Part III details in particular the shifting relations of West Coast Japanese communities with their Mexican American and Jewish counterparts: their prewar background, the impact of war and incarceration on their attitudes, and their connections in the postwar years. In both cases, the evidence vividly demonstrates that if solidarity among victims of discrimination is possible, it is neither automatic nor easy to maintain. In the interaction between Japanese Americans and Mexican Americans, the social and economic strains that dominated prewar relations between the two groups on the West Coast were exacerbated by the war. Even as the Mexican government displaced its own ethnic Japanese population, the most visible representatives and media of Southern California's Mexican communities supported mass removal—in contradistinction to the position taken by representatives of the very same media chain outside the West Coast. Even the two groups' common efforts against educational segregation in the postwar years were limited by their opposing views on race and culture. Mexican American elites agreed that they had a separate group culture, based on the Spanish language, but hotly denied any racial or biological difference from whites. Japanese Americans, conversely, considered themselves a nonwhite racial group, but rejected any suggestion that they were culturally or religiously distinct. This disagreement limited the field of common action.
Meanwhile, “From Kuichi to Comrades,” which explores Japanese American views of Jews, demonstrates how slow and painful the development of empathy can be. Jews and Buddhists formed the nation's two largest non-Christian religious populations, while the Jewish and Japanese ethnic communities shared numerous cultural similarities, including a common emphasis on education and entrepreneurship. Yet, despite lasting friendships among individuals, Japanese Americans and Jews largely failed to achieve lasting rapport on a group basis in the first half of the twentieth century. Instead, the two were competitors and freres ennemis of a sort: businessmen, scholars, and others from each group seemed to express envy and rivalry as much as amity for those of the other. Indeed, members of prewar West Coast Japanese communities—in an ironic reflection of their success in absorbing mainstream cultural values—gave voice to a nasty streak of anti-Semitism, and one that was quite open in comparison to their recorded opinion of other minority groups. Nisei began to change their views over time, especially as they resettled outside the West Coast, yet the two groups did not form the same community of interest with each other that both, in their different ways, managed to achieve with African American groups.
The last part of the book, in turn, is devoted to exploring various aspects of the historically consequential and complex matter of relations between Japanese Americans and African Americans. Whereas the two groups had little contact overall before the war, the spatial and socioeconomic convergence between the two groups caused by the involuntary migration of Japanese Americans, followed by the voluntary migration of African Americans and resettlement of Issei and Nisei from the camps, laid the foundation for an entente between members of the two groups. Meanwhile, the wartime confinement of Issei and Nisei caused a disproportionate number of African American thinkers and activists to draw parallels between the condition of Japanese Americans and their own treatment, and to speak out in favor of equal rights. Such expressions of solidarity by blacks (who were placed in the unaccustomed position of supporters rather than beneficiaries of support) deeply touched Nisei activists and ushered in a series of collaborations between members of the two groups in different fields. Part IV forms a prequel in a certain sense, in that it deals with the wartime period and the special circumstances that led to intergroup alliances between blacks and Nisei. A first piece, “African American Responses to the Wartime Confinement of Japanese Americans,” presents an overview of African American dissent to Executive Order 9066, outlining in the process some directions for further study. Meanwhile, “The Los Angeles Defender” (a play on the title of Chicago's African American newspaper) uncovers the outstanding, unsung efforts of Hugh E. Macbeth, a maverick Los Angeles attorney who devoted himself to defending Japanese Americans amid wartime hysteria. Macbeth's crusade combined abstract feelings of democratic principle with his personal regard for Nisei friends. Meanwhile, a short essay, “Crusaders in Gotham,” traces the ways in which Japanese Americans began to respond to the sympathy and support offered by their black colleagues. What it also demonstrates is that, in spite of the goodwill between the two groups, the path to collaboration was not easy, and it suggests that a balance of social power between the two played into the success or failure of coalitions.
The two essays in Part V, taking off from the preceding part, deal with the postwar relations between Japanese Americans and African Americans, through the lens of both groups' participation in legal and political struggles for civil rights. For politics, arguably more than ideology, played a central role in the attitude of the Nisei. In Hawaii, Japanese Americans represented a significant fraction of the population and threw themselves into electoral politics following the end of the war. (As a result of Democratic Party electoral coalitions with liberals and labor unionists brokered by war veterans such as Daniel Inouye, Hawaii achieved statehood and Nisei were elected to both houses of Congress by 1962.) Mainland Japanese Americans, conversely, long lacked the voter base and political clout to seek elected office. Instead, organizations such as the JACL were forced to pursue reform goals through lobbying efforts and lawsuits.
Nisei leaders quickly realized that interracial coalition with the NAACP and other ethnic and racial minority organizations was not only morally admirable but politically wise, since as a small and powerless ethnic group Japanese Americans had little chance to realize their objectives alone. Under the influence of national secretary Mike Masaoka and his brother Joe Grant Masaoka, boss of the West Coast office, the JACL not only formed an Anti-Discrimination Committee in 1946 to press civil rights lawsuits on behalf of diverse racial groups but in 1950 became a founding member of the lobbying and information group Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, among whose members it was the only nonblack racial minority association. The coalition strategy was a success: with support from their partners, the Nisei activists not only succeeded in erasing official discrimination against Japanese aliens but simultaneously played a small though vital role in legal challenges to segregation. “From Korematsu to Brown” draws the connection between the postwar Japanese American cases, notably the 1948 Supreme Court decision Oyama v. California, and the epochal 1954 Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education.
Yet the entente between the groups never became solidly established, and soon began to peter out. In part, the intergroup coalition was a victim of its own success—within three years after the closing of the camps, the Supreme Court neutralized anti-Asian alien land laws, struck down anti-Asian fishing laws as unconstitutional, and stripped restrictive covenants of enforcement power. Japanese Americans achieved further legislative victories on their own. In 1948, the JACL secured evacuation claims legislation, providing modest reimbursement for actual losses suffered during the war.7 Four years later, the McCarran-Walter Act opened US. citizenship for the first time to Japanese immigrants. These victories reinforced an already developing tendency among Japanese Americans to use self-help and accommodationist strategies to overcome discrimination, even as McCarthyism played a palpable role in their retreat from political activism.8 Yet the splintering of the fragile black-Nisei entente also reflected the lack of solid understanding between the larger populations of the two groups, and the reality of ethnic bias that remained inside the Japanese community. “An Uneasy Alliance” is a study of the rise and decline of the alliance between Nisei and blacks. In the aftermath of Brown and into the 1960s, even as Nisei achieved greater social acceptance, they revealed increasing ambivalence about interracial alliances. Their hesitation broke out into internal conflict within the JACL and Nisei communities in 1963–64, in the heyday of the mass civil rights movements by African Americans.
I conclude this introduction with a heartfelt, though most inadequate, expression of gratitude to all those who made the book possible. Recently a student of mine, on reading through an acknowledgments section, asked with wonder in his voice whether an author really needed to rely on so many people in order to do a book; my answer is emphatically yes. However, in the present volume the space for such listings is limited. Therefore, since this work is in many respects a continuation of my earlier books By Order of the President and A Tragedy of Democracy, I offer a double helping of thanks to those named
