Hawaii's Japanese community in the postwar Democratic Movement

This dissertation examines the social movements that changed the politics and social structure of Hawaii in the early 1950s from the perspective of its Japanese ethnic minority community. The landslide victory of the new Democrats in the 1954 election ended the 50-year Republican monopoly of Hawaii politics and came to be called the "Democratic Revolution" in Hawaii local history. The study uses the political process model and framing theory to analyze historical materials and data from a systematic content analysis of the Japanese language vernacular newspaper, Hawaii Hochi , in order to show how the Japanese speaking population of Hawaii, who were mostly first-generation (Issei) and elder second-generation (Nisei) took part in the social movements that led to this change.;First, the study demonstrates that the Japanese community had developed strong leadership and resources among the Issei early in the 20th century. The community had a long history of mobilizing community members to carry out labor strikes and other social movement campaigns aimed at obtaining equal status in American society, and viewed statehood for Hawaii and naturalization for Japanese as the prime vehicles for equality. Some elder Nisei won election to public office in the prewar period. Second, after World War II, the younger returning Nisei soldiers brought new momentum to these movements for equality, and the community managed to overcome the damage inflicted by the targeting of Japanese labor leaders in the Red Scare. Third, the study reveals the significant mobilization within the Japanese community in the early 1950s to support passage of new naturalization and immigration laws that would allow the Issei to become U.S. citizens, and then to promote their naturalization and voter registration. These campaigns helped to turn many Issei into voters just in time to help elect the Nisei candidates, who won heavily in the 1954 election. And lastly, this dissertation suggests a new way to look at the "Democratic Revolution" as an alternation of leadership from the elder Nisei to younger Nisei.