Class or Ethnic Solidarity: The Japanese American Company Union

Abstract

THE CONFLICTS which beset the maturing second-generation Japanese Americans were even more intense than those which so often have faced second-generation groups in the United States. The Nisei had inherited from ther parents a remarkable drive to succeed in the face of hardships, but they had also learned the American definition of success, by which standard the accommodation made by their parents could not be considered satisfactory. Suspicious and hostile white Americans had years before put the ambitious Japanese immigrants in their place by means legal and extralegal. The coming of age of the new generation can be dated, for the 1930's saw the proportion of adult Japanese males born in the United States increase from one in fifteen to one in three. Nowhere was the quiet drama of maturation played with deeper feeling or significance than in Los Angeles, the Japanese American metropolis, where-in contrast to the continental United States as a whole-Japanese population increased during the depression decade. By 1940, the 36,866 Japanese in the county, alien and native-born, constituted 29 percent of the national total.' To date, writings on the Japanese Americans have tended to con-