By Lisa Hoffman and Mary Hanneman
Becoming Nisei
University of Washington Press, 2020
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.
Author
Lisa Hoffman
Lisa M. Hoffman is professor of urban studies at the University of Washington, Tacoma and author of Patriotic Professionalism in Urban China: Fostering Talent and coeditor of Spaces of Danger: Culture and Power in the Everyday.
Author
Mary Hanneman
Mary L. Hanneman is associate professor of Asian studies and history at the University of Washington, Tacoma, and author of Japan Faces the World, 1925-1952 and Hasegawa Nyozekan and Liberalism in Modern Japan.
Other Resources
Tadaima! Video
A conversation between the authors of Becoming Nisei and Gregory Tanbara, descendant of Tacoma Nihongo Gakko (Japanese Language School) students. Produced by Japanese American Memorial Pilgrimages, 2021,
Review, Northwest Asian Weekly
“The interviews provide a warm character to the authors’ dedicated research, and the many other sources cited help complete the picture of an important part of all of our history.“
Book talk, Tacoma Historical Society
Communications Manager Kim Davenport of Tacoma Historical Society interviews the authors about Becoming Nisei.
