were victimized by underemployment and job discrimination. Excluded from capital and bank loans to start businesses, they were forced to take jobs with requirements well below their educational level. As a result, both by choice and by necessity, Japanese communities were forced to band together to ensure necessary services and to work together for common goals.
In sum, the variations in the status of the community had less to do with the region of settlement than with the particular characteristics of the local community and the nature of the resettlers themselves. There was thus no inherent advantage for Issei and Nisei to resettling outside the West Coast, and the truth of this point was demonstrated by the steady reflux of Issei and Nisei to the West Coast, which by mid-1947 was once again home to the majority of the mainland ethnic population. (In marked contrast, Japanese Canadians were forbidden to resettle on the Pacific Coast until 1949, and few cared to return even after the ban was lifted.)
Part I of this volume centers on the questions of resettlement and dispersal. It opens with an essay, “Political Science?” that places the government's scheme to “distribute” Japanese Americans throughout the country in larger context by looking at the policy alongside President Franklin D. Roosevelt's parallel plans for mass postwar transportation and resettlement of Jews and other European ethnic minorities throughout the Western Hemisphere. The existence of such plans, and the president's establishment of the M Project, a secret team of social scientists, to facilitate it, underlines the eugenicist thinking that underlay the official actions in both cases.
A related chapter, this time covering the semiofficial realm, discusses the views of the sociologist Forrest LaViolette and his contribution to debates over resettlement and absorption. LaViolette, a rare non-Japanese scholar of Nikkei in both the United States and Canada who served as a “social analyst” at the Heart Mountain camp, is a paradox. On one hand, he bravely supported equal rights for Nisei and quietly organized assistance for resettlers. At the same time, he remained so heavily fixated on the urgent need to dismantle separate minority communities in order to foster equality that he hailed forcible dispersion of ethnic Japanese in both countries as a positive step for civil rights, and mass confinement as a providential means to that end. The following essay, “Japantown Born and Reborn,” offers a comparative study of the experience of Japanese Americans in New York and Detroit, two cities outside the West Coast where vital Japanese resettler colonies formed, with the conditions faced by those who returned to Los Angeles, the main prewar Japanese population center. It thereby tests the official theory that Issei and Nisei, once dispersed outside the West Coast, would naturally face better conditions.
Connected with the spatial question of resettlement was the issue of assimilation and its meaning. This was not only a central social and cultural question for the Nisei but a deeply poitical and indeed existential matter as well. Before the war, as John Modell and others have demonstrated, Japanese communities practiced a political and economic strategy of racial accommodation.6 Rather than directly challenging race-based exclusion, Japanese immigrant communities developed a segregated niche economy, centered on the agricultural and fishing sectors, in which ethnicowned businesses employed the large majority of community members. At the same time, Japanese communities maintained their closest ties with Japan, through networks of consulates, business groups, and media, while large numbers of Nisei were sent to Japanese school to learn the ancestral language and culture. A significant fraction of Nisei—as many as 25 percent of the total by some estimates—were sent back to Japan for schooling. (Because of cultural differences and their lesser fluency in English, many of the Japanese-educated Nisei, the so-called Kibei, remained at a certain distance from the American-educated majority.)
If the Nisei were made conscious of their Japanese identity, they likewise attended public schools and absorbed mainstream values and popular culture, like other young Americans. What is more, the group was splintered into various cliques and factions. The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), the largest and most visible single group of second-generations, was composed largely of young professionals who were heavily Republican in political sympathies and assimilationist in temper. The JACL restricted its membership to U.S. citizens and stressed the Americanism of the group. Liberal and intellectual Nisei were visible in Young Democrat clubs and the vernacular press. They too trumpeted their Americanism, but favored more radical political reform and nonconformity in cultural terms, embracing jazz music and modern art and literature.
The exigencies of war and mass confinement washed away prewar alignments. First, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese consulates and schools shut their doors, and they remained closed long after the end of the conflict. Nisei found themselves in a kind of limbo, and in the altered and unfamiliar circumstances of wartime and postwar life, activists and intellectuals were impelled to rethink their group identity. Because attachment to Japan had become heavily stigmatized—all things Japanese were “rat poison,” in Miné Okubo's piquant phrase—the Nisei had to define themselves, and justify their collective existence, in exclusively American terms. Nisei were warned by government officials, and by each other, that they needed to manage carefully their self-presentation to avoid seeming different or threatening. Many Nisei Americanized their names and took to heart the official instructions they received to avoid other Japanese Americans and to “assimilate” to mainstream (middle-class Anglo-American) values.
Yet the old accommodationist strategy of seeking equality solely through good citizenship had evolved. Many Nisei, as they left camp and resettled outside, were inspired both by outrage over the wartime violation of their citizenship rights and by their new acquaintance with other racialized groups to perceive themselves as a minority among other minorities. Even the reconstituted JACL, though it retained its platform of Americanization, engaged in multiethnic coalition building. In an ironic turn, the wartime events not only opened mainstream media outlets to progressive Nisei, bringing them to the fore as community spokespeople, but also placed activists such as Larry Tajiri, Mary Oyama Mittwer, and Joe Grant Masaoka into positions of community influence. They advocated “assimilation” through political action in the public sphere and pressed Nisei to speak out against white supremacy, both for themselves and for other groups, as the sign of their adaptation.
A pair of pieces in Part II define some of the contours of the debate over assimilation and identity. “Birth of a Citizen” describes the evolution of Miné Okubo's 1946 graphic memoir Citizen 13660, the first and arguably most incisive study of the camp experience. The text reveals how the particul ar context of the resettlement era shaped Okubo's narrative. In the interest of ensuring continued government support for Japanese American resettlement and their social acceptance, not only did the author shy away from direct criticism of federal government policy in her text (as against her drawings) and associated publicity material, but she and her supporters collaborated with official pro-Nisei propaganda efforts.
The second piece, “The ‘New Nisei' and Identity Politics,” describes the efforts of various Nisei intellectuals to set a community agenda by calling on Nisei to “assimilate.” They not only failed to reach consensus on the meaning of such “assimilation” but offered widely varying understandings of their group identity and life. For Nisei writers Larry Tajiri and Ina Sugihara, assimilation meant participating as citizens in the public sphere in support of equal rights for all, and joining forces with other racial and ethnic minority groups—especially black Americans, who could provide an example of minority group cohesion and democratic struggle. Conversely, for the Canadian-born semanticist S. I. Hayakawa, himself a columnist for an African American newspaper and a devotee of jazz and black culture, assimilation meant above all acting like other Americans, eschewing all ethnic particularism, and consciously downplaying racial difference by organizing political action on an integrated basis. Thus, despite his genuine interest in promoting African Americans and his support for Japanese American relief and resettlement efforts, Hayakawa denounced the existence of separate Nisei social groups as a needless crutch.
Yet even when Nisei wished to expand beyond their own group, finding common ground with most other minorities proved an uncertain task. Despite their common history of prejudice, their coming together was by no means
