ABSTRACT
The story of Tajima’s marriage to Zheng, however, told another complex aspect of international relations. A daughter of Japanese emigrants, Tajima had been born and raised in California’s Central Valley and relocated to Japan with her mother and siblings six years before, in 1933.2 This highly educated modern Japanese woman thus had turned out to be a young immigrant from the United States. Tajima and her three siblings were far from alone in their unique position as American citizens living abroad. They were part of the Japanese American transnational generation, over 50,000 U.S.-born Nisei (second-generation Japanese Americans) that relocated to Japan and Japanese colonies before the Pacific War.3 Many among these young Japanese Americans were sent to Japan by their first-generation (Issei) immigrant parents to acquire a Japanese education. Others, like Tajima, accompanied their Issei parents who returned to Japan or moved to Japanese colonies, such as Korea and Manchuria, when the Great Depression added to many Japanese immigrant families’ struggle for survival in the United States during the era
of anti-Asian exclusion. Many Nisei also embarked on transpacific journeys to various corners of the expanding Japanese empire in Asia for career opportunities that were difficult to attain in the U.S. due to racial discrimination.
