Reviewed by: Redefining Japaneseness: Japanese Americans in the Ancestral Homeland byJane H. Yamashiro Zelideth María Rivas (bio) Redefining Japaneseness: Japanese Americans in the Ancestral Homeland, by Jane H. Yamashiro. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2017. Ix + 216 pp. $27.95 paper. ISBN: 978-0-8135-7636-7. Jane H. Yamashiro's Redefining Japaneseness is an innovative and provocative addition to Asian American studies. Yamashiro introduces and analyzes the [End Page 153] responses of more than fifty Japanese Americans from both the U.S. mainland and Hawai'i to examine Japanese American identity construction in Japan. In particular, Yamashiro differentiates the identity constructions of her subjects by analyzing how individual racialization projects, language fluency, history, citizenship, and ethnicity all contributed to the negotiation of identity construction while the subjects were in Japan and after they returned to the United States. By presenting her readers with examples of longitudinal identity formation, she expands upon existing representations of a static, homogeneous Japanese American identity. The reader is immediately engrossed in Yamashiro's texts, which are sprinkled with vignettes from her subjects that highlight her strong framework and analyses. As she sets up her argument, she distinguishes among Japaneseness on the U.S. mainland, Hawai'i, and Japan while historically categorizing Japanese Americans as those who arrived in the United States before World War II and those who arrived after. She argues that Japanese American incarceration during World War II shifted Japanese American identity into two categories: those who experienced incarceration or had family who experienced and those who did not. She also introduces new identitarian terms, shin-issei and shin-nisei (literally, new first and second generation) for those Japanese Americans who immigrated to the United States after World War II and did not have family histories that include World War II incarceration. Some of these Japanese Americans grew up away from a Japanese American community and, therefore, do not have a strong connection to Japanese American history or culture. Those who do not have a personal connection with World War II incarceration tend to have more personal connections to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the bombings during World War II, aligning them more closely with a Japanese identity. Similarly, knowledge of Japanese language can also shift identity construction because later generations of Japanese Americans tend not to have a fluency in Japanese and Japanese culture unless they have access to heritage schools that emphasize culture in addition to language. Japanese Americans from Hawai'i present an interesting case study in this book. More specifically, Yamashiro's subjects' responses point to the Japanese gaze, miscategorization, and association with Hawai'i identity as factors that influence their identity construction. The subjects emphasized that when Japanese nationals see the subjects as Japanese, they blend in and do not feel foreign. When they are miscategorized as foreign Asian immigrants because they do not speak the language, however, they quickly gain acceptance when they clarify their ancestry. Finally, their categorization of being from Hawai'i differs from Japanese Americans because they share a local culture and history separate from that found in the mainland United States. Finally, Yamashiro explores Japan's own categorizations of Hawai'i and the mainland United [End Page 154] States through Japan's perceived intimacy with the proximal state. In other words, because Japan is physically closer to Hawai'i than it is to the United States, there is more Japanese travel there, and therefore many Japanese believe that they intimately "know" Hawai'ian culture. These factors contribute to the differences in identity construction between Japanese Americans from the mainland and those from Hawai'i. The two strongest chapters in Yamashiro's book are "From Hapa to Hāfu: Mixed Japanese American Identities in Japan" and "Back in the United States: Japanese American Interpretations of Their Experiences in Japan" (chapters 3 and 5, respectively). The chapter on mixed race allows Yamashiro to delve further into the nuances of identity construction beyond "Japanese American." Here, she distinguishes among the various terms that Japanese Americans encounter in Japan: nikkeijin (typically someone who is of Japanese descent and is "phenotypically similar to most Japanese"), hāfu (typically someone of mixed race who is "phenotypically foreign...
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Apr 3, 2021
Yoshihiro Aoki + 10
Open Access