One notable figure among the prewar Nisei generation was Kazuo Kawai. Historian Jere Takahashi has referred to Kawai as one of the chief exponents of the ideology that Nisei, despite the prejudice against them in American society, could serve as a “bridge” between the United States and their ancestral Japanese homeland.
Kawai first became known in the 1920s, when he worked for the Survey of Race Relations sponsored by the University of Chicago. During the 1930s, Kawai was among the first members of the new generation to get an academic appointment. Stuck in Japan during World War II, he wrote editorials for Nippon Times and Contemporary Japan. He returned to the United States at the end of the 1940s and built an academic career. During these years, he published the book Japan’s American Interlude, a landmark study of the U.S. occupation of Japan.
Kazuo Kawai was born in Tokyo on April 13, 1904, the son of a Disciples of Christ minister, Rev. Teizo Kawai, and his wife Sada Shibata. The senior Kawai had converted to Christianity as a young man and had been educated at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, before returning to Japan to take up a pulpit. Teizo Kawai was sent to America in 1909 to serve as pastor of a Japanese American church (as a Christian minister from a high-class background, Teizo Kawai and his family were exempt from the restrictions of the Gentleman’s Agreement). The family settled on West 4th St. in Downtown Los Angeles.
Historian Mark Wild records that in the life history that Kazuo Kawai later produced for the Survey of Race Relations, he remarked that on first arriving in America, he was shocked by the appearance of white people: “The strange people who had red hair, blue eyes, and white skin, just like the pictures of the ogres in Japanese fairy-tale books.” Kawai related that, once established in his new home, his mother insisted that he concentrate on learning English. He was sent to a nearly all-white school, where he was isolated and mocked for his foreign birth and poor language skills.
In 1912 Kawai’s family moved to the East Side of Los Angeles, a racially diverse immigrant community. At first, he was intimidated by “the hordes of dirty little Mexican, Negro Italian, Greek, and Jewish children.” However, he soon succeeded in fitting into the “cosmopolitan east-side population.”
He excelled in school, where he was heavily influenced by Americanization campaigns. He related that during World War I, a time when Japan and the United States were allies, he was chosen to represent Japan in a school pageant, and was much praised for his participation.
After graduating from junior high school, Kawai enrolled at Los Angeles Polytechnic High School. There he excelled academically, and was selected as valedictorian of his graduating class. Nonetheless, he experienced a personal crisis.
While previously he had felt himself purely American, and had mostly white friends, in high school those friends began to turn away and ignore him, as if he did not exist. He began feeling like a “foreigner” in his own country, the more so as he was barred from US citizenship on racial grounds. He responded by taking on a “Japanese ” identity and hanging out with Nisei—though not by choice, he admitted. “[M]isery loves company and so, not by mutual attraction, but by common isolation, we became close friends,” he explained.
In the early 1920s, Kawai enrolled at UCLA (then called the University of California, Southern Branch). As a twenty-year-old student, he was recruited as a researcher by the University of Chicago Survey of Race Relations. Kawai worked as both an informant and a researcher. Historian Henry Yu has discussed Kawai’s work with the Survey. Along with Flora Belle Jan, a young Chinese American student, he provided both his own life history and did interviews with others about how they saw their place in America.
After completing his work with the Survey, in 1926 he published an essay in Survey magazine. In the essay, “Three Roads and None Easy,” he shared his conflicted feelings about being a marginal man: born in Japan, growing up in America and not feeling accepted by either whites or Japanese.
He started the essay by recalling a long-distance train ride he had taken. During the trip, he had had several discussions with an African American porter, who upon “seeing that I was not a white man, but a Japanese… beckoned me to come into his inner sanctuary by the washroom several times during the long, monotonous journey.” The porter explained that he was a college student who had taken time off to earn money for his education. He added bitterly that while several of his coworkers held college degrees, they were treated no differently than those with no education, remarking that “the Negro is looked upon as a servant, and the white man will not recognize him as anything else.” As a result, the porter confessed that he really did not know whether it was worthwhile continuing his education.
Kawai’s initial reaction to the porter’s recitation was one of racial superiority and of “a detached, condescending sympathy”—summed up in the thought: “Thank goodness, we Japanese in America are not like the Negroes. We are not a servile people.”
However, upon considering the matter, he began to see a similarity between his own status as a Nisei and that of African Americans: “I have come across incidents which are forcing me to reluctantly wonder very seriously if the new generation of American-born Japanese on the Pacific coast is not facing the same problem as the Negroes in finding suitable vocations.”
In his essay, Kawai identified the problem of “Japanese” in America as one of “racial contradictions” that left them always marginal (along similar lines of the double consciousness that W.E.B. DuBois famously described in African Americans). He repeated the story of a Nisei woman who decided to move to Japan after completing her college degree. “ ‘If I should get married over there,’ she confided jokingly, ‘there is nothing to prevent me from getting a prime minister for my husband; if I remain here, I can only marry a gardener, or, if very fortunate, a doctor.’ ”
Kawai concluded that the Nisei had three choices, all of them inadequate: They could resign themselves to second-class citizenship in America; they could move to Japan and try to make a life there; or they could work to change conditions and promote racial equality.
“For myself, I am frankly puzzled. I see some of my friends practically admitting defeat and settling down to a life of docile servitude. I see others of my friends so impatient that they are willing to take the desperate gamble the big of trying to adapt themselves to life in Japan. And I see still others buckling down to the long and difficult task of trying to change conditions. None of the three ways seems very inviting to me, but I suppose that my sympathy lies with the last group.”
In the end, Kawai decided that the best way to dealing with his conflict came through involvement in the Japanese Students Christian Association (JSCA). Kawai had already become active in the JSCA even before he wrote his essay—in 1925 he and a fellow Stanford student, Francis Hayashi, had spoken at a meeting of the San Francisco chapter, and in April 1926 he was elected Chairman of the JSCA’s San Francisco chapter.
At some point, he later recalled, he attended a church conference at Asilomar, California, where he learned about conflict between Japan and the United States, and became aware of “the challenge which that situation offered for interpreters who could bridge across the gap of the two races and the two civilizations, and bring the two together in a harmonious meeting, to synthesize the two cultures into a higher world culture.”
Since he was a child both of East and West, who carried both cultural traditions, Kawai reasoned, he was the best-equipped to negotiate between them, and explain each to the other. Rather than being a marginal American and trying in vain to “fit in” or moving to Japan and becoming an inauthentic Japanese, he realized that he could best overcome exclusion as a cultural interpreter between East and West.
While Kawai did not invent the idea that Nisei should provide a “bridge” between Japan and the United States—such ideas were popular both among leaders in Tokyo and Issei elites, as well as some prominent white Americans—his elaboration of it offered a novel and empowering approach for Nisei troubled by their identity conflict.
In line with his new goal of being an “interpreter,” Kawai reconfigured his professional orientation. While at the time he entered college, Kawai had been more interested in studying literature, he now considered that his job prospects in that field were limited, and in any case studying literature would not give him the platform he needed. As a result, he transferred to Stanford University, where he majored in Far Eastern History.
After graduating with an A.B. in 1926, and being named a Phi Beta Kappa, Kawai would go on to enroll in an MA program at Stanford, with help from a University Scholarship, and then to spend a year at Harvard University. His 1927 Stanford MA thesis, written under the direction of the Issei professor Yamato Ichihashi, was on “Western diplomacy relative to the Chino-Japanese [sic] War.” He went on to complete his PhD (1938) at Stanford.
He also became active professionally in his new field of East Asian Studies. In 1929 he attended the Fourth Annual conference of the Student Institute of Pacific Relations. The next year the organization published a pamphlet detailing Kawai’s discussion with Bay Area YMCA leader Henry Kingman at the conference. In 1930, he led an eight-week lecture course at Stanford under the auspices of the YMCA, titled “Outlines of History of Japan and China.” He also spoke on the subject at a banquet sponsored by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. In 1931, at the 5th Student Institute of Pacific Relations, he led a round table on “Cultural Contacts in the Pacific Area.”
In 1930, he published an article, “University-trained Bellhops” in the magazine The Intercollegian. Addressing himself to a largely white collegiate audience, he decried the absurdity and injustice of the job discrimination that Nisei graduates experienced on racial grounds, such that the only jobs open to them were as bellhops, fruit peddlers or curio dealers.
In 1931, Kawai was named coeditor with Howard Imazeki of the English section of the San Francisco Nichi-Bei (Japanese American News). The choice seems a bit surprising in retrospect, as Kawai had never been active in writing for the Nisei press. In fact, it seems plausible that the appointment was always intended to be temporary, as the article on Kawai’s hiring describes him as taking over from Miya Sannomiya, who was on a “leave of absence.”
Whatever the case, Kawai does not seem to have left much of a mark on the newspaper in the few weeks he worked there. He did not produce any articles under his byline during his stint at the Nichi-Bei, and his departure went unremarked in its pages.
In January 1932, in the wake of the Japanese military’s invasion and occupation of Chinese Manchuria, Kawai led a discussion on “The Conflict in the Orient” at the Open Forum at UCLA. In response to a presentation by partisans of China, he offered a firm defense of Japan’s intervention. His presentation was so well-regarded that a few days later, UCLA invited him to join its faculty as an instructor.
As UCLA Provost Ernest C. Moore stated in the pages of the UCLA student newspaper Daily Bruin, “Mr. Kawai was invited to come back to his first University after his wonderful discussion of the Manchurlan question at the University’s Public Forum a few nights ago. In him the University is sure it has found a young scholar of the greatest promise whose interest is in one of the fields of greatest and most growing human concern. He is a man in a hundred thousand.”
© 2025 Greg Robinson
