As a population that was forced to undergo mass incarceration and assimilation, Japanese American communities – and the language they use to perform, reproduce, and reconstruct their transnational identities – provide insight into our understandings of heritage language loss, linguistic forms of social differentiation, and surrounding political economies. Following a period of cultural suppression and language loss, Japanese American festivals and pageantry offer a glimpse into the racialized, gendered nature of language and semiotics as they are used to both challenge and reinforce existing social divisions. Utilizing ethnographic data, interviews, and archival research conducted within a Japanese American pageant program in Southern California, I seek to examine racial, gendered, and generational divides within and surrounding the Japanese American community at large. As a participant myself – in a pageant program that seeks to foster the Japanese American community’s next generation of cultural ambassadors – I aim to illustrate the linguistic and sociopolitical contexts surrounding transnational migration, racialized incarceration, and cultural performance as a means of either resisting or perpetuating ethnic assimilation. With a focus on language socialization and multimodal communication, I specifically draw on the work of scholars who study language ideologies and semiotic assemblages (Kroskrity 2021; Gal and Irvine 2019; Pennycook 2017). In doing so, I aim to illustrate the perceived benefits and detriments of Japanese language acquisition within spaces that promote intergenerational solidarity, cross-cultural exchange, and the vestiges of what it means to be either Japanese or American in an increasingly transnational world.