sansei
sansei noun: a grandchild of a Japanese immigrant to the Americas.
Noun
sansei (plural sanseis or sansei)
- A grandchild of a Japanese immigrant to the Americas.
- Born and brought tip mostly in South America, the United States (particularly Hawaii) and Canada, the nisei and sansei have Japanese features but often speak the language imperfectly, if at all. “If you don't speak Japanese well,” one sansei said ruefully, “it's better to he white.”1973 October 4, Robert Trumbull, “Offspring of Japanese Settlers in U.S. Find Japan Frustrating”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, archived from the original on 17 Feb 2022
- Under these circumstances it may not be unexpected to have the "assimilationist Sansei" protest that he is not a Japanese-Canadian; he is a Canadian, period. None of this hyphenated stuff.1978, Gordon Hirabayashi, “Japanese Heritage, Canadian Experience”, in Harold Coward, Leslie S. Kawamura, editors, Religion and Ethnicity, Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, page 66
Forms of sansei
| plural | sanseis |
|---|---|
| plural | sansei |
Origin of sansei
Borrowed from Japanese 三世 (“third generation”), from 三 (san, “third”) + 世 (sei, “generation”).
Questions about sansei
- What does sansei mean?
- Sansei means a grandchild of a Japanese immigrant to the Americas.
- What part of speech is sansei?
- Sansei is a noun.
- What is the plural of sansei?
- The plural of sansei is sanseis.
Words near sansei in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: sansei (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “sansei.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sansei. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.