Americans From Japan (1948)

The book opens with a section about tolerance, which is a very symbolic type of opening. The author points out in the Foreword that the Japanese who immigrated to Hawaii and the U.S. mainland did so at the request of the U.S. via the farmers and others that promised them jobs. He also soon is writing about the 100th/442nd combat groups.

He then goes into a history of Japan and the immigration. He discusses something that had not been figured into the immigration, and that is its effect on children born in Hawaii or the U.S. The parents handed down Japanese culture, but, as the students went to U.S. and Hawaiian schools, they began to adapt more American ways of behavior, which set up somewhat of a cultural conflict with their own parents.

There's a lot of attention to Hawaii, and how the monarchy was ended (basically by the greed of U.S. businesses).

To give you an idea of the nature of the book, here's a few chapter titles: The Ways of the People; Rats, Rice and History; Crisis, Customs and Festival, and Religion and the Four Virtues. The book, thus, is using a sociological/anthropological approach in much of its material.

The author also discusses the discrimination; not only the discrimination against the Japanese, but the Japanese discrimination against groups within their own culture, groups like the Eta and the Okinawans.

He discusses intermarriages in Hawaii, and how, by 1943-44, about 20% of the grooms of the Nisei women were non-Japanese. He points out some of the signs of assimilation, such as language, clothing, diet, occupation, the use of leisure time, beliefs, attitudes, convictions and ethics.

He has an entire chapter attacking the various rumors and false charges made against the Japanese Americans, things like sabotage.

A good example of the type of approach the author uses in the book follows:

“Modern man, certainly no more civilized than Athenian man, has located his scapegoat by color marking rather than deformity and made the Japanese (or the Negro or the Jew) the whipping boy for his own frustrations, shortcomings, sins and repressions. It is the sin he feels in himself-laziness or uncleanliness or sexual aberration from the communal mores-that he is punishing by transference to the person of the outcast. Societies which persecute minorities only reveal their own sickness.”

Then the book goes into the internment process. He discusses a number of the bad things that did happen, then moves on to what happened after the people were released from the centers.

This is an extremely well done book, basically a must for anyone interested in a more sociological/anthropological approach that is, at the same time, not dry but very interesting.

Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page