"Others don't feel like we have a separate identity but our story is so compelling," he said. "People just take Japanese-Americans for granted. One comment you commonly get is, `You're just like another white guy.' No, that's completely wrong."
Seki said both his parents were interned in US camps before they met (his father was released by volunteering to serve in the US military). After they married, no Japanese was ever spoken in their home as a way of proving, Seki said, "that they were Americans first, not enemy aliens."
In their movement to maintain their ethnicity, many Japanese-Americans have become more accepting of those with only partial Japanese ancestry, known as "hapas," or part Asian.
Eric Tate, a 34-year-old lawyer in San Jose whose mother is Japanese and whose father is black, said he co-founded one of the first hapa student groups in the early 1990s as a student at the University of California at Berkeley in response to feeling unwelcome by Japanese-American groups and sports leagues that restricted membership on the basis of Japanese heritage.
Tate said the tide had turned. In the 2000 census, more than 30 percent of married Japanese-Americans said their spouses were members of a different ethnic group or race, one of the highest intermarriage rate of any group. The offspring of such marriages added more than 300,000 people to the Japanese-American population.
"There's being a shift in paradigms from `Oh, outmarriage is a problem' to `Aw, shucks, we have to make these people embrace the culture because there won't be anybody left to embrace it,"' Tate said.
Phenotype and experiences like today's shared Asian culture may be part of an evolving ethnic identity, but Japanese-Americans from various generations said there is plenty to hand down.
Cherry, whose boyfriend is Mexican-American, clings to her biracial identity. "I won't take sides," she said.
But Cherry, who just completed a master's degree and is about to start a job as a social work therapist, said she would like her own children to learn Japanese, go to Japanese festivals, play in Japanese sports leagues and have a Japanese first name.
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