Intimate Strangers Shin Issei Women and Contemporary Japanese American Community, 1980-2020

"In Intimate Strangers, Toyota interviews Japanese women who migrated to the US in their twenties at the end of the 20th century.... Toyota illustrates these shin Issei women's resiliency and strength as they adjusted to living in the US, arguing that they were activists who changed their lives for the better and transformed the Japanese American community in the process. In detailing these women's stories, Toyota also analyzes how race, gender, and belonging intersect with their lives. Summing Up: Highly recommended."- Choice
"Intimate Strangers is an unprecedented ethnography that uncovers the lived experiences of shin Issei women in Los Angeles. Toyota's crafted work elevates the voices of these overlooked women, who, despite being employed at local Japanese restaurants, shops, and other establishments, often live in precarity due to their undocumented status. Her thought-provoking analysis of the complex interaction between these migrant women and Japanese Americans provides deep insights into the tensions and affinities that shape their relationships. Intimate Strangers is an invaluable resource for all those seeking a deeper understanding of the intersectionality of race, gender, class, and citizenship."- Yasuko Takezawa, Professor at Kansai Gaidai University, and author of Breaking the Silence: Redress and Japanese American Ethnicity "Highly personal and theoretically grounded, Intimate Strangers addresses diversities, tensions, and ruptures within contemporary Japanese America. Life histories of shin Issei women, which Toyota meticulously documents, defy a common understanding about postwar Nikkei experience, which privileged the memory of the wartime Nisei incarceration, third-generation political activism, and the influx of 'war brides' in the early Cold War years. As Toyota details, shin Issei women in Southern California built a transpacific Japan under the yoke of Japanese multinational corporations, engaged with more established U.S.-born Nikkei, and continue to carve out distinct identities. Intimate Strangers significantly expands Japanese American scholarship."- Eiichiro Azuma, Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan's Borderless Empire "Intimate Strangers is a landmark book. Hopefully, it is a prelude to subsequent studies that will take up the experience of other new populations within the ever-changing Japanese American community."- Nichi Bei News