City Girls the Nisei Social World in Los Angeles 1920-1950 (Oxford 2014) Reviews

On December. 7, 1941, the Japanese military attacked Pearl Harbor. The FBI began immediately to round up possible Japanese sympathizers in the United states, and in February FDR ordered the internment of all Japanese Americans in Washington state, Oregon, California and southern Arizona. Over 100,000 Japanese-Americans were transported to assembly points and then interned in 10 large camps, located in remote areas of the West, by the autumn of 1942. The internees were permitted to bring what they could carry, and their homes, businesses, angling boats, cars and country were sold for a pittance, abased or stolen - with few exceptions. No pets were immune.

Nearly a half-century subsequently, in 1988, the U.S. government fabricated a formal apology to survivors of the internment camps and paid each $xx,000. Public acknowledgment of the wrong done to Japanese-Americans unloosed the voices of those who were previously silent, and in the backwash numerous books, articles, films and websites have appeared virtually this shameful episode in American history.

"City Girls" by UCLA professor Valerie J. Matsumoto is an artful academic handling of 2nd-generation (Nisei) Japanese American girls and young women growing upwards in the Los Angeles area who successfully navigated generational, ethnic, racial and gender hurdles in the decades leading to the nadir of internment and the subsequent mail-war recovery.

Matsumoto uses information gleaned from a lively pre-war Japanese-American press to item the lives and aspirations of Nisei girls and women, especially the pivotal role played past clubs sponsored past the YWCA, Camp Fire Girls, Daughter Scouts, Protestant churches and Buddhist temples. These clubs, which numbered in the hundreds by 1941, provided social, educational, recreational and community service opportunities. Japanese-American girls learned leadership skills in clubs that would serve them and their communities well during internment and the firsthand post-war menses of aligning.

Japanese-American students were strongly encouraged past their parents to succeed in Los Angeles public schools, which were non racially or ethically segregated, simply girls and young women often were expected to work at home and in family businesses. The immature men were encouraged to seek post-secondary education, while about of the immature women were expected to work subsequently loftier schoolhouse graduation, marry and have children. Many of the first-generation (Issei) women had been "picture brides" (bundled marriages), and Nisei women felt a lot of pressure level to conform to traditional stereotypes that were said to uphold familial and group reputations.

The clubs (and school groups) gave Nisei women the opportunity to exercise greater social choices than their Issei mothers and aunts by providing a "condom" environs for males and females to meet and mix in the context of order activities that were both peer- and adviser-monitored. Nisei girls likewise had more leisure time than the older generation, and enjoyed dancing, movies, roller skating and all kinds of sports. The clubs frequently went on outings that introduced the Nisei to the globe outside of their neighborhoods and "Li'l Tokio." (Compassion their rural cousins who worked on farms and in the groves, from sunrise until sunset, with few of the social or educational opportunities of the city girls.)

Matsumoto relies on oral histories and interviews equally her other major source of information, peculiarly during the internment years. These were years of hardships and disillusionment, particularly for the older generation. The camps were ringed by barbed-wire fences, and armed guards patrolled the perimeter. The physical environment surrounding the camps was harsh and arid, and in that location was niggling familial privacy within the confines of the camp. The initial housing was composed of tar-paper barracks that were subdivided for families. Meals were served in dining halls, which subverted the traditional family unit meal, and in that location was little to do except become to school or labor for minimal pay.

As the Roosevelt administration began to typhoon Japanese-American young men for war machine service in Europe, Nisei young women began to leave the camps for college, wartime manufacturing plant jobs or domestic service - primarily in the Midwest. Some of the about interesting oral histories of Nisei women are about this period as they left the internment camps and a familiar Japanese-American environment, and moved into the globe where they constitute both acceptance and rejection. (Meanwhile, Nisei men in the war machine compiled an enviable record for service and sacrifice.)

After 1945, the Japanese-American population in the Los Angeles area rapidly rose to the level that it was in 1941. Laws that prohibited intermarriage and permitted restricted housing covenants were overturned by the courts. Returning Japanese-Americans competed with returning GIs and their families for scarce housing. Hostility lingered for some fourth dimension, and so the clubs and groups were reinvigorated to create a nurturing surroundings for the Sansei, or tertiary generation. Nisei women were of import in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and played key roles in the reparations campaign, using the organizational skills and service ethos they learned in the clubs.

The C-Bridge online archives contain a 30-minute interview with Matsumoto, a number of interviews with internment survivors and a WWII-era U.Southward. government propaganda flick about the camps. Densho.org, the website of the Japanese American Legacy Projection, is some other splendid website for internment-era history that includes a brief description of the Army camp Blanding alien detention facility.

Michael Hoffmann is a historian who lives in Duval County.

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Source: https://www.jacksonville.com/story/entertainment/books/2015/03/19/book-review-city-girls-nisei-social-world-los-angeles-1920/15655207007/

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