Nisei in Gotham: The JACD and Japanese Americans in 1940s New York

Abstract

The resettlement and activism of Japanese Americans in New York City during the 1940s represents a notable chapter within the large and complex history of the city's Nikkei (ethnic Japanese) community. Throughout the 20th century, the New York community has been distinctive among those in the United States. Like the larger city itself, New York's Nikkei population has been notable for demographic and occupational diversity, extraordinary cosmopolitanism, and political and artistic effervescence. At the same time, in stark contrast to its Pacific Coast counterparts, the New York community has long been marked by a lack of group cohesion, which the scattered residential pattern and transient nature of many of its members did nothing to reduce.Both these salient community characteristics — political/artistic self-assertion and dispersion — were accentuated with the coming of World War II. The impending conflict between Washington and Tokyo led to the abrupt departure of a large proportion of the city's Nikkei residents back to Japan. However, in the weeks after Pearl Harbor, a new group of anti-Fascist Japanese Americans, largely first generation, assumed community leadership. Their group was subsequently reinforced with the arrival of second-generation intellectuals and artists from the West Coast, who had been incarcerated en masse in camps and elected to resettle in the city afterward. Although the newcomers experienced discrimination and difficulties, they joined with the city's established Japanese population to form a truly cohesive community, with its nucleus the popular activist group Japanese American Committee for Democracy. Yet this group, because of its connections with the Communist Party, demonstrated the limitations as well as the force of Japanese-American political action.