From a Community Church to a "Commuter Church" : Speech Codes and Ethnic Identity among Japanese Americans

概要

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This paper reports some fieldwork findings from observations of a Japanese Baptist church in Seattle, Washington. The ethnographic observation of church services and related community activities by Japanese Americans depicts what may be called a cultural "tug-of-war" between Japanese past and American present. The church, now best characterized as a "commuter church" , is a material existence of Japanese American reinterpretation of Japanese past and American present. It is a site in which Japanese Americans re-create their Japanese heritage and reaffirm their cultural identity. In doing so, they transform their past and construct a new, shared ethnic identity. A transformation from a community church, which is defined by its locale, to a commuter church, which, in contrast, is defined by a voluntary community-wide network of people, can be taken as a material outcome of the competing cultural forces Japanese Americans experience. The study also describes a way in which some remnants of Japanese cultural terms and expressions serve as speech codes that invoke a Japanese past in the process of the cultural reinterpretation discussed above.