About fifty thousand second-generation Japanese Americans, or Nisei, moved to the Japanese Empire in the years before World War II to escape anti-Asian racism. Citizens, Immigrants, and the Stateless attempts to both document this migration and explore the way the Nisei encountered and challenged rigid, limited concepts of national membership both in the United States and in Japan. To achieve this, Michael Jin uses a series of case studies to examine aspects of Japanese American diasporic experience and identity, with a particular focus on the 1920s through the 1940s.
The book's first chapter chronicles the anti-Asian movement in the United States, especially California, the most popular destination for Japanese immigrants to the American mainland. Barred from owning land in much of the US West, a number of Japanese immigrants and their American citizen children migrated to Japan or other parts of the Japanese Empire in the 1920s and 1930s; in...
