Citizens, Immigrants, and the Stateless

From the 1920s to the eve of the Pacific War in 1941, more than 50,000 young second-generation Japanese Americans ( Nisei ) embarked on transpacific journeys to the Japanese Empire, putting an ocean between themselves and pervasive anti-Asian racism in the American West. Born U.S. citizens but treated as unwelcome aliens, this contingent of Japanese Americans—one in four U.S.-born Nisei—came in search of better lives but instead encountered a world shaped by increasingly volatile relations betwe