Transpacific Exodus: Japanese American Migrants in Japan through the 1950s

Abstract

Arguing for a reconceptualization of Asian American history that utilizes a transpacific framework, this important and welcome study expands our understanding of Japanese American history by tracing the migration of young U.S.-born Nisei to Japan and its colonial empire during the decades prior to the Second World War. Michael R. Jin argues that this migration, in which as many as one in four Nisei participated, should be regarded not as a return to Japan but as a separate wave of migration originating in the United States. The resulting diaspora, as such, was a U.S. and not a Japanese diaspora. In so arguing, Jin explains, he “writ[es] against the predominant orientation of ‘diaspora’ as fixated on diasporic subjects belonging to a timeless, ethnicized, and often romanticized ancestral home,” in this case, Japan (5). Key among those who comprised this “highly mobile transpacific diaspora” were Nisei born in the United States who were sent to Japan as children to be educated and were known as Kibei (written with characters representing “return” and “America”) on their return to the United States (4). Also among those Jin includes are children who accompanied immigrant parents who decided to return to Japan, sometimes in response to the alien land laws adopted by many western states by the 1920s, as well as older Nisei who chose to emigrate to Japan or other parts of an expanding Japanese empire as young adults in search of opportunities denied them in the country of their birth on grounds of race, only to be confronted by “a world with its own complex racial ideology and hierarchy” (9).