Asian American History and Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2023. US$33.00, paper. ISBN 9781439923528.
Just before he passed away in 2020, I received an e-mail from the renowned Asian-American UCLA scholar Lane Hirabayashi, asking me here at Illinois State if I knew of anyone overstaying their Japanese visas in the Midwest. At that time my first reaction was, “Are there really any such Japanese?” I didn’t know any personally. Later, however, one of my graduate students who was studying the DACA amnesty program told me that there were indeed numerous young Asians—including some Japanese—who are on the list of DACA applicants in Chicago.
Until recently, studies of Japanese Americans have been largely focused on issues of pre-World War II assimilation, or the internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II. Regarding issues of gender, most popular and scholarly work has been on the trials and tribulations of Japanese war brides living in the US after the war (e.g., Ward Miki Crawford, Katie Kaori Hayashi, and Shizuko Suenaga, Japanese War Brides in America: An Oral History, Greenwood Publishers, 2010). Research on Japanese female migration to the US between 1980 and 2020 is relatively rare, though there have been some important studies about Japanese women who migrated to other places like Singapore (e.g., Leng Leng Thang, Miho Goda, and Elizabeth MacLachlan, “Negotiating Work and Self: Experiences of Japanese Working Women in Singapore,” in Japanese Diasporas, Unsung Pasts, Conflicting Presents and Uncertain Futures, ed. Nobuko Adachi, Routledge, 2006) or other English-speaking nations (e.g., Sawa Kurotani, Home Away From Home: Japanese Corporate Wives Overseas in the United States, Duke University, 2005). These publications have addressed the attempts of Japanese women to achieve gender equality in the work force, which they feel is hard to do back in Japan. There have also been a number of studies of chuzai (Japanese “expat”) singles and families (e.g., Etsuko Kato, Mobile Japanese Migrants to the Pacific West and East: Self-Searching, Work, and Identification, Routledge, 2023), and the position of Japanese wives in such situations, when they accompany their husbands on extended overseas assignments. However, almost no work has been done on Japanese women who are overstaying their visas in the US, and how they relate to the greater Japanese-American community. That is, until this insightful and unique new book by Tritia Toyota.
Intimate Strangers reveals not only the presence of the substantial illegal migration of Japanese females to the United States after World War II, but also discusses their motivations for migrating from Japan. Toyota describes the life stories of these women, their social activities while in the US, and their relationships with current-day Japanese Americans (that is, those who are children of pre-World War II Japanese migrants). Toyota has spent almost ten years collecting data from about 45 of these Japanese women (6). She has no doubt invested much of herself in these thick descriptions, and this has paid off well, as her informants frankly and honestly divulge their—largely untold until now—life stories of transnational migration from Japan. And these stories are always fascinating, and often heart-wrenching.
The success of this unprecedented study could be due to Toyota’s inimitable career background—fascinating, itself. She was a television news anchor in California for some 30 years before she became an anthropologist. Her journalistic enthusiasm and experience helped her find people who were living on the edge, just below public scrutiny, and let them tell their own stories. Furthermore, her background contributed to the distinctive structure of this book. Though there is ample academic analysis, Toyota frequently allows her interviewees space to offer subversive remarks and responses to academic arguments. To Toyota, these women’s lived experiences take precedence over any sociological just-so stories. Such direct voices give the reader the feeling that they are an active interlocutor in the conversation. Toyota asks the right questions at the right time—the same ones we might ask had we been present. Thus, the experience of reading this book is very visceral.
Toyota calls these post-World War II Japanese female migrants Shin Issei (the “New First Generation” of Japanese immigrants since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965). She argues that a majority of these Shin Issei sought to find gender equality in the United States. It is hard to know exactly how many Shin Issei are living in the United States today. However, what is more important than sheer numbers is life choice: although 80 percent of her Shin Issei interviewees married local men and have children, about 20 percent of them have kept their undocumented status in the United States, some for over 40 years (74)—this, in a country that has never once produced a woman president, and whose various governing legislative bodies have rates of female representation not much better than Japan’s. Unfortunately, the media often creates an image of US gender equality in the minds of transnational migrants that acts as a strong motivation for them to come, regardless of the social, political, and economic realities.
Toyota also looks at an intriguing case study that might be a microcosm—literally and figuratively— of the interactions between the “new” and “old” Japanese immigrants: a dispute over the sale of the Keiro Senior HealthCare Center in Southern California. Originally established in 1961 by second-generation Japanese-American men to care for their aging parents, the importance of Keiro decreased for the more assimilated Japanese American community; yet at the same time, its importance increased in the gradually aging Shin Issei community (some of whom became more reliant on the Japanese language due to mental decline). In the end, the Japanese Americans and the Shin Issei could not come together enough, culturally or politically, to prevent Keiro’s closure.
The book is filled with a wealth of new, detailed information about gender issues in Japan, and how Japanese women who choose to live in the United States fare. This is a must-read book for anybody interested in Asian Americans and transnational migrants and diaspora communities.
Nobuko Adachi
Illinois State University, Normal