Although among the earliest immigrants from Asia, Japanese Americans have not experienced significant growth since 1960s immigration reforms. Instead, the Japanese American experience is divided between an older citizenry (shaped by the Second World War persecution) and modern sojourners who intend to return to Japan at some point in their lives. It is especially striking that the rhythm of these connections is shaped as much by Japanese outward orientations as by American policy.

The first Japanese came as laborers around the 1880s, escaping poor areas of Japan for Hawai’i and the West Coast. By the 1920s–30s, many became small-business owners and agriculturalists, and were able, unlike the Chinese, to import their families. Yet, with the rise of Japanese militarism and Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, anti-Japanese sentiment grew. One hundred and twenty thousand Japanese Americans on the West Coast (40 percent of the total population) had property confiscated and were interned in remote camps scattered around the country. Those in Hawai’i and the East were not interned, nor were citizens of German or Italian descent. After the war, when the camps closed, many returned to the West Coast, although they had lost homes, businesses and communities. Nonetheless, some Japanese Second World War veterans, mostly American-born, were able to reap the benefits of the GI Bill, and eventually entered the professional class. Daniel Inouye, the first senator of Japanese descent (from Hawai’i), was a decorated veteran. For others, the struggle for compensation and even recognition and apology for a racist wrong lasted for decades before redress bills were passed and signed in 1988. Many Japanese Americans have examined this experience in literature and film, forcing mainstream America to look at their history Steven Okazaki won an Academy Award for Day of Waiting in 1991. Kayo Hatta’s Picture Bride (1994), which focuses on the travails of earlier immigrants, gained studio funding and national distribution.

According to Bill Ong Hing (see Asian Americans), three factors have made America less attractive to Japanese immigrants since the Second World War. First, unlike the Chinese who were initially barred from bringing in families and then post–1965 established chain migrations, few Japanese people need to reunite with relations abroad.

Second, the strong economy and low birth rate in Japan (especially since the postwar recovery) present no incentive to leave Japan. Third, the internment proved to the Japanese that Americans would not welcome them in times of crisis, a negativity fanned by anti-Japanese sentiments whipped up around manufacturing and trade issues since the 1970s. Today many Japanese, however, enter the US not as immigrants, but as tourists and sojourners, including students, professionals and business people. Many stay in the US for a few years, orienting community reproduction towards their homeland through schools, grocery stores, bookstores and Japanese cable stations like those found in metropolitan New York City, Boutiques and department stores like Takashimaya also define a cutting-edge urban style.

Meanwhile, today’s third- and fourth-generation Japanese Americans generally lack discernible residential patterns or linguistic differences. Japan towns in San Francisco, CA and Los Angeles, CA are now commercial centers and tourist attractions, rather than residential ethnic enclaves.