Women's Studies Colloquium

"Japanese Eyes, American Heart": Politics of Race, Nation, and Masculinity in Japanese American veterans' WWII Narratives

By Mire Koikari (Women’s Studies, UHM) Oct 31 12:30pm-1:30pm Saunders 244

Abstract: This essay examines Japanese American veterans' narratives of WWII as a dynamic discursive site where heterogeneous and contradictory understandings of masculinity, military service, and national allegiance are articulated in the transnational Asia-Pacific context. While American loyalty and patriotism stand out as dominant themes in their narratives, the veterans' retelling of wartime military service by no means provides a uniform picture of heroic masculinity and patriotic nationalism. Having suffered from race- and gender-based dislocation as colored immigrants, Japanese American veterans’ narratives necessarily include moments of ambiguity, contradiction, and disruption and reveal the particularly complex nature of minority assertion for national belonging as they were caught between two imperial powers, i.e., the US and Japan. By examining diverse and often contestatory voices of one group of veterans, i.e., Japanese and Okinawan Americans from Hawai‘i who served in the Military Intelligence Service to fight against Japan in the Pacific Theater, this essay illuminates how minority men’s retelling of military service contradicts and disturbs the dominant understandings of gender, race, sexuality, nation and empire.

Mire Koikari is Associate Professor and Director of Women’s Studies at University of Hawai’i at Manoa. She is the author of the book, Pedagogy of Democracy: Feminism and the Cold War in the U.S. Occupation of Japan published from Temple University Press.

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