Urban Japanese, Rural American: How Regionality Shaped Nisei Girlhood in Prewar America

This thesis explores Nisei girls' racial and cultural identity formation in the American West before their forced removal to the World War II Japanese American mass incarceration camps. Japanese American history has long been dominated by male narratives, from labor histories of the 1880's first-generation Issei to the American patriotism of the 1930's second-generation Nisei. Japanese American women are generally considered through generational categories, promulgating a linear story of American progress. I argue that regionality is the main factor that shaped Nisei girls' self-identity, employing transcribed interviews with Nisei women born 1924-1929 as primary sources to write narrative histories differentiated by regionality. I demonstrate how ethnic Japanese urban enclaves fostered more identification with a Japanese identity than rural areas with less Japanese presence. Finally, I contend that World War II definitively ended their contrasting girlhoods and portended a wartime coming-of-age marked by a universal, external Japanese racialization, regardless of regionality. Contrasting the prewar girlhood experiences of Nisei women along regional lines reveals diverse identities in an assumed homogeneous group. Growing up before World War II, Nisei girls navigated the borderland of the American West between American expansionism and Japanese Imperialism in a racially and gender-subjugated position. Nisei girls articulated distinct racial and cultural identities relative to their regionality. This paper serves as a prologue to future scholarship on this cohort who would come of age behind the barbed wire in wartime incarceration camps. It also contributes to prewar Japanese American history with a novel framework emphasizing gender, generation, and regionality.