Kunisuke Hirano hiranok@umich.edu 1 The Shifting Boundary of Minority Identities: The Japanese American Citizens League and Same-Sex Marriage Introduction Tadayuki John Ito 1 , a Sansei (third-generation) young professional Japanese American explained that LGBT issues are still touchy among LGBT individuals, but not within the whole Japanese American community: “I feel it is still a touchy issue. Not within the Japanese American community as a whole, but with individuals in the Japanese American community like myself. As a Japanese American I want to be known as such. I don’t want to be known as gay. I am not ashamed to be gay, yet I am not proud. It is just the way I am. But I do feel a sense of pride to be Japanese. I am Japanese 1st, Gay 2nd and American 3rd.” This paper will analyze the experience of LGBT (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender) Japanese Americans. 2 The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), the national face of the Japanese American, appears to have long been sensitive to LGBT issues and officially affirmed the community’ s diversity. Since 1994, the JACL has been officially supporting same-sex marriage due to their view that the “same” injustice was presented by anti-miscegenation laws as by placing a ban on same-sex marriage; one cannot choose one’s race any more than one’s their sexual orientation. This paper, referring to cases of mixed-race Japanese Americans and LGBT Japanese Americans’ positions in discourse among Japanese Americans, will analyze the inclusiveness and boundaries presented by Japanese Americans’ sense of “we” as a minority group. This paper explores whether their notion of “we” includes other 1 All interviewees’ names are pseudonym. 2 Actually, LGBT people do not always regard each other as the same category. For example, expressions such as “GLB” or “L/G” are also used to clarify the subject group. Especially transgender people have been historically excluded by the other groups since they are regarded as “sick.” For more about LGBT politics, see Stryker (2006, 1-18). Here, I would like to use the term LGBT to describe a group of sexual minorities.