From Race to Ethnicity

Jonathan Y. Okamura is professor emeritus in the Department of Ethnic Studies, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

Introduction

Unlike most books about Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i, this work includes both contemporary and historical aspects of their experiences in the islands. I did not want to write a primarily historical book because a substantial and valuable literature on Japanese American history already exists and continues to be written by trained historians, unlike myself.1 Moreover, I have a greater research interest in ongoing problems and issues in the Japa nese American community than in its history, so I have included a few chapters on contemporary topics that are very related to some of the subjects I discuss in the three chapters concerned with Japanese American history. Indeed, some knowledge of the latter is necessary to understand fully the current status and circumstances of local Japanese since so much economic, political, and cultural change has occurred among them as well as in Hawai‘i as their host society.2 These changes are especially evident in the race and ethnic relations of Japanese Americans.

From Historical Race to Contemporary Ethnicity

Obviously, a single work cannot be expected to encompass the entire scope and diversity of the historical and contemporary experiences of Japanese Americans, at least not one written by me.3 In its more than a century and a quarter of sustained immigration and settlement beginning in 1885, the community has developed its own institutions, such as businesses and temples; has played major roles in the larger society in government, politics, and the economy; and has led and participated in some of the major historical events in Hawai‘i. These numerous accomplishments and contributions are one of the principal reasons why in organizing this book I decided to focus on particular social themes that highlight especially the changing race and ethnic relations of Japanese Americans with other such groups in Hawai‘i. As is evident from the chapter titles, these themes include struggle, re sis tance, advocacy, advancement, power, domination, and activism and hence can be seen to emphasize the political and economic dimensions of their evolving race and ethnic relations in island society.

By organizing the book and thus Japanese American experiences in this way, I have obviously devoted less consideration to other significant aspects of their history (for example, World War II) and contemporary situation (economic power). Another scholar with different theoretical and research interests than mine would have discussed other important issues, and perhaps themes, concerning local Japa nese and hence would have interpreted their experiences differently. However, based on my accumulated knowledge of the community and of Hawai‘i society, I have chosen to frame Japanese American experiences according to what I consider especially significant if not necessary in interpreting and appreciating their experiences. Above all, these experiences are viewed and analyzed from racial and ethnic perspectives because historically race was the dominant or ga niz ing principle that structured social relations in Hawai‘i. By the 1970s, ethnicity had assumed that paramount role, which continues to the present.

Accordingly, chapters 2 through 4 provide a racial history of the first eighty-five years of the Japanese American presence in Hawai‘i from 1885, when labor migration to the then kingdom of Hawai‘i commenced on a sustained basis, to 1970. In the latter year, George Ariyoshi was elected as the state of Hawaii’s first lieutenant governor of Japanese ancestry. More importantly, this placed him in the lead position to be the first Japanese American governor, which he became four years later. As a racial history, I describe and analyze Japanese American historical experi-

ences from a racial perspective that emphasizes the primacy of race in structuring their social relations with others and in their perception and treatment as a subjugated minority in island society. In doing so, I am to some extent ignoring other possible analytical frameworks, such as class, culture, or gender, but I focus on race and racialized experiences because they provide the most illuminating insights for interpreting and analyzing local Japanese history. Another major reason for highlighting race is because, as noted above, it was the primary or ga niz ing principle of Hawai‘i society during the historical period encompassed by chapters 2 to 4, as is evident in the anti-Japanese movement discussed in the first introduction two of those chapters. A summary of each of the three chapters is given below, but suffice it to state here that considered together they demonstrate the historical transformation of Japanese Americans from a highly racialized minority of immigrant plantation laborers to one of the most politically powerful ethnic groups in Hawai‘i, despite the virulent racism and discrimination to which they were subject for most of this period until well after World War II.

As for contemporary experiences, chapters 5 through 7 discuss in different ways the considerable power and status of Japanese Americans as one of the dominant ethnic groups in Hawai‘i, especially politically, in their relations with other such groups. Underscoring the significance of ethnicity (and no longer race) as the principal structural principle of island society, chapters 5 and 6 are concerned with the ascension to political and socioeconomic power by local Japanese and how they have maintained their power in electoral politics since 1986 when Ariyoshi left the governor’s office after twelve years. Chapter 7 is about four individual members of the fourth or yonsei generation, the most recent adult generation of Japanese Americans, who have been activists and advocates on behalf of the people of Hawai‘i, especially minority groups, rather than only local Japanese.

Regarding the transition from race to ethnicity as the primary organizing principle in Hawai‘i, during the period from 1885 to 1945 when race unquestionably was preeminent, it can be seen to have worked against Japanese Americans in excluding them from full and equal participation in society and in subjugating them as a working-class, racialized minority. However, at the same time, race worked for haoles in demarcating the paramount political, economic, legal, and social boundary that separated them from nonwhites and privileged them over the latter in innumerable ways in daily life. The reason that race operated on behalf of haoles is because, as the most powerful group in island society, they could insist and enforce that society be structured according to race rather than other possible regulating principles such as class or merit. Race thus functioned differentially for whites and nonwhites in structuring their social relations with each other, much to the disadvantage of the latter. However, during the quarter century after World War II, as local Japanese and other nonwhite groups challenged haole supremacy on the picket lines, at the voting polls, and at workplaces, ethnicity emerged as the foremost organizing principle of social relations by the early 1970s. In marked contrast to race, ethnicity worked for Japanese Americans rather than against them because, like haoles before them, they had become, along with local Chinese, one of the politically dominant ethnic groups in Hawai‘i and therefore could ensure that it was organized based on ethnicity and no longer race. However, ethnicity continued, like race, to be an exclusionary and subordinating barrier for Native Hawaiians, Filipino Americans, and other ethnic minorities, who did not enjoy economic and political advancement to the same extent as had Japanese Americans, Chinese Americans, and initially Korean Americans.

In advancing themselves in Hawai‘i, Japanese Americans used their ethnicity, that is, their shared identity, culture, and social relationships, to their advantage, for example, in bloc voting for Japanese American candidates, but other ethnic groups, including haoles, did the same. To clarify, in this book I use the concept of ethnicity in two different but related ways and with two different meanings. The first and more frequently invoked meaning is that ethnicity is an or ga niz ing principle of social relations in the same way that race, class, and gender are insofar as they structure or regulate relations among racial, class, or gender groups, respectively. The second and much less frequent way in which I discuss ethnicity is in terms of the combined identity, culture, and social relations of an ethnic group, as in the notion of Japanese American ethnicity, although this meaning of the term could also apply to Filipino American ethnicity or Korean American ethnicity.4

As for how ethnicity became increasingly significant as a structural principle of Hawai‘i society after World War II, this process was not unique to the islands. In the continental United States in the 1970s, the persistence of ethnicity among the third and fourth generations of the white ethnic groups, that is, Jewish Americans, Irish Americans, Italian Americans, and Polish Americans, was accounted for by social scientists in highly influential works, such as The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in the Seventies by Michael Novak (1972) and “Symbolic Eth-

nicity: The Future of Ethnic Groups and Cultures in America” by Herbert Gans (1979). This sociological emphasis on ethnicity (and culture) rather than race resulted in what race theorists Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1994: 20) have critically referred to as the “ethnicity approach to race” insofar as it obscures and ignores the continuing greater impact of race as the foremost or ga niz ing principle of American society.

In Hawai‘i, the nonhaole ethnic groups, including Filipino Americans, Native Hawaiians, Portuguese Americans, Chinese Americans, and Japanese Americans, successfully contested white supremacy and thereby introduction race as the primary regulating principle during the first decade following World War II through the 1946 sugar strike and the 1954 Democratic “revolution,” which are discussed further in chapter 4. Starting in the 1950s, local Japanese and local Chinese gained increasing political and economic power and thus began to differentiate themselves in their class status from Native Hawaiians, Portuguese Americans, and Filipino Americans. All of these groups, as well as others (for example, Korean Americans) had maintained some degree of cultural distinctiveness, although to significantly varying degrees. While Japanese, Cantonese, and Ilokano continued to be widely spoken and other aspects of Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino immigrant cultures continued to be practiced, Native Hawaiians had suffered much greater loss of their language, religion, and precontact culture in general. Nonetheless, together with the breakdown of the paramount racial boundary separating haoles and nonhaoles, the latter began to view themselves and other groups more as ethnic groups with differing cultures rather than as races with differing phenotypes, a process referred to as ethnicization, discussed below.

Cognizant of those social and cultural processes among Hawai‘i’s constituent groups and influenced by the new sociological focus on ethnicity in the 1970s, social scientists in the islands followed suit, as is evident in books such as People and Cultures in Hawaii (Tseng, McDermott, and Maretzki 1974) and Kodomo no Tame Ni (For the Sake of the Children):

The Japanese American Experience in Hawaii (Ogawa 1978). Furthermore, Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, Japanese Americans, and Native Hawaiians were all numerically large, so that racial categories such as Asian American and Asian Pacific American, commonly invoked in the continental United States, were not asserted by them as collective racial identities, thus further lessening the relevance of race in Hawai‘i (Okamura 1994). Even the federally recognized racial category white is not generally employed by whites in the islands, who tend to refer to them-

selves as Caucasian or less frequently as haole, the term most nonhaoles use for them. The absence of these racial categories also is indicative of the limited social construction of race in contemporary Hawai‘i.

As race is socially constructed, so is ethnicity evident in the social construction of ethnic (rather than racial) categories by the members of a common society. In constructing their ethnic categories and related identities, societal members are emphasizing that their cultural differences are more significant in distinguishing themselves from one another than their phenotypic differences. Consequently, the constituent groups in such a society consider themselves and are considered ethnic groups rather than races. This process by which ethnic groups are created (or create themselves) has been termed “ethnicization” and is evident when “a group of persons come to see themselves as a distinct group linked by bonds of kinship or their equivalents, by a shared history, and by cultural symbols that represent . . . the ‘epitome’ of their peoplehood” (Cornell and Hartmann 2006: 35). In contrast, “Racialization is the process by which groups of persons come to be classified as races” as a result of “certain bodily features or assumed biological characteristics [being] used systematically to mark certain persons for differential status or treatment” (34). Thus, an important difference between these two processes is that ethnicization generally originates by a group itself, especially in the construction and expression of its distinct ethnic identity, while racialization is externally applied to a group, usually by a more dominant group or power such as the state.

Hence, the difference between ethnicization and racialization as social processes is not simply that the former refers to the making of an ethnic group and the latter to the making of a racial group, because racialization is very much an assertion of power over another group, that is, racializing them so that they can more easily be treated differentially once they have been categorized as a race. This power dimension between groups is perhaps not as significant in ethnicization, although it can limit the capacity of a group of people to be considered and accepted as an ethnic group by others, despite their defining themselves as such. Other manifestations of power differences among ethnic groups in a common society include ethnic inequality, hierarchy, and conflict, which are certainly present among races. From this perspective, ethnicization, or more specifically the social construction of an ethnic identity by a group, can be understood as a means by which its members collectively seek to advance their political and economic interests in competition with other groups (Okamura 2008: 92).

Ultimately, the differences between ethnicization and racialization and between ethnic group and racial group are based on the difference between ethnicity and race as or ga niz ing principles. Despite the ongoing arguments that race should be subsumed as a special case under ethnicity, that an ethnic group can be a racial group at the same time, and that ethnicity has greater explanatory value than race, ethnicity and race as theoretical constructs should be kept analytically distinct because they reference different social phenomena, especially historical experiences. While I fully agree with scholars such as Omi and Winant (1994), Bonilla-Silva (1999), Dyson (2004), and others in their advocacy of race rather than ethnicity as the paramount or ga niz ing principle of social relations in the continental United States, I have applied ethnicity in my research and analyses of contemporary Hawai‘i because race as socially constructed matters considerably less in island society.

A more expansive and hence more useful definition of racialization is provided by Omi and Winant (1986: 64), who define it as “the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice or group.” Thus, not just groups but social relations and practices, including entire institutions such as an educational system, can be racialized, in other words, structured unequally according to race such that people from different racial groups are treated differently. In this book, I interpret many of the historical experiences of Japanese Americans as having been racialized by the dominant haoles, including working on the plantation, gaining access to nonplantation employment, seeking justice as in the Myles Fukunaga murder case, and contending with martial law, all of which are discussed in the chapters to follow. As for Japanese Americans themselves being racialized, the racial meaning ascribed to them changed historically from being innately inferior laborers capable only of toiling in the plantation fields (when they were still primarily Japanese nationals) to constituting an economic, political, and cultural threat to continued haole supremacy in Hawai‘i. Before discussing their history, this chapter provides some general information from the 2010 U.S. Census on the Japanese American population in Hawai‘i and the continental United States.

Demographic and Social Background

Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i total 312,292, including those who are racially or ethnically mixed (126,790), according to the 2010 Census (Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism 2012b). They thus represent 23 percent of the state’s population and are the third largest ethnic group after whites and Filipino Americans, the latter having surpassed local Japanese sometime after the previous census in 2000. While their population ranking declined, the number of Japanese Americans increased by about 15,600 or 5.3 percent, which was much less than the percentage gain for Hawai‘i’s population (10 percent). Their lower population rank should not be surprising since the Japanese American proportion of Hawai‘i’s population has been decreasing since 1920, when it reached its peak of 43 percent. Following statehood in 1959 and the consequent in-migration of whites from the continental United States, Japanese Americans were no longer the largest ethnic group in Hawai‘i beginning sometime in the 1960s. Contributing to their declining population rank is the much smaller annual emigration from Japan (500 persons) compared to the Philippines (more than 4,000) and the lower birthrate and delayed marriage of local Japanese women. With the Native Hawaiian population (289,970) at 21 percent in 2010 and their higher birthrate compared to Japa nese Americans, it is extremely likely that they will surpass the latter by 2020, making local Japanese the fourth largest group in Hawai‘i. This decreasing proportion of Japanese Americans is discussed in chapter 6, concerning maintenance of their political power.

Another significant finding of the 2010 Census is that most Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i (59 percent) are still racially and ethnically unmixed, although this proportion declined from 68 percent in 2000 (Okamura 2008: 25). The former percentage is considerably higher than that for other island groups, such as Chinese Americans, Korean Americans, and Native Hawaiians, and is a legacy of the very high in-marriage rate among the nisei or second generation. But local Japanese women and men out-marry above or at the average rate for Hawai‘i of 46 percent, particularly with whites and Chinese Americans, groups that share their relatively high socioeconomic status (Fu and Heaton 1997). This increasingly mixed population of Japanese Americans is readily apparent among the yonsei fourth and gosei fifth generations, possibly less than half of whom are full Japanese.

The median age (43.6 years) of Japanese Americans is significantly higher than that for Hawai‘i (38.6 years) as a whole, according to the 2010 Census (Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism 2012b). This finding is not only because they are living longer but more likely the result of the lower birthrate of women such that local Japanese families tend to have only one or two children. This small number results from the conscious planning of parents, which began with the sansei or third generation, to minimize the number of children in order to maximize their financial resources for their children’s benefit, particularly education. Such planning has been an important factor in the rise in socioeconomic status of Japanese Americans since the 1980s, although it has also contributed to their lower population rank.

The 2010 Census also reported that Japanese Americans continue to constitute a majority of the residents in certain areas (based on census tracts) long identified with them, including Upper Mānoa (64 percent), Pearl City Highlands (60 percent), Woodlawn (60 percent), Lower Pearl City (58 percent), Newtown (56 percent), Kaimuki (Twenty- Second Avenue, 56 percent), and Mililani (Ainamakua Drive, 56 percent) (Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism 2012a).5these communities are on O‘ahu where more than three- fourths (77 percent) of Hawai‘i’s Japanese reside. Upper Mānoa and Woodlawn are upper-middle- class neighborhoods, while the other five are middle class, reflecting the relatively high socioeconomic status of Japanese Americans. On the neighboring islands, the only community in which they are a majority of residents is in Hilo (Puainako, Kawailani) (51 percent), although local Japanese comprise more than 40 percent of the population in other areas of Hilo (Kahuku- Kaumana, Haihai). On O‘ahu, communities where Japanese Americans are represented at greater than 40 percent include, in Honolulu, Kapahulu, Palolo, St. Louis Heights, Alewa-Dowsett Highlands, Moanalua- Salt Lake, and East Honolulu; and out-side of Honolulu, ‘Aiea-‘Aiea Heights, Pacific Palisades, Mililani- Mililani Mauka, and Kāne‘ohe.

These population concentrations often result in Japa nese Americans being the largest ethnic group in many electoral districts, which are based on adjacent census tracts. This plurality representation in a given district contributes to the success of Japanese American candidates in

electoral politics and their consequent overrepresentation in the state legislature, which is discussed in chapter 6. The communities in which Japanese Americans are the most numerous group are primarily middle class in socioeconomic status and consist mostly of houses rather than apartment buildings. These factors can be related to the higher voting rate of local Japanese (and other voters in the United States), which also contributes to their success in elections. But candidates from other ethnic groups in Hawai‘i, such as Filipino Americans, whites, and Native

Hawaiians, also benefit from belonging to the largest group in an electoral district.

Japanese Americans in the United States

While they are certainly Japa nese American, local Japanese in Hawai‘i differ somewhat, especially culturally, from their “kotonk” counterparts in the continental United States.6 use the term “Japanese American” in self- or collective description, preferring the more casual “Japanese” as members of other ethnic groups in Hawai‘i similarly refer to themselves as “Filipino” or “Chinese.” However, continental Japanese Americans insist on including “American” when identifying themselves and their community because of their well- established concern that they might be viewed and treated as Japanese aliens, an apprehension that can be traced back to their incarceration during World War II. Although it is not claimed as their primary ethnic identity, Japanese Americans in the continental United States also consider themselves Asian American together with other Asian ethnic groups such as Vietnamese Americans and Asian Indians. While Hawai‘i has many of the same Asian groups, they, including Japanese Americans, have never embraced Asian American identity, preferring instead to claim “local” as a panracial identity, as is evident in the term “local Japanese.”

Nationally, Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i constitute 24 percent of the total number of Japa nese in the United States (1,304,286), according to the 2010 Census (Pew Research Center 2012). As in Hawai‘i, 59 percent of all Japanese Americans are racially and ethnically unmixed, which is somewhat surprising given the very minimal proportion of the population they comprise in the continental United States (0.3 percent) and the small number of annual emigrants from Japan. At about 33 percent, California (428,014) continues to have the largest number of Japanese Americans, with Hawai‘i ranked second and far smaller numbers in Washington (67,597), New York (51,781), and Illinois (28,623). However, in California, Japanese Americans are only 1.1 percent of the state population of about 37.3 million and are the sixth largest Asian American group after Filipino Americans, Chinese Americans, Vietnamese Americans, Asian Indians, and Korean Americans. This minimal percentage of the population in California and other states is a very significant factor in the limited political repre sen ta tion of Japanese Americans compared

to that in Hawai‘i. California has three Japanese Americans in its congressional delegation, while in the past Norman Mineta (1975– 1995) and Robert Matsui (1979– 2005) were U.S. representatives, and S. I. Hayakawa, originally from Canada, was a U.S. senator (1977– 1983). However, no state legislature has anywhere near the number of Japa nese Ameri-

cans that Hawai‘i does, and no other state has elected a governor of Japanese ancestry.

Island Japanese generally do not even

As for their socioeconomic status, 2010 Census data indicate that the occupational, income, and educational levels of Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i and in the United States as a whole are roughly comparable. Both groups have a relatively high occupational status, being well repre-

sented in management and the professions and very underrepresented in blue- collar work. For median annual household income, local Japanese ($70,800) have a higher level than all Japanese Americans ($65,400) (U.S. Census Bureau 2012; Pew Research Center 2012), which is a little surprising given the generally lower wages in Hawai‘i compared to California and New York. However, Hawai‘i Japanese have a lower percentage of college completion (35 percent) than Japanese Americans as a whole (46 percent) among persons twenty-five years and older.

Chapter Summaries

Six decades of Japanese American history in Hawai‘i (1885– 1945) cannot be adequately covered in a single book chapter, so instead chapter 2 highlights themes of collective struggle and re sis tance in the course of reviewing several major historical processes and events in which Japa nese were involved. These processes include labor recruitment and immigration, plantation labor and life, and labor or ga niz ing. The chapter also discusses the anti- Japanese movement that sought to subordinate Japanese Americans starting in the early 1900s after it became evident that they, as the largest ethnic group, had decided to remain permanently in Hawai‘i and not only on the plantations. Rather than simply adapting and assimilating to Hawai‘i society, this chapter demonstrates how Japanese Americans actively struggled against and resisted the anti-Japanese movement and other forces that sought to oppress them.

Chapter 3 analyzes one of the most significant historical events involving Japanese Americans prior to World War II, that is, the conviction and execution of a nineteen- year- old nisei, Myles Yutaka Fukunaga, for the brutal murder in 1928 of a ten- year- old Punahou School student, Gill Jamieson, despite Fukunaga’s very likely insanity. My primary reason for devoting an entire chapter to this case is that very little has been written about it, especially by academics, although it continues to be regularly mentioned in the popular press. From the larger racial context of the prevailing anti-Japanese movement, the chapter reviews the extremely quick arrest, conviction, and sentencing to death of Fukunaga within a three- week period after he had committed his crime. I argue that haoles unjustly rushed Fukunaga to his death sentence because he had brazenly transgressed the paramount racial boundary dividing whites and non-whites, particularly Japanese Americans, by killing a haole child from a prominent family. Nonetheless, I also discuss how the Japanese American community demonstrated resistance by seeking to prevent Fukunaga’s hanging by financially supporting appeals of his conviction that advanced all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Like the two previous chapters, chapter 4 proceeds from a racial perspective in interpreting the historical transformation of Japanese Americans from a working- class, racialized minority after World War II to becoming one of the politically dominant ethnic groups by 1970. Local Japanese fostered this transition by their leadership and active participation in the unionization of plantation and dock workers led by the International Longshoremen’s and Ware house men’s Union and in the revitalization of the Democratic Party together with other similarly economically and politically marginalized groups. Through the 1960s, Japanese Americans could be seen assuming an advocacy position for themselves and other ethnic groups that resulted in them advancing into the middle class and gaining increasing po litical power by the end of that decade. In addition, the chapter highlights the major contributions toward racial equality, economic reform, and social justice for Hawai‘i’s working people by the two individuals to whom this book is dedicated, Patsy Mink and Jack Kawano.

Unlike the previous three chapters, chapters 5 through 7 interpret Japanese American experiences from an ethnic rather than a racial framework, and chapters 6 and 7 are focused on contemporary issues in the local Japanese community. Chapter 5 is concerned with the ascension to both political and economic power by Japanese Americans as symbolized by the election of George Ariyoshi as Hawai‘i’s first governor of Japanese ancestry in 1974. It discusses the significance of Japanese American ethnicity in his three successful gubernatorial campaigns as evident in efforts to capture their vote and in their bloc voting for Ariyoshi. However, as local Japanese continued to rise in political and socioeconomic status, they found themselves charged with dominating and controlling Hawai‘i by groups that had been left behind, particularly Filipino Americans and Native Hawaiians, and with institutional discrimination against those groups in employment and education. The chapter also reviews how sansei, concerned about such accusations and other island issues, approached this situation quite differently from nisei government, business, and community leaders because being local Japanese had very different meanings for sansei.

Chapter 6 addresses how Japanese Americans have maintained their political power since 1986, when Ariyoshi left the governor’s office, despite their declining proportion of Hawai‘i’s population. It discusses Japanese American political repre sen ta tion in several arenas, including the office of the governor, Hawai‘i’s congressional delegation, and the state legislature where the issue of factional disputes among the ruling Democrats is reviewed. The chapter also considers the nature of “the Japanese vote” and the results of the 2012 elections, especially for local Japanese candidates. In addition, it discusses the significance of ethnicity in electoral politics, particularly in voting by different ethnic groups and in campaigning by Japanese American and non- Japanese candidates to attract local Japanese voters. Based on that discussion, I specify the most significant factors that contribute to maintaining Japanese American political power.

Continuing the interpretation of contemporary Japanese American experiences, chapter 7 presents profiles of four yonsei individuals who have served as political activists and cultural advocates, primarily for the benefit of groups other than local Japanese. The yonsei include Kyle Kajihiro, who is a community leader in the demilitarization movement in Hawai‘i; Candace Fujikane, associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, who has researched, published, and taught on behalf of Filipino Americans and Native Hawaiians; Blake Oshiro, who as a state representative authored Hawai‘i’s civil unions bill that became law in 2011, thus giving persons in civil unions the same rights and benefits as married persons; and Norman Kaneshiro, who is a cultural advocate for traditional Okinawan dance, music, and culture in general in Hawai‘i and Okinawa. I contend that in the process of conducting their advocacy and activism work, these individuals have contributed to redefining the meaning of being Japanese American in Hawai‘i.

The concluding chapter discusses the larger significance of Japanese American historical and contemporary experiences in Hawai‘i and of Hawai‘i itself as a multiethnic society in the broader context of the United States as a multiracial nation. Local Japanese also are compared to Asian Americans in general, particularly in relation to the model minority stereotype, which was originally applied to Japanese Americans in the continental United States, and to the more recent representation of Asian Americans as “becoming white” and the “new Jews.” The chapter also compares the political and socioeconomic status of local Japanese in Hawai‘i with that of other racial and ethnic minorities in America.

A Note on Methodology

Since I consider myself a multidisciplinary Asian American studies scholar and was initially trained as a social anthropologist, the research for this book was based on a variety of methods. For the historical chapters 2 and 4, I mostly used secondary sources of information published by other scholars. For chapter 3, I did my own research on the Myles Fukunaga case at the Archives Collection at Hamilton Library at UH Mānoa by reviewing newspaper articles and other documents, such as trial transcripts, related to the case. I also read numerous articles on the Fukunaga case in the Honolulu daily newspapers at the Microfilm Collection at Hamilton Library. I should mention that I cannot read Japanese, so I used the English language section in both the Hawaii Hochi and the Nippu Jiji newspapers for their coverage of the case. Chapter 5 is based mostly on secondary sources, but I did read some newspaper articles that reported on several of the events and issues I discuss. For chapter 6 I used several methods, including reviewing primary sources, such as newspapers, and secondary sources and conducting structured interviews with a number of state legislators and a journalist with Honolulu’s only daily newspaper. Formal interviews were also conducted with the four yonsei activists featured in chapter 7.