Becoming Nisei: Japanese American Urban Lives in Prewar Tacoma

A vital account of everyday Nisei life and identity formation in an early twentieth-century community

Tacoma’s vibrant Nihonmachi of the 1920s and '30s was home to a significant number of first generation Japanese immigrants and their second generation American children, and these families formed tight-knit bonds despite their diverse religious, prefectural, and economic backgrounds. As the city’s Nisei grew up attending the secular Japanese Language School, they absorbed the Meiji-era cultu...