Waubonsee Community College

Japanese American ethnicity, in search of heritage and homeland across generations, Takeyuki Tsuda

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 299-314) and index

illustrations

index present

non fiction

Japanese American ethnicity

bibliography

944956252

Takeyuki Tsuda

in search of heritage and homeland across generations

As members of one of the oldest groups of Asian Americans in the United States, most Japanese Americans are culturally assimilated into mainstream American society. However, they continue to be racialized as culturally "Japanese" foreigners in a multicultural America in which racial minorities are expected to remain ethnically distinct. In Japanese American Ethnicity, Takeyuki Tsuda explores the contemporary ethnic experiences of Japanese Americans from the second to the fourth generations and the extent to which they remain connected to their ancestral cultural heritage. Tsuda argues that the ethnicity of immigrant-descent minorities does not simply follow a linear trajectory in which cultural assimilation increasingly erodes the significant of ethnic heritage and identity over the generations. Instead each new generation of Japanese Americans has negotiated its own ethnic positionality in different ways. Drawing on extensive fieldwork with Japanese American in San Diego and Phoenix, Tsuda also place Japanese Americans is transnational and diasporic context, and analyzes the performance of ethnic heritage through the examples of taiko drumming ensembles. He shows that young Japanese Americans today are reviving their cultural heritage and embracing its salience in their daily lives more than the previous generations have done

Introduction: Ethnic heritage across the generations: racialization, transnationalism, and homeland -- History and the second generation -- The prewar Nisei: Americanization and nationalist belonging -- The postwar Nisei: biculturalism and transnational identities -- Racialization, citizenship, and heritage -- Assimilation and loss of ethnic heritage among third-generation Japanese Americans -- The struggle for racial citizenship among later-generation Japanese Americans -- Ethnic revival among fourth-generation Japanese Americans -- Ethnic heritage, performance, and diasporicity -- Japanese American taiko and the remaking of tradition -- Performative authenticity and fragmented empowerment through taiko -- Diasporicity and Japanese Americans -- Conclusion: Japanese Americans ethnic legacies and the future