Japanese Americans

http://www.jacl.org/about/about.htm

http://www.jacl.org/about/JACL_Survey.pdf

            The Japanese American Citizens League is the oldest and largest Asian American civil rights organisation in the United States, having been founded in 1929. Their current aims are to uphold the civil rights of those of Japanese ancestry, preserve their culture heritage and fight against any discrimination or social injustice against them or other minority groups. There are several factors to be found amongst the information given by the organisation that suggest reasons why Americans of Japanese ancestry feel that it is important to be able to identify themselves by their ethnic background rather than simply claiming to be “American”. For example, whilst they admit that an increase in multi-ethnic and multi-racial Japanese-Americans provides evidence of the assimilation of such people into the American mainstream, they also claim that these people more often than not continue to belong to Japanese-American communities and organizations such as the JACL, suggesting that their cultural heritage is still a very important feature of their identity. This is backed up by data that shows that people of the third generation (sansei) and fourth generation (yonsei) make up the majority of the JACL members, which shows that assimilation is as yet far from complete.

            The statistics provided also show that nearly a third of all Japanese Americans of the fourth generation still continue to marry other Japanese Americans. This confirms how a significant proportion prefer to identify themselves as belonging to a particular ethnic group which goes beyond a simple, generic American identity. In addition, the claim that Japanese Americans are only second to African Americans in feeling aggrieved about their treatment in the United States, something which the JACL believe is strongly linked to the experience of the internment camps, is also provided as evidence as to why Japanese Americans perceive their identity as important and why they still continue to maintain strong bonds within their ethnic community. They obviously believe that those who come from the same background, with the same historical experience and culture, are easier to understand and form key relationships with.

             In conclusion, we can see that to Japanese Americans their ancestry clearly plays an important role in constructing their identity. This is not all that surprising given the size of the United States and the multitude of different ethnicities that live within the country. ‘American’ identity is a contemporary thing, it means being an American citizen today. But people also have an important historical identity, and in the case of Japanese Americans this means having been at one time treated as enemies of the country in which they now live.