Loving Luxury: The Cultural Economy of the Japanese American Home, 1920

In the early 20th century, immigrant Japanese communities experienced heavy anti-immigrant sentiment through land laws, housing disenfranchisement, and exclusion. This dissertation examines how immigrant Japanese communities in Los Angeles cultivated respectable middle-class lifestyles in order to gain national inclusion. Utilizing Survey of Race Relations interviews, newspapers, papers of community organizations, and early 20th century social science research, this dissertation reveals how Japanese Americans responded to anti-immigrant sentiment by creating and building a material culture of American luxury in the home. Out of a growing consumer-driven market economy that greatly appealed to white middle-class standards of living, a new value system emerged within the Japanese American home. This dissertation introduces the new value system as a cultural economy, where practices around the home, individual manners, and family-oriented lifestyles became cultural measurements for national inclusion and exclusion as well as social prestige and hierarchy. Japanese Americans grew a profound commitment to middle-class respectability through newly gendered associations to labor as well as meaningful accumulation of economic success measurable in the stuff of homes.