Mixed Race Studies

“Out of an obscure place”: Japanese War Brides and Cultural Pluralism in the 1950s

differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
Volume 10, Number 3 (1998)
pages 47-81

Caroline Chung Simpson, Associate Professor of English
University of Washington

In the spring of 1954, the American philosopher Horace Kallen was invited to deliver a series of lectures at the University of Pennsylvania reviewing the state of cultural pluralism in American postwar society. The concept of cultural pluralism was Kallen’s own invention, an idea of American society first expressed in his 1915 essay, “Democracy Versus the Melting Pot,” in which he defended America’s growing racial and ethnic diversity-“the federation or commonwealth of nationalities” that seemed to emerge in the wake of early-twentieth-century immigration-as the strength rather than the curse of the nation. Although by 1954 the supposed menace of immigration had long since been checked, most notably by the 1924 Immigration Act that imposed severe restrictions on immigration from Europe and Asia, the diversity Kallen had defended earlier in the century was once more poised to overwhelm the national imagination. As Kallen delivered his lectures that spring, the Supreme Court was hearing the Brown case, the culmination of a stream of compelling legal arguments that contested the notion of “separate but equal” established in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson. Given the anxiety that racial desegregation provoked in many whites, Kallen and the liberal intellectuals attending his lectures understood the need to reassess and restate the case for cultural pluralism.

In the face of tense public and legal debate over desegregation, Kallen reasserted the promise of pluralism in stirring strains that seemed at times to evoke an almost radiant vision of what Americans might yet achieve. His vision depended on the willingness of white Americans in particular to embrace change. As he put it, “the dogma that we cannot change the past is not an understanding of the process of change but a prejudice of our resistance to it and a static illusion symbolizing our fear of it” (“Meanings” 24). The chief effect of his lectures and the published responses to them was to affirm that the coming changes in race relations anticipated by the Brown deliberations would be generative rather than enervating:

It is the variety and range of his participations, which does in fact distinguish a civilized man from an uncivilized man, a man of faith and reason from an unreasoning fanatic, a democrat from a totalitarian, a man of culture from a barbarian. Such a man obviously orchestrates a growing pluralism of associations into the wholeness of his individuality.

In descriptions like this one, Kallen recasts the threat of integration as a deft “orchestration” of differences that would leave the nation “whole” rather than fractured. But while most Americans might have assumed this orchestration would soon occur through increased interactions between blacks and whites, as indeed it did, there were other, less visible avenues by which public voices sought to orchestrate or imagine the successful transition to racial integration in the mid-1950s…

….Such is the case of Japanese Americans in the postwar period, a group often neglected in considerations of American pluralism and postwar integration despite the fact that the meaning and shape of Japanese American identity was caught in a tremendous crisis. The relocation and internment experience was, of course, the most startling evidence of that crisis. But the postwar dilemma of Japanese Americans as citizen-subjects, while often limited to discussions of the internment experience of the West Coast population, in fact incorporates a range of national experiences and histories, including the resettlement program after the war and the impact of the immigration of Japanese war brides on the meaning of Japanese American citizenship.

Japanese war brides were perhaps the most visible representatives of Japanese American life in the postwar period, although they did not always self-identify as Japanese Americans. Still they were often presented as emergent members of a new kind of Japanese American community, which was primarily attractive because the war brides were seen solely as compliant wives and mothers unfettered by the disturbing public history of internment. Settling into domestic life in the 1950s, with little fanfare, as unfamiliar national subjects who had formerly been citizens of an enemy nation, Japanese war brides soon became meaningful figures in the discourse on racial integration and cultural pluralism. As white Americans tried to negotiate the threat of black integration, and government programs tried in vain to resettle interned Japanese Americans, Japanese war brides provided at least one “unofficial or obscure place” out of which the redemption of cultural pluralism, as an ideal that stabilized relations rather than disrupted them, would reemerge as a distinct possibility. In significant ways, the postwar popular media’s changing view of Japanese war brides projects them as an early form of the Asian American model minority. The 1950s transformation of the Japanese war bride from an opportunistic and ignorant alien seeking to penetrate the suburban affluence of white America to the gracious and hard-working middle-class housewife was an early exemplar for achieving the integrated future in America, a halcyon story of domestic bliss and economic mobility difficult to extract from the stories of long-time racialized citizen-subjects…

…But even more troubling for the concept of national identity was the issue of “the Eurasian children of these marriages.” In tow with their mothers, they promised to increase “the Japanese-race population back home” (25). However, the underlying concern of the Post authors is less that the Japanese American race would be replenished by these immigrant women than that their mixed race marriages and their “Eurasian children” would eventually erode the distinctions between the white and Japanese races. “The effect of these mixed marriages on American life at home is still to come,” conclude the authors, who imagine in mythic terms “the arrival of thousands of dark-skinned, dark-eyed brides in Mississippi cotton hamlets and New Jersey factory cities, on Oregon ranches or in Kansas country towns” where “their bright-eyed children soon will be knocking on school doors in most of the forty-eight states” (25). The probability of mixed race families living openly in formerly white or non-Asian areas of the nation not only renders these regions unfamiliar; it also disturbs miscegenation anxieties that are the bedrock of white resistance to racial integration. The interracial marriages of Japanese war brides, then, established the limits of white-Japanese relations, limits that had been checked in the case of resettled Nisei by the idiom of patronage that defined their contacts with whites. Although, as the passage of time revealed, these limits did not necessarily contain the ambivalent feelings often expressed by most of the fifteen Nisei respondents to the 1943 study…

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