Charles Kikuchi was a second-generation Japanese American, or Nisei, who wrote virtually every day of his adult life, starting in 1941 at the age of twenty-five and ending mere days before his death from stomach cancer in 1988. Between diary entries and letters to family and friends, Kikuchi penned well over 100,000 pages, observing almost every significant moment in twentieth-century American history. Focusing on the 1940's, my dissertation examines the diary during Kikuchi's internment in California and Arizona, his resettlement in Chicago in 1943, his experience in the U.S. Armed Forces from 1945 to 1946, and his eventual settling down in New York City, where he would work as a psychiatric social worker for twenty-four years.; The diary provides a canvas upon which the history of racial and ethnic formation in the 1940's can be projected, played out, and analyzed. It was at this stage that ethnic and racial minorities were struggling over and negotiating the urban spaces they were forced to share, as a majority of internees were permitted to leave their camps as early as 1943 and relocate to Chicago and New York City, while others eventually returned by 1945 to Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Japanese Americans simultaneously met other minorities in inevitable conflict, but also with common cause, over jobs, housing, politics, culture, and the war itself. Therefore, Kikuchi's personal odyssey and attempt to fully comprehend what it meant to be Japanese, American, and (small "d") democratic in many ways reflected the nation's own journey between the Scylla of racial "dilemmas" (at home) and the Charybdis of democratic challenges abroad (in the transition from hot to Cold War).; Based on previously unexamined archival material, my dissertation emphasizes the correspondence Kikuchi kept and the conversations he recorded in his voluminous diary with the progressive activist Louis Adamic, the Cal demographer Dorothy Swaine Thomas, her husband, the Chicago School sociologist W. I. Thomas, African Americans on the South Side of Chicago, and Black and Nisei GI's. Building on the knowledge gained from these interactions, and through his own experience as an interned U.S. citizen, Kikuchi courageously sought the ideal of an American democratic "family," based on his own vision of a multiracial and multiethnic America, one which rejected assimilation as mere Anglo-conformity and instead privileged the diversity of all immigrant and minority cultures.
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