








ersity. But it hardly seemed to make, much difference, at least at first: history textbooks continued to focus on the white experience.
Liberal educators and minority advocates complained that the books were increasingly out of touch with the demographic reality of California. By omitting the non-whites  contribution to US nation-building, they argued, the textbooks distorted history, failed to instil pride in minority students and may have fed negative stereotypes of non-whites.
So this year, California invited publishers to submit new history textbooks prepared strictly according to a new set of guidelines. Among other things, the new textbooks were to foster  cultural literacy,  so that students could grasp the nation-building contributions of various ethnic groups.
The object was to strike a balance between emphasis on traditional American democratic values, on the one hand, and a new awareness of the racial, cultural and ethnic roots of those who make up the nation.
Seven years ago, the last time the state renewed its history textbooks, 22 publishers sought a piece of California s US$170 million textbook market, the nation s largest. But this year, unwilling to spend the money for new books to meet e state s stringent requirements, all but 111116 publishers dropped out of the running.
Public hearings and a panel of state-aPP inted experts (including minorities)
A different mix
California population by ethnic group1
further narrowed the short-list down to two: offerings from Houghton Mifflin and Holt Rinehart & Winston, respectively. These are impressive history textbooks by any standard certainly by any Asian standard. They bend over backwards to be honest, accurate and sensitive.
For example, the eighth grade book by Houghton Mifflin suggests that the teacher challenge students with the question:  How did the treatment of [early] immigrants ridicule, hostility, violence, job and housing discrimination compare with the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution? 
Later on, the book invites students to comment on the incongruity of a World War II photograph of young Japanese Americans being drafted into the US Army from an internment camp where they were being held on suspicion of disloyalty.
The books elicited a storm of controversy before they were approved. All sorts of interests women and gays, as well as assorted religious and ethnic groups wanted their stories told their way, and at length. On the other side of
27. Spicier Melting Pot
the spectrum, some critics argued that the new books had already gone too far.
The frantic attempt to include everybody, the critics argued, amounted to effective ethnic and gender quotas on public school curricula. The end result, they warned, could be a  Balkanised  California, splintered into self-centred and mutually hostile groups.
Indeed, Asian Americans can come in conflict with other groups particularly the larger, more homogeneous and also fast-growing Hispanic community as they compete for scarce resources. For example, Asian Americans and Hispanics are united in their opposition to a radical English Only movement, led by white conservatives and insisting that all official business must be conducted solely in English. The movement s extremists have tried to suppress the use of foreign languages even in commercial signs and opposed public libraries carrying Asian-language books. But while most minorities uphold bilingualism in principle, Asian American students living in areas with large Hispanic populations often complain that their schools offer Spanish (along with French, German and so on) as a second language but not Korean or Vietnamese.
Optimists counter that California and the nation will hold together and evolve into a harmonious microcosm of the world as it should be  A More Perfect Union  (as one of the books is entitled, borrowing language from the preamble to the US Constitution). To reach that goal, though, will require a lot more debate on how much multiculturalism is desirable, versus how much and what sort of a common American culture.
But, as Asian Americans gain political clout and increasingly assert themselves, the evolving American culture will inevitably incorporate more of their inputs and become  Asianised. 
Susumu Awanohara
Scapegoats no more
Japanese Americans caught in trade war cross-fire
Half a century after the US, at the start of World War II, incarcer-tenti ^Pa*1686 Americans in delaw camPs without due process of 1 e government has acknowledged
its mistake and begun paying compensation to surviving internees. That bittersweet victory was a reminder of how far Japanese Americans have come.
Today, they are arguably the best-as
similated Asian American community. Still, some of them worry that Japanese Americans could be victimised once again, now that US-Japan relations are deteriorating.
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5. ASIAN AMERICANS
The institutions and self-perceptions of the Japanese American community were profoundly affected by the struggle to redress wartime internment. Unorganised demand for redress arose early, but picked up momentum in the radical atmosphere of the civil rights and antiVietnam War movements of the 1960s and early 1970s.
Encouraged by official admissions at that time that the World War II internments had been an error, Japanese American activists notably those of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) began a concerted campaign for more concrete  redress and reparations. 
The struggle was painful and divisive for the Japanese American community itself. Accusations were traded on who turned in whom to the FBI as dangerous aliens. Debate was revived on whether Japanese American draft resisters among the internees deserved condemnation or praise. Yet the struggle was also cathartic, particularly for those who spoke of their wartime experiences and feelings for the first time. The fight for redress also renewed the ties between Japanese Americans and other US ethnics: Asian American, Black, Hispanic and Jewish groups supported it.
The humiliation of internment probably made the Japanese Americans more eager to join the US mainstream and become like hakujin, or Whites. In this, they have succeeded, more or less.
The assimilationist trend was reinforced by the dwindling of Japanese immigration to the US. As a result, the ratio of US-born Japanese Americans is much higher than for other Asian American groups.
The Japanese Americans enjoy impressive educational achievements, an enviable occupational profile and the highest average family income of all Asian American groups. No wonder they have fewer grievances than newer Asian American arrivals a possible cause for the occasional Asian American complaint that the Japanese Americans are aloof and fail to make common cause politically.
Many Japanese Americans fret that mounting US-Japan friction over trade
investment, technology and security issues could damage relations between Japanese Americans and the mainstream population.
Some alarm bells went off in the community a few years ago when Hawaii, worried about rising Japanese investment in the state s real estate, tried (unsuccessfully) to pass legislation restricting land ownership.
For the most part, though, Japanese Americans have tried to steer clear of US-Japan disputes. Some Japanese Americans may feel they understand Japan s positions on issues and can help articulate them to mainstream America. In the past, they might have been more inclined to serve as a bridge between the two countries. Nowadays, it is riskier.
Besides, Japanese Americans have long nurtured a grudge that Japanese from Japan tend to treat them as inferiors and ignore them when doing business in the US. This gap may have narrowed as the Japanese Americans have gained respectability back in the ancestral homeland through their success.
But, at the same time, younger Japanese Americans have grown more distant from things Japanese. Many of them share the mainstream American exasperation at Japan s perceived  intransigence. 
Self-preservation instincts might also help explain some of the Japanese American coolness to the motherland. To seem to be doing Tokyo s bidding is an increasingly risky business, particularly for a Japanese American with any political ambitions.
Whatever latent sympathy they may retain for the Japanese side on bilateral issues, hardly any Japanese Americans can forgive the racist remarks of some Japanese officials. In this, they are motivated not only by fear of racial backlash. As beneficiaries of the US civil rights movement, many Japanese Americans are truly indignant.
How else to react to comments like Japanese Justice Minister Seiroku Kajiyama s recent comparison of foreign prostitutes in Tokyo with Blacks moving into white US neighbourhoods? Both in-
fluxes, Kajiyama quipped,  n atmosphere. 
Japanese Americans still wine recollection of former prime i Yasuhiro Nakasone s 1986 pro: ment that American knowledgt trail Japan s because of the admi Blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mex the US population. In the same the more recent assertion by Watanabe, a leading politicia American Blacks have few qualn defaulting on debts.
Bruce Iwasaki, a member of tional Coalition for Redress and tions, wrote in the Los Angele lately that  Japanese American ] could not have occurred without rights movement led by African cans.
 The most heinous single vio civil liberties inflicted by the I ernment in this century was the i ation of 120,OCX) Japanese Amei World War II concentration cai In the decades [since], the I movement against segregation America s attitude toward racial
 Members of the Congressioi Caucus were the first to suppor tions [for the internees]. Japanes icans have [Black leaders] to t winning redress. 
Perhaps the time has now c Japanese Americans to lend a ha re-education of the ancestral h< muses JACL president Cress gawa. Tokyo s abject apologies isterial wise-cracks are not en says. They must be accompanie islative and educational progra overcome racial bigotry and dis tion.
 The difference between th< Japan is that the US has th grammes and Japan doesn t,  b points out. He hopes the JACL. help of US minority organisai the Japanese Government, can curriculum on the subject for schools. He has already appro panese Ambassador in Washing! Murata with the idea.
Susumu Av
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Article 28
BLACK-KOREAN
CONFLICT
IN LOS ANGELES
DARRELL Y. HAMAMOTO
Darrell K Hamamoto teaches at the Uni-mity of California, Irvine Program in Comparative Culture.
OF THE estimated 820,000 Koreans in the United States, over 164,000 reside in Los Angeles County. One in five Koreans in the Southern California region live in the district of Los Angeles known as  Koreatown.  Koreans represent 10 percent of the population of Koreatown with African Americans and Latinos predominating. Along with South-Central Los Angeles, Crenshaw, Hollywood, Mid-Wilshire, Echo Park, and Silver Lake, the Koreatown community bore the brunt of the recent urban rebellion, perhaps the worst civi
