A book talk and signing with Tritia Toyota, author of “Intimate Strangers: Shin Issei Women and Contemporary Japanese American Community, 1980-2020” (Temple University Press), will be held on Sunday, March 3, from 2 to 4 p.m. at West Los Angeles Buddhist Temple, 2003 Corinth Ave. (entrance on La Grange Avenue), West Los Angeles.
At the end of the 20th century, many twenty-something Japanese women migrated to places like Southern California with few skills and an overall lack of human capital. These women, members of the Shin Issei community, sought economic opportunities unavailable to them in their homeland.
In “Intimate Strangers,” Shin Issei women tell stories of precarity, inequality, and continuing marginality, first in Japan, where they were restricted by gendered social structures, and later in the U.S., where their experiences were compounded by issues such as citizenship.
“Intimate Strangers” charts the experiences of Shin Issei lives: their existence in Japan prior to migration, their motivations for moving to the U.S., their settlement, and their growing awareness of their place in American society. Toyota chronicles how these resilient young women became active agents in circumventing social restrictions to fashion new lives of meaning.
The Nikkei community has been transformed by the inclusion of Shin Issei, and Toyota describes the tensions around intergroup negotiations over race, identity, and the possibility of common belonging. “Intimate Strangers” is a perceptive study of migration and community incorporation enacted around cultural differences and processes.
Toyota is a research scholar at the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. She is the author of “Envisioning America: New Chinese Americans and the Politics of Belonging.” She also wrote and produced the documentary “Asian America.” A former broadcast journalist, she is a recipient of the Award for Excellence in Graduate Mentoring and Teaching from the UCLA Asian American Studies Graduate Student Association.
Discussants:
Valerie J. Matsumoto is a professor in the Department of History and the Department of Asian American Studies at UCLA. In addition to her book “City Girls: The Nisei Social World in Los Angeles, 1920-1950,” she is the author of “Farming the Home Place: A Japanese American Community in California, 1919-1982” and co-edited the essay collection “Over the Edge: Remapping the American West.”
She has received the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, the Toshio and Doris Hoshide Distinguished Teaching Award, and the Award for Excellence in Graduate Mentoring and Teaching from the UCLA Asian American Studies Graduate Student Association. In 2017 she was appointed to the George and Sakaye Aratani Chair on the Japanese American Incarceration, Redress, and Community.
Yasuko Takezawa is a visiting professor serving as the Terasaki Chair in U.S.-Japan Relations with UCLA Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies for 2023-2024. She is also a professor at the Intercultural Research Institute, Kansai Gaidai University, and professor emeritus at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, Kyoto University, which she retired from in 2023. She is president of the Japanese Association of Migration Studies, and a member of the Science Council of Japan (SCJ). After her award-winning first book on the transformation of ethnicity among Japanese Americans, which focused on their wartime incarceration and redress, her research interests shifted from ethnicity to race.
Over the past two decades, Takezawa has been leading a series of large international collaborative research projects. She has earned a reputation as the leading scholar in race studies in Japan. Her most recent publication in English is “Race and Migration in the Transpacific,” co-edited with Akio Tanabe (London: Routledge, 2023).
Books will be on sale at the event for signing after the program. Payment by credit card is preferred.
Attendees are encouraged to wear face masks in this season of elevated risk of COVID-19 and other respiratory viruses.
Sponsored by Japanese Institute of Sawtelle, Sawtelle Japantown Association, West Los Angeles Buddhist Temple, West Los Angeles United Methodist Church, UCLA Asian American Studies Center, UCLA Asian American Studies Department and UCLA Nikkei Student Union.
To RSVP, click here.
Venue info: (310) 477-7274, www.wlabt.org