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“The Pacific Era Has Arrived”: Transnational Education among Japanese Americans, 1932–1941

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Eiichiro Azuma
Eiichiro Azuma*
Affiliation:
Department of history, University of Pennsylvania
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Extract

Looking back on the two years at Keisen Girls' School, I am so grateful for the opportunity to have been able to study here…. Our teachers have taught us that it was mistaken if we simply aspired to mimic the ways of Japanese woman. Cognizant of our special position as Americans of Japanese ancestry, we must instead strive to promote the U.S.-Japan friendship. Furthermore, we must adapt the merits of the Japanese spirit [that we have acquired here] to our Americanism. Back in the United States, we will dedicate ourselves to the good of our own society as best possible citizens, cooperating with Americans of other races and learning from each other…. Such is the mission of the Nisei as a bridge between Japan and the United States—one that we have come to appreciate [through our schooling in Japan].

Just about two years before Pearl Harbor, a young Japanese American woman took this pledge to herself when she completed a special study program in Tokyo, Japan. Although the shadow of war loomed increasingly over the Pacific, thousands of American-born Japanese (Nisei) youth like her flocked to their parents' native land during the 1930s to pursue cultural and language learning, as well as formal secondary and higher education. In any given year following 1932, an estimated 1,500 young Nisei students from North America resided in Tokyo and other urban areas of Japan. Often referred to as Kibei after returning to their native land, these young women and men attempted to embrace their ethnic heritage and identity during their sojourn in Japan with the support of Japanese educators.

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Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 43 , Issue 1: A Special Issue on Asian-American Educational History Guest Editor: Eileen H. Tamura , Spring 2003 , pp. 39 - 73
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Copyright © 2003 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 Kimura, Tsuyuko “Ninenkan o kaerimite“ [Looking back on the two years], Keisen 74 (July 1939), 4, the Keisen Women's College Archives, Tokyo, Japan [hereafter KWCA].Google Scholar

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3 For example, the summer language program at Yonsei University in Seoul attracts hundreds of Korean Americans every year, while the Korean government offers college preparatory classes and three-month cultural immersion courses under the so-called “homeland invitation education program.” Likewise, the Republic of China has sponsored a summer study tour program (known as the “Love Boat”) and intensive language program, and its Chung Hwa Correspondence School has catered to more serious students for long-term education since the mid-1960s. See the National Institute for International Education Development (NIIED: South Korean government) at niied.interedu.go.kr/job/job_03_e.asp; and the Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission (Taiwan) at www.gio.gov.tw/info/yb97/html/ch0903t.htm; and the Overseas Chinese Youth Language and Study Tour to the Republic of China (Taiwan) at www.abcflash.com/studytour. To date, there is only one scholarly work on this topic. Based primarily on oral interviews with past participants, Ellen Wu's thesis offers an in-depth analysis of the Overseas Chinese Youth Language Training and Study Tour. See Ellen Dionne Wu, “Chinese American Transnationalism Aboard the ‘Love Boat': The Overseas Chinese Youth Language Training and Study Tour to the Republic of China, 1966–1997,” (M.A. thesis, University of California at Los Angeles, 1998).Google Scholar

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18 Ibid., 4–8. Computation by this author.Google Scholar

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87 In understanding this dynamic, Rogers Brubaker's insight into “the triadic relational interplay between national minorities, nationalizing states, and external national homelands” is useful. He explains that a “national minority” has its own “nationalism” based on localized collective interests, which often clash with the nationalizing nationalism of the country in which the group resides, as well as the “transborder nationalism” of its external homeland. For more detail, consult Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 4–6.Google Scholar

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93 Keihokyoku, Naimusho “Showa 17-nen chu ni okeru Gaiji Keisatsu Gaikyo“ [General report of anti-foreign police force] 1942, reprinted in Gaiji Keisatsu Gaikyo vol. 8 (Tokyo: Ryukei Shosha, 1980), 77; and Murayama Tamotsu, Shusen no Koro [Around the end of the war] (Tokyo: Jiji Tsushin, 1968), 23–24, 156. See also the autobiographies of such Nisei in Amerasia Journal 23 (1997), 145–216; Masayo Duus, Tokyo Rose: Orphan of the Pacific (New York: Kodansha International, 1979); Russell Warren Howe, The Hunt for “Tokyo Rose” (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1990); and Mary Kimoto Tomita, Dear Miye: Letters from Japan, 1939–1946, ed., Robert G. Lee (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).Google Scholar

94 For the critique of the exclusion of these Japanese Americans from history, see Ichioka, “Beyond National Boundaries,” vii-xi. In 1957, a prominent Nisei journalist Bill Hosokawa printed a poignant article with regards to the Nisei's abandonment of transnationalism in the postwar years. In it, the writer traced the origins of the prewar bridge concept to “idealists and do-gooders on both sides of the ocean,” as well as Issei, whose “dreams could not stand up under the realism of power politics and hot steel” after Pearl Harbor. “But if the Nisei flopped as bridges,” Hosokawa continued, “their faith in their country was justified” because “[t]oday their acceptance as Americans is complete and their position in their native land is secure.” As if he forgot his own struggle to live a transnational life in the late 1930s as the editor of Japan-sponsored newspaper in Singapore, Hosokawa dismissed the bridge concept as having no relevance to their collective identity—one forged in the context of the wartime internment and military service. See Bill Hosokawa, “Maybe Nisei Have Flopped as ‘Bridges’ Across the Pacific,'” Pacific Citizen (Holiday Issue), Dec. 20, 1957, 4.Google Scholar

95 Good examples include Ron Takaki's narratives of multicultural America and its national identity based on diversity, which counter the recent reaffirmation of the preeminence of Western civilization by pundits like Allan Bloom and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. See Ronald Takaki, “Multiculturalism: Battleground or Meeting Ground?,” in Color-Lines to Borderlands: The Matrix of American Ethnic Studies, ed. Johnnella E. Butler (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 3–17; A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1993), esp., 1–17; and Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1998), 1–13, 509.Google Scholar