Japanese Americans and Cultural Continuity : Maintaining Language through Heritage

Traces the history of Japanese language schools in America, focusing on the efforts of the Japanese community in California to maintain its linguistic and cultural heritage during the period from the early 20th century to WWII, and surveying conditions during the war and in the postwar era up to th

Although the United States is a nation of immigrants, few Americans are familiar with the ethnic community mother-tongue schools that nurtured and maintained the immigrants'' language and culture. This book records the history of the schools of Americans of Japanese ancestry, focusing on the efforts of the Japanese community in California to maintain their linguistic and cultural heritage. The main focus of the book is on the period from the early 20th century to World War II, but it also surveys conditions during the war and in the postwar era up to the present. The coverage examines the difficulties experienced by the ancestors of the model minority, from the San Francisco Japanese school-children segregation incident in the early part of this century to private school control laws in the 1920s. The book also surveys the lives of Japanese Americans as college students in Japan in the 1930s, as well as looks at Japanese communities in Hawaii and Brazil.