Transpacific Exodus: Japanese American Migrants in Japan through the 1950s

Arguing for a reconceptualization of Asian American history that utilizes a transpacific framework, this important and welcome study expands our understanding of Japanese American history by tracing the migration of young U.S.-born Nisei to Japan and its colonial empire during the decades prior to the Second World War. Michael R. Jin argues that this migration, in which as many as one in four Nisei participated, should be regarded not as a return to Japan but as a separate wave of migration originating in the United States. The resulting diaspora, as such, was a U.S. and not a Japanese diaspora. In so arguing, Jin explains, he “writ[es] against the predominant orientation of ‘diaspora’ as fixated on diasporic subjects belonging to a timeless, ethnicized, and often romanticized ancestral home,” in this case, Japan (5). Key among those who comprised this “highly mobile transpacific diaspora” were Nisei born in the United States who were sent to Japan as children to be educated and were known as Kibei (written with characters representing “return” and “America”) on their return to the United States (4). Also among those Jin includes are children who accompanied immigrant parents who decided to return to Japan, sometimes in response to the alien land laws adopted by many western states by the 1920s, as well as older Nisei who chose to emigrate to Japan or other parts of an expanding Japanese empire as young adults in search of opportunities denied them in the country of their birth on grounds of race, only to be confronted by “a world with its own complex racial ideology and hierarchy” (9).

Jin uses a series of case studies to sketch the contours of this diaspora and to outline key elements of the evolving social, cultural, and legal structures that framed their identity as citizens or subjects of one or both nations over time. Where Japan considered the Nisei Japanese subjects based on the principle of jus sanguinis unless they formally renounced their Japanese citizenship, the United States regarded the Nisei as citizens based on the principle of jus soli by virtue of their birth there. Jin argues, however, that the virulent rhetoric of anti-Japanese extremists who sought—but failed—to secure an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to rescind the citizenship of U.S.-born Nisei, taken together with ever more restrictive alien land laws, gave rise to such an intensely racialized environment that it operated as a constraint on the full rights of citizenship well before the outbreak of the Second World War. The ambiguous nature of Nisei citizenship, he suggests, was also reflected in the fact that Japanese Americans could, in certain instances, be stripped of their citizenship. Nisei women who married Japanese men were especially vulnerable based on marriage laws that stripped all U.S. women who married Asian men of their citizenship, rendering them stateless if they were not dual nationals.

Kibei loomed large in the imagination of anti-Japanese exclusionists to the point, Jin argues, that “the wartime mass incarceration of Japanese Americans in the United States” can itself be understood “as a critical extension of a Japanese American diaspora” (59). The presence of Kibei who had been educated in Japan and were fluent in Japanese was a critical element in the rationale advanced by General John L. DeWitt, head of the U.S. Army’s Western Defense Command, for the forced removal and wartime incarceration of all Japanese Americans. Concern about the Kibei shaped not only U.S. government policy but also that of the Japanese American Citizens League, whose Nisei leaders regarded the Kibei with suspicion and actively cooperated with U.S. authorities, providing the names of Kibei leaders and conducting surveys intended to ascertain the political positions of the returnees. It was a strategy that did not work: if anything, their targeting of the Kibei served only to confirm existing biases in the minds of those bent on perceiving all Japanese Americans as a threat. Even after the war, Japanese American leaders continued to promote “the image of patriotic, Americanized Nisei to gain public support for an official government apology and reparations,” thereby ensuring that the transnational element of Japanese American history represented by the Kibei would remain largely overlooked (11).

While Kibei were among those who resisted the forced removal and mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during the war, they were also among those who stepped forward to join the U.S. Army when the opportunity presented itself. A number of Kibei served as interpreters during the war for both the U.S. and the Japanese armies, as did Nisei living in Japan or in other parts of its colonial empire. While Japanese Americans who volunteered or were drafted into the Japanese Army lost their citizenship as a result, the pressing need of U.S. Occupation forces for interpreters after the war facilitated the reassertion of their U.S. identity. In time, some who had been stripped of their citizenship emigrated to the United States and successfully applied to become naturalized citizens. Some Nisei, Jin acknowledges, “became agents of brutal Japanese imperialism” (8). He also, however, reminds us of the postwar struggle for recognition by U.S.-born Nisei living in Hiroshima who were injured by the atomic bomb. Both the United States and Japan had a stake in overlooking their presence. As Jin explains, the popular belief that only Japanese were victims of the atomic bomb directed attention away from “Japan’s colonial past as well as the horrific implications of nuclear violence at the hands of the U.S. military” (141). These are all elements of a complex history that come more clearly into focus only when Asian American history is viewed through a transpacific lens that extends well beyond the borders of the United States.

In offering an alternative way of conceptualizing both diaspora and migration, this book opens the door to new avenues of inquiry and points to new areas of study, including questions that could also be asked about others who participated in an extended transpacific diaspora that was a product not just of two empires. How, for example, might the historical experience of Kika Nisei—Canadian-born Nisei who returned to Canada (still part of the British empire) after being educated in Japan—complicate our understanding of dynamics of race and citizenship throughout the Pacific world through which Japanese American migrants also traveled? Even before the war, Japanese immigrants could apply for naturalization in Canada, as they could not in the United States, but they were denied the ability to vote in British Columbia as were their Canadian-born children—a right not withheld from U.S.-born Nisei. As in the United States, Japanese Canadians were forcibly removed from the coast and incarcerated during the war. In contrast to the United States, however, Canada barred Japanese Canadians from returning to the coast until 1949 and forced even those who were Canadian-born to choose between resettlement in eastern Canada and expatriation to Japan, which itself created a new diaspora. The potential inherent in the inter-imperial approach that Jin utilizes, in short, is evident not only in what it reveals about the Japanese American diaspora that is his focus but in the fact that it could be usefully extended also to take other imperial networks into account within both a transpacific and a broader worldwide context.