Japanese American Ethnicity

As members of one of the oldest groups of Asian Americans in the United States, most Japanese Americans are culturally assimilated into mainstream American society. However, they continue to be racialized as culturally "Japanese" foreigners in a multicultural America in which racial minorities are expected to remain ethnically distinct. In Japanese American Ethnicity, Takeyuki Tsuda explores the contemporary ethnic experiences of Japanese Americans from the second to the fourth generations and the extent to which they remain connected to their ancestral cultural heritage. Tsuda argues that the ethnicity of immigrant-descent minorities does not simply follow a linear trajectory in which cultural assimilation increasingly erodes the significant of ethnic heritage and identity over the generations. Instead each new generation of Japanese Americans has negotiated its own ethnic positionality in different ways. Drawing on extensive fieldwork with Japanese American in San Diego and Phoenix, Tsuda also place Japanese Americans is transnational and diasporic context, and analyzes the performance of ethnic heritage through the examples of taiko drumming ensembles. He shows that young Japanese Americans today are reviving their cultural heritage and embracing its salience in their daily lives more than the previous generations have done.