| Chapter 1: | Reconsiderations of Race, Ethnicity, and Identity: Transnational Migrants in Post–World War II Global Society |
and race. By doing so, I hope to provide a deeper explanation for why Japanese and Nikkei people construct and reconstruct ethnic identity in their daily lives in the ways that they do.
What Is Ethnicity and Race?
The American Anthropological Association, in their seminal 1998 statement on race, says:
For the general public, especially in the West, these “visible physicaldifferences” are customarily reduced to skin color. Why is skin color used as the basis for racial classification? Living in societies that do this, people believe it is obvious and logical, because skin color is one of the most visible of human characteristics, and it is easy to tell someone's geographic “home” by using it. Of course, this is just custom and has no basis in reality. Such visible criteria could easily be replaced by something else.2 For example, when first seeing people from Europe and North America, Japanese called them a variety of things, including aoi me no hito (blue-eyed people), ke-t
(hairy Chinese),3 and hana no takai-hito (big-nosed people). For the Japanese, the physical characteristics they noticed most were not based on skin color. It is true that skin-color-based terms do exist among the Japanese—for example, haku-jin (white people)—but these were originally used by Japanese migrants to North America after they arrived there, or were based on the Western way of categorizing people.
Many people believe a black-and-white dichotomy is a natural classification in the human mind, and they argue this as a basis for racialclassification (Banton 1987, xii–xiv). According to them, the human mind is naturally structured to see the world in binary oppositions