シズエ・シーゲル

The Japanese American experience has rarely been examined through a Sansei lens. Art by first-generation Issei and second-generation Nisei who were among the 120,000 incarcerated in American concentration camps during World War II has been well-documented, as has the heavily assimilated and media-centric landscape of younger API artists. But the third-generation Sansei have remained a shadow or sandwich generation subsumed between survivor guilt and filial piety on the one hand and kodomo no tame ni (sacrifice for our children) on the other.

The Issei identity was defined by immigration, the Nisei by the mass incarceration. But what does it ...

>> Part 1

Current Japanese American Attitudes

Intermarriage has been a major, and controversial, topic of discussion within the Japanese American community over the years. The Pacific Citizen has consistently afforded a forum for some of this discussion (particularly the Holiday Issue, December 20-27, 1985). As more and more marriages across culture and race occurred, unresolved questions, opinions and prejudices surfaced.

For many years, people who were of mixed race were seen as a loss to the community. Some people went so far as to state that intermarriage was worse than internment as an assault on the JA community. The assumption ...

To be biracial and Japanese American means having many different labels from which to choose. For this historical overview, we will use “Hapa”, a term popularized by the Hapa Issues Forum, to mean people who have an Asian/Asian Pacific Islander parent and a parent of any other race. Our focus here is on those with a Japanese or a Japanese American parent.

There is no single Hapa experience. Over the decades, Hapas have had widely different experiences based on individual circumstance and background, as well as the time period and environment into which they were born. The history of ...