Michael Jin

“Surviving the Bomb in Diaspora: Intergenerational Suffering and Justice-Seeking Among Korean Pihaeja” by Naoko Wake and Michael R. Jin. The American Historical Review (2025) 130 (3)

Uncovering the voices of the Korean diasporic atomic bomb survivors across multilingual and transimperial spaces in archives and memories in East Asia and the Americas, Naoko Wake and I explore the historical meaning of compensatory justice for those who have been deprived of their national right of redress. Korean atomic bomb victims’ lifelong struggles for survival after World War II have hinged on their confrontation with multiple forms of colonial and state violence across national borders that have severely compounded their redressability. Their history exposes the fundamental limits of the postcolonial discourse on human rights that has privileged justice adjudicated by nation-states. The voices of these survivors of multiple generations across the transpacific diaspora also offer powerful insights into the role of the United States in the interimperial history of not only the bombs but also their victims, spanning a longer period than customarily assumed by historians. To gain such insights, this article elucidates how Korean survivors have formed their diasporic identities, memories, and activism as they have grappled with the fraught, US-centric notion of compensatory justice and, by extension, offered textured critiques of the dualistic notion of the war between Japan and the United States that has circumscribed the bomb’s historiography.

“Citizen Aliens: American Xenophobia, Japanese American Migrants, and the Transpacific Borders of Belonging.” Journal of American Ethnic History (2025) 44 (4)

In this article I explore the perspectives of Kibei, U.S.-born Japanese Americans who returned from their transpacific sojourn in Japan, which illuminate the deeply entrenched culture and politics of American xenophobia and a systemic assault on Asian Americans’ birthright citizenship, from Chinese exclusion to anti-Japanese political campaigns throughout the Jim Crow American West. The Kibei’s lifelong journeys across transpacific borders of belonging expose the enduring exclusionary regime of US citizenship.

Please join me for a public talk sponsored by the American Bar Foundation this Wednesday, February 22 at 12 Noon. I will be discussing the long-term consequences of the Asian exclusion movement that culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court case Ozawa v. United States (1922) on the lives of U.S.-born Asian Americans. The seminar will take place via Zoom. To register, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.

From Citizens to Aliens: Asian Americans and the Racial Limits of American Citizenship

Michael R. Jin

The landmark 1922 Supreme Course case Ozawa v. United States stamped the legal status of immigrants from Japan as “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” bolstering the intense exclusion movement based on the powerful Orientalist representation of Asians as unassimilable foreigners. This movement to police the racial boundaries of citizenship not only excluded Asian immigrants from American citizenry, but also threatened the citizenship rights of U.S.-born Asian Americans. In their concerted effort to strip Asian Americans’ birthright citizenship, leading anti-immigrant agitators deployed the same xenophobic rhetoric to argue that U.S.-born Japanese Americans should be treated as Japanese nationals. Japanese Americans’ struggles to protect the integrity of their birthright citizenship demonstrate that exclusionary legal measures designed to stop the influx of Asians did not simply affect the immigrant generation. Focusing on the experiences of Japanese Americans throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, this talk explores the complex and bizarre consequences of the pervasive anti-Asian xenophobia in the American West that rendered many Americans of Japanese ancestry stateless and subject to legal exclusion as “aliens ineligible for citizens.” 

February 19, 2023 marks the 100th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, which followed Ozawa v. United States. This talk honors the history of Asian Americans and their struggle for US citizenship amid pervasive anti-Asian xenophobia in the early twentieth century.