By Stefanie Parish
This year will mark ninety years since the first Nisei Week Queen was crowned. Similar to the infamous Miss America contest, Japanese American beauty contests had their humble beginnings in the early 20th century. The first “Nisei Week Queen” was crowned in 1935. Organizers hoped that hosting a contest of this sort would bring more business to the Little Tokyo shops that struggled during the Great Depression.1 The LA-based contest returned shortly after World War II and provided an opportunity for Japanese Americans to choose and celebrate a model citizen in the form of a local beauty queen.
Here, I will focus on two political cartoons that appeared in Pacific Citizen.2 I argue that the contest served as a physical and intellectual space that Japanese Americans moved through in order to reinscribe, reject, and/or reform aspects of mainstream American identity.
Even after several decades had passed and many Japanese Americans had attained middle class American status, local beauty contests in the 1980s were vibrant debate spaces for community views on race and gender.
Figure 1
In 1982, concerns over what made someone Japanese American abounded with the crowning of a mixed-race Nisei Week Queen. The criticism reached such heights that the local beauty queen wrote an op-ed defending her role as the community’s de-facto ambassador. She took the opportunity throughout the piece to suggest that blood origins should not determine her acceptance by the Japanese American community. She instead argued that her cultural knowledge (e.g., fluency in the Japanese language) and dedication to her community (e.g., attending Nisei Week festivities since childhood) should determine her ability to represent them.3 This incident helps to contextualize the image drawn by Pete Hironaka in the same issue of Pacific Citizen.
As rates of interracial marriage increased and older generations worried about the preservation of Japanese culture, conversations about proper representation and belonging through the Nisei Week Queen were entrenched in restrictive ideas of “blood” percentages determining someone’s race. Some community members argued that the contest should continue to require participants to have two parents with 100% Japanese ancestry. The presence of this cartoon (and the beauty queen’s op-ed), however, speaks to the diverse set of voices within the community that sought to push back against the idea that preservation of culture required the continuation of exclusionary ideas of racial identity.
By juxtaposing a 19th century example of Japanese elitism with a 1980s discussion of a mixed-race woman winning Nisei Week Queen, Hironaka is condemning the “debate” over mixed-race ancestry as old-fashioned petty gossip. He’s also commenting on the reality that despite a change in nationality and a century in between, individuals were still resorting to exclusionary behavior. This example displays the ways in which race, gender, and ethnicity were performed, refuted, and reaffirmed in the pageant sphere and how this extended to the ways Japanese Americans viewed their role in local and national debates about race, American identity, and belonging.
Just a few years later, the Nisei Week beauty contest was once again at the center of community discourse. By the mid-1980s, there were mounting concerns by the Japanese American public about the priorities set forth by the community’s biggest organization: Japanese American Citizens League (JACL).
Depicted clearly in this cartoon is a story of conflicting priorities among two generations of organizational leaders, with older folks asserting that the JACL had not done enough to help senior citizens nor had they made serious progress in obtaining financial redress for survivors of internment.
Figure 2
Additionally, this image puts forth a narrative by some community members that the exaltation of local pageant queens was a waste of limited resources in a post Second Wave feminism world, potentially threatening the legitimacy of the JACL as a civil rights organization. The role of the beauty queen was once celebrated as evidence of racial progress and a potential (although limited) opportunity for Japanese American women in the public sphere. By 1985, however, it is clear that community ideas of what made a model citizen had shifted. Whether fellow Japanese Americans were glorifying or diminishing the importance of the local beauty queen, both sides showed how these debates about race and gender replicated sexist structures of power as they rarely centered the voices of the pageant participants. Regardless, discourse in ethnic newspapers on the future of the JACL-sponsored beauty contests displayed that they were a significant space where individual and group conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality were negotiated and rebuilt in the postwar era.
Participants, organizers, and observers considered the beauty contest a valuable community space and a serious forum for consideration of what being American meant to them and how they should strategically present themselves to an outside world that had once deemed them “enemy Aliens”. In other words, beauty contests were more than frivolous displays of femininity or restrictive spaces to objectify women. Rather, they were dynamic spaces where people and groups (re)negotiated acceptable presentations of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class; all while moving through local, national, and international contexts. The political cartoons mentioned above display plainly that pageants were vibrant and complicated spaces, where the development and debate over a unified Japanese American identity was constantly reassessed, reaffirmed, and rejected by participants and onlookers alike.4
About the Author:
Stefanie Parish is an MPhil student working on American History at the University of Cambridge. Her graduate research builds on the work of previous scholars by examining Japanese American pageants in the period after World War II and seeks to discover how and why pageants seem to be crucial to Japanese American community identity. She works on lesser-known stories and hopes to unearth and share the complex, sometimes contradictory histories of her community as a worthy avenue of rigorous scholarship.
References:
- Gwen Muranaka, “Nisei Week History: A Love Letter to Little Tokyo,” Nisei Week, https://niseiweek.org/foundation/#legacy. ↩︎
- Pacific Citizen newspaper, a program of the Japanese American Citizens League, www.PacificCitizen.org. ↩︎
- Hedy, Posey. “Former Nisei queen responds to rift over ‘mixed ancestry’” Pacific Citizen. September 24th, 1982. https://pacificcitizen.org/wp-content/uploads/archives-menu/Vol.095_%2313_Sep_24_1982.pdf. ↩︎
- For more on local Japanese American festivals, see Lon Kurashige’s Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival, 1934-1990. For more information on race, national identity, and the Miss America pageant see Sarah Banet-Weiser’s The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity and Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain’s Pure Beauty: Judging Race in Japanese American Beauty Pageants. ↩︎
Image credits:
- Cover image: “Mayor Fletcher Bowron at a Nisei festival in Little Tokyo, 1940, Los Angeles, California.,” Densho Encyclopedia https://encyclopedia.densho.org/sources/en-denshopd-i227-00003-1/.
- Figure 1: “Progress” in Human Relations,” Pacific Citizen. September 24th, 1982. https://pacificcitizen.org/wp-content/uploads/archives-menu/Vol.095_%2313_Sep_24_1982.pdf.
- Figure 2: “Upon the re-evaluation of the purposes of JACL,” Pacific Citizen. March 29th, 1985. https://pacificcitizen.org/wp-content/uploads/archives-menu/Vol.100_%2312_Mar_29_1985.pdf.
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