Once, the traditional "breaking of the sake barrel" to celebrate opening ceremonies of the Nisei Week Japanese Festival would not have been on Nicole Miyako Cherry's to-do list.
As a Southern California teenager growing up in the suburban comfort of South Pasadena, Cherry was into inline skating on the beach, playing intramural soccer and scoring tickets for Boyz II Men concerts.
The daughter of a Japanese-American mother and a white American father, Cherry, now 24, said her integrated lifestyle allowed for few conspicuous ethnic markers other than perhaps wearing a kimono for Halloween or attending an obon festival.
But last year, she competed for, and won, the title of Nisei Week queen, becoming the official representative of the oldest Japanese-American cultural event in the region with the nation's largest concentration of Japanese-Americans outside of Honolulu.
"If people in my generation don't get involved, who's going to take over?" she asked.
Cherry's transformation from typical American teenager to ethnic ambassador is a statement about the uncertain cultural path of young Japanese-Americans who often find themselves lost. Shrinking population numbers, high intermarriage rates and the legacy of the rush to assimilate after the World War II internment experience have all combined to leave the sansei (third generation,) yonsei (fourth generation) and gosei (fifth generation) struggling to hold on to an identity they can call their own.
Cherry is among a number of Japanese-Americans awakening to an unsettling realization: that it may be up to them to fight to preserve their culture, even if most of them may not speak Japanese, or may not have visited Japan or may not even look Japanese.
Hapa is said to mean "half Asian" and is a term increasingly used to define American-Asians, Amerasians, or European-Asians. ie. hapas. It is generally used to define a mix of Asian and Caucasian.
Hapa is sometimes used, loosely, to signify anyone who has Asian and any other racial mix.
But the term is strictly said to be a Hawaiian word meaning: "Of mixed blood, person of mixed blood as in hapa hawai'i, part Hawaiian."
(The Hawaiian Dictionary, Mary Kawena Pukui and Samuel Ebert, page 58). Source: Google
Gil Asakawa, author of Being Japanese American (Stone Bridge Press, 2004), said another reason for the fervor among some young Japanese-Americans to assert their ethnic identity may be that it has become cool to be Japanese.
"Japanese culture is hip in American mainstream so the door has been opened for these Japanese-Americans to embrace the culture more," said Asakawa, who said he was jolted into consciousness about his heritage by the death of his father in the early 1990s.
But even as Japan's exports like anime (Japanese animation) and karaoke, not to mention its influences in food, technology and design, have become popular globally, many among the younger generations of Japanese-Americans say they are also looking at what it means to be Japanese-American, not just of Japanese descent. Central to Japanese-American pride is progenitors who survived and thrived in the US after their experiences during World War II.
"The culture and the traditional aspects go back to Japan, but I tend to look at the Japanese-American experience -- my grandfather being in an internment camp," Cherry said. "That's huge."
Many other groups also struggle to nourish their ethnic roots, but many Japanese-Americans seem to be going about it with a sense of urgency.
The Japanese-American population is in decline: Immigrant populations from other parts of Asia, including China, South Korea and the Philippines, now dwarf the number of Japanese-Americans, who once made up the largest Asian group in the US.
The trend has left some Japanese-Americans feeling as if they are disappearing.
Although Buddhist temples, sports leagues and families promote cultural identity, many longtime Japanese-American organizations and institutions are losing members or eroding. Only three Japantowns are left in California, including Little Tokyo here.
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