Asian America. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. xvii, 223 pp. (Tables, maps, B&W photos.) US$30.00, paper. ISBN 9781503614901.
Michael R. Jin’s transnational history of the Japanese American diaspora is a powerful book that pushes us to rethink the traditional narrow understanding of nisei experience. By conceptualizing these second-generation Americans as a diaspora, Jin challenges national historical narratives that circumscribe the experiences of nisei in the United States. Not only does Jin’s analysis of Japanese American diasporic experiences disrupt the dominant narrative of nisei as loyal Americans, but it also complicates this by decentering internment as the defining experience of nisei life. Jin then offers a nuanced consideration of nisei experiences that traverse two colonial empires where their Japanese American identities develop. The identities evolve as nisei Japanese Americans negotiate the politics of empire stretching from North America through East Asia, eventually taking some of them to the battlefields of Europe and Oceania.
Jin uses an “interimperial approach” to expose how US oppression contributed to Japanese American diasporic identity. He shows how often iterative movements between North America, Japan, and the (former) Japanese Empire nurtured this identity. This approach knits together the experience of Asian exclusion in America, Japanese colonization in Asia, and US Empire. This interimperial approach brings together Asian and Asian-American studies and advances recent moves to address “Global Asia.” Using the concept of diaspora to analyze and describe Japanese American migration projects is an exciting innovation that forces us to relinquish the familiar stories of Japanese migration to the United States as a linear process bound in a specific time resulting in patriotic US-born nisei Japanese Americans. Freed from these constraints, Jin invites us to see a more complex story that demonstrates the spatial and temporal aspects of Japanese American identities.
Citizens, Immigrants, and the Stateless offers rich empirical analysis based on the lives of nisei Japanese Americans. Jin uses meticulously researched case studies to ground each chapter and illuminate the marginalized stories and transnational histories of Japanese Americans in the Pacific. He uses a multitude and diversity of sources gathered from across the Pacific to investigate and understand individual experiences. The result is a compelling narrative that exposes the challenges that a racist American society posed to nisei whose stories include and transcend the standard focus on loyalty, heroism, and patriotism despite the trauma of internment. One of the most significant contributions of this work is how it highlights the diversity of nisei experiences and identities rooted in a Japanese American identity. This identity was central to negotiating their diasporic experiences.
There are five empirical chapters. Chapter 2 uses the story of Toshiko Inaba and her younger brother, Akira, who returned to the US after spending their formative years in Japan. Children going to Japan to live with family was not an unusual occurrence, Jin explains, as immigrant parents often found a welcome respite from child-rearing when they were trying to establish their lives in an often-hostile new home. Toshiko Inaba was refused entry into the US, despite possessing documents to prove her citizenship. She eventually spent more than a year in detention at Angel Island before being deported to Japan. She was never allowed to reunite with her family in the US. This gendered experience of nisei Japanese Americans who lost or feared losing their US citizenship while abroad demonstrates how racist and sexist US law undermined Asian American birthright citizenship. Akira Inaba was part of a segment of nisei called kibei—nisei Japanese Americans who returned to the US before WWII after growing up in Japan.
Kibei experiences anchor chapter 3. Kibei were cast as “the enemy within,” a dangerous fifth column that helped justify internment policies. Jin’s analysis shows how kibei also became scapegoats within internment camps even as they vehemently argued for recognition of their equal rights as citizens of a democracy. Chapter 4 highlights the life of David Akira Itami, one of 10,000 kibei who returned to the US before the Pacific War. This chapter further examines the challenge that complex transnational kibei experiences and identities pose to a unified Japanese and US nisei experience. Jin argues that kibei, like Itami, played a pivotal role in shaping politics and social relations within Japanese American communities in the United States. Their language ability and cultural competence made them valuable to the US government even as it stirred suspicions of their loyalty. Chapter 5 focuses on the experience of the 20,000 Japanese Americans stranded in the Japanese Empire during the Pacific War. More specifically, the chapter examines the gendered experience of Japanese American men who served in the Japanese military and those who served in non-combatant roles working for Japanese intelligence. The final empirical chapter, chapter 6, examines the experiences of nisei Japanese American victims of the atomic bomb. The largest number of Japanese emigrants to the US were from Hiroshima Prefecture, and 3,000 nisei Japanese Americans lived within the city of Hiroshima at the start of the Pacific War. The US government did not acknowledge those who were victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as their existence challenged the dominant narrative of the bombing. Their fight for recognition and medical care from the US government did not fit neatly into the more well-known battle for compensation for those the US government confined to internment camps.
These case studies uncover the transnational experiences of nisei Japanese Americans. Their stories complicate our understanding of how US social, legal, and political institutions shaped the lives of nisei Japanese Americans, created a diasporic identity in what Jin calls the borderlands of two empires, and had wide-ranging implications for Japanese American communities. Of course, these are American stories that unsettle mainstream myths of national identity, US immigration, and wartime loyalty and patriotism. Transnational migrants’ breadth of experiences were born of the need to survive in the face of rejection in their homeland. This rich transnational history arrives 77 years after WWII ended, 81 years after the executive order to intern Japanese and Japanese Americans, amid protests for racial justice and a rise in violence against Asian Americans; exactly when we need it.
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Honolulu