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California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: August 2, 2004
Reviewed:
Latest Update: August 2, 2004
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Young Japanese-Americans Honor Ethnic Roots

1. Introduction Why I chose to share this reading.
2. Focus: Main point of this reading.
3. Reading Full identification of source for reading AND excerpt.
4. Concepts: Concepts and Key Words.
5. Discussion Discussion questions.
6. Conceptual Linking to Substantive Courses What this has to do with our class.

* * *

Photo by Monica Almeida/ The New York Times Japanese-American families prepared costumes before a traditional dance at the Obon Festival last month in Culver City, Calif.

Photo by Monica Almeida/ The New York Times
Minoru Nishida, a student at U.C.L.A., practices with a Japanese taiko drum group in a rehearsal studio on the U.C.L.A. campus. They perform in traditional dress at local cultural festivals.

Introduction:

• I wanted to share these readings with you because they reflect our growing concern with who we are and where our roots are, as we become increasingly global. We cannot preserve the old traditions, especially as most of our communities become multi-ethnic. But we can respect and honor our roots.

Focus:

• I would liike you to come away from this reading with a resolve to investigate in greater depth some of your own roots. I am Irish. My grandfather immigrated from Ireland. Yet I know little of my Irish roots. I resolve to delve into some of my Irish past. jeanne

Concepts and Key Words:

• issei: first generation
• nisei: second generation
• sansei: third generation
• yonsei: fourth generation
• gosei: fifth generation

Reading:

Nisei Week in San Francisco, August 2004.

• Young Japanese-Americans Honor Ethnic Roots By Mireya Navarro. New York Times. At p. A1. August 2, 2004. Backup, including highlights.
• History of Nisei Week . . . Backup.

  "Nisei Week became an instrument not only to revive and revitalize Little Tokyo's economic base, but to expose the non-Japanese audience out there to the Nisei's message that the successors to the Issei were a generation of Americans."
  From History of Nisei Week.

Discussion Questions:

1. What did the depression have to do with the celebration of Nisei Week in 1934?

   Consider that the great depression meant that sales were hurt, and the western world knew little of Japanese culture. A Royal court of Queen and Princesses, a parade, AND the hiring of more nisei by the issei seniors was good for business, which desperately needed a boost.

2. Why has it remained so popular?

   Consider that celebrations are colorful and musical and entertaining. And consider that almost every culture today is attempting to preserve its stories, its dances, its music, its language, as the younger generations, Americans all, grow more distant from the "old ways."

Conceptual Linking to Substantive Courses:

• Agencies:
  Sample linking: Ways in which underlying assumptions of assimilation affect services offered and clients' ability to access and use those services. How does this reading illustrate the need for social agencies, for more generalized agencies, for what Bolman and Deal would call "leadership" AND "management"? How does this reading suggest ways in which we could be more effective in rendering help, and what is the reading's relationship to a "safety net" for those who need help?

• Criminal Justice:
  Sample linking: Ways in which some groups are underrepresented in the unstated assumptions of our theories. How does this reading serve to illustrate adversarialism, mutuality, retribution, revenge, illocutionary understanding, the definition and operation of the criminal justice system?

• Law:
  Sample linking: Extent to which laws are made on the assumption that we are all essentially assimilated to the dominant culture. How does this reading help us see the need for contextual readings in law? How does it relate to our natural instincts to seek some kind of natural law? What facts and principles does the reading offer for discourse that could clarify for Others validity claims presented by an Obscure Other?

• Moot Court:
  Sample linking: Ways in which to make validty claims of harm understood by those who have never experienced many of the world's different perspectives. How can this reading enlighten our praxis in terms of different kinds of discourse, like instrumental, illocutionary, governance?

• Women in Poverty:
  Sample linking: The culture of poverty and assimilation. How does the reading deal with our underlying assumptions about poverty, especially poverty of the exploited, the NOT- male? What does the reading suggest of the interrelationship between our society and its children, generally cared for by women, often poor?

• Race, Gender, Class:
  Sample linking: The extent to which silence has been imposed by these affiliations so that domination and discrimination have entered our unstated assumptions in interpersonal relations and the structural context arising from them. What does the reading tell us about exploitation and alternative ways to deal with one another? What does it tell us about institutionalized -isms and our denial of complicity? What does it tell us about our common humanity?

• Religion:
  Sample linking: The spiritual component. Humans are spiritual creatures, creatures that recognize moments that go beyond ourselves to God, Allah, Isis, Gaia, the Universe, or a deep sense of responsibility to create our own meanng. How does the reading fit into our ability, our need to create such meaning in life?

• Love !A:
  Sample linking: What's the aesthetic link in this reading? How does it bring us closer to one another as humans? What does it tell us about our need for love, unconditional love, not rewards for doing well or being well, but caring and acceptance for being who we are?