Rebuilding the American Dream

42 Suffolk University Law Review 769, 2009

Professional baseball, America's pastime, during the period following the Second World War, tells the story of new integration within the sport: Major League Baseball's color-line is smashed with the inclusion of UCLA product Jackie Robinson in 1947. Also during this time, the historic career of Yankee great Joe DiMaggio, a second-generation Italian American immigrant from the Bay Area, was also coming to its end. Missing from this narrative are the Japanese American players, famous on the West Coast for the talented teams produced within their communities. At this time, Japanese American players had much success playing in the professional leagues of Japan. This paper investigates the complex transformation of Japanese American racialization and Japanese American baseball as an agent of United States influence and partnership with Japan following the devastation of the war and the atomic bombs and explores the role of the great American pastime in both the domestic and the international arena.

名桜大学教員養成支援 センター年報 [Meio University Teacher Training Support Center Annual Report], 2021

Immigration to the United States has always involved an array of timelines, routes, and circumstances. The well-documented Ellis Island corridors reveal just a glimpse of the human migration story with focus solely on the European experience, yet have remained the quintessential portrayal of immigration in America. In contrast, the narratives of those who have traveled from the Pacific have received less mention in these discussions. This article will not remedy the inclination to generalize American cultural and historical information; rather, it will provide readers with some insight into the diversity of situations and the challenges of immigrants arriving to the United States. The descriptions that follow are based on several interviews that have attempted to gather information of family histories and include both firsthand and secondhand accounts. The content in this report was gathered from both interviews and historical sources. The family histories of several Okinawan-Americans will be explored from their lives in Okinawa to the experiences that they faced in America.

Cultural Studies, 2022

This article studies baseball played at ‘the margin of empires.’ It attends to the manifestations of ‘baseball complex’ – the persistent sociopsychological a!ective force for baseball that derives from personal experiences/memories and political/historical institutions – in two geohistorical contexts: Japanese American internment in the US during World War II and Taiwan around the 1930s under Japanese rule. Besides historical references, newspaper reports and critical scholarship, two films are taken as core texts of analysis: Desmond Nakano’s American Pastime (2007), which enacts a story of baseball in the Topaz Relocation Center in Utah, USA during the second World War, and Umin Boya’s Kano (2014), which tells the story of Kano baseball team emerging from Taiwan under Japanese colonization. My reading draws attention to the stratified power structure that characterizes the margin of empires and suggests to move beyond the binary comprehension of baseball as either a tool of acculturation and colonization (for the imperial and dominant) or a medium of social ascendancy and cultural assimilation (for the colonized and minoritized). I argue that baseball not only could be utilized by those holding power or those obviously minoritized/colonized, but could be needed urgently by those caught in-between the powerful and the disempowered, such as the marginalized whites assigned to guard over Japanese Americans on sites of the internment or the Japanese relegated to Japan’s colony in Taiwan. Moreover, by foregrounding baseball’s trans-Pacific trajectory and exploring baseball’s entanglement with the triangulated power processes between the US, Japan, and Taiwan, I challenge the static meaning of baseball while testing out cinema’s value in simulating historical situations and changes.

Parenting in a Multicultural Society, 1980

2024

Noula Karaszi's paper explores the experience during World War II, Japanese Americans were subjected to internment camps, a dark chapter in American history that stripped them of their civil liberties and forced them from their homes. This paper explores the multifaceted experiences of Japanese Americans during internment, focusing on themes of identity, loss, and resilience. Through an analysis of literature, scholarly articles, and personal narratives, the paper delves into how internment affected Japanese American identity and memory. Works like Lawson Fusao Inada's "Only What We Could Carry" and Hisaye Yamamoto's stories offer poignant insights into the dispossession and dehumanization faced by Japanese Americans. The paper also examines contemporary reflections on these experiences, emphasizing the importance of learning from history to address current issues of prejudice and discrimination.

John Okada : The Life and Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy (1957), 2018

John Okada's No-No Boy is celebrated as a prime example of Japanese American literature for its detailing of the psychological, material, and political consequences of the incarceration and their impact on the lived experience of the book’s protagonist, Ichiro Yamada. Scholarly discussion and critical interest in the novel continues to grow, more than sixty years since its initial publication. This review of the critical literature charts the history of that discussion and synthesizes the main discussions, debates, and contestations.

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States government ordered the evacuation and internment of over 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry. The wartime imprisonment of these men, women, and children; many of them U.S. citizens is a widely known fact among both scholars and the general public. What most do not know, however, is that select groups of Japanese Americans existed who were able to escape this fate through various means. This paper will examine two such groups located in Eastern Oregon who were able to avoid internment by providing labor that was vital to the national war effort. Also discussed, are the cultural concepts of freedom and personal liberty prevalent in America during World War II and how they compare to the experiences of the Japanese Americans who lived and worked within the two Eastern Oregon groups.

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 2014