8. Diasporicity and Japanese Americans

Abstract

This chapter situates Japanese American cultural heritage and transnational ties to the ethnic homeland in a broader diasporic context and proposes the concept of diasporicity to address the relative strength of a geographically dispersed ethnic group’s transnational connections and identifications both with the ancestral homeland and to co-ethnics residing in other countries. Although Japanese Americans are members of the Japanese-descent (nikkei) diaspora, prominent national differences prevent them from identifying with other Japanese-descent nikkei as peoples with a common ethnic heritage. However, like other diasporic groups, they have much stronger social connections to their ethnic homeland than they do to other Japanese descent communities in the Americas.