Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity: The Nisei Generation in Hawaii

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University of Illinois Press, 1994 - History - 326 pages

Wartime hysteria over "foreign" ways fueled a movement for Americanization that swept the United States during and after World War I. Eileen H. Tamura examines the forms that hysteria took in Hawai'i, where the Nisei (children of Japanese immigrants) were targets of widespread discrimination.

Tamura analyzes Hawaii's organized effort to force the Nisei to adopt "American" ways, discussing it within the larger phenomenon of Nisei acculturation. While racism was prevalent in "paradise," the Nisei and their parents also performed as active agents in their own lives, with the older generation attempting to maintain Japanese cultural ways and the younger wishing to become "true Americans." Caucasian "Americanizers," often associated with powerful agricultural interests, wanted labor to remain cheap and manageable; they lobbied for racist laws and territorial policies, portending the treatment of ethnic Japanese on the U.S. mainland during World War II.

Tamura offers a wealth of original source material, using personal accounts as well as statistical data to create an essential resource for students of American ethnic history and U.S. race and class relations.

 

Contents

The Hawaii Setting
1
Background
9
Settlers
22
The Americanization Campaign
45
Discrimination and Americanization
70
The schooling of the Nisei
91
Schools as Channels for Plantation Work
125
Japanese Language Schools
146
Cultural Changes
188
Occupational Changes
211
Epilogue
235
Firsts among Japanese Americans in Hawaii
241
Notes
245
Works Cited
293
Index
319
Copyright

Social Changes
165

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About the author (1994)

Eileen H. Tamura is a professor of the history of education at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.