This fascinating book sheds much needed new light on the complex history of early Japanese immigrants in the United States. Most studies on the first generations of Japanese Americans have focused on political and economic discrimination or presented narratives of the immigrant experience. This book, however, addresses issues of race, class, and both Japanese and American imperialism in the period just before and during World War II. Eiichiro Azuma is an assistant professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, and was an associate at the International Nikkei Research Project and Japanese American National Museum. He was a student at UCLA under the prominent Japanese American historian Yuji Ichioka. The ten years he spent in such a rich environment has paid off handsomely: he has assembled an impressive collection of private narratives, local and national political documents (in English and Japanese), and many other rare sources to make a book that tells the story of a Japan that hoped to use these immigrants to their nationalist advantage, and an America that likewise hoped to do so. Azuma takes “an inter-National perspective” (5). With this unconventional spelling, he wishes to stress the interstitial nature of the lives of these Japanese transnational migrants caught between two imperial nation-states. He criticizes the casual way the term “transnational” is often used, giving the impression that immigrant identity is simply a hybrid of the two national experiences, with the newcomers being deterritorialized or denationalized global citizens. Azuma argues, however, that Japanese transnational migrants have always resisted unilateral choice, taking a pragmatic and “eclectic approach to the presumed contradiction between things Japanese and American” when “faced with the need to reconcile simultaneous national belongings as citizen-subjects of one state and . . . resident members . . . another” (6). Azuma supports his inter-National argument by analyzing specific Japanese American issues in relation to nation-state hegemonic power. For example, Azuma believes that the early history of the Japanese in the United States was characterized by Japanese immigrant elites who wished to establish an Imperial Japanese social and political presence overseas. America resisted by prohibiting new Japanese immigration in 1924. However, in an effort to maintain a strong overseas diasporic society, many Japanese of the first generation sent their American-born children back to Japan for schooling instead of trying to assimilate. Azuma also describes how the ethnic conflicts among different Asian minorities were actually conflicts of social class as much as racism under white supremacy. There is really no other book that takes quite this perspective on Japanese American history or transnational labor migration. Azuma’s prose is dynamic, lively enough to capture the student’s interest, and sophisticated enough for the specialist. Many new stories are told and many old ones reinterpreted. Anyone interested in the chronicle of ethnic America will find much of value in this book.

Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America: Azuma, Eiichiro: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 306 pp., Publication Date: February 2005

Farewell to Manzanar

Asian-American Literature.

ABSTRACT Julie Otsuka’s 2011 novel The Buddha in the Attic politicizes the first-person plural “we” narration to recuperate the silenced voices of Japanese American picture brides. The novel’s unconventional narrative style, however, has been criticized for reducing picture brides to “lists” and reproducing stories that deprive Japanese Americans of individuality. This article examines how Otsuka’s use of the “we” narration and self-mimicry locates Japanese American femininity and agency at the historical confluence of imperialist and assimilationist dynamics. It contends that the novel’s stylistics make visible not only a collective minority consciousness, but also the complex subjectivity of picture brides in a transnational space of diasporic negotiation, social masking, and situational coalition. In doing so, the novel questions not only a lack of individuality, but individuality itself. That is, it demonstrates how ethnic and diasporic literature can ethically comment on a universal notion of political individuality and revise it with multiple and contingent perspectives.

Emily Yu Zong

Papers

The voice of diversity: Picture brides and masked individuality in Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic