Nisei experience in the context of larger conversations about “adolescence as a stage in life” in the early twentieth century (5). Focusing on what historian Vicki Ruiz calls “cultural coalescence,” we see the dynamics of cultural adaptation and maintenance paralleling the social world of Mexican American women. The process of navigating between their newfound American femininity and parental expectations of courtship, marriage, and work was “messy, exuberant, and variable,” as Matsumoto poignantly describes (83). As mainstream advice columns became an accepted means of self-improvement and advancement, Nisei women writers came to lend their own literary voice to a generation coming of age. Mary Oyama, a key member of the Nisei Writers Group, was a popular advice columnist writing under the pseudonym “Deirdre” for the San Francisco Shin Sekai-Asahi. On the opposite side of the Pacific, the “modern girl,” or the Japanese equivalent of the American flapper, captured the hearts and minds of urban Japanese youth, as parents and critics alike tried to make sense of the powerful appeal of Western consumer culture.

While some Nisei women enjoyed being cultural ambassadors, others questioned the community’s ethnic performances and their culturally prescribed gender roles. On one occasion, a hundred Nisei girls dressed in kimonos served as interpreters for the Japanese Naval Training Squadron while Nisei men were noticeably absent. Female club members were the face of Little Tokyo’s Nisei Week festival since its beginning in 1934, but the women’s traditional Japanese garb could also reinforce their exotic and foreign image. As US-Japan tensions increased, Nisei-only clubs came under fire, with little regard to their history of camaraderie and support. Following their forced relocation during World War II, Nisei women turned to their prewar successes to recreate their social life in an otherwise dreary, cheerless environment. Some provided a valuable link to the national war effort, where they exchanged thousands of letters with Nisei soldiers overseas. Nisei girls’ clubs continued to thrive during the postwar resettlement period, as they negotiated the expectations of the War Relocation Authority with their own hopes and trepidations about life beyond barbed wire.

City Girls raises a number of important questions about community mobilization and empowerment that resonate with current affairs and concerns. As Matsumoto notes, some of these Nisei women would later play a pivotal role in the campaign for wartime redress and reparations in the 1970s and 1980s. Combining their organizational skills with political militancy, Nisei women were instrumental in the passage of the Civil Liberties Act in 1988. Yet their history also illustrates how the community could be at odds over strategies to bring about social change. Some unwittingly adopted mainstream stereotypes towards other minorities in their quest for racial inclusion, while others called for integrated membership for fear of appearing too “clannish” (206...