This book is at once a cultural history of Japanese American kinship and a contribution to the study of the contemporary kinship system of the United States. It brings to the analysis of American kinship a theoretical perspective that attends to the historically situated, symbolic processes through which people interpret and thereby transform their kinship relations. By examining kinship change among Japanese Americans, I elucidate a particular case of a general process I take as having been central to the development of contemporary American kinship. For, while Japanese Americans have a unique and rich cultural heritage and a distinctive and troubled social history, the process of kinship change they have undergone since the turn of the century has been shared by many other Americans. I begin with the premise that kinship relations are structured by symbolic relations and serve symbolic functions as well as social ones. It follows from this that kinship change involves symbolic processes, and that a study of it must attend to the manner in which relations among symbols, meanings, and actions have shaped relations among people. My second premise is that we can comprehend the system of symbols and meanings structuring people's kinship relations in the present only if we know their kinship relations in the past. If symbolic systems help people answer the questions and cope with the problems of meaning they confront in their everyday lives, symbolic analysis can only be enriched by a knowledge of the social history that has given rise to these questions and problems. Conversely, we can comprehend that social history only if we comprehend the system of symbols and meanings through which people interpret and thereby transform the past. In this study I treat the oral kinship autobiographies I elicited from first- and second-generation Japanese Americans in Seattle, Washington, both as cultural tales and as accounts with a good degree of historical veracity. Because people's recollections of the past are reasonably accurate and do not obliterate facts so much as reinterpret them, they can be mined to reconstruct a social history of events and actions. At the same time they can be used, along with what people say about the present, as material for a symbolic analysis. Unlike most Japanese Americans, and most of those who have studied them, I do not uncritically assume a timeless past of "Japanese tradition" in which stem-family households were endlessly reproduced by people who obeyed the "rules of the Japanese family system." Instead, on the one hand, I reconstruct kinship relations in Japan from immigrants' accounts of their kinship biographies and, on the other, regard the Japanese past and the American present that figure so centrally in these accounts as complex symbols whose meanings must be explicated. The analytic strategy I have formulated for this study is one I think can be usefully applied to groups besides Japanese Americans and other ethnic groups whose conceptions of their particular cultural traditions and experiences as immigrants are similarly prominent in their discourse on kinship relations. It can help us better understand the social and symbolic processes shaping kinship even among those sectors of our society whose ethnicity has been made invisible by hegemonic processes that cast a particular cultural system as a generalized American one. For whether they view themselves as having an ethnic past that is Polish, Italian, African, English, or, in the case of "just plain American," one supposedly unmarked by ethnicity, all these folk commonly speak of a "traditional" past in opposition to the "modern" present. Like Japanese Americans, they too construct tradition by reconceptualizing the past in relation to the meaning of their actions in the present, thereby transforming past and present in a dialectic of interpretation.

This postmodern feminist study explores changes in Japanese American women's perspectives on child rearing, education, and ethnicity across three generations-Nisei (second), Sansei (third), and Yonsei (fourth). Shifts in socio-political and cultural milieu have influenced the construction of racial and ethnic identities; Nisei women survived internment before relocating to the midwest, Sansei women grew up in white suburban communities, while Yonsei women grew up in a culture increasingly attuned toward multiculturalism. In contrast to the historical focus on Japanese American communities in California and Hawaii, this study explores the transformation of ethnic culture in the midwest. Midwestern Japanese American women found themselves removed from large ethnic communities, and the development of their identities and culture provides valuable insight into the experience of a group of Asian minorities in the heartland. The book explores central issues in studies of Japanese culture, the Japanese sense of self, and the Japanese family, including amae (mother-child dependency relationship), gambare (perseverance), and gaman (endurance).

Literature Review from the year 2003 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: B, San Francisco State University (Ethnic Studies), course: AAS 833 Asian American Family and Identity, language: English, abstract: In her book Transforming the Past: Tradition and Kinship Among Japanese Americans, Sylvia Junko Yanagisako argues that Japanese American kinship is the outcome of a process of negotiation between Issei and Nisei, between the past and the present, between Japanese and American culture. The Nisei use the same words and concepts as their Issei parents to evaluate the real world, they attribute, however, a different meaning to these words and concepts. In order to make sense of their world, they interpret the mass culture they are exposed to on the basis of their own folk history. Like any other work, Transforming the Past has both strengths and weaknesses, some of them more important than others. In this essay, I want to point out those strengths and weaknesses that I believe to be most important. As far as the structure is concerned, Transforming the Past is a quite well organized book. It looks at the three aspects of marriage, filial relations, and siblinghood and kinship in a very organized way, namely by first describing the Issei views, followed by the opinion of the Nisei.

Discusses the history, culture, and religion of the Japanese Americans, their problems and their place in American society.

An interdisciplinary look at the dramatic changes in the contemporary Japanese family, including both empirical data and analyses of popular culture.

Although the United States is a nation of immigrants, few Americans are familiar with the ethnic community mother-tongue schools that nurtured and maintained the immigrants' language and culture. This book records the history of the schools of Americans of Japanese ancestry, focusing on the efforts of the Japanese community in California to maintain their linguistic and cultural heritage. The main focus of the book is on the period from the early 20th century to World War II, but it also surveys conditions during the war and in the postwar era up to the present. The coverage examines the difficulties experienced by the ancestors of the model minority, from the San Francisco Japanese school-children segregation incident in the early part of this century to private school control laws in the 1920s. The book also surveys the lives of Japanese Americans as college students in Japan in the 1930s, as well as looks at Japanese communities in Hawaii and Brazil.