To talk about "political style" is to acknowledge a dynamic and somewhat improvisational approach to politics; it is to acknowledge the need to work within the limits presented by tradition, resources, and social context. To speak of "political style" in relation to a particular ethnic group is to recognize their agency in shaping their history.In Nisei/Sansei: Shifting Japanese American Identities and Politics, Jere Takahashi challenges studies that describe the Japanese American community's essentially linear process toward assimilation into U.S. society. As he develops a complex and nuanced account of Japanese American life, he shows that a diversity of opinion and debate about effective political strategy characterized each generation of Japanese Americans. As he investigates the ways in which each generation attempted to advance its interests and concerns, he uncovers the struggles over key issues and introduces the community activists whose voices have been muffled by assimilation narratives.Takahashi's approach to political style includes the ways that Japanese Americans mustered and managed political resources, but also encompasses their on-going efforts at self-definition. His focus, then, is on personal and social action; on individual activists, power, and ideological shifts within the community, and generational change. In telling the story of the community's complex and dynamic relationship to the larger society, he highlights individuals who contributed to the struggles and debates that paved the way for the emergence of a distinct Japanese American identity. Author note: Jere Takahashi teaches Asian American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

In these buoyant and inventive stories, Karen Tei Yamashita transfers classic tales across boundaries and questions what an inheritance—familial, cultural, emotional, artistic—really means. In a California of the sixties and seventies, characters examine the contents of deceased relatives' freezers, tape-record high school locker-room chatter, or collect a community's gossip while cleaning the teeth of its inhabitants. Mr. Darcy is the captain of the football team, Mansfield Park materializes in a suburb of L.A., bake sales replace ballroom dances, and station wagons, not horse-drawn carriages, are the preferred mode of transit. The stories of traversing class, race, and gender leap into our modern world with and humor.

Since 1855, nearly half a million Japanese immigrants have settled in the United States, and today more than twice that number claim Japanese ancestry. While these immigrants worked hard, established networks, and repeatedly distinguished themselves as entrepreneurs, they also encountered harsh discrimination. Nowhere was this more evident than on the West Coast during World War II, when virtually the entire population of Japanese Americans was forced into internment camps solely on the basis of ethnicity.

At the age of 6, I discovered a jar of brightly colored shells under my grandmother's kitchen sink. When I inquired where they had come from, she did not answer. Instead, she told me in broken English, "Ask your mother. " My mother's response to the same question was, "Oh, I made them in camp. " "Was it fun?" I asked enthusiastically. "Not really," she replied. Her answer puzzled me. The shells were beautiful, and camp, as far as I knew, was a fun place where children roasted marshmallows and sang songs around the fire. Yet my mother's reaction did not seem happy. I was perplexed by this brief exchange, but I also sensed I should not ask more questions. As time went by, "camp" remained a vague, cryptic reference to some time in the past, the past of my parents, their friends, my grand parents, and my relatives. We never directly discussed it. It was not until high school that I began to understand the significance of the word, that camp referred to a World War II American concentration camp, not a summer camp. Much later I learned that the silence surrounding discus sions about this traumatic period of my parents' lives was a phenomenon characteristic not only of my family but also of most other Japanese American families after the war.

Despite many social injustices, Japanese Americans are one of the most socioeconomically successful ethnic groups in the United States, having the highest median educational level among both Non-white and white groups, a median income exceeding that of white Americans, and greater likelihood of being employed as professionals than are members of the society as a whole. Given each succeeding generation's increasing rate of assimilation into U.S. society, with its concomitant impact upon ethnic ties and affiliation, the author asks whether or not a distinct Japanese community can be maintained into the fourth generation. This study, which employs a national sample of three generations of Japanese Americans, is the largest of its kind ever undertaken. The volume systematically analyzes the socioeconomic adaptation of the Japanese to U.S. society and develops a sociohistorical model that explains the unfolding of the assimilation process.

Three voices. Three acts of defiance. One mass injustice. The story of camp as you’ve never seen it before. Japanese Americans complied when evicted from their homes in World War II -- but many refused to submit to imprisonment in American concentration camps without a fight. In this groundbreaking graphic novel, meet JIM AKUTSU, the inspiration for John Okada’s No-No Boy, who refuses to be drafted from the camp at Minidoka when classified as a non-citizen, an enemy alien; HIROSHI KASHIWAGI, who resists government pressure to sign a loyalty oath at Tule Lake, but yields to family pressure to renounce his U.S. citizenship; and MITSUYE ENDO, a reluctant recruit to a lawsuit contesting her imprisonment, who refuses a chance to leave the camp at Topaz so that her case could reach the U.S. Supreme Court. Based upon painstaking research, We Hereby Refuse presents an original vision of America’s past with disturbing links to the American present.