"The main theme of this book is the interplay of Americanization and acculturation of the Japanese in the Hawaiian Islands. By acculturation the author refers to what the Nisei wanted and actually did achieve-their adaptation to American middle-class life" -- Preface.

Cross-cultural studies require sound methodology and psychometrics. This book outlines advances in assessment from many expert perspectives.

Derek Taira argues that during the territorial period many Hawaiians neither subscribed nor succumbed to public schools' aggressive efforts to assimilate and Americanize but instead engaged with American education to envision and support an alternate future.

As a leading dissident in the World War II concentration camps for Japanese Americans, the controversial figure Joseph Yoshisuke Kurihara stands out as an icon of Japanese American resistance. In emotional, often inflammatory speeches, Kurihara attacked the U.S. government for its treatment of innocent citizens and immigrants. Because he articulated what other inmates dared not voice openly, he became a spokesperson for camp inmates. In this astute biography, Kurihara's life provides a window into the history of Japanese Americans during the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Hawai'i to Japanese parents who immigrated to work on the sugar plantations, Kurihara worked throughout his youth and early adult life to make a place for himself as an American: seeking quality education, embracing Christianity, and serving as a soldier in the U.S. Army during World War I. Though he bore the brunt of anti-Japanese hostility in the decades before World War II, he remained adamantly positive about the prospects of his own life in America. The U.S. entry into World War II and the forced removal and incarceration of ethnic Japanese destroyed that perspective and transformed Kurihara. As an inmate at Manzanar in California, Kurihara became one of the leaders of a dissident group within the camp and was implicated in "the Manzanar incident," a serious civil disturbance that erupted on December 6, 1942. In 1945, after three years and seven months of incarceration, he renounced his U.S. citizenship and boarded a ship for Japan, where he had never been before. He never returned to the United States. Kurihara's personal story illuminates the tragedy of the forced removal and incarceration of U.S. citizens among the West Coast Nikkei, even as it dramatizes the heroic resistance to that injustice. Shedding light on the turmoil within the camps as well as the sensitive and formerly unspoken issue of citizenship renunciation among Japanese Americans, In Defense of Justice explores one man's struggles with the complexities of loyalty and resistance.

This book studies the Japanese-American coffee farmers in Kona, Hawaii. Specifically, it sheds light on the role of first and second generation immigrants in the emergence of the Kona coffee agricultural economy, as well as factors that contributed to the creation of the Japanese community in Kona. The people there have survived much turmoil, including harsh treatment on the sugar plantations, economic instability, Pearl Harbor and racial stigma, and ethnic and religious identity crises. Despite these challenges, the pillars of the Japanese coffee community have remained stable.

One of the central tasks of Asian American literature, argues Patricia P. Chu, has been to construct Asian American identities in the face of existing, and often contradictory, ideas about what it means to be an American. Chu examines the model of the Anglo-American bildungsroman and shows how Asian American writers have adapted it to express their troubled and unstable position in the United States. By aligning themselves with U.S. democratic ideals while also questioning the historical realities of exclusion, internment, and discrimination, Asian American authors, contends Chu, do two kinds of ideological work: they claim Americanness for Asian Americans, and they create accounts of Asian ethnicity that deploy their specific cultures and histories to challenge established notions of Americanness. Chu further demonstrates that Asian American male and female writers engage different strategies in the struggle to adapt, reflecting their particular, gender-based relationships to immigration, work, and cultural representation. While offering fresh perspectives on the well-known writings—both fiction and memoir—of Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Bharati Mukherjee, Frank Chin, and David Mura, Assimilating Asians also provides new insight into the work of less recognized but nevertheless important writers like Carlos Bulosan, Edith Eaton, Younghill Kang, Milton Murayama, and John Okada. As she explores this expansive range of texts—published over the course of the last century by authors of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and Indian origin or descent—Chu is able to illuminate her argument by linking it to key historical and cultural events. Assimilating Asians makes an important contribution to the fields of Asian American, American, and women’s studies. Scholars of Asian American literature and culture, as well as of ethnicity and assimilation, will find particular interest and value in this book.

Asian American Women brings together landmark scholarship about Asian American women that has appeared in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies over the last twenty-five years. The essays, written by established and emerging scholars, made a significant impact in the fields of Asian American studies, ethnic studies, women?s studies, American studies, history, and pedagogy. The scholarship is still relevant today?broadening our critical understanding of Asian American women?s resistance to the forces of racism, patriarchy, militarism, cultural imperialism, neocolonialism, and narrow forms of nationalism. The essays in this collection reveal the experiences and struggles of Asian American women within a global political, economic, cultural, and historical context. The essays focus on diverse issues, including unconventional Asian American women of the early 1900s; the life of a Japanese war bride; possibilities for transnational Asian American feminism; the politics of Vietnamese American beauty pageants; mixed race identities and bisexual identities; Filipina healthcare providers; South Asian American representations; and a multiracial exchange on pedagogical interventions. The collection represents the rich diversity of Asian American women?s lives in hope of creating a new transnational space of critical dialogue, strategic resistance, and alliance building.

This intercultural communication text reader brings together the many dimensions of ethnic and cultural identity and shows how they are communicated in everyday life. Introducing and applying key concepts, theories, and approaches--from empirical to ethnographic--a wide variety of essays look at the experiences of African Americans, Asians, Asian Americans, Latino/as, and Native Americans, as well as many cultural groups. The authors also explore issues such as gender, race, class, spirituality, alternative lifestyles, and inter- and intra-ethnic identity. Sites of analysis range from movies and photo albums to beauty salons and Deadhead concerts. Visit our website for sample chapters!

Documents the life histories of Japanese American women who served in WWII.

Culture, Ethnicity and Personal Relationship Processes reviews new theory and research on personal relationships among African, Latina/o and Asian Americans as well as personal relationships among different ethnic groups. The collection focuses on the give and take of affection and respect in personal relationships as influenced by specific cultural values. Using diverse strands of research from psychology, psychiatry, sociology and other disciplines, the contributors take both a retrospective and a prospective look at ethnicity and the reciprocity of affectionate and respectful behavior. Throughout the book, the reader will be challenged to take stock of common misperceptions currently blocking the way to a greater understanding of relational dynamics as a function of ethnicity. Contributors: Raymond Buriel, James Liu, and Diana Rios.