Sansei

Sansei are grandchildren of Japanese immigrants/emigrants, literally, “third generation” in Japanese. As with other generational terms for Japanese Americans in the United States (Issei, Nisei), Sansei refers to a specific cohort set of experiences as well as to generations in the United States and removed from Japan. As with any category of people, patterns of similarities can be made salient at the same time that the diversity of the group is also recognized. This entry describes the background and the future development of the Sansei.

Most Sansei came of age in the 1960s and have tended to follow two different career and lifestyle paths. Most have continued in their parents' footsteps, opting to become middle-class professionals and taking on relatively conservative views largely consistent with that of the White majority.

[Page 1198]Other Sansei, as Jere Takahashi has explained, have been more affected by the social movements of the 1960s and have developed more radical perspectives. The views of this second group have been greatly shaped by the civil rights, Black Power, Yellow Power/Asian American, women's, anti-Vietnam War, anticolonial Asian nationalist, and transnational Third World solidarity movements of the late 1960s and 1970s. This activist culture significantly influenced the ways in which Sansei identity was racialized and positioned in relation to other people of color in the United States and around the world. These Sansei eventually became involved with or started their own community service-oriented organizations to immediately and directly apply their more progressive political perspectives.

Sansei are commonly associated with and given credit for being the instigators of the Japanese American redress and reparations movement, which ultimately attained a government apology and $20,000 for each person who was forced to relocate because of Executive Order 9066 issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 signed by President Ronald Reagan acknowledged that the relocation and internment of Japanese in the United States during World War II was unconstitutional and a violation of their civil rights. The attainment of this redress and reparations is often attributed to the activist view prevalent among Sansei. Though their parents' generation had stronger memories of the internment and were more directly affected by it, Sansei experienced a different socialization that may have enabled them to come together to mobilize the Japanese American community at the right political opportunity to insist that Japanese American civil rights had been violated by their forced evacuation, relocation, and wartime internment within their own country.

Sansei experiences and identity formations on the U.S. mainland and in Hawai'i are quite different, though both have been constructed as part of larger cross-racial and cross-ethnic social identities. On the U.S. mainland, the 1960s saw the development of Asian American panethnic identities; Sansei learned to see themselves as part of this racialized group that sought empowerment through the assertion of common political interests between ethnic groups previously viewed as separate, including Chinese, Filipinos, and Koreans.

Meanwhile, Hawai'i Sansei identities have been constructed within a larger context of “local” multiculturalism. Because of the way Hawai'i politics and society have developed, people with ties to the local area are increasingly distinguishing between “locals” and “nonlocals.” In addition to Japanese, “local” identity usually includes people of native Hawaiian, Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Portuguese, Samoan, and other ancestries. This category includes both Indigenous People and the descendents of immigrants, juxtaposing them against mainlanders, military, (Japanese) businesspeople, tourists, and other temporary or recent migrants.

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