Advantage Through Crisis: Multiracial American Japanese in Post-World War II Japan, Okinawa and America 1945--1972

Advantage Through Crisis, is a comparative history of multiracial American-Japanese people who grew up in the U.S., Japan, and Okinawa during the post-World War II period through reversion in 1972. Immediately after the war, many children sired by members of the U.S. military were left behind in the care of their Japanese mothers and the Japanese government. Thousands of these multiracial Japanese-born Americans, neither received citizenship from the Japanese government nor were acknowledged by the U.S. government, and were legally stateless. Many were objects of intense discrimination and physical abuse because their visible American features made them politically marked bodies and a symbol of Japan's defeat. In short, they were Americans left overseas without U.S. governmental support, and often without the support of their biological parents. Many of these individuals lived in orphanages for mixed-race people until adopted by American, Japanese, or European families. At the same time they were left in the care of others, numerous American-Japanese grew up with their biological families in the U.S. and in Japan observing interracial marriages and their mixed families firsthand. Quite a few came to the U.S. on their own as teenagers and adults.;I document the history of American-Japanese people through oral history, and construct my narrative by contextualizing their voices with archival research. This research is the first to look at life course histories of mixed-race American-Japanese, who are in their fifties and sixties, while examining their transnational experience. My approach of oral history in combination with archival research in English and in Japanese provides a complete historical framework of this population. My contribution to the scholarship connects the existing research on war brides, mixed-race families and Critical Mixed Race Studies and expands it to include the voices of multiracial people, including adoptees, from interracial unions. Upon interviewing multiracial people in the U.S. and Japan, I found that despite discrimination based on differences in race, often their multiracial consciousness served to provide them with options, not limitations. This study gives voice, presence, and historical recognition to American-Japanese whose stories, until now, were rarely told from their perspective.