In the field of Japanese American history, most scholarship on the Nisei, the second generation Japanese American, have tended to study them as a minority community that lived out the rest of their lives in the United States. However, Michael R. Jin’s Citizens, Immigrants, and the Stateless: A Japanese American Diaspora in the Pacific is a welcome departure that centers the lives of the Nisei who were born in the United States, migrated to Japan, returned to the United States, or whose situations led them elsewhere and back again—what he identifies as a “highly mobile transpacific diaspora.” A historian in the program of Global Asian Studies at University of Illinois Chicago, Jin has written a book on diasporic Japanese Americans that contributes to the fields of history, Asian American Studies, and Asian Studies in three dynamic ways. First, he attempts to destabilize the migration model of sending and receiving countries and complicate existing interpretations of Japanese Americans as national subjects. Rather, he offers a transnational history that expands what it means to be Japanese American. Second, if he were to map it, instead of dropping one pin in the United States, Jin drops multiple pins onto multiple places to reconstruct the borderland space across North America and the Japanese Empire in Asia to unearth stories of those long overlooked, such as emigrants from Asia in transnational and transoceanic diasporas. Third, he proposes a way out of the World War II loyalty narrative that once staked Japanese American claims to the nation-state and has since enraptured our scholarly and public imagination: that Nisei’s citizenship was fragile long before WWII incarceration.
Spanning across the twentieth century, the book is divided into six chapters, which can be separated into two thematic sections. The first three chapters explicate three ways that Japanese Americans resembled a highly mobile diaspora in the decades leading up to World War II. The first chapter examines how many Nisei left the United States after the 1924 Immigration Act and became migrants in their parents’ home country of Japan. The second chapter explores the real possibility that Nisei might become stateless by explicating the story of Toshiko Inaba who returned to the United States only to have her birthright citizenship revoked because of the Cable Act. The third chapter tracks how, after Japanese American citizens were incarcerated as “enemy aliens” during World War II, Kibei—Japanese American returnees from Japan—posed as a problem to the narrative of loyalty. Taken together, Jin does the heavy lifting to show that US birthright citizenship did not protect Japanese American citizens from economic insecurity, anti-immigrant legislation, and wartime incarceration, and that because of the fragile nature of their US national status, utilized their transnational connections to make significant moves that would better, or help them survive, their circumstances.
The next three chapters focus on diasporic identity and public narratives around World War II. Jin carefully moves through political minefields of public and academic interpretations on incarceration and redress by focusing on Japanese American lives that did not fit neatly into the framework of national loyalty. Jin does this in chapter four by examining the shifts of Kibei’s lives before, during, and after the war. He looks at the social worlds of a Kibei who was born in the United States, educated as a youth in Japan, returned to the United States to work for a community newspaper printing pro-Japanese imperialism propaganda, incarcerated and served as a translator for the US Army during World War II, and then served as a language monitor in Japan during the Tokyo War Crimes Trial. He argues against the trap of assessing their switches as merely reflective of their national loyalties. In chapter five, Jin investigates Nisei who served in the Japanese Army during World War II and lost their US citizenship, as well as their place in US public memory on incarceration. In the sixth chapter, Jin explores how some 1,000 Japanese Americans who survived the US dropping of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima could not access medical care and were also left out of redress efforts. By centering these little-known stories, Jin shows how public memory on incarceration and redress is limited by a national framework and how such groups can be more richly understood through a transnational lens.
With an uncanny ability to find and piece together these overlooked stories from the corners of multiple archives, Jin utilizes a plethora of Japanese and English language sources. His sources range from Japanese American newspapers in the United States, immigration files at National Archives in the United States, sources on Japanese schools in archives in Japan, memoirs and autobiographies, and personal interviews. He is exhaustive in his research and unwavering in his focus on diasporic identity and its significance. But what I appreciate the most is his beautiful storytelling and how he takes great care to bring to life each of these unique individual histories. As a historian of women and gender, I am particularly curious about the role of gender in this highly mobile transpacific diaspora. For example, in chapter two, I am fascinated by Toshiko Inaba’s story and wonder how in general the Cable Act impacted Japanese American women’s diasporic identity. How did stateless women such as Inaba live out their lives? And did Inaba re-attempt to enter the Unites States after the Cable Act was repealed?
Overall, Jin’s book is an example of transnational history at its best. His book contributes to the fields of Asian American Studies and History by rethinking old categories such as immigrant, citizen, internment, and loyalty. I for one have taken notes for serious curriculum revision when I next teach my course on the Japanese American incarceration camps. For those interested in immigration, diaspora, World War II, incarceration, and a-bomb survivors, go read this book.
University of California Press