Eiichiro Azuma | The Politics of Transnational History Making: Japanese Immigrants on t... Page 1 of 28 http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/89.4/azuma.html From The Journal of American History Vol. 89, Issue 4. Viewed December 3, 2003 15:52 EST Presented online in association with the History Cooperative. http://www.historycooperative.org The Politics of Transnational History Making: Japanese Immigrants on the Western 'Frontier,' 1927-1941 Eiichiro Azuma In 1927 Toga Yoichi, a Japanese immigrant in Oakland, California, published a chronological 1 history of what he characterized as 'Japanese development in America.' He explicated the meaning of that history thus: A great nation/race [minzoku] has a [proper] historical background; a nation/race disrespectful of history is doomed to self-destruction. It has been already 70 years since we, the Japanese, marked the first step on American soil. Now Issei [Japanese immigrants] are advancing in years, and the Nisei [the American- born Japanese] era is coming. I believe that it is worthy of having [the second generation] inherit the record of our [immigrant] struggle against oppression and hardships, despite which we have raised our children well and reached the point at which we are now. But, alas, we have very few treatises of our history [to leave behind]. Thirteen years later, a thirteen hundred-page masterpiece entitled Zaibei Nihonjinshi--Toga himself spearheaded the editing--completed that project of history writing.1 Not the work of trained academicians, this synthesis represented the collaboration of many Japanese immigrants, including the self-proclaimed historians who authored it, community leaders who provided subventions, and ordinary Issei residents who offered necessary information or purchased the product. In this instance, moreover, history writing was synonymous with history making, for the former entailed not only the privileging of specific self-images over others but even the fabrication of historical 'facts.' Over the years, Toga and like-minded immigrant historians, writing in Japanese, together produced a systematic discourse that asserted their compatibility with, and placement within, Anglo-American society while it affirmed the ties they maintained to their homeland state. This study unveils how that collaborative history making forged a collective memory and an undifferentiated identity among groups of Japanese immigrants. Issei history writing signified a larger change in the immigrant perspective on life in the United 2 States that commenced in the mid-1920s. At that juncture, the success of the Japanese exclusion movement created a situation wherein many Issei groped for something to take pride in and to hope for. Entering the American West in the aftermath of the Chinese exclusion of the early 1880s, Japanese immigrants, too, were soon engulfed by the politics of racial exclusion led by organized labor, the press, and nativist groups.2 Having struggled with institutionalized discrimination since the turn of the century, the society of 188,500 Japanese found themselves under rigid white control a quarter century later. In addition to de facto segregation in their daily lives, the enactment in 1913 and 1920 of California's alien land laws (and of similar laws in other western states) deprived them of tenancy and landownership.3 The denial of naturalization rights provided Issei with no access to http://www.historycooperative.org/cgi-bin/printpage.cgi 12/3/2003 Eiichiro Azuma | The Politics of Transnational History Making: Japanese Immigrants on t... Page 2 of 28 the formal political process, rendering them powerless against racist politics at the state and federal level. The Japanese did fight back in the court system with a lingering faith in American justice, but decisive triumphs for racism came in cases testing the alien land laws in 1922-1923 and in a historic 1922 United States Supreme Court decision that upheld the legal definition of the Japanese as 'aliens ineligible for citizenship' on the ground of their 'Mongolian' origin. Less than two years later, the U.S. Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924 that terminated Japanese immigration until 1952.4 As Issei writers often opined in the vernacular press, the mid-1920s marked the end of 'an era,' an end that fostered a sense of oneness and collective destiny among many residents.5 In this context, Issei historians' concerted effort to write a common history can be seen as a 3 desperate attempt to overcome the group's crisis of racial subordination with a shared memory of their 'glorious' past. The notion of a racism-induced break in history prompted many immigrant writers to forge a narrative of their past accomplishments--or 'development' (hatten), as Toga and other historians put it--in light of the new journey that their community appeared to be undertaking. Starting in 1927, the Japanese community saw the publication of many histories, which all had remarkably similar theses, narrative schema, and thematic organization.6 Cast in a transnational framework, the concepts of pioneer and development constituted the core of this intellectual endeavor, which resulted in the racialized reinvention of a collective self--as concomitantly American frontiersmen and Japanese colonists/colonialists--acceptable to both their adopted country and their homeland. Taken together, the history texts revealed a dimension of Japanese immigrant epistemology after exclusion. We can learn much about the lives of this racial minority during the interwar period of the American West from the analysis of their transnational history making. Printed at the height of exclusionist agitation, this 1921 cartoon exemplifies an emerging sense of the collective self among Japanese immigrants, the celebration of hardship and perseverance http://www.historycooperative.org/cgi-bin/printpage.cgi 12/3/2003 Eiichiro Azuma | The Politics of Transnational History Making: Japanese Immigrants on t... Page 3 of 28 that formed the 'Issei pioneer thesis.' Here a struggling Issei (Japanese-born) man personifies the 'Japanese in America.' Despite his heavy bundle, labeled 'exclusion,' he envisions a better future. In English and to the right in Japanese, the weeping sun promises him: 'Be patient and do your best, some day you will win.' Reprinted from Shin Sekai (New world, San Francisco), Jan. 21, 1921. Recent studies have presented the revisionist interpretation that the decades of the 1920s and the 4 1930s provide a crucial background for the complexities of Japanese American experiences during and after the Pacific War. Situated between the Japanese exclusion movement and the wartime internment, the interwar years had previously drawn little scholarly attention. The orthodox scheme treated the decades as a mere transitional moment in the evolution of two generations of Japanese Americans from 'foreign' immigrants to full-fledged Americans. Revisionist historians have recently complicated that master narrative and refuted a simple progressive process, shedding light on the unique 'binational' or 'dual' nature of Japanese American experiences prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor.7 These studies have taught us the fallacy of seeing Japanese American lives from the standpoint of polarized national/cultural identities and allegiances--the Japan-versus-America binary that has obfuscated the complexities and nuances of this 'borderland' minority in a transnational politico-cultural space. In fact, as articulated recently by pundits of the new western history, the American West, as a borderland, has always been a meeting place of various ideas, interests, and powers; Japanese in this site of cross-cultural mixing must likewise be seen as players in an entanglement and contestation across multiple national spheres.8 From this vantage point, historical revisionism has already unveiled some aspects of the complex 5 intellectual world in post-1924 Japanese America. As important as it was, history making constituted but one of the three major currents in the intellectual development of the time. Other major immigrant intellectual endeavors included an equally teleological discourse on the so-called Nisei problem, which delved into the dilemmas that the American-born generation would probably encounter due to their national and cultural dualities. Ranging from Nisei marriage to employment, and from education to dual citizenship, the examinations of emergent challenges invited the active participation of many Issei leaders, educators, and parents in resolving them under the existing racial conditions. An idea of Japanese in the United States--especially the Nisei--as a trans-Pacific bridge of understanding was the third product of the strained race relations. A form of discursive self-empowerment, this grandiose transnational imagination reckoned the Nisei as an agent of change not only in U.S.-Japan relations but also in global civilization. The bridge concept glamorized this racial minority as a cultural interpreter and political mediator between the two emerging powers of the post-World War I period--the so-called Pacific era in which the center of the world had been purportedly moving from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. Focusing on Issei history making, this study addresses the similar politics of transnational representation, relating it to eclectic identity formation between 1927 and 1940 and critical adjustments thereafter. The analysis of such changes and continuities delves into the effects of co-optation and manipulation