Identity and the Second Generation

How Children of Immigrants Find Their Space

Faith G. Nibbs, Caroline B. Brettell, Faith G. Nibbs, Caroline B. Brettell

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780826520708
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études des enfants en sociologie

Most recently, Americans have become familiar with the term "second generation" as it's applied to children of immigrants who now find themselves citizens of a nation built on the notion of assimilation. This common, worldwide experience is the topic of study in Identity and the Second Generation. These children test and explore the definition of citizenship and their cultural identity through the outlets provided by the Internet, social media, and local community support groups. All these factors complicate the ideas of boundaries and borders, of citizenship, and even of home. Indeed, the second generation is a global community and endeavors to make itself a home regardless of state or citizenship.This book explores the social worlds of the children of immigrants. Based on rich ethnographic research, the contributors illustrate how these young people, the so-called second generation, construct and negotiate their lives. Ultimately, the driving question is profoundly important on a universal level: How do these young people construct an identity and a sense of belonging for themselves, and how do they deal with processes of inclusion and exclusion?

1

HISTORY AND THE SECOND GENERATION

Differences between Prewar and Postwar Japanese American Nisei

Takeyuki (Gaku) Tsuda

INTRODUCTION: GENERATIONAL SPACES

For quite some time, the leaders of the Japanese American community have been concerned about the steady decline in participation among youth in Japanese American organizations such as the Japanese American Citizens League and various Japanese American historical societies.¹ This is especially a concern with the Japanese American Historical Society of San Diego. Started by a group of elderly second-generation Japanese Americans (nisei) who had been interned in concentration camps during World War II, the JAHSSD has a large membership and is more active than JACL in San Diego. Its annual meeting would draw close to two hundred members. However, the JAHSSD focuses primarily on historical events surrounding World War II and has struggled to attract Japanese American youth, who are either yonsei (fourth generation) or shin-nisei (the “new nisei” descendants of post–World War II Japanese immigrants in the United States). As a result, the members who attended JAHSSD events were almost exclusively elderly and middle aged.

In order to address the lack of youth participation, the JAHSSD and JACL decided to hold its 2006 annual Day of Remembrance event on the University of California at San Diego campus in collaboration with the university’s Japanese American student organization, called the Nikkei Student Union. The Day of Remembrance is the annual commemoration of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and is held on February 19, the date on which President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066.

Unfortunately, the 2006 event was poorly organized. It was held in the central courtyard plaza of UCSD’s student center. The speakers were mainly elderly nisei from JAHSSD who spoke at length about their experiences of being interned during World War II. They sat at a makeshift table on a stage in front of the student theater under a sign that advertised an upcoming performance of The Vagina Monologues. The event was constantly disrupted by the hustle and bustle of UCSD students, who were either walking through the plaza on their way to class or having lunch and conversations at nearby tables and paid no attention to what the speakers were saying. To make matters worse, music and announcements were blaring through the courtyard from another student organization trying to recruit new members, constantly threatening to drown out the Day of Remembrance speakers.

Although there were plenty of students in the courtyard, it was distressing to see how few Japanese American students had bothered to show up. Most of the audience members who had come specifically to attend the event were elderly nisei and older third-generation sansei mainly from JAHSSD and JACL. They listened intently to the speakers and reacted a number of times to what they were saying. Most of the handful of Japanese American students who were present were fourth-generation yonsei who were Nikkei Student Union board members. Partly because of the noise and distractions in the plaza, they were not paying attention to the speakers and mainly chatted among themselves. The general impression one received was of an older generation attempting to pass on their experiences and historical legacy to a younger generation, who had moved beyond the past and were too preoccupied with their daily lives to even notice.

However, most conspicuous in their absence were any shin-nisei students from the postwar second generation. Although the yonsei NSU board members were not listening to the speakers, at least they had come, perhaps out of respect for their elders. In contrast, the shin-nisei from NSU did not even bother to show up. “I’ve never attended Day of Remembrance events,” one of them once told me. “In fact, I didn’t even know what that was until I joined NSU. I feel no real connection to the internment of Japanese Americans, since my family didn’t go through it. My family was in Japan during World War II. They were running away from American air raids over Tokyo.”

Since the Japanese Americans are one of the oldest Asian American ethnic groups in the United States, there are some pronounced generational divisions within the community. Most notable is the division between the elderly, prewar nisei, whose Japanese parents immigrated to the United States during the 1910s and 1920s, and the younger, postwar shin-nisei generation, who are mainly a product of Japanese immigration after the 1960s. Although they are technically of the same second generation, the prewar nisei were shaped by their internment during World War II, a life-changing tragedy that continues to define who they are. It remains relevant to their current lives, especially through their participation in community events, their efforts at establishing memorials to commemorate it, and their attendance at periodic reunion events with others who were interned in the same concentration camp.

In contrast, the shin-nisei came of age mainly after the 1980s and are far removed from the prewar discrimination and struggles of the elderly nisei. Although they are definitely aware of the internment experience and its importance, having studied about it in school or visited remnants of the internment camps, they felt little personal connection to it since it was not part of their family’s history. During a discussion about the Japanese American internment experience in the “Culture Forums” held by the Nikkei Student Union, one of the former shin-nisei board members was rather blunt about his different historical consciousness. “All of this focus about internment in the Japanese American community kind of alienates shin-nisei like me,” he stated in front of the others. “I’m also Japanese American, but I have a different history. If other Japanese Americans don’t see me as Japanese American because of this, that’s OK. My family wasn’t in the camps. They were in Japan and suffered during World War II. I feel much more connected to the Japanese war experience than I do to the internment [of Japanese Americans].”

Although the prewar nisei and shin-nisei are both second generation in terms of immigration, they are clearly from completely different generations in terms of history. In other words, they occupy different generational spaces of social belonging and identity because they are a product of different historical eras. The prewar generation of nisei are primarily the descendants of agricultural immigrants from poor, rural Japan who arrived in the United States after the turn of the twentieth century. They grew up during a period of increasing American hostility toward their ethnic homeland and discrimination against Japanese Americans, which led to their internment in concentration camps during World War II. They also had fewer opportunities to maintain transnational connections to their ethnic homeland. As a result, many of them eventually distanced themselves from their Japanese heritage, culturally assimilated to American society, and emphasized their national identity and loyalty as Americans.

In contrast, the postwar second generation are children of wealthier Japanese immigrants who came to the United States as professionals and elite business expatriates starting in the 1960s. The shin-nisei came of age in a multiethnic and increasingly globalized America after Japan’s image in the United States had improved considerably because of its postwar economic prosperity and the popularity of Japanese commodities and popular culture. They therefore suffered much less discrimination and had many more opportunities to become transnationally engaged with their ethnic homeland. Unlike the prewar nisei, they maintain strong ties to their ethnic heritage and to Japan, have become fully bicultural, and have developed transnational identities. Therefore, because of their different formative historical experiences, the prewar nisei inhabit an exclusively assimilationist and nationalist space, whereas the postwar nisei construct their ethnicities and identities in a much more transnational space.

CONCEPTUALIZING IMMIGRANT AND HISTORICAL GENERATIONS

The concept of generations can be understood from both an immigrant and historical perspective. The immigration studies literature on the second generation uses the concept of generation in two ways. First, generations can refer to genealogical birth order within an immigrant family. Therefore, the first generation are the immigrant parents, and the second generation are their children. Many studies of the second generation classify generations only according to family birth order, so that all children of immigrants are members of the second generation regardless of whether they were born in the country of origin or the host country (e.g., Rumbaut and Portes 2001; Portes and Rumbaut 2001; Levitt and Waters 2002; Smith 2006; Kasinitz, Waters, Mollenkopf, and Holdaway 2008). However, immigrant generations also refer to distance from the country of origin (see also Kasinitz, Waters, Mollenkopf, and Holdaway 2008: 400; Foner 2009: 3). In this sense, the second generation includes only the children of immigrants who were born in the host country, who are further removed from the country of origin than their first-generation parents. The children of immigrants who were born in the country of origin but immigrated as youth and raised in the host country are therefore called the 1.5 generation, since they are in between the first-generation immigrant parents and the second generation in terms of distance from the origin country. This chapter adopts the latter definition of immigrant generation so that “second-generation Japanese Americans” refers only to those born in the United States to Japanese immigrant parents.

However, generation can also refer to a specific age group that is a product of a certain historical period. Such “historical generations” were born and grew up around the same time and have similar historical experiences. Therefore, generation can also refer to historical age cohorts, such as the prewar or postwar generation, the Baby Boomer generation, or Generation X. According to Karl Mannheim’s seminal theoretical work on the subject (1952: chap. 7), generations are not based solely on biology or genealogy but are ultimately cohorts defined by common historical location. However, it is not simply shared historical experiences that define the members of a generation, but historical events that they experienced during a young age, which have a determining influence on the rest of their lives. Therefore, Mannheim pointed out that older and younger people who experience the same historical processes together are not members of the same generation. In this sense, historical generations are age cohorts who had similar formative historical experiences in childhood or youth. Mannheim is strongly implying that subsequent historical events do not have as decisive an impact on a generation’s consciousness and identity as those it experienced when it first came of age.

A historically grounded conception of generation may be just as important as an immigration-based conception of generations in explaining similarities and differences within immigrant-origin ethnic groups (Eckstein 2002). There is no doubt that there are significant differences between the first and second immigrant generations in terms of educational achievement, cultural assimilation, socioeconomic mobility, identity, and transnational engagement (e.g., see Perlmann and Waldinger 1997; Boyd and Grieco 1998; Levitt and Waters 2002; Rumbaut 2005; van Niekerk 2007). However, certain differences within an immigrant-origin ethnic group are the product of historical cohort differences and cannot be explained simply by an immigrant generation perspective based on family birth order or distance from the country of origin.

Of course, immigration studies about the second generation are not completely oblivious to historical generational differences. A number of researchers have noted the significant differences between the current second generation, whose immigrant parents arrived in the United States after the 1960s, and the second-generation descendants of the last great wave of immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Gans 1992; Portes and Zhou 1993; Perlmann and Waldinger 1997; Eckstein 2002; Levitt and Waters 2002: 13–14; Perlmann 2005; Portes et al. 2005: 1001–3; Rumbaut 2005: 1041–43). Although these studies appear to be purely historical comparisons and give the impression that the prewar second generation is no longer around, a good number of individuals from this earlier historical cohort are still alive today as elderly people and coexist with the postwar second generation. However, research on the contemporary second generation focuses exclusively on the descendants of post 1960s immigrants, and the author is not aware of any studies of the elderly prewar second generation.

There are a number of immigrant groups like the Japanese with a long history of immigration that spans both the pre- and postwar period such as the Chinese, Filipinos, Mexicans, Russians, and other eastern and southern Europeans. The contemporary second-generation descendants of these immigrant groups therefore have substantial members from both the pre- and postwar period so that the second immigrant generation consists of two different historical generations and age groups whose formative childhood experiences occurred during different time periods.² As a result, they continue to live in different historically constituted spaces of interaction and belonging today. I argue that such differences based on historical generation can be just as significant as the differences between the first and second immigrant generations. Therefore, for such ethnic groups, it is highly problematic to ignore such historical differences among members of the second generation simply because they share the same immigrant family birth order or distance from the ethnic homeland.

THE PREWAR NISEI: AMERICANIZATION AND NATIONALIST BELONGING

As members of the prewar historical generation, today’s elderly Japanese American second generation was shaped by historical events pertaining to World War II, which placed them on an ethnic trajectory that led to very different assimilation and identity outcomes compared to the postwar shin-nisei. Because they grew up in an era of increasing anti-Japanese hostility leading up to World War II and were interned in concentration camps during the war as enemy aliens, they had to demonstrate their loyalty as Americans in order to avoid discrimination. As a result, they emphasized cultural assimilation over the retention of their ethnic heritage or transnational ties to Japan. Because of such formative historical experiences, the generational space that is the basis for their sense of ethnic identity and belonging remains an exclusively nationalist field of interaction.

JAPANESE AMERICAN INTERNMENT AND POSTWAR DISCRIMINATION

My prewar nisei interviewees were interned in concentration camps as children and teenagers and continue to have very strong recollections of their experience. The great irony of the internment experience, however, is that it was extremely difficult for the first-generation immigrant parents, but much less so for their second generation children. The parents often lost their homes, businesses, and jobs, and their families were uprooted, relocated, and locked up in concentration camps for years in desolate locations in California or Arizona with extreme temperatures. Not only were they forced to live in miserable and crowded barracks with no privacy, they often lost their former authority over their children in the camps and faced constant anxiety about their futures, causing some of them to suffer from psychological problems such as depression.

In contrast to the parents, the second-generation children were relatively shielded from the trauma and emotional suffering of the internment experience (often by the parents themselves). In fact, they enjoyed the activities for children in the camps and often spent their days playing with other Japanese American children. They were relatively free from parental control, and instead of spending much time with their parents, they often ate, played, and went t...