Takeshi's personal history and academic interest has converged into his dissertation project, which explores how citizenship has evolved in the U.S., from citizenships of different states into the citizenship of the nation. And he feels extremely lucky to be where he is now: after 20 years and a continent away from his childhood home, he is finally able to revisit his memories, this time as a visiting scholar at the Centennial Center doing archival research in the area.
Takeshi was born in the U.S. and grew up in Gaithersburg, Maryland. He returned with his family to Japan when he was 11, but his interest in America remained strong; he majored in public law at Waseda University, Tokyo, writing his Master?s thesis about the American Constitution and the 1924 immigration law (which excluded Japanese from emigrating to the U.S.). He is now a Ph.D. candidate in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program at the University of California, Berkeley.
His dissertation explores how the boundaries of citizenship in the U.S. were, until recently, drawn at the state rather than the federal level. In many areas where citizenship mattered (and matters today)?control of immigration, control of state resources, of voting rights, social rights, etc.?individual states defined who counted as citizens and granted (or withheld) rights accordingly. Takeshi is interested in how this arrangement broke down; his hypothesis is that increased population mobility and accompanying disputes between people who moved around and locals who tried to limit them raised political and legal stakes high enough that constitutional adjustments had to be made.
He focuses on several periods in American history to examine this constitutional evolution. While at the Center, he is looking at the period between 1830 and 1850, focusing on several states where such tensions became significant. This includes Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, which had to deal with Blacks alternating between slavery and partial citizenship statuses as they crossed state borders, as well as New York and Massachusetts, which had to deal with cross-Atlantic migration and the question of which rights should be granted foreigners. Using the Center as his base, he is gathering sources at the metro area?s state archives. He wants to know how disputes arose and were handled by state legislatures and executives as well as by the courts, and how they were discussed in newspapers and political pamphlets at the local level.
It is an undertaking that allows him to turn his own struggles with mobility, inclusion, and exclusion from a burden into an asset, heavily intertwined with U.S. social history.
