ABSTRACT
Our inquiry began as a two-pronged effort. First, we set out to describe the mainland Japanese as a distinctive American minority group and thereto presented a pertinent social profile. We observed that Japanese Americans number just over one-half million, including Hawaii. And, although Japanese Americans now reside in every one of the fifty states, we showed this to be a recent, postwar phenomenon. In 1960, twenty-three states had 1,000 or more Japanese American residents, and even these were relatively new arrivals, since in 1940 there were only seven states that had 1,000 or more residents. Even with postwar dispersion from the Pacific Coast, Figure 4.1 shows that the Japanese are still heavily concentrated on the West Coast. All told, there are five major centers of concentration across the country: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, and New York City.
