Skip to content
Regular price $30.00

Shipping calculated at checkout

Low stock

Please note: While we do our best to insure that cover images are up to date, if you are looking for a specific cover, please send us an email to verify before purchasing.

Becoming Nisei: Japanese American Urban Lives in Prewar Tacoma

Author: Hoffman, Lisa M ; Hanneman, Mary L

Publication Date: 12/31/2020

Format: Paperback

Tacoma's vibrant Nihonmachi of the 1920s and '30s was home to a significant number of first generation Japanese immigrants and their second generation American children, and these families formed tight-knit bonds despite their diverse religious, prefectural, and economic backgrounds. As the city's Nisei grew up attending the secular Japanese Language School, they absorbed the Meiji-era cultural practices and ethics of the previous generation. At the same time, they positioned themselves in new and dynamic ways, including resisting their parents and pursuing lives that diverged from traditional expectations.

Becoming Nisei, based on more than forty interviews, shares stories of growing up in Japanese American Tacoma before the incarceration. Recording these early twentieth-century lives counteracts the structural forgetting and erasure of prewar histories in both Tacoma and many other urban settings after World War II. Lisa Hoffman and Mary Hanneman underscore both the agency of Nisei in these processes as well as their negotiations of prevailing social and power relations.

x