Review: Becoming Nisei: Japanese American Urban Lives in Prewar Tacoma, by Lisa M. Hoffman and Mary L. Hanneman

Abstract

In 2004, as part of its downtown campus expansion, the University of Washington Tacoma demolished the old Tacoma Japanese Language School (TJLS) building, one of the few remaining landmarks from the pre-World War II Tacoma Japantown (Nihonmachi). Once a vibrant urban ethnic enclave, Nihonmachi was home to the city’s Japanese American families and businesses before their displacement by Executive Order 9066 in 1942 and the mass wartime incarceration that followed. When a call went out for a public history project to preserve the legacies of TJLS, Lisa M. Hoffman and Mary L. Hanneman stepped up to document a rich history of Tacoma’s prewar Japanese American community. Based on forty-two interviews with former Nisei (second-generation Japanese American) Tacoma residents combined with rigorous archival research, Becoming Nisei offers a unique translocal and transnational approach to the often-overlooked interwar period in the twentieth-century Japanese American experience.Throughout the book’s six chapters the authors bring together the interviewees’ vivid recollections of the cityscape—neighborhood streets, family-owned businesses, houses of worship, and the language school— that they had navigated as children. These “structures of memories” (pp. 11–12) help the authors reconstruct the historical landscape of prewar Tacoma Japantown through their extensive analysis of the archival records and maps at the UW Library Special Collections. Tacoma’s Japantown served as a unique space in which the young Nisei developed their sense of belonging and their understanding of race politics and power relations in American society during the era of Asian exclusion. Becoming Nisei makes an important contribution to urban history by recovering the important but often ignored role that non-white communities like Tacoma’s Japanese Americans have played in shaping the socioeconomic, cultural, and physical landscapes of American cities.Among the many cultural and socioeconomic institutions of the prewar Tacoma Japanese American community, the language school serves as the focal point of the authors’ analysis of Nisei’s multiple transnational and inter-generational positionalities (p. 107). Established by Issei (first-generation Japanese immigrant) educators, TLJS brought the cultural and social ethos of Meiji Japan into the diasporic lives of Nisei students (pp. 36–37). The nonsectarian language school allowed Nisei children across religious and prefectural affiliations to learn the linguistic, cultural, and ethical nuances of their parents’ homeland and develop close transnational ties to Japan (p. 50). In this way, the book demonstrates that the immigrant parents, who were “products of the Meiji Era” (1868–1912), had played a critical role in transplanting the institutions of modern Japan and its education system to Tacoma’s Japanese community. Future studies on the prewar Japanese American experience would benefit from further examination of how the sociopolitical and cultural dynamics of the transpacific world during the Taisho Era (1912–1926) and the prewar Showa years (1926–1941) also shaped the Nisei experience, as both Issei and Nisei were products of these volatile interwar periods as much as they were products of Meiji Japan.Overshadowed by the memory of the World War II incarceration in both the scholarship and public narrative of Japanese American history, the interwar period nevertheless has attracted the attention of a growing number of historians as a crucial formative era that shaped Nisei’s identities. Becoming Nisei is a unique and timely addition to this understudied chapter in Japanese American history. Despite the prevailing image of the Nisei before the war as dependent on their immigrant parents and too young to muster a voice of their own, the book demonstrates that Tacoma’s Nisei were “active participants in constituting their own” positionalities through their relationship to the community’s history (p. 12).