This is a very interesting article on Japanese immigrants to New York City. My parents were “Big Apple Issei” in the 1960′s, a time when one could count the number of Japanese restaurants in Manhattan on one hand. Today, there’s 3 Japanese restaurants on my block!
In the last two decades, thousands of young Japanese like Q have come to New York in search of the custom-tailored lifestyles that are hard to carve out in a homeland, where johshiki — traditional ways and morality — still exert a powerful influence. Such young people make up the majority of their fellow countrymen, or rather, countrywomen, living in the city.
Census data from 2000 show that 63 percent of the 16,516 foreign-born Japanese living in New York are women, and 64 percent are 20 to 39 years old. That percentage of young people is nearly 23 percentage points higher than it is for Chinese or Koreans, the two largest Asian immigrant groups in the city.
The interesting trends are that Japanese women are leaving Japan faster than Japanese men are. Those progressive Japanese women who leave Japan due to the restrictions of the culture and the traditions are the very people who are best equipped to bridge the gender inequality gap. Sadly, they aren’t in Japan, and thus the culture takes longer to change.
This line (below) resonated with me pretty deeply, as a native New Yorker, and Japanese-American, who is no longer in NYC.
In the end, even New York may not be big enough for some Big Apple issei. Many aspire to become citizens of the world who can travel, work and live in a variety of locations. They are modern people born of an extremely traditional culture. This koan-like paradox is most clearly evident in the fact that, unlike their predecessors, most of these young Japanese immigrants are not trying to become US citizens. They like being Japanese; they simply prefer to live in New York.
Q finds her groove in NY: ‘Issei,’ or Japanese immigrants, are cultural refugees drawn to New York’s creative clamor and in search of freedom for their spirits [taipeitimes.com]
i’m assuming the people in this article are not from Tokyo…
“I can’t imagine being in Japan, I couldn’t break dance there” ?
“other American cities are too much like Japan” ?
if you replace “Japan” with “Tokyo” in this article, it would be mostly untrue.
seems more like a mega cities vs the rest of the world issue to me.
Christmas cake. heh.
but i can relate to that last paragraph you quoted too.
dunno about the focus on issei, tho.
technically i (was/will be) an issei but am more like a nisei, as you are.
What I find interesting is that, in my case at least, I feel quite similar to these Japanese twenty-somethings. I have a desire to “carve out my own lifestyle” as an expat, but I’m not really interested in ditching my American-self. Its a grass is always greener type of situation for a lot of young people now I think. We’re smart enough to realize faults in our own countries (and when we travel abroad the faults there too), but we’re too attached to the identy that same country gives us. I think we might be the cusp of a truely international generation, or if not that, a movement.
Well, my wife fits the exact mold of what you are talking about — she came to the US a little mre than five years ago to study English and carve out a little bit of a life here in the US. She now works for a major financial institution in New York, and loves it. And although she misses Japan, she will be the first to tell you that there’s probably more opportunity for her here than there. While she has tons of career potential with a US firm, she fears that in Japan she’d be relegated to ‘office lady’ duties. Surely things probably aren’t nearly as bad as she likes to pretend they are, but there is still a wide discrepency between what she could be here versus what she could be in Japan. (FWIW, she grew up in rural Japan, where the opportunities probably aren’t as great as they would be in Tokyo)
Interesting to compare this with the article you had about Japanese going to Paris and finding that their expectations of the place were not at all in tune with reality.
Still, most are in their twenties and thirties. That would lead me to assume that many “come home” when they are ready to settle down. Or maybe they just move to Connecticut…
I used to live in Singapore for two year and the similar thing is happening
there: there are a lot of Japanese women living more freely than in their
own country. One of my friends even told me she felt choking when her air
plain was landing, at the same time, she did not feel like leaving when she
flew back, though.
It’s very nice to see those young Japanese women going their own way, but
what disturbing me living there was also them including other foreigners.
They like living there as a alien because they can take advantage their
status as a foreigner from a country with a strong economic power. I didn’
t wanna be one of those foreigners so I left Singapore.
On the article, Big Apple issei, I can see a little bit of exaggeration and
bias but it’s half true. But for me, a Japanese woman who lived in New
York City for a short period of time, there seems to be something the
writer missed out to talk about.
I like New York City because I don’t have to concern if I’m feminine or
not. I don’t dress like “cute” models on Japanese mainstream fashion
magazine and I don’t talk like female TV stars as if I don’t have a
brain. Q could break dance in Tokyo but she may not be treated as a woman
even by her male friends dancing together. I assume Japanese women living
in New York City will find themselves just the way they are without feeling
pressure that they might step out of a prototype of Japanese woman.
This article helped me to realize older I get, more I’m internalizing the
prototype I used to fight against. Thanks, Gen. It’s tiring to resist,
but I need to be myself, and I want all the Japanese women to be themselves
someday.