Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Becoming Nisei: Japanese American Urban Lives in Prewar Tacoma

Becoming Nisei: Japanese American Urban Lives in Prewar Tacoma

Hoffman, Lisa M.
Hanneman, Mary L.

Paperback

Asian American StudiesRegional: Pacific Northwest

ISBN10: 0295748222
ISBN13: 9780295748221
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: Dec 31 2020
Pages: 312
Weight: 0.88
Height: 0.90 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

A vital account of everyday Nisei life and identity formation in an early twentieth-century community

Tacoma's vibrant Nihonmachi of the 1920s and '30s was home to a significant number of first generation Japanese immigrants and their second generation American children, and these families formed tight-knit bonds despite their diverse religious, prefectural, and economic backgrounds. As the city's Nisei grew up attending the secular Japanese Language School, they absorbed the Meiji-era cultural practices and ethics of the previous generation. At the same time, they positioned themselves in new and dynamic ways, including resisting their parents and pursuing lives that diverged from traditional expectations.

Becoming Nisei, based on more than forty interviews, shares stories of growing up in Japanese American Tacoma before the incarceration. Recording these early twentieth-century lives counteracts the structural forgetting and erasure of prewar histories in both Tacoma and many other urban settings after World War II. Lisa Hoffman and Mary Hanneman underscore both the agency of Nisei in these processes as well as their negotiations of prevailing social and power relations.

Also in

Asian American Studies

View All