In 1930s Los Angeles, Natsuye Fujimoto, a second-generation Japanese American teenager, compiled a booklet she entitled “Recipes (Japanese).” Carefully documenting the food her family enjoyed and considered Japanese, she included dishes ranging from “Nasu-Ni (Sautéed Eggplant)” and traditional New Year’s “Ozoni” soup, to “Shrimp Salad” and “Baked Flat Fish” with “Pesha Meru” (béchamel) sauce.1 The notation “Serves 5”—the number in the Fujimoto family—on many of the recipes suggests that these dishes constituted part of the family’s regular diet. Fujimoto’s “Shrimp Salad” with pineapple and cucumber shows how Japanese immigrant families adapted the idea of the Western salad, dressing theirs with Japanese sweet wine, vinegar, ginger, and mustard. Her “Baked Flat Fish” recipe called not for baking the fish in an oven, with which many Japanese immigrants were unfamiliar, but frying it on a stove; and the “Pesha Meru” sauce served over the fish contained the butter, flour, and egg yolks of a classic French sauce. The recipe for “Chinese Steamed Castella” hinted at even earlier histories, referencing both a Chinese cooking technique and the “Castella” cake linked with the influence of Portuguese traders in Japan. The Fujimoto family’s culinary practices offer glimpses of the process by which women have transmitted, adopted, and combined elements of Japanese American culture.
The food prepared by nisei (U.S.-born second-generation) women in the pre-World War II period reflects their efforts not only to sustain family and ethnic community but also to cross social and cultural boundaries. In chapter 19 of this book, Delores Phillips draws attention to such crossings in the 1999 cookbook Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian, which she examines as an endeavor to “transform space in ways that resist the customary boundaries of nation and culture.” Second-generation Japanese Americans grew up in an era of exclusion, when boundaries between racial groups in the U.S. West were defined by restrictive housing covenants, alien land laws, laws against interracial marriage, and discrimination in the workplace and recreation. If Jaffrey’s cookbook “imagines the eater as a global citizen,” the nisei’s culinary activities in the 1920s and 1930s reaffirm their sense of themselves as American citizens with deep attachments to ethnic cultural practices.
In the context of race relations before World War II, the second generation’s preparation and consumption of Western dishes can be read as a sign of interest in new flavors and a way of claiming and demonstrating their Americanness. Their tastes also showed the influence of regional demographics and interactions with other minority groups in Southern California. At the same time, nisei women continued to prepare the traditional holiday food and experiment with familiar Japanese dishes. Drawing on both the ethnic press and oral history, I examine in this chapter young Japanese American women’s engagement with foodways, at home and in their clubs, with a focus on prewar Los Angeles.2 Given women’s primary culinary responsibilities, they played a creative role in shaping both the mundane and festive elements associated with ethnic culture.
Natsuye Fujimoto and her family were part of the growing Japanese American population on the West Coast in the early twentieth century. By the 1890s, the growing stream of Japanese laborers immigrating to Hawai‘i and the continental United States reflected elite dreams of Japanese colonial expansionism as well as the pragmatism of displaced farmers seeking economic opportunities and avoiding military service by going abroad.3 Although white nativists who had clamored for the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 now began to press for restrictions on Japanese immigration, Japan’s political clout as a rising world power at the turn of the century delayed these measures. The 1908 Gentlemen’s Agreement between Japan and the United States halted the influx of Japanese laborers, but a loophole permitted the entrance of the wives and family members of earlier residents. Their arrival before the 1924 Immigration Act steadily narrowed the gap in the sex ratio in the immigrant community. Indeed, due in part to the legal loophole facilitating family reunification and growth, the nisei became the biggest prewar group of second-generation Asian Americans. By 1910, Los Angeles County boasted the largest concentration of issei (first-generation immigrants) and nisei, numbering 8,641 in the continental United States, and by 1930, this number had increased to 35,000, half of whom were U.S.-born nisei. The emergence of the second generation hastened the development of family-centered communities. Ethnic newspapers like the Rafu Shimpo and Kashu Mainichi in Los Angeles vied for nisei readers by offering English-language sections edited by fellow nisei. In Southern California, most issei and nisei engaged in agriculture, fishing, and gardening and operated small businesses, such as the restaurants owned by Natsuye Fujimoto’s father.4
Like many other Asian Americans and other people of color in the U.S. West, Japanese Americans faced formidable obstacles in all areas during the 1920s and 1930s. A battery of laws hampered their economic pursuits, marital choice, and political involvement, and residential segregation limited where they could live. Sometimes they were denied service in, or faced limited access to, restaurants, theaters, swimming pools, and other public facilities.
Over the past decade, research by historians like Eiichiro Azuma has shown how issei and nisei leaders tried to maneuver, despite the sometimes crushing intersection of U.S. and Japanese imperial movements.5 Azuma asserts that “the Issei’s concepts of the ‘Pacific era’ and their children as a ‘bridge of understanding’ between the United States and Japan glamorized a future role for the nisei beyond the borders of the American nation.”6 The racial barriers they faced in the United States made this concept particularly appealing, although as David Yoo points out, “Very few of the second generation could have served as true bridges, since they lacked adequate knowledge of Japanese language, history, and culture.”7 Still, mindfulness of their parents’ and their own vulnerability spurred the nisei’s efforts to promote “Pacific understanding” and harmonious interracial relations. The occasional newspaper reports of Japanese food prepared by nisei youth clubs for white women’s organizations and local “international festivals” exemplify small steps toward the acceptance the Japanese Americans hoped to gain from the dominant society. They also echo the part that issei and nisei envisioned the second generation’s playing in facilitating amity between Japan and the United States. In their using ethnic food as a diplomatic gesture of goodwill, women were expected to serve as ambassadors.
During this era of exclusion, both issei and nisei formed their own organizations for peer support, fostering camaraderie and gaining access to material resources through gendered and generational networks. Nisei youth clubs were widespread in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco. By the eve of World War II, the Rafu Shimpo’s estimates of the number of nisei youth organizations in Southern California ranged from four hundred to six hundred, with young women raising the number.8 Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) and church-sponsored clubs were particularly numerous, as club membership offered girls a place of acceptance and understanding, as well as a vehicle through which to gain parental approval for social and recreational activities.
Japanese American women’s culinary work and creativity were important to their families and communities, shaping one of the most cherished markers of ethnicity. According to Susan Kalčik, “Foodways can be charged with emotion and significance for both old and new Americans because food is potentially a symbol of ethnic identity.”9 Providing food was also one of the ways in which women helped build and sustain their social networks. In accordance with Western and Asian gender roles, girls and women prepared most of the food, which constituted a major arena of unpaid female labor and a vital element of Japanese American gatherings. As prewar ethnic newspapers documented, food was important to the nisei world, whether prepared for a family holiday or a group fund-raising event. No report in the 1920s of an outing, meeting, wedding, or club social would be complete without a reference to the “good eats” that were enjoyed.
The role of food in the urban nisei’s social world offers a lens through which to explore what Vicki Ruiz terms “cultural coalescence,” the process by which immigrants and their children select, maintain, adapt, and create cultural forms, drawing from as many influences as societal circumstances permit.10 Their choices—and the broader evolution of American foodways—show both an attachment to the familiar and the appeal of novelty. Donna Gabaccia views this “tension between people’s love of the familiar and the pleasure they find in desiring, creating, and experiencing something new” as a key to identity and culture.11 Nisei women’s efforts both to maintain ethnic cultural practices and to experiment with other cultural influences are particularly evident in their foodways.
As they engaged in cultural coalescence in everyday life, urban nisei women pondered the impact of the “modern girl,” the younger, style-conscious, consumerist avatar of the “new woman” who had emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In China, Japan, Europe, Australia, South Africa, and the United States, social critics in the 1920s voiced alarm at what they viewed as the modern girl’s preoccupation with fashion, cosmetics, romance, dancing, and dating. In Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo, immigrants and older nisei likewise expressed concern about the second generation’s idealization of modernity as epitomized by American popular culture. Even though young women’s flapper fashions and makeup drew censure, other aspects of Western culture were smoothly integrated into the Japanese American community. As a Rafu Shimpo headline announced in 1936, “Western Dish Predominant Nisei Palate.”12 Clearly, culinary activities may have offered nisei girls a parentally approved avenue by which to claim modern femininity and Americanness.
Indeed, culinary experimentation also interested issei women like the mother of Mary Nishi Ishizuka, who excelled at both Japanese and Western cooking—she made mouth-watering tsukemono (pickles) and sukiyaki, as well as corn chowder. Ishizuka remembered fondly the “bottles and bottles of root beer that she made for us.”13 As did the Filipina women about whom Dawn Mabalon writes in chapter 7, many Japanese women shared their culinary knowledge with their friends. Urban issei women also became acquainted with new dishes through their jobs as domestic workers in white households and from neighbors. For example, Setsuko Matsunaga Nishi recalled that her mother learned from an African American neighbor how to bake deep-dish apple pie. Issei Taka Honda attended adult classes in English and cooking at the Nora Sterry School in west Los Angeles, where she learned how to prepare a Thanksgiving dinner. “And she learned how to make pumpkin pie,” her daughter Rose recounted, as well as banana nut bread and cookies—“we had peanut butter cookies coming out of our ears.”14 Many issei women kept up with the latest Japanese recipes through women’s magazines like Shufu no tomo, and those with English-language skills consulted American guides such as The Joy of Cooking.
Both nisei daughters and their issei mothers were eager to improve their culinary skills, as reflected by the popularity of cooking classes in the Japanese American community. The classes offered by the Japanese YWCA in Los Angeles included not only sewing and Japanese literature but also “Japanese and western style culinary art.”15 Other groups also sponsored classes. For example, the Midori Kai, an “uptown ladies club,” advertised lessons in baking and making puddings as well as Japanese dishes.16 Girls’ organizations also sometimes offered cooking lessons. In 1928 the young nisei women members of the Blue Triangle Club, affiliated with the YWCA, favored culinary training over handicrafts and etiquette.17
These cooking classes were often explicitly aimed at preparing women for their anticipated roles as wives and mothers, thereby reinforcing traditional gender roles. In 1927 the Rafu Shimpo joked about culinary skills as a means of attracting male romantic interest: “Well, anyway the way to the men’s hearts are through their stomachs.”18 With domestic harmony in mind, the Midori Kai proclaimed the household art of cooking to be a necessity for every wife and mother; wives were invited to attend their classes so that “their husbands will always want to eat at home.”19 The Rafu Shimpo similarly encouraged women to take the Japanese YWCA’s Japanese cooking classes, saying, “Girls, here’s one way you can make your husbands happy. They may be tired of ham and eggs every morning.”20 A decade later, a forum of college nisei men and women in Northern California reported that men believed that cooking skills were essential for women and that most college women students were either majoring in home economics or taking cooking classes. All present agreed that “we shall want both American and Japanese cooking in our homes.”21
These examples make it clear that from the 1920s, Japanese Americans were interested in not only Japanese but also Western dishes. As the “ham and eggs” remark suggests, some aspects of European American cuisine may have quickly found a place in urban Japanese American homes. Other ethnic cuisines were appealing as well, especially Chinese and Chinese American food. For instance, in 1927 the Japanese YWCA hired a chef to teach women how to prepare chop suey.22 The Blue Triangles, whose ambitions matched their adventurous palates, decided in 1928 to learn how to cook the “favorite dishes of all the countries.”23
Nisei women also tried the recipes offered by the Rafu Shimpo newspaper. In a time when few ethnic cookbooks were written in English, the Japanese American newspapers in Los Angeles and San Francisco constituted an important resource for second-generation women who wished to prepare Japanese dishes, and clearly many of them did. In 1936 the Rafu Shimpo reported in a special supplement, “In many of the American homes of Japanese descent, we find that a large part of the food habits handed down by the elders are being perpetuated,” adding optimistically that “Japanese meals will continue to be served … long after the first generation will have passed on.”24 To further this aim, and perhaps in response to its readers’ interest, in 1940 the Rafu Shimpo offered a pamphlet of “15 popular” reprinted Japanese recipes for the price of ten cents.25
Indeed, the Japanese American test of a “good housewife” was the preparation of boiled rice, the staple of the Japanese diet. Nisei daughters—and second-generation Chinese American women like Jade Snow Wong—faced a rigorous judgment of their domestic skills, to which the cooking of rice was critical.26 Acknowledging this, the Rafu Shimpo helpfully imparted the “secret” of making good boiled rice. Drawing on this mainstay of the Japanese household, readers also found tips on how “left-over rice may add variety” to the menu, making return appearances in dishes such as stuffed bell peppers.27 These recipes also reflected Depression-era strategies for making more expensive ingredients go further by stretching them with less costly starches.
By the mid-1930s, nisei women appear to have been most interested in three areas of cuisine: “Japanese,” “American,” and “Chinese.” In this, they both reflected and bucked the larger trend of the homogenization of the national diet stemming from the growth of giant food companies, technologies of preservation and distribution, and a flood of culinary advice dispensed via radio, cookbooks, and newspapers.28 Harvey Levenstein notes that “the center of gravity of American cookery”29 shifted from New England to the Midwest at this time—a shift that may have been hastened in California by the influx of midwestern migrants in the early twentieth century. To the nisei, “American” food seemed to mean the kind of meat-and-potatoes fare popular among transplanted midwesterners. In 1936 the Rafu Shimpo focused a special supplement on these three categories, taking pains to distinguish between “Real Tempura” and “Occidental Fritters” and to explain how “Original Sukiyaki” differed from the “U.S. Variety.”30 This may indicate the nisei’s interest in preserving cultural practices and flavors and also the introduction of certain Japanese dishes—like sukiyaki—to the perhaps more adventurous West Coast. As the newspaper blithely predicted, “It won’t be long before the American people will come to adopt Japanese dishes in their homes.”31 This optimistic pronouncement accompanied the photo of apparently European American “college girls learning the technique of handling chopsticks at a restaurant in Tokyo.”32 The image and caption suggest that at least some Japanese Americans perceived cultural adaptation as more than a one-way process. Hopes for the future appreciation of Japanese cuisine by mainstream America may have been linked with hopes for the increased social acceptance of Japanese Americans.
Japanese American experiences with racial barriers as well as cultural trends in the larger society both reinforced the appeal of Chinese food to the nisei. In the early twentieth century, Chinese food, particularly chop suey, gained enormous popularity in urban America, embraced as a sign of cosmopolitanism by customers who were unaware that their favorite dishes were unknown in China and had been developed by creative immigrant entrepreneurs adapting to local tastes.33 The issei and nisei joined a diverse clientele who enjoyed chow mein and egg foo yung. For Japanese Americans, Chinese restaurants were important as sites where they could be sure of a welcome, as denial of service at white-owned restaurants deterred many issei and nisei from entering them. As nisei Katsumi Kunitsugu pointed out, “You go into just any old restaurant, and sometimes the waitresses wouldn’t serve you. They don’t tell you to get out, they just never came around to take your order.”34 In Los Angeles, Chinese eateries such as San Kwo Low, Far East, and Manshu Low offered tasty, affordable food and often served as the setting for Japanese American wedding receptions and organizational banquets.
Hopeful that food might serve as a cultural bridge, the Rafu Shimpo presented a vision of the nisei kitchen that highlighted technological advancements in tandem with the continuation of “traditional Japanese dishes.”35 For nisei women and housewives across the country, commercially prepared canned foods were a convenience and bore a prized stamp of modernity. To the prewar nisei, modernity was often linked with Western culture. In the ethnic press, recipes for foods such as “Magic Mayonnaise” and “Parisian Dressing” frequently called for commercially processed ingredients. In this spirit, the Rafu Shimpo writer’s description of the well-stocked kitchen included “a colorful assortment of packaged and canned foods, quite a number of which were unmistakably Japanese.” Chilling in the refrigerator were “containers of fruit juices and tomato juice” while “packages of quick-frozen meats and vegetables” from the market waited in the freezer section. In the lean years of the Great Depression, this rosy image reflected more aspiration than reality, projecting women’s culinary creativity as an instrument for social transformation. Nonetheless, the writer had high hopes that “nisei housewives” might improve Japanese cuisine by adapting “scientific American features” and thus “blaze the path to a new Pacific understanding through the food that will be served in the homes of America and Japan.”36
Women’s culinary experimentation and improvisation stimulated the development of hybrid forms that became part of Japanese American cuisine. A recipe for pakkai (sweet-and-sour spareribs),37 reflected this hybridization. Among the ingredients were katakuriko (Japanese starch made from dogtooth violets), shoyu (soy sauce), green chilis (an element of regional Mexican American cuisine), and a can of pineapple, hinting at the labor migration routes of Chinese and Japanese from Hawai‘i to the continental United States. In the process of cultural coalescence, Japanese immigrants and their children drew on a rich array of culinary traditions in the multicultural landscape of the U.S. West.
Cities, especially, offered the nisei opportunities to try new dishes. Fumiko Fukuyama Ide recalled how for the first time, as a junior high school student, she bought a dish of macaroni and cheese at the cafeteria: “I loved it! I never knew such things existed.” On the way home after studying at the downtown central library while she was attending Belmont High School, she and her friends would stop at Thrifty Drugstore for cherry cokes and ice-cream sodas. A special treat was a jaunt to the Pig ‘N Whistle—“THE dessert place to go to”—which introduced her to delights such as mocha chocolate cake and carrot cake.38
The city nisei’s taste for a variety of foods can be found in journalist Larry Tajiri’s paean to his favorite snacks, which included nabeyaki udon with homemade noodles at a café in Little Tokyo; tacos and a cup of champorrado (Mexican hot chocolate) on Olvera Street in the Mexican section nearby; hamburgers and onions from a drive-in; and a bowl of clam chowder at a waterfront restaurant.39 A variety of cultural influences and the integration of Japanese and U.S. holidays can be seen in the array of recipes in the Kashu Mainichi as well. In the spring of 1938, for example, home cooks could find instructions for a Lenten pineapple-strawberry salad, sake no miso shiru (miso soup with salmon), a Ukrainian Easter dessert, kashiwa mochi (a sweetened rice confection) for Japanese Boys’ Day, Mother’s Day angel food cake, and a German potato salad to serve fifty.40
City families living in or near an ethnic enclave were more likely to have access to—and to be able to afford—a range of Asian and Western ingredients. Natsuye Gwen Fujimoto’s family recipes called for a wide array of Japanese vegetables, seaweed, herbs, and nuts, such as warabi (bracken), wakame (seaweed), renkon (lotus root), and ginnan (gingko nuts), reflecting the size and vibrancy of the southern California ethnic communities. The Rafu Shimpo’s recipes were geared to Japanese American kitchens stocked with both Western and Asian supplies and to cooks who wished to broaden their culinary repertoire. In its “Hints for Housewives,” women were taught how to prevent mildew in soy sauce containers and how to keep nori (dried seaweed) and senbei (Japanese crackers) crisp, as well as how to preserve the aroma of coffee or tea and how to determine the safety of eating oysters.41
In the early 1940s, the Rafu Shimpo’s recipe section—by then a regular feature—affirmed nisei women’s continuing interest in both Japanese cultural practices and culinary diversity. The array of dishes covered mirrored the various influences and synthesis in the nisei’s lives. For instance, a discussion of tsukemono (Japanese pickles), without which a “Japanese meal is never complete,” might share the page with recipes for cream sponge cake and baked lemon pudding.42 The nisei were also encouraged to try “‘Good neighbor’ dishes from south of the border,” such as “Enchilada Luncheon Pie” and “Mexican Chicken,” although they were so heavily adapted to the mainstream U.S. (and possibly Japanese American) palate that it is questionable whether a Mexican cook would recognize their origin.43 Reflecting the urban nisei girls’ involvement in clubs, the newspaper offered “sure fire” and “can’t miss” cookie recipes for “your next club tea”44 or for the club cookie sales that had become “quite the fad these days.”45
The preparation and consumption of food became a bonding experience for nisei girls, particularly as part of their club activities, which thrived in West Coast cities like Los Angeles. Together, they experimented with making foods unfamiliar to their parents, like seafoam candy and fudge, and they cemented ties of gender and generation at club teas and “progressive dinners” during which each course would be served at a different club member’s home. They often utilized their culinary skills on behalf of their organizations, holding box-lunch socials and cookie sales to raise money for club activities and social service projects.
Joint activities among nisei girls’ and boys’ clubs sometimes reinforced traditional gender roles, as young women were usually expected to provide “the eats.” When the Blue Triangle girls’ club and the UCLA Bruin Club (mostly male at that time) went on a hike on Mount Baldy in 1928, the two clubs promised that “the girls will furnish all the provisions from sandwiches to ‘nigiri-meshi’ [Japanese rice balls] and the boys will have enough to eat. … There will be no danger of starvation.”46 While this arrangement may have been based on the young women’s having initiated the hike, it was common for girls to supply the food for such gatherings. When a combined Christian Endeavor group from Union Church drove to Eagle Rock for an outdoor meeting, the girls brought the provisions. With tongue in cheek, a reporter described a sumptuous feast: “The ‘light’ refreshments which the girls fixed up consisted of ten spring chickens, chipped beef on toast, asparagus with mayonnaise, roasted venison, barbecue, etc. Everybody was so hungry that the food disappeared quickly.”47 Girls’ clubs were even sometimes asked to prepare and serve the food for boys’ club events, as in the case of the YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) Hi-Y Club’s “Father-Son Banquet.” The Rafu Shimpo declared, “The success of the party was due to the splendid way in which the Girl Reserves from M.E. and Union Church cooked and served the dinner.”48 Paying fifty cents per plate, the guests consumed “gambelorious quantities of nutritious filaments.”49 Two years later, the girls’ clubs proved to be a great help to the Oxy Hi-Y boys in “all their banquets, entertainments, and many other ways.” The young men found “that it was hard to do many things without the help of the fairer sex.”50
The boys’ clubs, however, also occasionally reciprocated, treating the girls’ organizations to festivities in appreciation of their help. When a Rafu Shimpo reporter asked rhetorically, “Did the Girl Reserves and the Hi-Y Boys enjoy the social party that was given by the boys in honor of the Girl Reserves and [their adviser] Mrs. Leech?” the answer was, “Hope to kiss the flea they did!” This social, attended by forty nisei, began “with the game of Domestic Science,” and adhering to the prevailing gender conventions, the reporter commented, “It is remarkable how many of the kitchen utensils the boys knew.”51 Still, not surprisingly, a girl proved to have greater culinary familiarity: “Celia had the most names and she received a prize which she shared with a boy.” After playing various games, “the merrymakers went to another room, and there partook of heavy refreshments.” While this reference indicates that the food was more substantial than punch and cookies, it also suggests the gendering of the food and the association of “heavy refreshments” with males.52
Box-lunch socials, popular in the late 1920s, also reveal the nisei clubs’ reinforcement of conventional gender roles, as well as their cultural adaptation, and combined opportunities for flirtation and fund-raising. This practice, probably brought to California by white migrants from the Midwest, showcased and commodified young women’s domestic skills. Young men purchased both the food and the company of the maker. In 1926, in order to raise money to install showers (for the boys) at the Japanese M.E. Church gym, the Epworth League youth held a box-lunch social. “All girls who plan to attend,” the Rafu Shimpo reminded, “are earnestly asked to bring box lunches. These will be auctioned, so make something enough for two.”53 The reporter underscored the assumed differences in male and female appetites: “Remember, even if you are a light-eater, boys always have a big appetite.”54 In 1931, the All Around Girl Reserves held a highly successful Valentine box lunch social, raising more than sixty dollars to send delegates to the annual Girl Reserves summer conference. The Valentine social ended with “each boy dancing with the fair maker of his lunch.”55 Such events allowed nisei girls to push the boundaries of coed socializing in the immigrant community, display their culinary ability, and raise funds for group endeavors. In addition to strengthening bonds among their nisei peers, young women used their cooking skills to foster friendly interracial relations.
Not only did they provide many of the “good eats” for Japanese American organizations, these young women sometimes introduced Japanese food to groups outside the community.56 In the 1930s, for example, when sukiyaki became a trendy dish in Southern California, nisei girls prepared it for their own birthday parties and gatherings and were also called on to cook and serve it for interethnic college organizations and European American society events. In 1931, when a white Girl Reserves group requested “a real Japanese dinner,” their nisei Girl Reserve hosts decided to serve sukiyaki, with soup and salad.57 While the nature of the “salad”—sunomono (salad dressed with vinegar) or Waldorf?—remains ambiguous, the inclusion of this wording suggests the influence of Western notions about how meals should be organized and offers a glimpse into the process of cultural coalescence. This occasion also exemplifies how nisei girls served as representatives of the ethnic community, using food as a cultural bridge.
From the mid-1920s to World War II, ethnic holiday food was very important to Japanese Americans, urban and rural. As Micaela di Leonardo found in her study of Italian Americans in California, the planning and presentation of festive dishes and other rituals are female responsibilities, part of the women’s work of maintaining kinship ties.58 In chapter 7 of this book, Dawn Mabalon describes how even in the difficult years of the Great Depression, Filipino American women provided an array of delicacies for the birthdays and other celebrations that drew families together. Chinese American women also cooked special holiday foods that signified wishes for health, wealth, and longevity. Issei and nisei women, too, played a crucial role in preparing the symbolic dishes central to the celebration of family, community, and shared ethnicity.
Rice cakes, a central New Year’s food, required elaborate, often communal, preparation, which is called mochi tsuki. Rose Honda remembered that relatives and friends would gather a few days before New Year’s for the festive occasion. Her mother would soak and steam sweet glutinous rice, which would then be dumped into a large concrete mortar. The men would take turns pounding it rhythmically with wooden mallets, two at a time, while the women would wet the mochi. When it had reached a smooth consistency, the women would remove the rice and quickly shape the hot, sticky mass into small round rice cakes. Everyone who came to help with the mochi tsuki would take some home. After putting part of it aside for their New Year’s soup, Rose’s family would toast the fresh mochi and eat it with soy sauce and sugar or a mixture of kinako (toasted soybean flour) and sugar. “It was so good,” Rose remembered. “And to this day, I just love it.”59
New Year’s Day—Oshōgatsu—was the major holiday for Japanese Americans, whose ways of celebrating varied somewhat depending on the region of Japan they had come from. For most of them, it was imperative to have a fresh start for the New Year, with a clean house and a bath the previous night. Since supposedly no work should be done on New Year’s Day, the women spent hours preparing a variety of symbolic dishes invoking health and good fortune for the year to come. Most Japanese families thus began New Year’s Day with ozōni, a clear soup in which the rice cakes floated, symbolizing prosperity. When people visited their friends to share good wishes for the new year, they enjoyed the ogochisō (feast) prepared by the issei and nisei women of the household, which might include mame (sweetened black beans, a homonym for “health”), kazunoko (fish roe for fertility), kinpira (spicy strips of burdock root), kamaboko (steamed fish cakes), nishime (a cooked vegetable dish), makizushi (rolled sushi), inarizushi (rice in fried sweetened tofu pouches), and yōkan (a sweet bean confection), accompanied by green tea, and, for the adults, saké (rice wine).60
Before World War II, the coverage of ethnic festival food in the newspapers shifted to reflect the changing demographics and the coming of age of the second generation. In the earlier years at holiday time, the Rafu Shimpo ran detailed educational articles, sometimes reprinted from the Japanese press, on the proper presentation and symbolic significance of foods like mochi (rice cakes) and mame (black beans). For example, in 1936, Rafu staff writer Mitsuko Yoshii compared New Year celebrations in Japan and the United States, explaining that the Japanese served foods associated with prosperity, longevity, and good health. “American New Year dinners apparently place emphasis on the appearance of the table” and accoutrements such as shining silverware and expensive candlesticks; by contrast, she said that the Japanese had “deep sentimental definitions embedded in the food itself.”61
As youngsters, the urban second generation enjoyed a mixture of New Year’s observances. As Nellie Nimura wrote in 1931 in a New Year’s greeting to the editor of the Rafu Shimpo, “I’m getting a quite a dose of this Japanese American harmony idea. Danced just about all night of New Year’s Eve a la American style and getting up early the same morning to eat historic ‘o-zoni’ and other antiquated foods.”62 Nimura happily slept through the rest of the day, getting up in time to hear the football game score. Her letter suggests that she lived in her parents’ household as a daughter—perhaps a younger daughter—who was not required to do any of the Oshōgatsu (New Year) work. One might even speculate that Nimura’s breezy attitude toward holiday harmony may have suffered a serious challenge when her turn came to face the tasks of preparing the ozōni and all the “antiquated dishes” she so readily ate.
By the end of the 1930s, the swelling ranks of the nisei had matured and increasing numbers of second-generation women had begun to shoulder the primary responsibilities in their parents’ and their own households. As nisei handled more of the food preparation, the newspapers explained not only the significance of the dishes but also the instructions for making them. At this time, recipes for special New Year’s dishes appeared seasonally in both the Kashu Mainichi and the Rafu Shimpo.63
By this time, obvious tensions were arising between the time-consuming work of producing Oshōgatsu food and the urban nisei’s inclination to celebrate the holiday in more Western fashion. In 1941, a journalist reported,
With each new year, the traditional Japanese-style New Year’s Day with its dishes after dishes of Japanese food becomes more outmoded. The young folks don’t see much sense in wasting the precious New Year’s Eve hours in working over a hot stove for foods they’d just as soon do without, while the issei parents are beginning to agree with them.64
Nevertheless, traditional recipes were reprinted for the benefit of nisei whose parents “feel that New Year’s wouldn’t be New Year’s without kazunoko, omochi and the rest.”65 Of course, many of the second generation did enjoy eating ozōni, nishime, sushi, and yōkan. But given the amount of work involved in preparing these foods, the desire to please the issei and a sense of filial duty clearly became major factors in nisei women’s decisions about how to celebrate the New Year. Japanese American cultural practices, cherished and challenged, then faced severe testing during World War II.
Japanese American family and community life on the West Coast was shattered by the forced uprooting and incarceration during the war. Both issei and nisei struggled to adjust to the crude communal facilities in desolate regions of the country. Nisei artist Miné Okubo’s drawings of the barracks, latrines, and mess halls and her description of the camp food convey the disruption of prewar family routines and diet. Confined in the Topaz camp in Utah, Okubo observed, “Often a meal consisted of rice, bread, and macaroni, or beans, bread, and spaghetti. At one time we were served liver for several weeks, until we went on strike.”66 Increasingly, many people—especially the youth—began to spend mealtimes with their peers rather than family members. As Heidi Kim explains in chapter 6, mess hall dining became a potent and problematic symbol of the fragmentation of the nuclear family in the camps. Although mess hall dining was only part of the wartime hardships faced by Japanese Americans, it exemplifies their loss of autonomy and the impact of mass exclusion and incarceration on the family structure. After the war, resettlement presented challenges as well.
After the war ended in 1945, Japanese Americans were permitted to return to the West Coast, where they faced lingering racial hostility, residential segregation, and a swelling labor force. Jobs and housing were hard to find, and the issei and nisei scrambled to find wage-paid work. Many men went into gardening, while women entered the garment industry and, if lucky, clerical work. As the Rafu Shimpo showed, the focus of the early postwar years was survival, during which time growing numbers of the second generation—whose median age was seventeen at the outset of war—began to marry and form families.
Postwar nisei households reflected the sexual division of labor that prevailed in mainstream society and the immigrant community. Whether as daughters or wives, Japanese American women were responsible for the bulk of domestic work. One of their key responsibilities was food preparation. In January 1946, soon after the Rafu Shimpo resumed publication, a woman reader suggested including a “cooking recipe column,” saying, “I know lot of nisei girls will be looking forward to something like that.” Mirroring prewar gastronomical preferences, she added, “Try and add variety by printing Chinese, American, and Japanese recipes, whenever possible.”67 Perhaps at her prompting, for about a year the Rafu ran a weekly “Today’s Recipe” column, starting on February 5 with directions for the Chinese dish “Celery Chow Yuk,” followed on February 9 by simple recipes for a Japanese shrimp concoction and “Nasu no Goma-Shoyu,” a minimalist eggplant dish. All the featured dishes were Chinese or Japanese. The short lists of ingredient (two pounds of eggplant were the only ingredient in the “Nasu no Goma-Shoyu” recipe) may reflect the fledgling skills of novice cooks as well as postwar budgets and the need to economize. Although by 1947 recipes no longer appeared in the Rafu, notices of cooking classes did.
Community cooking classes similarly reflected Japanese American tastes and economic pressure. In July 1947, Mrs. Matsuo, a “well-known dietician,” began teaching classes at the International Institute in East Los Angeles for young adults and teenagers interested in Italian, American, and Japanese cuisine.68 Mindful of budgetary concerns and growing families, she demonstrated “new culinary methods of preparing one pound of meat to serve six or eight persons.”69 The American Red Cross (ARC) also offered cooking classes to issei and nisei, with an emphasis on thrift, assuring prospective students, “Careful selections and good cooking can help you win a bout with continued high food prices.”70 Notably, the ARC gently challenged gender divisions in the kitchen by issuing an invitation to “brides, husbands, and experienced homemakers” to attend the classes.71
As Japanese American families returned and communities took root, girls’ club activities resurged in Southern California by the late 1940s. The Atom-ettes, who began as a group of sixth graders attending the West Los Angeles United Methodist Church, are an example. As for the prewar nisei girls’ clubs, service was an important component of the Atomettes’ activities, and they had great impact on church traditions after the war. Rose Honda, one of their two advisers, explained:
They were the ones who started the bazaar. They called it May Bazaar, and … they went out to the strawberry fields, and picked the strawberries, and made strawberry jam, and sold it. They were the ones who started the Easter breakfast. … They did all the cooking, and they must have served 50 or 75, or more people—seven girls.72
As did the nisei girls’ clubs before the war, the Atomettes used culinary skills to raise morale and strengthen community ties.
From the 1920s to the 1950s, second-generation girls and women nourished their communities, preparing the food for a wide variety of private and public events ranging from club socials and church fund-raisers to weddings. They maintained Japanese cultural practices through cooking staples like rice and special symbolic holiday dishes. At the same time, they introduced other cuisines into the ethnic community, adjusting the flavors to suit Japanese American tastes. The girls’ club offerings, the food sections of the ethnic press, and family recipes like those of Natsuye Fujimoto reveal the eclectic influences and delight in experimentation that have expanded Japanese American foodways. Through their multifaceted culinary work, nisei women affirmed ties of ethnic culture and community, claimed modern femininity and Americanness, and demonstrated creativity in cultural adaptation.
1. Natsuye (Gwen) Fujimoto, “Recipes (Japanese),” Hirasaki National Research Center, Japanese American National Museum (JANM). Many thanks to Jane Nakasako and the other JANM staff and docents who assisted with this research.
2. By foodways, I mean the ideas and practices associated with food.
3. Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 23–31.
4. Fujimoto’s father’s restaurants—the Park Restaurant and the New Star Restaurant—in Los Angeles served items like hamburgers and turkey sandwiches.
5. Azuma, Between Two Empires.
6. Ibid., 138.
7. David K. Yoo, Growing Up Nisei: Race, Generation, and Culture among Japanese Americans of California, 1924–49 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 32.
8. The Rafu Shimpo holiday issue for December 22, 1939, 16, estimated that there were nearly six hundred nisei clubs in Southern California; in the December 23, 1940 holiday issue, 16, Sadae Nomura refers to “400 active nisei organizations.” Four hundred appears to be a reasonable estimate.
9. Susan Kalčik, “Ethnic Foodways in America: Symbol and the Performance of Identity,” in Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States: The Performance of Group Identity, ed. Linda Keller Brown and Kay Mussell (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 44. Kalčik points out, “We are now not so much concerned with defining ethnicity as a category whose characteristics and traits we want to list but as a social process in which the relationship of individuals and groups and the communication of identity are significant” (44).
10. Vicki L. Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), xvi.
11. Donna R. Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 229.
12. Rafu Shimpo, October 11, 1936.
13. Mary Nishi Ishizuka, interview by Valerie J. Matsumoto, August 4, 2009.
14. Rose Honda, interview by Valerie J. Matsumoto, July 30, 2009.
15. Rafu Shimpo, March 28, 1927.
16. Rafu Shimpo, March 7, 1927.
17. Rafu Shimpo, October 15, 1928.
18. Rafu Shimpo, February 28, 1927.
19. Rafu Shimpo, March 7, 1927. This pronouncement may have come from the reporter rather than the Midori kai.
20. Rafu Shimpo, October 18, 1926.
21. See Kimi Kanazawa, “The Nisei Come of Age,” Kashu Mainichi, May 24, 1936.
22. Rafu Shimpo, July 25, 1927.
23. Rafu Shimpo, October 15, 1928.
24. Rafu Shimpo, October 11, 1936.
25. Rafu Shimpo, January 7, 1940.
26. See Jade Snow Wong, Fifth Chinese Daughter (1945; repr., Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989), 57–59.
27. Ibid.
28. Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 24–39.
29. Ibid., 37.
30. Rafu Shimpo, October 11, 1936.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food (New York: Twelve, 2008), 56–65.
34. Katsumi (Hirooka) Kunitsugu, interview, REgenerations Oral History Project: Rebuilding Japanese American Families, Communities, and Civil rights in the Resettlement Era (Los Angeles: Japanese American National Museum, in collaboration with Chicago Japanese American Historical Society, Japanese American Historical Society of San Diego, and Japanese American Resource Center/Museum, 2000), 262.
35. Rafu Shimpo, October 11, 1936.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Fumiko Fukuyama Ide, interview by Valerie J. Matsumoto, March 27, 2001.
39. Kashu Mainichi, November 26, 1933.
40. Kashu Mainichi, March 25, 1938; April 4–5, 13–14, 25, 1938; May 7, 12, 1938. The recipe for potato salad was printed by request.
41. Ibid.
42. Rafu Shimpo, February 4, 1940.
43. Rafu Shimpo, January 4, 1942, 10. The defining ingredient in both recipes appears to have been one tablespoon of chili powder.
44. Rafu Shimpo, March 3, 1940. I beg to differ with the food editor regarding the “sure fire” nature of the brown sugar cookies.
45. Rafu Shimpo, December 7, 1941.
46. Rafu Shimpo, January 1, 1928. The Bruin Club was responsible for planning half the program.
47. Rafu Shimpo, July 25, 1926.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid.
50. Rafu Shimpo, March 12, 1928. The Oxy Hi-Y boys reciprocated with a leap-year dinner in honor of the S.O.F. and All Around Girl Reserves.
51. Rafu Shimpo, June 20, 1926.
52. Rafu Shimpo, June 20, 1926. The boys appear to have varied cooking skills:
The sandwiches, which were made by Danar Abe and his gang, must have been good because it went around three or four times. If the sandwiches were good, the Hungarian Goulashes [sic] which was made by the honorable secretary of the Hi Y Club was even better. … At the end of the social, the secretary was mobbed by the girls who wanted the recipe.
53. “Box-Lunch social at M.E. Church by Epworth Youths,” Rafu Shimpo, November 29, 1926.
54. Ibid.
55. “Financial Success Marks All Around Lunch Social,” Rafu Shimpo, February 23, 1931. By this time, dancing had become a feature of the nisei box-lunch social, expanding the opportunity for male-female socializing and flirtation. For more examples of box-lunch socials held by girls’ clubs, see “Two Events on Program of Emba Girl Reserves,” Rafu Shimpo, May 25, 1931; “Sea Breeze Plan Idea for Emba’s Box Lunch Social,” Rafu Shimpo, June 8, 1931; and “Cherry Blossom Club Plan Benefit Box Lunch Social,” Rafu Shimpo, November 15, 1931.
56. Jade Snow Wong recounts how she cooked Chinese food for her friends at Mills College in Fifth Chinese Daughter, 155–61.
57. Rafu Shimpo, December 6, 1931. See also Rafu Shimpo, April 22, 1937, for a nisei club sukiyaki party.
58. Micaela di Leonardo, The Varieties of Ethnic Experience: Kinship, Class, and Gender among California Italian-Americans (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 215.
59. Honda, interview.
60. For a description of an urban family’s mixture of Japanese and U.S. New Year’s customs in Seattle, see Monica Sone, Nisei Daughter (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1953), 80–86.
61. Rafu Shimpo, holiday issue, December 24, 1936, 9.
62. Rafu Shimpo, January 5, 1931. Nimura’s brief letters appeared for a while as a regular feature entitled “With Apologies to Will Rogers.” It seems that she was a local nisei living in Boyle Heights in east Los Angeles.
63. The New Year’s recipes were credited to Dr. P. M. Suski (i.e., Suzuki), an influential issei leader and the father of Louise Suski, the first nisei editor of the Rafu Shimpo’s English-language section. He also wrote a book to help the nisei learn the Japanese language.
64. Rafu Shimpo, December 28, 1941.
65. Ibid.
66. Miné Okubo, Citizen 13660 (1946; repr., Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1983), 143.
67. Rafu Shimpo, January 31, 1946, 1. Her letter to the editor was signed “Miss T. K.”
68. “Cooking lessons,” Rafu Shimpo, July 25, 1947, 1; “Cooking class,” Rafu Shimpo, October 18, 1947, 1. Mrs. Matsuo also offered a class on making varieties of chop suey; see Rafu Shimpo, September 6, 1947.
69. “Cooking class,” Rafu Shimpo, October 18, 1947, 1.
70. “Reports Cooking Classes by ARC,” Rafu Shimpo, September 20, 1947, 1. Unfortunately there were no follow-up reports of who signed up for the classes.
71. “Reports Cooking Classes by ARC,” Rafu Shimpo, September 26, 1947, 1.
72. Rose Honda, REgenerations Oral History Project, 80. Mary Ishizuka was the other Atomettes’ adviser.