Airborne Dreams

In 1955 Pan American World Airways began recruiting Japanese American women to work as stewardesses on its Tokyo-bound flights and eventually its round-the-world flights as well. Based in Honolulu, these women were informally known as Pan Am’s “Nisei”—second-generation Japanese Americans—even though not all of them were Japanese American or second-generation. They were ostensibly hired for their Japanese-language skills, but few spoke Japanese fluently. This absorbing account of Pan Am’s “Nisei” stewardess program suggests that the Japanese American (and later other Asian and Asian American) stewardesses were meant to enhance the airline’s image of exotic cosmopolitanism and worldliness. As its corporate archives demonstrate, Pan Am marketed itself as an iconic American company pioneering new frontiers of race, language, and culture. Christine R. Yano juxtaposes the airline’s strategies and practices with the recollections of former “Nisei” flight attendants. In interviews with the author, these women proudly recall their experiences as young women who left home to travel the globe with Pan American World Airways, forging their own cosmopolitan identities in the process. Airborne Dreams is the story of an unusual personnel program implemented by an American corporation intent on expanding and dominating the nascent market for international air travel. That program reflected the Jet Age dreams of global mobility that excited postwar Americans, as well as the inequalities of gender, class, race, and ethnicity that constrained many of them.

“Airborne Dreams draws big, compelling themes from the experiences of a small group of women who put a distinctive spin on the stewardess mystique. Christine R. Yano deftly explores the gender and racial stereotypes, complex class relations, and corporate ambitions that prompted Pan Am’s hiring of Japanese American flight attendants at the height of the airline’s cultural and commercial dominance. Equally important, we get a rich portrait of the opportunities and pleasures that her subjects found in their work and the ways that they transcended the very stereotypes they represented.”—Kathleen M. Barry, author of Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants, “Airborne Dreams is a fascinating account of Pan Am’s ‘Nisei’ program and the ways that it embodied interrelated conceptions of postwar America, gender and racial politics, globalism, and cosmopolitanism. By combining sources ranging from airline archives to interviews with many former Pan Am stewardesses, Christine R. Yano has given us a refreshingly novel understanding of corporate history and its relation to key social and cultural issues.”—Laura Miller, author of Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics, “[A] very interesting book that tells the history of Pan Am and its international stewardess program begun in the mid-1950s. The book features personal interviews and commentary from Japanese-Americans who flew the Pacific Pan Am air routes out of Hawaii, routes that opened up opportunities even as they made a name for an airline moving into the jet age.“, “[This] book ... certainly paints a fascinating picture of the background to the American gender and racial issues that still fill the big screens of the world, and it broadens out the stereotypical anti-communist image that preceded America’s entry into Vietnam.... Definitely an anthropology book worth taking out into the big wide world!”, “Historians who use oral histories will be sympathetic to Yano's ambition to use the small details of everyday life to illuminate the larger issues of corporations and nations. . . . That she was able to recover the history of this small changing cadre at all is impressive and valuable. . . . [I]t would be a mistake not to embrace the notion of the aircraft cabin on an international flight as a ‘frontier,’ and to miss the complex cultural analysis that Yano provides in this deft study of pioneering Japanese American women.”

Christine R. Yano is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawai`i, Manoa. She is the author of Crowning the Nice Girl: Gender, Ethnicity, and Culture in Hawai`i’s Cherry Blossom Festival and Tears of Longing: Nostalgia and the Nation in Japanese Popular Song.