Review by Choice Review
Azuma's book represents an ambitious approach to Japanese American history that provocatively challenges long-held assumptions about the Japanese American and immigrant past. Examining the transnational ideas, practices, and politics of Japanese Americans as they "tried ... to present themselves as quintessential Americans," Azuma (Univ. of Pennsylvania) studies Japanese immigration between 1885 and 1941. He examines Japanese discourse on the differences between emigration and national expansion, then traces how the transnational ethnic community attempted to construct an identity within the complicated borderland of US expansionism and Japanese imperialism. Azuma's narrative draws on a wide range of sources in both English and Japanese to challenge one-dimensional assumptions while recovering a forgotten part of the Japanese American past. His transnational perspective also covers a number of important but often neglected topics, including the migration of Japanese Americans to foreign lands, the construction of public memory in the US, and the Nisei experience in Japan. In pursuing this transnational perspective, Azuma argues that the oversimplified post-WW II image of "the superpatriotic Japanese American was accompanied by the forgetting and distorting of a transnational past." ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. A. W. Austin College Misericordia
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
