On October 13, 1955, Pan American World Airways stunned the commercial aviation industry by ordering the largest fleet of jet aircraft in the world, officially ushering in the Jet Age. In that same year, the airline embarked on a new personnel program, hiring Japanese American women to serve its Tokyo-bound and famed round-the-world flights. Although the airline claimed to hire these women to speak Japanese, in order to compete with Japan Air Lines which began international air travel in 1954, Yano’s analysis shows that beyond language, the women added the look of the exotic Asian woman. With Honolulu as their base, these women were informally dubbed Pan Am’s “Nisei” (second-generation Japanese American) stewardesses, even if not all of them were second-generation or Japanese American. Rather, by calling these women “Nisei,” Pan Am drew upon the cultural capital of Nisei war veterans and their minority patriotism. These women were among the first non-white stewardesses in Pan Am and other airlines’ employ. However this breaking of the racial barrier came not as a matter of civil rights, but as carefully drawn corporate strategy to expand Pan Am’s global domination utilizing some of the drawing power of the Asian woman.

This talk analyzes Pan Am’s “Nisei” stewardess project from its inception in 1955 to 1972, when the women themselves instigated the end of their closed-base status in order to gain more employee rights. This study situates Pan Am’s “Nisei” stewardesses within an era of postwar American empire tied to newfound mobilities symbolized particularly by jets and Asian American women. Through interviews with the women and archival research, Yano juxtaposes Pan Am’s ambitions with individual aspirations and experiences. Yano argues that both share mutually constitutive “airborne dreams,” embedded within the nascent cosmopolitanisms of this frontier era known as the Jet Age.

Pan Am’s “Nisei” stewardesses provide an important lens upon a particular period in American history filled with the complexities of assimilationist rhetoric and racialized hiring. Becoming corporate persons in a prestigious American company at the forefront of a global industry – in particular for Japanese Americans only ten years following the end of World War II – called upon assimilation within the gendered domain of “model minority” femininity and professionalism.

Airborne Dreams is available to purchase from the Museum Store >>

How to Be An American Housewife crosses continents, cultures, decades, and generations to tell the story of a Japanese woman who marries an American soldier at the end of World War II, her thorny relationship with her American daughter, and the trip to contemporary Japan that changes both of their lives in dramatic and unexpected ways.
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Wingshooters, set in the 1970s, is about racial bigotry in Deerhorn, Wisconsin—a small town that is entirely white until the arrival of nine-year-old Michelle, the daughter of a Japanese mother and a white American father, moves in with her grandparents. Revoyr’s new novel examines the effects of change on a small, isolated town, the strengths and limits of community, and the sometimes conflicting loyalties of family and justice.
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Interviews with the authors on DiscoverNikkei.org:

How to Be an American Housewife—An Interview with Margaret Dilloway

From Crenshaw to Deerhorn: An Interview with Nina Revoyr

SPECIAL NOTE: Sunday is the LA Marathon, so here is a link to the Street Closures /.

Come hear Olympic gold medalist Kristi Yamaguchi read from her newest book, It’s a Big World, Little Pig! In this squeal to her best-selling debut book, Poppy, the adorable, persistent, dreaming-big pig, has a new adventure in store for her—the World Games ice-skating championship in Paris! She will be signing the book after the program.

Few baseball fans know about the Japanese American Nisei Leagues, or of their most influential figure, Kenichi Zenimura (1900-1968). A talented player who excelled at all nine positions, Zenimura was also a respected manager and would become the Japanese American community's baseball ambassador. He worked tirelessly to promote the game at home and abroad, leading goodwill trips to Asia, helping to negotiate tours of Japan by Negro League All-Stars and Babe Ruth, and establishing a 32-team league behind the barbed wire of Arizona's Gila River Internment Camp during World War II. This first biography of the "Father of Japanese-American Baseball" delivers a thorough and fascinating account of Zenimura's life.

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Join a remarkable panel of novelists featuring New York Times bestselling author Jamie Ford (Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet), Kristina McMorris (Bridge of Scarlet Leaves), Margaret Dilloway (How to Be an American Housewife), and Paula Yoo (Good Enough). Topics will include the influence of Asian American history on today’s literature, weaving true and personal accounts into fiction, and cultural education through storytelling.

Prisons and Patriots provides a detailed account of 41 Nisei who were imprisoned for resisting the draft during WWII. Lyon parallels their courage as resisters with that of the late civil rights hero Gordon Hirabayashi.

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FREE!
This critically acclaimed World War II novel tells the story of Maddie Kern, an aspiring violinist who secretly elopes with her Japanese American boyfriend—the night before Pearl Harbor is bombed. When her beloved Lane is interned at a relocation camp, Maddie dares to remain at his side. Behind barbed wire, tension simmers and the line between patriot and traitor blurs. As Maddie strives for the hard-won acceptance of her new family, Lane enlists in the Military Intelligence Service to prove his allegiance to America, no matter the cost.

The first biography of Asian American activist and Black Panther Party member Richard Aoki

An iconic figure of the Asian American Movement, Richard Aoki (1938-2009) was also, as the most prominent non-black member of the Black Panther Party, a key architect of Afro-Asian solidarity in the 1960s and 70s. His life story exposes the personal side of political activism as it illuminates the history of ethnic nationalism and radical internationalism in America.

A reflection of this interconnection, Samurai among Panthers weaves together two narratives: Aoki’s dramatic first-person story and an interpretive history by a leading scholar of the Asian American Movement, Diane C. Fujino. Aoki’s candid account of himself takes us from his early years in Japanese American internment camps to his political education on the streets of Oakland to his emergence in the Black Panther Party. As his story unfolds, we see how his parents’ separation inside the camps and his father’s illegal activities shaped the development of Aoki’s politics. Fujino situates his life within the context of twentieth-century history—World War II, the Cold War, and the protests of the 1960s. She demonstrates how activism is both an accidental and an intentional endeavor, as well as how a militant activist practice can also promote participatory democracy and social service.

The result of these parallel voices and analysis in Samurai among Panthers is a complex—and sometimes contradictory—portrait of a singular extraordinary activist and an expansion and deepening of our understanding of the history he lived.

Diane C. Fujino is associate professor and chair of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her books about leading Asian American activists Yuri Kochiyama (Heartbeat of Struggle) and Fred Ho (Wicked Theory, Naked Practice) are published by the University of Minnesota Press.