ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the politics of the racialization of Burakumin as a double minority within the Japanese immigrant community in the US, as well as the solidarity in their struggle against discrimination that developed across the Pacific between Japanese immigrants on the West Coast and Burakumin in Japan. The history of Burakumin in Japanese communities in the US was even more complex. The historical experience of Japanese Americans on the West Coast of the US around the turn of the twentieth century can be located within a century-long movement that shaped the structure of race relations in America as a whole. The chapter looks at cases of Burakumin emigrants to the US in order to elucidate the movement of people, information, and money that developed between Japan and their new home and to examine the lives they led in the new country.
