UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Beyond Two Homelands: Migration and Transnationalism of Japanese Americans in the Pacific, 1930-1955 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2m6426kq Author Jin, Michael Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ BEYOND TWO HOMELANDS: MIGRATION AND TRANSNATIONALISM OF JAPANESE AMERICANS IN THE PACIFIC, 1930-1955 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in HISTORY by Michael Jin March 2013 The Dissertation of Michael Jin is approved: ________________________________ Professor Alice Yang, Chair ________________________________ Professor Dana Frank ________________________________ Professor Alan Christy ______________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Michael Jin 2013 Table of Contents Abstract iv Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 Chapter 1: 19 The Japanese American Transnational Generation in the Japanese Empire before the Pacific War Chapter 2: 71 Beyond Two Homelands: Kibei and the Meaning of Dualism before World War II Chapter 3: 111 From “The Japanese Problem” to “The Kibei Problem”: Rethinking the Japanese American Internment during World War II Chapter 4: 165 Hotel Tule Lake: The Segregation Center and Kibei Transnationalism Chapter 5: 211 The War and Its Aftermath: Japanese Americans in the Pacific Theater and the Question of Loyalty Epilogue 260 Bibliography 270 iii Abstract Beyond Two Homelands: Migration and Transnationalism of Japanese Americans in the Pacific, 1930-1955 Michael Jin This dissertation examines 50,000 American migrants of Japanese ancestry (Nisei) who traversed across national and colonial borders in the Pacific before, during, and after World War II. Among these Japanese American transnational migrants, 10,000-20,000 returned to the United States before the outbreak of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and became known as Kibei (“return to America”). Tracing the transnational movements of these second-generation U.S.-born Japanese Americans complicates the existing U.S.-centered paradigm of immigration and ethnic history. The history of these transnational migrants revises the existing model of immigration history by complicating the linear and predictable notion of the so-called sending and receiving societies. The transnational experiences of Japanese Americans in both Japan and the United States offer diverse notions of citizenship, nationalism, race, colonialism, and loyalty by placing the history of an ethnic community beyond dichotomous cultural and political distinctions between two nation- states. The five chapters in this dissertation explore the period from 1930 to 1955 in Japanese American history as a history of transnational movements. The experiences of Japanese American migrants in Japan, Japan’s colonial iv posts, and the United States before WWII illuminate the complex interplay between the rise of Japanese militarism, diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Japan, and the heightened anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States. During the Pacific War, their education in Japan and their bilingual and transnational identities made the Kibei in the U.S. convenient scapegoats as a pro-Japan element. Declassified federal and military records reveal that the presence of Kibei had a profound impact on the U.S. government’s policy on the mass incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans during WWII. Meanwhile, many Japanese Americans who were stranded in Japan during the war had to endure firebombing and starvation; and many Nisei men in Japan were conscripted into the Japanese military to fight the Allied forces in the Pacific Theatre. For many Nisei strandees in Japan, the war blurred the cultural, political, and even legal boundaries of their citizenship, as they found themselves in situations in which they had little room to negotiate their national allegiance. This dissertation offers an example of how Japanese American transnational experiences before, during, and after WWII demonstrate a critical intersection of the histories of migration, transnational families and communities, and diplomatic policies on both sides of the Pacific. v Acknowledgements Many wonderful mentors, colleagues, friends, and supporters made this dissertation a truly rewarding and enjoyable project. I am truly blessed to be a student of Alice Yang, my advisor, who has been the greatest source of inspiration and strength in my intellectual life. I am also grateful to the other two members of my dissertation committee. Alan Christy’s incredible intellectual guidance and support has sustained me through all stages of this project. Dana Frank has always been a source of assurance and strength to me, and her constructive criticism has been indispensable for my work. I have benefited tremendously the wonderful intellectual community at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I owe a debt of gratitude to all of my mentors at UCSC who have helped me develop as a scholar and teacher: Herman Gray, Marilyn Westerkamp, Terry Burke, Gail Hershatter, George Lipsitz, Dana Takagi, Bruce Levin, Pedro Castillo, Minghui Hu, Kate Jones, Matthew Lasar, Bruce Thompson, Brian Catlos, Eric Porter, and Karen Tei Yamashita. I am indebted to our wonderful staff in the History Department—Stephanie Hinkle, Meg Lilienthal, Christine Khoo, Stephanie Sawyer, Rachel Monas, and Kayla Ayers—for their patience and kindness. Also, many thanks to my glorious colleagues in the history graduate program for their friendship and support: David Palter, Sara Smith, Yajun Mo, Chrislaine Pamphile-Miller, Jeff Sanceri, Ana Maria Candela, Colin Tyner, Urmi Engineer, and Noel Smyth. vi This project would not have been possible without the financial support from the UCSC History Department, the Institute for Humanities Research, the University of California Pacific Rim Research Program, and the Japan Foundation. I am grateful to the archivists and staff at McHenry Library at UCSC, Charles Young Research Library at UCLA, Claremont University Library, Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, the Japanese American National Museum, the Diplomatic Record Office in Tokyo, the Peace Museum in Hiroshima, and the Prefectural Archives of Hiroshima and Yamaguchi. I want to give my heartfelt thanks to Yoneyama Hiroshi and the International Institute of Language and Culture Studies at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto for giving me the institutional support crucial for my research in Japan. I also want to thank Sakaguchi Mitsuhiro, Minimikawa Fuminori, Monobe Hiromi, Kadoike Hiroshi, and other wonderful scholars in Japan that generously gave me their time and advice. I want to extend special thanks to Eiichiro Azuma and Arthur Hansen for their guidance and intellectual generosity. Lastly, I want to give my most heartfelt thanks to my wife, Sharareh Motallebi, for her love and patience. Also, many thanks to my parents for their tremendous encouragement and support. This dissertation is lovingly dedicated to my family. Michael Jin Santa Cruz, California March 17, 2013 vii Introduction: Migration and Transnationalism of Japanese Americans in the Pacific Nobuyo Yamane’s childhood in Tacoma, Washington in the 1920s and early 1930s looked like that of a typical second-generation Japanese American (Nisei) girl from an average Japanese immigrant family. She grew up with six siblings, attended Japanese language classes after school, and picked strawberries with her friends to earn money during summer breaks. Her grandfather had immigrated to Hawaii in 1886 from Ōshima, a small island off the coast of Yamaguchi Prefecture in southwestern Japan.1 During the “first wave” of Japanese emigration to Hawaii from 1885 to 1894, Ōshima had produced over one-third of all Japanese contract migrants in Hawaiian sugar plantations.2 Yamane’s parents, Yoshi and Moriichi, then joined a growing contingent of Japanese migrants to the mainland United States, settling in Tacoma at the turn of the twentieth century.3 Yamane grew up in the Japanese American community during a time of significant social transformations. The anti-Asian and anti-immigrant sentiments on the U.S. West Coast since the mid-nineteenth century had culminated in a series of legal and judicial measures that excluded Japanese immigrants from the American citizenry during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The enactment of the California Alien Land Law in 1913 1 Nobuyo Yamane, “A Nisei Woman in Rural Japan,” Amerasia Journal 23:3 (1997), 183-184. 2 Hori Masaaki, Hawai ni Watatta Kaizokutachi: Suo Ōshima no Iminshi (Fukuoka: Gen Shobō, 2007). 3 Yamane, “A Nisei Woman in Rural Japan,” 183. 1 and a series of added restrictions to the law in the following decade prohibited Japanese immigrants from owning or leasing agricultural land. Between 1917 and 1925, other “Western” states, such as Arizona, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, Louisiana, and Kansas, also enacted Alien Land Laws. In 1921, the year in which Yamane was born in Tacoma, the State of Washington passed its own Alien Land Law. In the following year, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Takao Ozawa v. United States officially stamped Japanese immigrants’ status as “aliens ineligible to citizenship” by reaffirming the 1780 U.S. Naturalization Act’s stipulation that the right to naturalization was reserved for “free independent whites.” Three years later,