What Makes our Society Accepting: Exploring Japanese Immigration Cases in Monterey and San José
Channel: SJSUCollegeHA
Date: 19/04/2022

After the WWII, the Monterey people welcomed the Japanese Americans’ return from the internment camps, with a newspaper advertisement titled “Democratic Way of Life for all” signed by more than 400 local people. Similarly, Secretary Norman Mineta, who became the Mayor of San Jose, as the first Japanese American Mayor of a major city, in 1971, witnesses that San Jose’s anti-Japanese sentiment was not as bad as other cities, and that the SJSU president and some faculty members at that time supported them, according to his biography book “Enemy Child”(2019). This is also evidenced by the fact that Santa Clara County accepted about twice as many pre-war Japanese American population right after WWII (Lukes and Okihiro 1985:123).

Since 2020 Fall to date, Dr. Yasue Yanai's students have been researching why Monterey people welcomed the Japanese Americans after WWII from various perspectives such as geographical conditions, history, demography, economical competition, cross-cultural collaborations, segregation of their residential areas etc. By interviewing the local people and historians and by reading Lyndon(1997), Yamada (2009), Thomas(2011) and the online articles, in JPN102B (SJSU studies area V) “Local and Minority Cultures of Japan”, to learn the key factors that contribute to the creation of an accepting society, like the Monterey case. In coming 2021 Fall and 2022 Spring, the course will focus on our hometown San José and the role of our San Jose State University at that time through the analysis of our local newspaper San Jose Mercury, JACL Newsletter, Spartan Daily and the local Japanese Americans life story interviews collected in Japanese American Museum San José as well as some additional interviews of the local people, while reading Lukes and Okihiro (1985) and Warren (2019) .  

In this symposium, we report what we found from our research on San José in comparison with those of Monterey and discuss how we can make our society more accepting with the panelists, Prof. Gary Okihiro of Yale University the author of “Japanese Legacy: Farming and Community Life in California Santa Clara County”(1985), Mr. Tim Thomas, the Monterey local historian and the author of “The Japanese on the Monterey Peninsula”(2011), Prof. Steven Doi, the scholar of Japanese American Museum of San Jose, and Prof. Ma, Assistant Professor of Psychology, SJSU. 

Resources:
*H&A in Action: https://www.sjsu.edu/ha-in-action/index.php
*Other H&A in Action Events: https://www.sjsu.edu/ha-in-action/engage/current-events/index.php
*World Languages & Literatures @ SJSU: https://www.sjsu.edu/wll/
*Dr. Yasue Yanai: https://www.sjsu.edu/people/yasue.yanai/

Sponsored by the Artistic Excellence Programming Grant, College of Humanities & the Arts, SJSU