Community Analysis Report No. 6: Nisei Assimilation

min revent Jup 07 WAR RELOCATION AUTHORITY Community Sect Community Analysis Report No. 6 July 21, 1943 TRUMAN ARCHIVES NATIONAL RECORDS LIBRARY NISEI ASSIMILATION U.S. GOVERNMENT I. Are the Nisei Assimilated? The old question as to whether the Oriental peoples are readily assimilable, or are not assimilable at all--has been cropping up here and there lately, and seems largely to have gone unanswered. For this reason, the Community Analysis Section feels obligated to inform WRA staff members of facts bearing on the problem and to point out that so far as Japanese Americans are concerned, they have proven their assimilability by actually becoming as American in their thinking and in their behavior as have other second generation immigrant groups, not ordinarily regarded as "unassimilable". Many people have accepted the "unassimilability" charge without question, having been influenced by a long tradition in American popular thought characterizing the Oriental as "mysterious" or "inscrutable" - and by an un- spoken assumption that a racial difference necessarily indicates deep, psychological differences. Actually, of course, the Issei differ in their mental sets from, say, people born and bred in Maine or Texas; but the differences derive from differences in culture, not from differences in race. Also, it is true, there are psychological differences which set the Nisei off from young people in the same age groups whose families have a long history, covering several generations, in this country. Most of these last differences are also characteristic of second generatinAmericans of other racial stocks. They are derived from the minority group status of Japanese Americans and are comparable to the psychological peculiarities of all second generation immigrant groups whose parents migrated here as young adults, bringing with them the language and many of the customs of their homeland. So it is with such groups as the Italian Americans, Greek Americans, or Spanish Americans, that the Japa- nese Americans with their conflicts of two cultures, exposed to one at home and a second outside the home, must be compared. With them, as with other children of immigrants from foreign lands, the most serious kinds of conflicts with parents have arisen over such issues as the use of the foreign language at home, the degree of freedom and independence which should be al- lowed to young people, the conditions under which marriages should be contracted, the kinds of careers or the sorts of education which ought to be pursued. With them, just as with the other second generation groups, the pull of the majority, American culture has proven far the stronger, with the result that most C-0367-P1 of 8-BU-COS-WP