Thanks for your Post #39.
I think you are right. All my friends in High School (San Francisco) were either Americans of Japanese or Chinese descent. I just figured that they would mostly tact towards the conservative spectrum of politics - since that seems to be a better fit to their values (maybe not the Christian aspect of it - but certainly on the work and education ethics aspect).
I'm just appalled/surprised that all of the Japanese-American politicians are far leftists (Honda, Matsui, former Congressman Minetta; the Hawaiian Senators) -- but you are right, it probably has more to do with the area they are from (SF Bay Area and Hawaii).
That is exactly right ~ it depends on where they managed to run for office and win. Most of it in the SF Bay area is "coalition politics" where ALL the Asians, including the Filipinos vote for the Japanese-American in those areas.
In Hawaii, the two largest groups are JA and Chinese American, and they compete ~ with most JAs being Democrats and most CAs (CBA, and ABC) being Republican.
The JAs are a smaller percentage of the larger population in Southern California and simply have more difficulty climbing the chairs in party politics as a consequence.
BTW, I've met every single JA in Congress over the last 50 years EXCEPT Senator Hayakawa ~ but then again I worked directly with the guy who had been his chief staff assistant at San Fran State when he was beating back the barbarians.
It's one of your smaller ethnic groups, so in JA personal politics and relationships it's a short distance from the top to bottom.