Japanese American Food: Postwar Cultures and Kitchens: Diversity and Identity

After World War II, and not only because of the experience of internment, family power structure and authority tended to decline—as it has among middle-class families in Japan. Children rarely inherit a family business, and parents instead invest more in schooling than in family training, shifting children’s point of reference outside the home. The issei, themselves poorly educated for the most part, felt the gap acutely: children and grandchildren had a new language and new measures of success. The spread of Japanese families to the eastern United States produced diversity and attenuation of community identity as families moved farther from the hubs of Japanese American ethnicity on the West Coast. Japanese Americans raised on the West Coast feel that they are a completely different breed from East Coast Japanese Americans. In the West, being Japanese American is “just like breathing” while in the East, “you’re always conscious that you’re different!” In the East, Japanese Americans tend to be marked as Asian, and their foodways confused with Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean cuisines.