Model Students, Model Citizens: Narratives of Japanese American Students, 1930s–1940s

The origin of the model minority myth of Asian Americans is frequently traced to World War II and the war hero narrative of the all-Japanese 442nd Infantry Regiment. The dominance of this narrative privileges the experiences of Japanese American men over women while also obscuring the role of educational institutions in the development of the model minority myth. In this paper, we draw from a unique dataset of college applications of Japanese American and White women from the 1930s and 1940s to explore how they constructed themselves as college material. Our results show that when crafting their college applications, Japanese Americans, and others acting upon what seemed to be in their best interest at the time, relied heavily upon a model citizen narrative. As a result, the image of Japanese Americans as upstanding citizens went hand in hand with a college education, paving the way for the high-achieving, model minority image.