The Problem of Biculturalism:
Japanese American Identity and
Festival before World War II

Lon Kurashige

On May 23, 1934, Mihiko Shimizu persuaded the leading association of Japanese immigrants in Los Angeles to establish a celebration in honor of their American-born children. Such a Nisei, or second-generation, festival, he asserted, was needed to reenergize the small businesses of Little Tokyo, which no longer enjoyed the rapid growth and prosperity they had in the 1910s and 1920s.1 Shimizu saw the sluggish market for his dry goods as an indication of a long-term trend that would prove more devastating to Japanese retailing than the current depression-era belt tightening. With the immigrant generation (or Issei) getting older and new immigration from Japan prohibited, Little Tokyo soon enough would not be able to rely primarily upon a Japanese-speaking clientele. The growth market was the Nisei. To attract second-generation customers, Shimizu advised Issei shop owners and managers to cut prices, enlarge merchandise displays, and hire clerks who spoke English and could cater to the younger generation's tastes. The challenge of a Nisei festival, he maintained, was to disabuse Japanese American youth of the notion that "American [department] stores" offer "better quality and less expensive goods of the same type found in Japanese stores."2	1
But Shimizu faced a more immediate burden within his own generation. To his chagrin, a rival organization planned a festival in the same quest for Nisei purchasing power. The sponsorship of the much-touted celebration was plunged into controversy. The Nisei group chosen by both sides as their partner in running the festival stayed out of the fray. Yet the neutrality of that group, the Los Angeles Chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League (jacl), expressed its own belligerence. The young jaclers railed against the "factionalism" and "selfishness" of the Issei elders, refusing to participate in an event that compromised their "pure" and "altruistic" attempt to unite and aid the ethnic community.3	2
Such a high-handed response was normally a hazardous proposition in a community where age and claims to deference were so positively correlated. But the jaclers were emboldened in their criticism of the Issei old guard by the specter of anti-Japanese prejudice. Certain "American factions," the ethnic press intimated, had warned the youngsters to keep away from the Issei leadership lest they be "painted with the tar-brush of Japan-ism." Larry Taiji, a columnist and jacler, advised the Nisei organization not to ally itself with "Japanese nationalistic groups" to avoid becoming a "target to the many anti-Japanese groups who are awaiting just such an opportunity" to question the Nisei's loyalty to the United States. Tarnishing the public image of the younger generation also was a serious proposition for the Issei leaders. They had counted on the Nisei's American citizenship as a bulwark against new developments of the antagonism that already prohibited Japanese immigrants from becoming American citizens and owning land in California. Faced with Nisei defiance and the renewed threat of racial hostility, the competing Issei associations had little choice but to settle their differences by handing over the proposed Nisei Week festival to an ostensibly independent jacl. Thus began southern California's preeminent and longest-running Japanese celebration.4	. . .