Japaneseness in Racist Canada: Immigrant imaginaries during the first half of the twentieth century

Abstract

This study explores how Japanese immigrants in Canada understood themselves and conceptualized their community during the first half of the twentieth century. Using vernacular texts in Japanese language, I scrutinize their self-expressions and expand the discourse of Japanese-Canadian history beyond a frame centred upon white racism and exclusionary policies. I start by suggesting the need to relativize normative ideas about the individual to contextualize immigrants' cognitive and discursive practices. Next, I outline notions about the self and collective, morality, and language as intricate components of nationhood in Japanese modernity. Then I turn to immigrant texts. Focusing on debates concerning language education of the second generation (Nisei), I examine how constitutive elements of the Japanese nation affected diasporic subjectivity and self-understanding. As I argue, immigrants claimed their space in Canada by asserting Japaneseness and navigated a hostile world by deploying cultural tools of Japanese modernity. Hegemonic epistemology of Western modernity, however, prevents their history from being assessed on its own terms.