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Jonathan Ridewood

7 May 2008

History 353

Research Paper

Alidio

The Japanese-American Experience in Hawaii from the Gannen Mono to the Nisei

The story of Kyuzo Toyama, an elite educator and civil rights leader in Okinawa and Tokyo, elucidates a number of the themes and transnational linkages in the study of the Japanese immigrants in Hawaii. His life explains why citizens left for Hawaii, the role of the Japanese government in encouraging workers to leave their homeland, and how emigration developed from a temporary migration to more permanent communities. Toyama’s connection to Hawaii began after seeing an advertisement recruiting immigrants to Hawaii. Quickly, he concluded that emigration “might be the only positive solution to the problems of an increasing population and inevitable food shortages in Japan”[1] that overwhelmed the Japanese government and its populace near the turn of the nineteenth century. Working with plantation owners in Hawaii and Japanese government officials, Toyama recruited a group of Okinawans for three year labor contracts. Upon arrival the immigrants worked in conditions far worse than even their worse expectations. The United States Congress saved the laborers from fulfilling their three-year contracts after passing the Organic Act that effectively “made contract labor immigration in Hawaii invalid”[2]. A majority of the immigrants left for the mainland U.S. or quit their plantation jobs.

Toyama, discouraged by the first round of immigrants, still believed in the benefits of Hawaiian migration. After a handful of the immigrants who did return to Japan reported on their success in Hawaii, Toyama began to promote a second journey to work on the Hawaiian plantations. This time Toyama led the group himself, but the conditions of plantation work remained as grueling. To appease the workers, Toyama appealed to the workers sense of a Japanese nation. In “inspiring” talks every Saturday evening, Toyama reminded the workers that they were “pioneers in Okinawa’s overseas emigration”, would “save their homeland from poverty”, and “stimulate further emigration to Hawaii”[3]. The role of the Japanese immigrants in Hawaii was no longer a three year quick-fix to their economic problems but grander illusions of Japanese empire and regional hegemony. The success of this second paved the way for further emigration to Hawaii, greater community consolidation, and the eventual introduction of the Japanese to another country with imperial ambitions, the United States

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In Eiichiro Asuma’s Between Two Empires: Race History and Transnationalism in Japanese America, he discusses the Japanese immigrant population on mainland America as situated between two conflicting ideologies, two divergent racial doctrines, and two empires in competition of one another. Using a transnational framework Asuma concludes that the Japanese immigrants generally accepted the racial categories and meanings upheld promoted by both their homeland and their new home. Building upon Between Two Empires and the work of other historians contributions of the Japanese-American history, the purpose of this paper is to consider the impact of the same two empires in their role in shaping the Japanese immigrant population in a different setting, Hawaii. Unlike in mainland America, the territory literally became a battleground for the two empires as they endeavored to homogenize the immigrant populations to coincide with the political and economic goals during the first half of the twentieth century. The Japanese immigrant population, however, resisted conforming to either of these two empires’ plans and created their own permanent communities in Hawaii, blending facets and ideologies of both of the countries on their own terms. This paper will explain the two overarching plans of the Japanese and the United States governments for the Japanese immigrant populations in Hawaii and the goals of the immigrants themselves and then examine two areas in which the Japanese established their unique community.

The Japanese emigration project incorporated concepts appropriated from the West such as imperialism and nation-building that intensified under the political and socioeconomic conditions of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Japan’s efforts to modernize after the end of the closed-door policy of the Tokugawa regime placed the nation in direct contest with other Asian nations and the European colonial powers that had penetrated the commercial markets of East Asia. Japan joined the “international scramble for new territories and export markets” because members of the country’s intelligentsia believed that expansion “would be imperative in defense of Japan’s fragile security”[4]. Lacking the economic development and military prowess of its competitors, Japan, “often served as a source of cheap workers for the more advanced economies”[5], effectively shattering the line between colonialism and emigration. Japanese immigrants were to be loyal subjects of the Japanese empire on foreign soil, serve as “commercial linkages between their homeland and their new country of residence”[6], and set up isolated Japanese communities or ‘second Japans’ to remain under control of the Japanese state. Excerpts from the official instructions of Miki Nabeshima, governor of Hiroshima Prefecture, to one of the first wave of immigrants to Hawaii state these aims succinctly:

Rule 1: Remember that each of you are the subjects of the Japanese empire, and never disgrace your homeland with shameful acts…

Rule 3: Think of your coworkers as your parents and siblings, help each other, and never quarrel with one another.[7]

In order to implement their imperial goals, the Japanese government defined the terms of emigration and enacted social controls to maintain their links to the Japanese immigrant communities in Hawaii. The negative experience of the Gannen Mono, the first group of Japanese immigrants to travel to Hawaii in 1868, led the Japanese government to restrict emigration until 1883. Instead of relying on businessmen to organize the terms of emigration, the Japanese government took an active role in organizing who would travel to Hawaii and what the terms of labor would be. The two governments negotiated an agreement in which the workers would retain loyalty to the Japanese government and return home after three years of hard labor[8]. The government hoped immigration would relieve concerns of overpopulation because workers were chosen by from specific densely populated urban areas. Worker’s contracts stipulated that 25 percent of their gross wages were to be saved and sent back home to Japan. Once the living quarters proved to be substandard and the working conditions “subjected the workers to many indignities at the hands of the ruthless overseers”[9], the Japanese government intervened to ensure their investment succeeded and sent a minister of the government to negotiate better terms. In the years of contract labor, such intervention by representatives of the Japanese was commonplace whenever the Japanese government objected to the status of the immigrants.

Intervention was not limited to arrangements with the Hawaiian government, and on occasion, the Japanese government sought to control the Japanese immigrants themselves - particularly when workers became unruly. In the late 1880s, many workers indulged “in heavy drinking, gambling and licentiousness, disregarding completely the regular savings and remittances that were required by the Japanese government”[10]. The Japanese government’s interests in Hawaii were too important to allow relations to deteriorate, so the government fired the ineffective consul supervising the plantation workers and replaced him with General Taro Ando, a more decorated and respected diplomat. After touring the plantations and urging the immigrants to be better representatives of the Japanese nation, the General resorted to two methods of social control. First he cooperated with Rev. Kanichi Miayam of the Methodist Conference of San Francisco to restore order and self-respect among the plantation laborers[11]. Secondly, he established the Japanese Mutual Aid Association and the Temperance Society, whose leadership consisted of Japanese-born, non-plantation worker elites. These efforts helped maintain a greater degree of loyalty to the Japanese nation and ensure proper loyalty towards the Japanese empire.

While the goal of the Japanese intelligentsia and elite was empire and expansion through emigration, the first Japanese immigrants left their homeland motivated mostly by worsening conditions in Japan. After the decline in crop prices in the early 1880s that “sent into default many small family farmers who had spearheaded the early growth of commercial agriculture”[12], the Japanese government lifted its ban on emigration to appease calls for a quick economic recovery. The goal of the first wave of immigrants was to work in Hawaii under three-year contracts, return to their homeland, and “rebuild and expand their agricultural enterprises”[13]. Emigration would be temporary and allow for social uplift in Japan, not Hawaii. Some immigrants decided to stay in Hawaii, but when the United States annexed the Hawaiian territory in 1898, migration became more permanent, weakening the control the Japanese government had over terms of migration and the communities already in Hawaii.

Even as part of the Japanese imperial project, immigrants in Hawaii lived under the hegemonic control of the United States, which conspired to “Americanize” the immigrants into a culturally uniform, homogenous citizenry. Americanizers in Hawaii sought to “to strip immigrants of their native *”[14] and replace them with American ideals and traditions. Initially, pseudo-scientific practices determined that the Japanese were unfit for Americanization because, as the editor for a Honolulu newspaper declared, “no matter how responsive the Japanese may be to their American environment, their physical type marks them out as Orientals”[15]. Once the number of Japanese in Hawaii significantly increased, so did the efforts of Americanizers to transform the immigrant populace. Eileen Tamura argues that the motivation of the Americanizers originated from anxieties over losing control over the island and “Japan’s visibly growing military strength and aggressive foreign policy”[16]. If the Japanese maintained their customs and language, the territory would become “Japanized” and the United States would lose control of one of its imperial possessions. Official U.S. policy, however, prevented the Japanese in Hawaii from citizenship, reserving citizenship for free whites and Africans even as forces in the country attempted to transform the population into “Americans”. A Supreme Court decision in November of 1922 declared that Takao Ozawa, a Japanese-born Hawaiian, was ineligible for naturalization because he was neither white nor black. The Americanization process of Japanese immigrants would have to occur without the legal status of citizenship in venues and areas of Hawaiian life discussed later in this paper.

Rejecting both the imperial project of Japan and the Americanization goals of cultural homogeneity, Japanese immigrants in Hawaii strived for cultural assimilation into U.S. and Hawaiian society. But assimilation would not be a linear progression from being “Japanese” to American”. Issei (first generation Japanese immigrants) leaders “envisioned a dual process of naturalization relative to the two worlds”[17] they blended. They would adopt American middle-class norms while maintaining linkages to Japanese culture. Fred Kinzaburo Makino, publisher of the Hawaii Hochi, articulated reasons for cultural assimilation and that the ideals and practices of the U.S. and Japan were not necessarily mutually exclusive. He argued that the Japanese “should retain those aspects of Japanese culture that helped them adapt to and succeed in America” and stressed “justice and a square deal, rather than acquiescence”[18]. Many of the values he discussed – such as patriotism, the work ethic, economic opportunity, social mobility, and group solidarity – were compatible with Japanese and American ideals. Becoming American did not necessarily mean that the immigrants would have to lose qualities that made them Japanese.

Differing modes of education for the Nisei, second generation Japanese in Hawaii, allowed the Japanese communities in Hawaii to seek a middle-class suburban life, combat forces of Americanization, and complicate their ties to Japanese imperial ambitions. Once the U.S. annexed the Hawaii and white citizens began to move to the territory in greater numbers, Japanese families enrolled their children into four different types of schools – segregated public schools, vocational public schools, private schools, and Japanese-language schools. (Japanese enrollment in private schools was limited and will not be discussed.) Most Hawaiian families enrolled their children in public schools which, beginning in 1922, were segregated by ethnicity. Supporters of the change argued that segregation protected the English language and encouraged speech habits[19]. Segregation, however, assured the elite in Hawaiian society that the racial hierarchy would remain in place. This fact was further compounded with the push during the 1920s for schools to offer vocational programs. During the decade, Congress threatened “to cut off the influx of Filipino laborers”, which made it necessary for sugar planters to turn to domestic sources of labor. Territorial leaders supported this year, and a push was made for a change in curriculum. The Federal Survey Commission recommended “that a full-scale vocational education curriculum be developed”, and Superintendent Henry W. Kenney discussed the need to “educate the rising generation so as to equip it for the work which will come to its hand when it leaves school”[20]. Educators and public officials like Kenney expressed the view that there would be no white collar jobs for the ethnic populations of Hawaii if they became educated. The adoption of vocational schools would keep the ethnic populations in the fields.

Japanese-language schools fostered Japanese nationalism and culture yet in many instances, failed to effectively instill these values in the Nisei generation. In Between Two Empires Azuma argues that mainland immigrants attempted to “mold the Nisei mind toward an understanding of the collective racial ideal so they would effectively undertake their generational mission”. This social engineering required the Nisei to learn the “authentically” Japanese moral values and have a “strong sense of racial price or racial consciousness”[21]. Education in Japanese-language schools in Hawaii had similar goals. Tom Ige, a student of the Japanese language schools, remembers that he was required to “bow very reverently before the picture of the Japanese emperor and empress”, sing the Japanese national anthem, and practice Japanese Buddhism[22]. In his biography, Ige questions the purpose and usefulness of learning the Japanese practices. Predictably, Issei students in Hawaii failed to fully learn the Japanese language and “use the proper honorific expressions appropriate to different occasions”[23]. In interviews with Nisei educated in the Japanese-language schools, they exclaimed that what stuck with them years later was the Japanese moral education, shushin. A student recalled that, “it was the moral education which I had at the Japanese school that formed my character”[24]. Forced Japanese nationalism failed because the Nisei generation lacked the motivation to become fluent in Japanese and fully appreciate their Japanese heritage. Their goals, often middle class acculturation, did not require the language and cultural practices of their parents.

After the end of the contract system and the development of labor unions in Hawaii, labor disputes provided an important outlet for Japanese workers to distance themselves from the Japanese mainland and adopt American norms on their own terms. In 1909 Japanese workers staged the “Great Strikes”, the Hawaiian territory’s most protracted labor dispute. Though the strikers lost, they were soon granted improved wages and working conditions, but more importantly, the 1909 strike set the stage for a massive sugar strike in 1920 that “ignited the latent hostility that had been building against Japanese immigrants since the beginning of the century”[25]. The English-language press in Hawaii framed the strike as a “racial clash” and accused Japanese language teachers and newspapers and Buddhist ministers of encouraging the workers to strikes. Ironically, the Buddhist temples served as a place for workers to organize their dissent, not as a place for ministers to encourage the strikes. Fearing that the Japanese would achieve control of the sugar industry, members of the English-language press believed that the strike would lead to the Japanization of the entire island. The Star Bulletin asked if Hawaii “is to remain American or become Japanese?” and asserted that any white “American” who advocated anything less than resistance was “a traitor to his own people”[26]. The very same English-language newspapers called for the Americanization of the Japanese, but during the strike of 1920, Americanization efforts were delayed to obscure the economic demands of the plantation workers.

In many ways, the strikes of 1920 captured the ideals and conceptions of America that the Americanizers championed in their efforts to transform the Japanese immigrants. Yasutaro Soga, editor of a Japanese-language newspaper and leader of the 1909 strike, did not view the dispute as a racial clash and argued that “the strike was a demand for an American standard of living”[27]. The labor organizations modeled themselves after the American Federation of Labor and pursued a closer approximation of American equality by convincing the Puerto Ricans, Spanish, Portuguese, Hawaiians, and Chinese to join the strike. Also, the 1920 strike marked the ascension of the Nisei, second generation Japanese in Hawaii, to positions of leadership within the Japanese community. The strike leaders averaged an age of 32, and the older generation of workers advised caution when the younger Japanese urged a more aggressive stance”[28]. The Nisei better understood the gap between the rhetoric of the Americanization forces and the reality of plantation living.

Navigating between the Imperial claims of two empires, the first two generations of Japanese immigrants consolidated a permanent community in Hawaii that combined their traditional Japanese values with American middle-class life. Neither power could effectively assert its control over the Japanese immigrant community in Hawaii. Though WWII complicated the claims of the Issei and Nisei generations in Hawaii to Japan, ties to their motherland remain today. The War may have accelerated the process of acculturation, but the Japanese community remained a unique, heterogeneous part of Hawaiian culture.

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[1] Yukiko Kimura, Issei: Japanese Immigrants in Hawaii, (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988), 49

[2] Yukiko Kimura, Issei: Japanese Immigrants in Hawaii, 51

[3] Yukiko Kimura, Issei: Japanese Immigrants in Hawaii, 52

[4] Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires (New York: University of Oxford Press, 2005), 18

[5] Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires, 19

[6] Fukuzawa Yukichi, Ijuron no Ben (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1932): 459-460

[7] Yukiko Kimura, Issei: Japanese Immigrants in Hawaii, 7

[8] Yukiko Kimura, Issei: Japanese Immigrants in Hawaii, 4

[9] Yukiko Kimura, Issei: Japanese Immigrants in Hawaii, 5

[10] Yukiko Kimura, Issei: Japanese Immigrants in Hawaii, 7

[11] Yukiko Kimura, Issei: Japanese Immigrants in Hawaii, 7

[12] Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires, 28

[13] Yukiko Kimura, Issei: Japanese Immigrants in Hawaii, 33

[14] Eileen H. Tamura, Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity, (Urbana and Chicao: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 54

[15] Eileen H. Tamura, Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity, 56

[16] Eileen H. Tamura, Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity, 61

[17] Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires, 50

[18] Eileen H. Tamura, Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity, 63

[19] Eileen H. Tamura, Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity, 111

[20] Eileen H. Tamura, Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity, 137

[21] Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires, 22

[22] Eileen H. Tamura, Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity, 154

[23] Eileen H. Tamura, Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity, 156

[24] Eileen H. Tamura, Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity, 156

[25] Eileen H. Tamura, Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity, 213

[26] Eileen H. Tamura, Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity, 215

[27] Eileen H. Tamura, Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity, 215

[28] Eileen H. Tamura, Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity, 216

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