In 1922 the U.S. Supreme Court declared Japanese immigrants ineligible for American citizenship because they were not “white,” dismissing the plaintiff's appeal to skin tone. Unable to claim whiteness through naturalization laws, Japanese Americans in Hawaiʻi developed their own racial currency to secure a prominent place in the Island's postwar social hierarchy. This book explores how different groups within Japanese American society staked a claim to whiteness on the basis of hue and culture. It demonstrates how the meaning of whiteness evolved from mere physical distinctions to cultural mar ... More

In 1922 the U.S. Supreme Court declared Japanese immigrants ineligible for American citizenship because they were not “white,” dismissing the plaintiff's appeal to skin tone. Unable to claim whiteness through naturalization laws, Japanese Americans in Hawaiʻi developed their own racial currency to secure a prominent place in the Island's postwar social hierarchy. This book explores how different groups within Japanese American society staked a claim to whiteness on the basis of hue and culture. It demonstrates how the meaning of whiteness evolved from mere physical distinctions to cultural markers of difference, increasingly articulated in material terms. Nisei consumer culture demands examination because consumption was vital to the privilege-making process that spilled over into public life. The book builds on recent scholarship that considers ethnic communities within a trans-Pacific context, highlighting ethnic fluidity as a strategy for material and cultural success. Yet even as it assumed a position of conformity, the Japanese American consumer culture that took hold among Honolulu's middle class was distinct. It was at once modern and nostalgic, like the wayo secchu ideal—a hybrid of Western and Japanese notions of beauty and femininity that linked the ethnic group to the homeland and mainstream U.S. culture. By focusing on the marketing of whiteness that connected the old world and new, the book reveals the dynamic commercial and cultural environment that underwrote the rise of the Nisei in Hawaiʻi.