Review of <i>Nikkei in the Interior West: Japanese Immigrants and Community Building, 1882–1945</i> By Eric Walz
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Studies of Japanese immigration into North America generally focus on the larger Hawaiian and West Coast populations, but there is a small body of work on other areas, including New York, Texas, and the Canadian heartland. The core of Eric Walz’s book is a pioneering sourcerich examination of Japanese immigration and settlement experiences in the American West, including Nebraska, but excluding the coastal states and Midwest. As long as its focus stays on these sparsely distributed migrants, the book is an interesting addition to the literature, though not a final word. The decision to include Japanese historical and cultural context is admirable, though executed poorly, and the decision to close the narrative at the end of World War II leaves later developments unresolved.\nWalz introduces and demonstrates stages of immigrant ethnic formation, from initial forays into a new frontier, individual settlement and family stages, and finally construction of ethnic communities with local, regional, national, and sometimes international connections. These central chapters feature vivid details drawn from oral histories, memoirs, diaries, newspapers, and government records. The presentation is roughly chronological, guided by concepts of diasporic ethnic formation found in recent scholarship on Japanese and other migrations. While this is not a comparative study, discussion of Latter-day Saint communities as another ethnic tradition occupying much of the same geography is fascinating and productive.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".