The Protestant and the Catholic: Dimensions to Asian American History

We all know about them, the hard working, high achieving Asian American students who have gained a reputation in American education reminiscent of the Jews of an earlier generation. The American media has dubbed them “whiz kids”; their peers know them as “curve wreckers” or “grinds”; but no representation of them has been more celebrated or debated than the accolade “model minority.” Many scholars have questioned the ideological assumptions and statistical data that inform the notion that Asian Americans are ideal citizens for blacks and other racial minorities to emulate. Indeed, if specialists in Asian American Studies agree on anything, it is that this argument both exaggerates and romanticizes Asian American achievement. Yet what we learn in two recent books by historians Brian Masaru Hayashi and Gary Y. Okihiro might surprise even the most ardent critic of the model minority myth.

Brian Hayashi, assistant professor of history and American studies at Yale University, introduces us to Asian Americans whose civic virtues were anything but exemplary. In the first chapter of “For the Sake of Our Japanese Brethren” we meet two Japanese Protestants who disavowed ties to the United States to serve in the Japanese military during World War II. We also learn about the violent rebellions that erupted in the concentration camps that housed Japanese Americans. These stories, and the broader narrative of which they are a part, round out the complexities and contradictions of Japanese American identity before and during World War II. In doing so, they question the prevailing image of Japanese Americans as model American patriots, willing to die for their country and accept the injustice of internment. Further, they challenge generations of research pronouncing that Christians, better than any other group in Japanese America, conformed to Anglo-American values and culture.

“[I]f Christianity was such a powerful conveyor of American values to Japanese American converts,” Hayashi asks, “then why did some Christians support Japan during the war years?” (p. 20). His goal is to explain the ethnic retention and Japanese nationalism of persons, who by all accounts, were thought to have been unequivocally American. The analysis of Protestants tests the hypothesis of assimilation that, in the end, the author finds lacking. His thesis contends that the Protestants “were clearly not at the forefront of Japanese American cultural assimilation in the prewar period” and that they “were often highly nationalistic in their sentiments toward Japan and far less positive about American culture than had been assumed” (p. 6). Hayashi focuses on the period between the world wars (1918–1942) to understand the nationalist sentiments of a significant number of Japanese immigrants. His findings are drawn largely from two types of sources: (1) archival collections pertaining to Japanese immigrants and American Protestants, and (2) the private records of three Protestant Churches in the Los Angeles Japanese American community.

Hayashi’s book has a minimalist appeal: clear storyline, concise argument, and economical prose. The thesis is presented as a puzzle in six parts, each of which highlights a different reason why Japanese American Protestants in Los Angeles retained ethnicity. In so doing, Hayashi analyzes the Japanese Protestants’ class background, material interests, ideological and theological beliefs, gender, generation, and social context. He reveals that they blamed their white brethren for the 1924 exclusion of Japanese immigration, and thus began to refuse their financial support. So it was that the Japanese Protestants embraced more firmly the ethnic community that in the 1930s, encouraged by the expansion of the Japanese empire, became increasingly anti-assimilationist. The Protestants even adapted Christian theology to suit the precepts of Japanese nationalism. Christ’s rejection of worldly possessions, for example, became transformed into an appreciation of the selfless...