Publish and Flourish is an annual event that celebrates the accomplishments of our staff and faculty who have published monographs within the past year. The UW Tacoma Library purchases all staff and faculty publications to make them available to our campus community. This year’s event is being hosted online through our blog.
This week we are highlighting:
Becoming Nisei
Authors: Lisa M. Hoffman, Ph.D., and Mary L. Hanneman, Ph.D.
Departments: Urban Studies (Lisa) and School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences: Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs (Mary)
“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.”
“Becoming Nisei provides more much-needed proof of the importance of Japanese and Japanese Americans in the United States. It places their past solidly in all of our memories—not just theirs—and gives us a window into who they are today.”
– Northwest Asian Weekly
“This rich and detailed resource adds new dimensions to our state’s and our city’s understanding of Japanese American history. Thanks to the work of Hoffman and Hanneman, we will continue to learn from these Nisei for decades to come.”
– Tamiko Nimura, HistoryLink.org historian
“An innovative and revealing book. The authors use the history of the Tacoma Japanese school to offer a more well-rounded perspective on the prewar Nisei experience.”
– Greg Robinson, author of After Camp: Portraits in Midcentury Japanese American Life and Politics
“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.