This study, entitled “Negotiated Identities: Japanese Americans of California, 1924-52” utilizes social and cultural historical methodologies to recast the study of immigration, ethnicity and religion within American history. While the existing literature focuses almost wholly upon European peoples, this dissertation examines the Pacific migration of an Asian group and its subsequent community formation in the American West. Unlike many works that explore ethnicity, “Negotiated Identities” gives primacy to Japanese Americans as historical agents -- asking how they, as individuals and as communities, made sense of their lives in the United States. As a work of religious history, the study asks how religion, as an institution and as a system of belief, played a major role in the shaping of Japanese America.

“Negotiated Identities” analyzes the interplay of immigration, ethnicity and religion within Japanese American communities in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Bracketed by two immigration acts affecting Japanese American entry to the United States, the dissertation follows a pre-war (1920s & Depression) wartime (World War II and Japanese American Internment) and postwar (resettlement) sequence. The study focuses on ethnic institutions, immigrant culture and other “internal” factors. At the same time, Japanese Americans were part of their larger context -- influencing and being influenced by their urban settings in California.

Much of the attention will fall on the children of immigrants (Nisei) who embodied and negotiated these internal and external forces —— often blurring the lines between Japanese and American. More specifically, the analysis focuses on Nisei organizations that helped shape generational consciousness in terms of religion, politics, education, and other areas. Among these groups, ethnic churches served as social service agencies, as places of ethnic solidarity and as centers of faith. The Young People’s Christian Conference (YPCC) , for example, promoted programs for Nisei that fostered leadership and that gave meaning to issues of identity.