Distant Islands: The Japanese American Community in New York City, 1876–1930s by Daniel H. Inouye (review)

Daniel H. Inouye's Distant Islands represents a significant work that addresses a sorely neglected subject matter in the field of Asian American history: the East Coast experience of Japanese immigrants. Unlike their Chinese American counterparts, whose lives and communities in New York have been the topic of a number of systematic studies, the Japanese immigrant experience in North America has hitherto been told primarily as a West Coast story. This was due in part to the small and dispersed nature of the Japanese population on the East Coast. In contrast to the rural agricultural communities which in many ways came to define the experience of Pacific Coast Japanese Americans, the Japanese residents of early-twentieth-century New York City generally hailed from urban centers such as Tokyo and settled into what Inouye calls "micro communities"—small groups of a similar socioeconomic status that coexisted within larger neighborhoods in the social fabric of New York. Drawing on his training as an urban and public historian, Inouye sheds light on the origins and development of this little known yet fascinating group.

Part of a projected three-book series about the ethnic Japanese population in New York City—with an overall time span covering roughly one hundred years from the second half of the nineteenth century up until the 1950s—Distant Islands, the first entry, focuses on the early formation of this group and the development of its internal social hierarchies through the 1930s. Inouye structures his book around the idea that the New York Japanese American "community"—if it could be called that—was resistant to cohering around a sense of shared ethnic and cultural heritage, and instead divided itself along lines of status and class. The chapter organization reflects this core framework, with the first five chapters describing the four-tiered class and status hierarchy, along with a separate, non-tiered student sphere, that he argues characterized the Japanese American world in New York City. He adds a further layer of complexity to this scheme by using chapters six and seven, which form the second part of the book, to demonstrate how Buddhist and Protestant religious organizations gave the appearance of a cohesive Japanese American community during the interwar years, despite its stratified social structure.

Inouye populates his narrative with colorful characters who speak to the richness of the nikkei (i.e., Japanese diaspora) experience in turn-of-the-century New York. Focusing initially on the social elite, he traces, for example, the rise of the silk and cotton merchant Rioichiro Arai, whose success in bringing Japanese silk to the American market saw him become the first person of Asian descent to be elected to the board of the American Silk Association, in a fitting reflection of Japan's rising status in the world following its successive victories in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05). Also featured here is the story of mid-size merchants such as Senzō Kuwayama—a Japanese grocer who helped to popularize among American consumers ajinomoto (also known as mono-sodium glutamate, or MSG for short), a food-flavoring agent responsible for the savory umami taste that has become so fashionable in recent years—and the Katagiri Brothers—owners of a Japanese grocery store that has continued to sell Japanese foods and wares from the same Midtown Manhattan location since its opening in 1907.

Unlike all of the other North American cities that had populations of one thousand or more ethnic Japanese residents by the 1920s and 1930s, New York never developed a single, readily identifiable Japanese American enclave along the lines of Little Tokyo in Los Angeles. Inouye persuasively shows why this was the case, giving a multifactor explanation that takes into account not only the social stratification of the nikkei community but also the spatial separation between different...