Japanese American Nisei Left

JAPANESE AMERICAN NISEI LEFT. Nisei, the children of immigrants, typically born between 1910 and 1940, can be described as the most assimilationist of any Japanese American generation, indeed of nearly any non-European ethnic-generational group of their era. Their later racialization as model citizens offered a dramatic turn from the public perception of a prewar and wartime enemy. After World War II, Japanese Americans gained unprecedented opportunities for jobs, housing, and citizenship rights. But the shift from “yellow peril” to model citizen rested on shaky grounds, and could crumble at any moment, especially when challenging the racial, political, and economic order. During the Cold War, a time when the nation’s rise to dominance came through a global fight against fascism, many Americans seemed eager to play down anti-Japanese racism. The nation that had recently demonized and incarcerated Japanese Americans all but demanded a transformed view crucial to the struggle against communism in Asia.

The Nisei Left has largely been erased from historical memory. Karl Yoneda, the most renowned prewar Nisei Leftist, was born in Los Angeles in 1906, but lived in Japan as a teenager, where he participated in labor strikes. Back in California in 1926, he soon joined the Los Angeles Japanese Workers Association and the Communist Party. For the next 15 years, he worked intensively as a labor organizer and editor of Rodo Shimpo, a Japanese labor newspaper, and faced multiple arrests and beatings from the Los Angeles “Red Squad.” While the Communist Party suspended its Japanese American members for the duration of the war, Yoneda, like other Communists, showed strong support for the US war effort, including going early to prepare the Manzanar concentration camp and serving in the US Army. After the war, Yoneda worked as a longshoreman and chicken farmer, joined the redress movement and picket lines, and spoke on labor issues.

Numerous other Nisei were active in the prewar Left. In the Popular Front period, Nori Ikeda was introduced to Marxism at UC Berkeley and encouraged her two sisters to join the Young Communist League. Of the sisters, Kazu (Ikeda) Ijiima had the greatest influence on the Asian American Movement as cofounder of the New York–based Asian Americans for Action.

In Hawaiʻi, Nisei were prominent in the leadership and rank-and-file of the labor and Left movements in a US territory viewed as a feudal outpost useful to US militarism and sugar and pineapple production. In 1937, longshore organizing turned into International Longshoreman and Warehouse Workers (ILWU) chapters in Hilo, Honolulu, and Kauaʻi and the local Communist Party strongly focused on labor organizing. Adopting industrial unionism, the ILWU organized agricultural, waterfront, and others laborers into their union. During the largest strike wave in US history, Nisei ILWU organizers like Yasuki Arakaki and Bert Nakano on the Big Island and George Goto (Noboru Furuya) and Ichiro Izuka on Kauaʻi, along with many others, waged militant strikes, notably in sugar in 1946 and longshore in 1949. The most famous ILWU Nisei leader is Jack Kawano, known for his tireless frontline organizing and for testifying before the House Un-American Committee (HUAC) in 1951. While the “Reluctant 39,” including many Nisei, took the fifth at the HUAC hearing in Honolulu in 1950, Kawano and another Nisei former Communist, Ichiro Izuka, were the government’s star witnesses. Their testimony led to the arrests of seven activists in 1951 as part of the nation’s Smith Act sweeps. The Hawaii 7 defendants included four Nisei—Jack Denichi Kimoto, first CP chair; Koji Ariyoshi, editor of the leftwing Honolulu Record; Charles Fujimoto, CP chair; and Eileen Fujimoto, ILWU secretary.

In 1949, the Nisei Progressives formed in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, emerging from Nisei for Wallace committees (NWC) to support the 1948 Progressive Party bid of Henry Wallace for US president. In New York, the NWC produced a brochure supporting platforms on Japanese American issues (“evacuation” claims bill, naturalization rights) and for peace, economic abundance, and racial equality. Many of the NWC activists—including Ernest Iiyama, Kazu (Ikeda) Iijima, Tak Iijima, Nori Ikeda Lafferty, Dyke Miyagawa, Chiye Mori, Kenny Murase, Joe Oyama, and Eddie Shimano—had previously participated in the Oakland Young Democrats, the Young Communist League, or political discussion groups inside the concentration camps. In Chicago, Nisei women Chizu (Kitano) Iiyama and Miyo Uyeno headed the NWC. In Los Angeles, husband-wife team, Sakae and Fumi (Okanishi) Ishimoto, both Communist Party members at the time, founded the NWC, while Art Takei, Sue Kunitomi, Frank Kanno played prominent roles.

The Nisei Progressives was the only Japanese American organization to denounce and organize against the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, despite its provision of Japanese American citizenship rights. Enacting a deep solidarity, they opposed the act based on its provisions that restricted Black West Indian immigration, made immigrant radicals vulnerable to deportation and denaturalization, imposed grossly unequal immigration quotas favoring Western Europe, and promoted anti-Asian racism (with Asians as the only group enumerated by ancestry, not national origins). In Los Angeles, they further partnered with Black tenants to work for fair housing and to oppose the gentrification of Little Tokyo.

When the Asian American Movement emerged in the late 1960s, the next generation of Japanese American activists worked in pan-Asian formations influenced by Black Power and Third World anticolonialism. Through their activism, they came to learn about Nisei radicalism, challenging their views of Nisei political acquiescence. Nisei like Kiyoshi Okamoto, Frank Emi, and more than 300 internees resisted the military draft. Nisei like Paul Kochi had been subject to deportation for their alleged Communist affiliation. They worked with Sue Kunitomi Embrey, a former Nisei Progressive member, in establishing pilgrimages to the Manzanar concentration camp. They worked Yuri Kochiyama, a Nisei associated with Malcolm X and Black revolutionaries in Harlem.

Recovering a history of the Nisei Left challenges the still dominant narrative of Japanese American model minorities, reveals politics rooted in anti-colonialism and anti-racism, and renews an intergenerational legacy of Japanese American radicalism.

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Fujino, Diane C. “Cold War Activism and Japanese American Exceptionalism: Contested Solidarities and Decolonial Alternatives to Freedom.” Pacific Historical Review 87 (2018): 264-304.

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Horne, Gerald. Fighting in Paradise: Labor Unions, Racism, and the Making of Modern Hawai’i. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011.

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