UC Berkeley

Becoming “Hawaiian”: World War II War Heroes and the Rise of Japanese American Power, 1941-1963 examines the most celebrated Asian American war heroes in US history—the Japanese American WWII GIs—to reveal how those soldiers from Hawai‘i became racialized and legitimated as “Hawaiian” war heroes. I introduce a concept of “Hawaiian” racialization as a process by which various racial and ethnic communities ascribed qualities and characteristics of Hawai‘i, such as exotic, friendly, and feminine, onto the non-native men while the soldiers themselves actively created an heroic “Hawaiian” identity. During WWII from their mobilization to their return home from battle, the soldiers were racialized and celebrated as “Hawaiian” war heroes in the US South, in the Japanese American incarceration camps, in liberal white spaces across the US mainland, in Hawai‘i, and internationally in the European campaign. This resulted in cementing an image of “Hawaiian” war heroes as worthy representatives of the Territory and Japanese America to both US mainland and local audiences. I show that this process supported these men’s stakes as inheritors and as future patriarchal leaders of Hawai‘i, Japanese America, and Asian America in the postwar. The heroic racialization facilitated the passage of Hawai‘i Statehood in 1959 and the successful election of two “Hawaiian” war heroes into Congress in 1963. Using extensive multi-site archival research, my historical analysis relies on racial, gendered, and sexuality theories and frameworks from ethnic studies, settler colonial studies, feminist studies, and Asian American studies. This project illustrates Asian Americans creating a celebratory American identity through their racialization as indigenous. The power of non-natives to become the “new” natives is central to US Empire, which supports foundational claims to land, home, family, and nation. My research historicizes Asian American alignment with US Empire, spotlights a power dynamic between Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and reveals how Japanese Americans legitimated themselves as “Hawaiians” through the vehicle of the US war hero.