Some Thoughts on National and Cultural Identity

Abstract

Japanese and Americans of Japanese ancestry have been linked in the American political realm and in popular imagination since the beginning of Japanese migration to the United States in the late nineteenth century. Mostly, the conflation of a foreign Japanese identity with a Japanese American one has resulted in both tremendous racism and cultural misunderstanding. Anti-Japanese immigration and naturalization laws and the World War II incarceration of over 120,000 Japanese Americans are evidence of the former impulse; the continued expectation and interpretation of an essential “Japanese-ness” in the art and expression of Japanese Americans exemplifies the latter.