This study examines how orthodox narratives of Japanese American experience in popular and academic discourse have contributed to the skewed way in which the membership of Japanese America has been defined and its boundaries cemented since the 1910s. That process entails glorification and demonization of certain types of Japanese Americans as well as exclusion of other individuals from the race history. Based on the accumulated effects of such discursive contrivances, the established notions of community, identity, history, and indeed race in contemporary Japanese America have affirmed and even encouraged the marginalization of anomalous historical agents—like Kibei—while rendering others—like postwar immigrants—as perpetual co-ethnic foreigners.