Growing Up Nisei
Race, Generation, and Culture among Japanese Americans of California, 1924-49


By David K. Yoo - 2000, 244 pages, paperback.
A volume in the series The Asian American Experience, edited by Roger Daniels

Book Description from Back Cover
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About the Author

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Book Description from Back Cover

The place occupied by Japanese Americans within the annals of U.S. history has consisted mainly of a cameo appearance as victims of incarceration after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In this provocative work, David K. Yoo broadens the scope of Japanese American history beyond its usual confines to examine how the second generations -the Nisei- has shaped its identity and negotiated its place within American society.

Framed by the Immigration Act of 1924, which effectively curtailed migration from Japan to the United States, and the Tokyo Rose treason trial of 1949, Growing Up Nisei traces the emergence of a dynamic Nisei subculture and shows how the foundations laid during the 1920s and 1930s helped many Nisei adjust to the upheaval of the concentration camps. Yoo demonstrates that schools, racial-ethnic churches, and the immigrant press served not merely as waystations to assimilation but as tools by which Nisei affirmed their identity in connection with both Japanese and American culture.

A thoughtful consideration of the gray area between accommodation and resistance, Growing Up Nisei attests to a complexity of experience and context that forgoes one-dimensional cardboard figures and moves toward a portrayal of Japanese Americans as fully human.

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Comments from Back Cover

"A marvelous contribution .... The voices of Nisei men and women emerge with irony, vigor, and poignancy--fully human--within the context of their times."
-- Valerie Matsumoto, author of Farming the Home Place: A Japanese American Community in California, 1919-1982

"Richly captures the complex racial dilemmas faced by the Nisei and the creative solutions they formulated. A major contribution to Asian American history and American studies."
-- Yuji Ichioka, author of Views from Within: The Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study

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Background on David K. Yoo

DAVID K. Yoo, an associate professor of history at Claremont McKenna College, is the editor of New Spiritual Homes: Religions and Asian Americans.

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