The experiences of second-generation Japanese Americans -- the Great Depression, world war, postwar prosperity and Cold War -- spanned much of the 20th century. Historians of the nisei have, understandably, concentrated on the most dramatic and tragic episode in Japanese-American history: the incarceration of 120,000 alien parents and citizen children during the Pacific War.
David Yoo believes there has been too much emphasis on the internment, which has foregrounded the group's victimization to the exclusion of an awareness of the "rich subculture" the nisei created on the West Coast in the 1920s and '30s.
Further, he thinks that the nisei's assimilationist image -- their acceptance of internment and their drive to become "200 percent Americans" after the war -- belies the complexity of their response to their ambivalent position as a racial-ethnic minority in prewar America, as well as to their wartime dislocation.