Book Talk: Shin Issei Women and Contemporary Japanese American Community

Intimate Strangers: Shin Issei Women and Contemporary Japanese American Community, 1980–2020

Book Talk and Signing by Author Tritia Toyota

At the end of the twentieth century, many twenty-something Japanese women migrated to places like Southern California with few skills and an overall lack of human capital. These women, members of the shin Issei community, sought economic opportunities unavailable to them in their homeland.

In Intimate Strangers, shin Issei women tell stories of precarity, inequality, and continuing marginality, first in Japan, where they were restricted by gendered social structures, and later in the United States, where their experiences were compounded by issues such as citizenship.

Intimate Strangers charts the experiences of shin Issei lives: their existence in Japan prior to migration, their motivations for moving to the United States, their settlement, and their growing awareness of their place in American society. Toyota chronicles how these resilient young women became active agents in circumventing social restrictions to fashion new lives of meaning. The Nikkei community (Americans of Japanese ancestry who were born in the United States) has been transformed by the inclusion of shin Issei, and Toyota describes the tensions around intergroup negotiations over race, identity, and the possibility of common belonging.

Intimate Strangers is a perceptive study of migration and community incorporation enacted around cultural differences and processes.

Speaker:

Tritia Toyota is a Research Scholar at the Asian American Studies Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Envisioning America: New Chinese Americans and the Politics of Belonging. She also wrote and produced the documentary Asian America. She is the receipient of the Award for Excellence in Graduate Mentoring and Teaching from the UCLA Asian American Studies Graduate Student Association

Discussants:

Valerie J. Matsumoto is a professor in the Department of History and the Department of Asian American Studies at UCLA. In addition to her book City Girls: The Nisei Social World in Los Angeles, 1920-1950, she is the author of Farming the Home Place: A Japanese American Community in California, 1919-1982 and co-edited the essay collection Over the Edge: Remapping the American West. She has received the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, the Toshio and Doris Hoshide Distinguished Teaching Award, and the Award for Excellence in Graduate Mentoring and Teaching from the UCLA Asian American Studies Graduate Student Association. In 2017 she was appointed to the George and Sakaye Aratani Chair on the Japanese American Incarceration, Redress, and Community.

Yasuko Takezawa is a Visiting Professor serving as the Terasaki Chair in U.S.-Japan Relations with UCLA Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies for 2023-2024. She is also a Professor at the Intercultural Research Institute, Kansai Gaidai University, and Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, Kyoto University, which she retired from in 2023. She is president of the Japanese Association of Migration Studies, and a member of the Science Council of Japan (SCJ). After her award-winning first book on the transformation of ethnicity among Japanese Americans which focused on their war-time incarceration and redress, her research interests shifted from ethnicity to race. Over the past two decades, Professor Takezawa has been leading a series of large international collaborative research projects. She has earned a reputation as the leading scholar in race studies in Japan. Professor Takezawa’s most recent publication in English is Race and Migration in the Transpacific (co-edited with Akio Tanabe), London: Routledge, 2023;

Books will be on sale at event, limited numbers of book available for sale at special event price of $20. Prefer payment by cash $20 or by credit card - Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover. Book signing by author after program is ended.

This event will be subject to Los Angeles County Public Health Department COVID-19 health advisory and UCLA’s COVID-19 health and safety protocols. Attendees are encouraged to wear face masks in this season of elevated risk of COVID-19 and other respiratory viruses.

Sponsored by

Japanese Institute of Sawtelle

Sawtelle Japantown Association

West Los Angeles Buddhist Temple

West Los Angeles United Methodist Church

University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Asian American Studies Center & Department

University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Nikkei Student Union