Topic: The Japanese Association of America’s use of power ...



IN ORDER TO CREATE A MORE PERFECT SOCIETY: THE JAPANESE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA’S RESPONSE TO THE WEST COAST ANTI-JAPANESE “YELLOW PERIL” PHENOMENON, 1908-1924

HELEN KAIBARA

EASTERN KENTUCKY UNIVERSITY

Abstract:

The United States may be a land of immigrants, but the experience of each immigrant group is unique as it struggles to find a place in American society. For Japanese immigrants living on the West Coast in the first decades of the twentieth-century, the path to acceptance was impeded by de facto and de jure manifestations of a combination of racism and xenophobia called “yellow peril.” This paper examines the Japanese Association of America’s (JAA) role in early Japanese immigrant settlement, its sources of authority, and its campaigns to “clean up” the lifestyles of the working class Japanese, notably in partnership with the Japanese government.

The primary sources utilized in this study are a comprehensive history of the Japanese experience in the United States produced in 1926 by the JAA, American diplomatic papers, and a collection of writings and speeches by a leading anti-Japanese figure, V.S. McClatchy. These sources, in addition to several scholarly books on the topic, support the finding that the JAA’s influence was enhanced by its ties to the Japanese government, and the JAA used this influence to pursue campaigns aimed at reforming the lives of the lower classes to make that group more acceptable to American society. The Japanese government actively assisted the JAA in these campaigns because they hoped that these actions would preserve Japan’s image in the United States.

_____________________________________

“We live here. We have cast our lot with California. Our interest is here, and our fortune is irrevocably wedded to the state in which we have been privileged to toil and make a modest contribution to the development of its resources…We have unconsciously adapted ourselves to the ideals and manners and customs of our adopted country, and we no longer entertain the slightest desire to return to our native country.”

George Shima, President of the Japanese Association of America, 1924[?]

From the time of its formation in 1900, the Japanese Association of America (JAA) actively shaped the direction of the Japanese immigrant community on the West Coast. As the climate in the United States grew increasingly hostile to Japanese residents, the actions of the JAA became increasingly reactionary and aimed at protecting the Japanese community. The JAA always sought assimilation, yet in 1908 with authority from the Japanese government, the association also entered into campaigns to cleanse the immigrant society morally in an effort to ease the feeling of “yellow peril”[?] surrounding Japanese neighborhoods. The JAA’s community involvement often transcended their official authority, yet the Japanese government allowed this and even assisted the JAA’s reform efforts because the JAA’s aim of moral reform was to enhance the image of Japan abroad.

Within the various narratives of immigrant experience, study of the relationship between the country of origin and ethnic association formed by immigrants in the new country can help illuminate the immigrant group’s transition to a new culture. For much of the period between 1900 and 1924, the JAA was the prominent organization for Japanese residents in the United States, and the JAA maintained exceptionally close ties to the Japanese government, the latter often sending aid to help JAA initiated campaigns in the United States. The efforts and significance of the JAA is inextricably connected with the story of early Japanese immigration on the West Coast and scholars consistently recognize the importance of this association.

Yuji Ichioka[?] offers a standard view asserting that the JAA was the “key political organization”[?] of the Japanese immigrants in the United States. Moreover, the JAA became vastly more eminent after the Japanese government delegated administrative authority to it in the aftermath of the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907.[?] In fact, the JAA was of great assistance to the Japanese government in tracking Japanese nationals in the United States. Similarly, the Japanese government as well as elites and philanthropists across the Pacific in Japan aided the JAA’s campaigns to reform the lives of their laboring countrymen in the United States. Scholar Eiichiro Azuma[?] stresses the discord between the socioeconomic classes of Japanese immigrants. He argues that the Japanese literati on both sides of the Pacific attributed anti-Japanese sentiment on the West Coast to less than savory behavior of unskilled laborers and Japanese engaged in illicit businesses. Seeking to mitigate the growing anti-Japanese fervor, a “transnational elite partnership”[?] formed to address the behavior of the lower classes and save Japan’s image.

Ichioka and Azuma’s excellent monographs taken together reveal a picture of the interactions between the JAA and the Japanese government’s efforts to control emigration/immigration per the Gentlemen’s Agreement, and the persistent aim to reform the behaviors of the laboring classes to uphold the Japanese national image. In concert with other scholarly books on the subject, such as works by Hosokawa[?], and Sawada[?], one begins to see the many nuances in this story. The primary sources used for this article were a book by the JAA outlining the history of Japanese in the United States,[?] American diplomatic papers from the years 1907, 1908, and 1924, as well as a collection of writings and speeches by the prominent anti-Japanese leader, V.S. McClatchy. This collection of primary and secondary sources demonstrates that after 1908, the JAA’s influence was significantly enhanced by becoming an administrative arm of the Japanese government, and the JAA used its’ heightened influence to pursue campaigns aimed at reforming the lives of the lower classes to make that subset of the population more palatable to mainstream American society. The Japanese government was not only aware of these campaigns, but actively assisted the JAA in sometimes intrusive endeavors because elites on both sides of the Pacific saw a common problem, and thought the campaigns were a possible solution that would preserve Japan’s image abroad.

The treatment of Japanese immigrants in the United States was significantly tied to the experience of earlier Chinese immigrants. Chinese immigrants began to arrive on the West Coast following the California Gold Rush of 1849. Soon after, they served as inexpensive laborers who built the transcontinental railroad, yet their acceptance of low wages and strong work ethic which made them attractive to employers, caused animosity between the new immigrants and the native work force. Many white workers viewed the Chinese as a threat to both the rate of pay and also their ability to secure jobs. These economic concerns fueled nativist sentiments, drawn out even more by the aesthetic “otherness” of the Chinese. Violence and discrimination toward this group of immigrants became common on the West Coast. The anti-Chinese racism transcended friction with the white laborers with whom they initially had competed. The anti-Chinese feeling spread through society and was institutionalized by the United States Congress in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which banned further Chinese immigration.[?]

Intellectuals and entrepreneurs were the first settlers to come to the United States from Japan in the late eighteen seventies and the eighteen eighties. The real influx of Japanese immigration came in the years between 1891-1907 when contract labor companies were recruiting laborers directly from Japan and paying their passage up front. The laborers brought in by the contractor companies worked in a variety of occupations, commercial fishing, agriculture, and on the railroads.[?] It was in the capacity of railroad work where the Japanese first began to inherit the hostility previously shown to Chinese workers.

Japanese had been present in the United States for nearly thirty years before the JAA was established. Historian Bill Hosokawa asserts that until roughly 1900, the hostility that the Japanese faced was largely left over resentment toward the Chinese.[?] Until 1900 however, the Japanese did not have a formal organization to combat anti-Japanese hostility. A freak occurrence of disease, mass hysteria, and an intensity of anti-Asian sentiment provided the impetus for the Japanese to organize. In March of 1900, the San Francisco Board of Health discovered that an inhabitant of San Francisco’s Chinatown had the Bubonic Plague. On May 7, the first public anti-Japanese protest was held in the city at which the issue of banning Japanese immigration was linked to the existing Chinese exclusion. Then just two weeks later, Mayor James Phelan mandated that all Asian residents in the city be inoculated against Bubonic Plague. Japanese business owners quickly saw that the disease scare was harming their collective image and would frighten away potential customers from the Asian quarters thereby spelling their economic doom. They saw the need to organize to protect their interests and formed the JAA.[?]

The founding members of the JAA came from the middle and privileged classes in Japan, and were the self-described “frame and brain” of the JAA. They declared that some had left land, some money, and some status back home in Japan to come to America and live in democracy. They proudly identified with the earliest Japanese emigrants whom they called “pioneers.” This was the generation that had witnessed the momentous political and social modernization of Japan as it transitioned from the Edo (1600-1868) to the Meiji (1868-1912) Era. It was during the Meiji Era in which the prospect of making ones’ future on individual effort rather than familial connections and societal construction first became a possibility, and this wave of settlers felt a special affinity to American democracy.[?] The JAA promulgated a charter for the organization, the basic spirit of which was to “expand the rights of Imperial subjects in America and to maintain the Japanese national image.”[?]

In the first decade of the twentieth-century, the JAA developed into a rather complex structure. With the exception of organizations in Oakland and San Jose, the Association did not expand beyond San Francisco until hostility and an intensification of the Japanese exclusion movement fed by Anti-Japanese newspaper editors, occurred in 1905.[?] The structure of the JAA continued to develop and by 1908, the organization had a footprint in California and a few other key western cities. This year was a watershed year for Japanese-American relations.

This anti-Japanese/anti-Asian “yellow peril” sentiment fueled by increasing Japanese immigration had been festering on the West Coast for several years creating a palpable tension. The most common complaints against the Japanese immigrants were that they were “unassimilable,” that they were a detriment to the indigenous white labor force, and that they would eventually (perhaps by design) gain control of the territory through population increase. The accusation that the Japanese were unassimilable was based on race, culture, and politics. The number of Japanese in the United States was a concern for many, both through immigration and birth rate. In typical “yellow peril” fashion, rumors of deliberate and nationalistic procreation circulated like this one from a woman who claimed to be an expert on Japanese culture for having taught elementary school in the island nation for a number of years.

“Tourists do not learn that every girl (school girl) is thoroughly drilled in the doctrine that, should she become a ‘picture bride’ in America, or an immigrant to other lands, her loyal duty to her emperor is to have as many children as possible, so that the foreigners’ land may become in time a possession of Japan, through the expressed will of a majority of the people.”[?]

Compounding the alarm of so many exclusionists by the sheer number of Japanese immigrants was the persistent argument that Japanese could not be “true” Americans because traditional Japanese values, such as loyalty to the mother country and the Emperor, would be taught in the home and in ethnic schools which most Japanese children attended to supplement their American education. Moreover, the exclusionists claimed, the Japanese government counted Japanese residing abroad and their children as subjects of the empire and expected loyalty from them.

“No Japanese may expatriate without formal permission of his government; such permission may not be obtained under any circumstances if applied for after he is 17 years of age. Prior to that age application may be made through his parents or guardian. It is said that there living in Hawaii and (the) continental United States today upwards of 90,000 American-born Japanese enjoying, because of birth, all the rights of American citizenship…Only 73 applications from these American-born Japanese for expatriation, and permission had been granted in 64 cases.”[?]

This anti-Japanese feeling forced the United States through its diplomats to negotiate with their Japanese counterparts to stop the flow of migrant laborers from Japan, and led to the Gentlemen’s Agreement which was finalized on February 18, 1908. At issue had been the increasing numbers of Japanese laborers arriving in California, and the state’s discriminatory responses to the growing minority population, which included segregating Japanese school children in 1906. For its part, the Japanese Government was desperate to find some way to ease the ill treatment of its nationals in California. In the Gentlemen’s Agreement, American diplomats promised better treatment of the Japanese already in California, specifically, Japanese school children would not face segregation, if Japan agreed to limit the number of unskilled laborers headed for American shores. The two governments agreed that Japan would not issue passports to laborers with the exception of former residents of the United States, parents, wives, and children of residents of the United States, and “settled agriculturalists,” or persons having a share in farm equipment in the United States. The government of Japan also agreed to make changes to its passport issue process.[?]

Contrary to the view of the emperor sending subjects to foreign lands with a mandate to “peacefully penetrate,” the Japanese government had always been hesitant to allow its citizens abroad. Japan had existed in a state of self-imposed isolation from 1639-1853, when the American Commodore Matthew Perry, with a fleet of sophisticated battleships, re-opened Japanese ports to the West. During the period of isolation, Japanese were not able to leave the country and foreigners were not permitted to enter Japan; both infractions were a capital offense. The only exception to this isolation was on the small island of Deshima in Nagasaki harbor where Dutch merchants were able to maintain a minimal presence.[?]

After Perry initiated political change in Japan, the Japanese government still did not want its nationals venturing to other countries, especially not as contract laborers. Japan’s national image was the issue. After such a long seclusion, Japan did not want the first impression other countries had of its citizens to be given by lowly workers and to this end; immigration was prohibited by law until 1886 when internal conditions forced the change in policy.[?] If maintaining Japan’s image in the international community was a concern in the fin de siecle diplomatic atmosphere, it became an obsession in the beginning of the twentieth-century. The reason for this was that Japan had earned a higher place of esteem in the world through successful military conflicts with China in 1895, and Russia in 1905. In Japan’s ascendancy, it did not want the issue of a few thousand manual laborers in the United States to obscure what if felt to be its rightful place among the world powers.

“It is not the intention of the Japanese Government to question the sovereign right of any country to regulate immigration to its own territories. Nor is it their desire to send their nationals to the countries where they are not wanted…To Japan the question is not one of expediency, but of principle. To her the mere fact that a few hundreds or thousands of her nationals will or will not be admitted into the domains of other countries is immaterial, so long as no question of national susceptibilities is involved.”[?]

To honor the agreement entered with the United States, the Japanese government instituted several restrictions on emigration. Most importantly, two categories of passports were created. The first was for Imin, or migrant non-skilled laborers, and the second was for hi-imin, or non-migrants such as students and businessmen. Hi-imin had to prove financial security and have at least 11 years of education. Imin passports were seldom granted which led determined laborers and the enterprising middlemen to find ways around the restrictions by obtaining a hi-imin passport. The new procedures were immediately plagued by fraudulent applications which required the Japanese government to issue stricter guidelines to curb abuse of hi-imin passports.[?]

A newly married or adopted family member could not accompany a hi-imin abroad and a person who had changed their residency could not apply for a passport until six months had elapsed. This was to prevent the relocation of aspiring laborers to areas with lax regulations. The category of student was often abused by young laborers wanting to emigrate. In response, students wanting to study in the United States had to give a compelling reason why they needed to go specifically to America rather than Europe where the education was considered better and the tuition cheaper.[?] However, passports were granted at the city and prefecture levels, and guidelines were not uniform in all locations, which allowed for some discrepancy. This may have accounted for how laborers were still able to get student passports.[?] Therefore, despite the proliferation of rules issued by the Japanese government to reduce passport fraud, the number of passports continued to increase because of a disjointed administrative system.

As a result of this accord, the Japanese government needed a network in place on American soil to aid in tracking and verifying the legitimacy of its nationals. Concentrated exactly where the Japanese population was and run by the pillars of the Japanese community, the JAA provided this network beginning January 1, 1909.

The post 1908 organization of the Japanese Association of America was three- tiered. At the top were the local Japanese consulates which had the real political power and made up the top tier. The second tier consisted of the central bodies of the JAA, which were regional bodies organized around a consulate. Typically, the consulate delegated the authority to issue residency certificates to the central bodies which in turn authorized the local associations in respective cities to register individuals and issue certificates after collecting personal information including address, financial status, and a photograph of each applicant.[?] This information was used in tracking individuals and sharing information with other local associations in a self-policing effort to combat “yellow peril.” The Japanese Government was obligated to uphold its end of the Gentlemen’s Agreement with the United States, but because of problems in the internal emigration bureaucratic setup, controlling the flow of emigrants proved difficult for Japan. As the numbers of Japanese immigrants steadily rose, resentment of these immigrants escalated and American officials began to wonder if the Japanese government was faithfully executing the gentlemen’s agreement. Faced with this precarious situation and with Japanese national pride on display for the entire world to see, the Japanese government may have relied on the JAA even more to verify the legitimacy of immigrants. With the passport system in Japan apparently failing it was even more crucial for the auxiliary administrative arm of the Japanese government in the United States to seem strong and to have Japan’s solid backing. The JAA had now become a strong organization and one with a narrow view of how the Japanese residing in the United States should live. The Japanese government did not attempt to reign in the lifestyle campaigns initiated by the JAA in 1908. The assimilation campaign and especially the moral reform campaigns reflected the desire of elites on both sides of the pacific, throughout the ranks of the Japanese government as well as within the JAA to “maintain the Japanese national image”[?] in the United States as laid out by the JAA charter.

The JAA advocated permanent settlement over financially motivated temporary immigration for the Japanese residing in their jurisdiction. They invited prominent speakers from Japan with a pro-settlement agenda to address the masses of migrant workers in an attempt to persuade them to sink permanent roots in the United States.[?] In such a small ethnic group, the behaviors and fortunes of all Japanese, regardless of socioeconomic status were linked. The ability and the desire to assimilate, as well as the methods of assimilation fueled much of the debate with the exclusionists and consumed the energy of the JAA. The intensity behind this issue of assimilation came from the claim of anti-Japanese activists that the Japanese should not be eligible for citizenship because their cultural and racial background was so dissimilar from the majority Western European background of the United States. The proponents of this idea, the exclusionists, were the editor of The Sacramento Bee, V.S. McClatchy, the American Legion, and the California Farm Bureau Association, among others.[?] To counter the exclusionists, some prominent Japanese publically insisted that adaptability was an essential component of the Japanese mind frame. Kanzaki Kiichi, the General Secretary of the JAA, testified before the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization in 1920, and offered “the rapid growth of modern Japan”, as proof of the innate Japanese racial ability to assimilate.[?]

Regardless of whether or not assimilation was an intrinsic part of Japanese culture as early defendants claimed, the practices that the JAA encouraged were assimilation techniques. These middle and upper-class aliens adopted the practices of the dominant culture with the goal of gaining acceptance. They also pressured the lower class migrant workers to embrace the trappings of Americanism and the shibboleth of gaimenteki doka became a major campaign of the JAA.

Gaimenteki doka, or adopting the outward appearance and customs of a native, was adopted largely in response to the claim levied by those seeking to exclude Japanese that because the Japanese basic racial and cultural make up was so different from mainstream American society, they would not be able to assimilate. The massive effort behind gaimenteki doka was in part to disprove such sentiment and also to gain acceptance from the majority society.

The manifestations of gaimenteki doka ranged from sartorial choices, to the maintenance of Japanese neighborhoods, and personal behavior. The proponents of this method of fitting in consisted of the majority of the Japanese community. They especially believed that all Japanese living in the United States regardless of sex or age should wear western-style clothing. This effort was to distinguish them from the Chinese who infamously preferred their traditional garb and were ridiculed by Americans for this practice.[?] Advocates encouraged personal living spaces and furnishings to fit American standards, and even public spaces in Japanese neighborhoods conformed to Americanization as Japanese-language signs were removed whenever possible. Social interaction was also directed along American normative concepts. Wives were told to walk alongside their husbands rather than behind them to negate the image of gross marital inequality in Japanese society. The Japanese were also encouraged to celebrate American holidays in lieu of Japanese ones, and acquiesce to the larger Christian culture by not working on Sundays.[?]

In 1911 the JAA unveiled a three part “campaign of education” to address larger issues facing the Japanese community. The first leg of the campaign was to educate people in Japan about the condition of their countrymen living in the United States. Misinformation had circulated about the Japanese exclusion movement and some in Japan blamed the Japanese residents for raising the ire of their white neighbors, and thereby disgracing the homeland. The second leg of the campaign endeavored to educate Americans about both the Japanese immigrants and their homeland. The JAA believed that ignorance was at least partially responsible for the anti-Japanese feelings. Finally, the campaign also worked to popularize the idea of permanent settlement among Japanese residents. To meet all of these aims, the JAA enlisted the help of two prominent Japanese, Nitobe Inazo and Shimada Saburo, both of whom went on extensive lecture tours to spread the message of the JAA both in Japan and the United States. These speakers were selected carefully and both men had solid credentials which embodied the modernity the JAA hoped would impress Americans and inspire the Japanese to emulate. Inazo was an eminent intellectual and educator who touted an American education. Saburo was a member of the Japanese legislative body and a well-known Christian.[?]

The JAA also strove to clean up activities of some in the Japanese community which were offensive to the majority American culture. Gambling offers a good example of the JAA’s tactics in operation. As the drive toward assimilation took on an increasingly desperate tone in the face of mounting hostility, the JAA began to police the moral fiber of certificate applicants. It was no longer sufficient to have orderly paper work from Japan; the petitioner also could not be of ill moral repute.

In 1908, local JAA chapters in cooperation with both Buddhist and Japanese Christian organizations devised an anti-gambling campaign consisting of general discouragement, followed by shaming individual repeat gamblers. In the first phase, posters were hung in Japanese public spaces and anti-gambling representatives even stood at the entrances of gaming halls. The second phase aimed to shame habitual gamblers to reform, entailed releasing the personal information of repeat gamblers to the immigrant newspapers and forwarding the disgraceful publications to relatives back home in Japan. Gaming addicts who might hope to run from their tainted past by moving to a new location in the United States were often horrified to learn that the local associations had a tight communication network and that blacklists were quickly shared. Beyond the social ramifications, the incorrigible gambler normally had his claim for a certificate rejected by the local association.[?]

As World War I approached, the JAA intensified their anti-gambling campaign. The organization conducted a wide-spread survey and found that annually Japanese immigrants were losing $3 million to Chinese-run gambling houses.[?] While the intensity of the “yellow peril” in the majority population and political sentiments surrounding the pending war figured more prominently in the decision to increase the anti-gambling campaign, such a large figure of lost wages also sounded a clarion call to save the supposedly helpless gambler from the Chinese gaming houses, and himself.

The JAA formed special local committees to address this social ill and charged them to take over the existing effort and also pursue three additional objectives. First, the committees were to encourage members of the Japanese community to observe the actions of neighbors and inform the committee of gambling. Second, the committees were to order all hotels, boardinghouses, labor camps, stores, and other places of normal patronage to expel known gamblers. Total social isolation was the goal. The committees also shared information about known gamblers with local authorities when it was felt that an individual was beyond the reprimand of the community. The gamblers would be picked up by police, questioned for information which could be potentially damaging to the gambling house operators and if the individual was cooperative, he was released to begin anew in society. Last, the committees were charged with finding alternative, wholesome ways for Japanese laborers to entertain themselves and with creating such facilities.[?]

An extreme example of these policies in action was in the rural community of Walnut Grove, California, where the “oriental district” was home to both Chinese and Japanese populations with their respective businesses which included Chinese-run gaming halls. In 1910, the local chapter of the JAA admonished Japanese for gambling, and proposed self-segregating the Japanese population away from the gaming halls where “the Chinese fattened themselves by squeezing dumb Japanese laborers.”[?] In 1915, a fire destroyed much of the “oriental district” and in its aftermath, Japanese leaders convinced the community to rebuild in a new location separate from the corrupting influences of the Chinese. The local association of Walnut Grove completed the Japanese isolation by passing resolutions to prohibit gamblers, transients, and other undesirables from entering their enclave.[?]

Moreover, it is reasonable to assume that the government would approve of the associations’ efforts to clean up Japan’s image abroad through the anti-gambling campaign. The local JAA branch not only prohibited undesirable interlopers from coming into the Japanese neighborhood, but residents could not venture into areas that the chapter did not condone. Shortly after the completion of the new enclave, a Japanese barber set up shop in nearby Locke Chinatown with disastrous personal results. The community shunned all contact with his family, and his relatives in Japan were told of his “traitorous” act. Even after closing his business in Chinatown, he was not accepted back into the Japanese community until he had issued a formal public apology and he and his family had endured tremendous humiliation.[?]

The behavior and perception of Japanese women in the United States was another concern for Japanese leaders and the educated classes on both sides of the Pacific. The flesh industry in particular had long been a rallying point for action among Japanese Christians in the United States.

“Lately in the cities of California, Washington, and Oregon in America, Japanese women who ply the infamous trade, namely, prostitution, are increasing in number by the months…Engaged in their illicit business, they sense no shame at all at the scandalous sight they present. Because they do not, a public outcry has been aroused among the American people, so that recent female arrivals are continually denied landing permission…These women are a blot on our national image and national morality.”[?]

In 1874 the California Fukuienkai Christian Association was founded with the help of two Americans, Drs. Stogy and Harris. By 1882 the Fukuienkai had become involved in the heart of the Japanese prostitution problem—human trafficking.[?] The group tried in vain to breakup a complex ring of pimps, sailors, and merchants who lured oblivious Japanese village girls to docks under false pretense, stowed them away on steam ships, and delivered them into the hands of brothel owners upon reaching the United States. Similarly, in San Francisco around the same time that the Fukuienkai were endeavoring to halt the abduction ring, the Japanese Christian groups Chorokiyoukai and Miyoukai were cooperating with local American churches to stamp out general prostitution from the city.[?]

However, in 1908, working with local law enforcement offices from the outset enabled the JAA’s anti-prostitution initiatives to be more successful. In Fresno, California, the local JAA chapter formed a close alliance with the Japanese Methodist Episcopal Church led by Pastor Kitazawa Tetsuji, to eliminate prostitution from the city. They especially focused on the China Alley neighborhood and through these efforts some nominal figures in the Japanese prostitution matrix such as prostitutes and pimps were periodically arrested. The campaign achieved a solid victory with the arrest and eventual deportation of Fresno, California’s most notorious brothel in 1914.[?]

Also in 1914, the Japanese government which had been aiding the JAA in its reform campaigns proposed a division of labor. Both parties agreed that moral reform was essential to ending the negative view of Japanese within mainstream American culture, but the two groups also knew that reforming the ways of unskilled laborers would not bear fruit without a good publicity strategy. Tokyo proposed that the JAA continue with its moral reform campaigns and the Japanese consulates would take over the public relations functions. The new division of responsibility allowed the JAA to further pursue its core projects with the aid of partners supplied by the Japanese government.[?]

One of the JAA partners was Eiichi Shibusawa, Japan’s leading entrepreneur and founder of the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce. On a visit to California he was particularly discouraged when he toured an immigrant community and found “the old undesirable customs of the Japanese peasantry” still the norm in the new country. Knowing that the crude ways of the aliens were not impressing American neighbors, Shibusawa returned to Japan and began the Japan Emigration Society, which offered programs to educate emigrants about the customs of American life before they boarded the steamships to their new home in the United States.[?] The Japanese government lent support in the form of an annual subsidy processed through the Japanese Foreign Ministry, and the society also received contributions from wealthy Japanese benefactors concerned with their country’s image abroad.

Due to the large number of picture brides leaving for the United States, the society’s classes emphasized women’s duties. A typical course consisted of basic Western etiquette and values (six hours); practical English (six hours); living conditions in a foreign land (six hours); vital domestic skills (six hours); household management (six hours); public sanitation and feminine hygiene (three hours); and child rearing (two hours). This thirty-five-hour program was repeated weekly free of charge to participants. The content of the society’s classes closely mirrored the concerns of the JAA leaders and the two organizations cooperated closely in this endeavor. The importance of these future wives and mothers to the perception of the Japanese community was foremost in the minds of both groups as evidenced by a 1916 guide for Issei, or first-generation, women compiled by the JAA. In this guide the women were reminded that they were “obliged to demonstrate the virtue of Japanese women and compel (white) Americans to admit them as first-rate women in the world.” The responsibilities these women were charged with went beyond the typical wifely duties of creating a home of “comfort” and “a place of relaxation” for her husband. In the United States, the Issei wife would also have to run a moral household, to discourage “unsavory conduct, foul speech, gambling, drinking, and smoking.” The importance of this vigilance was to uphold the national honor of Japan and prevent the second generation Japanese from inheriting the vices of their fathers.[?]

Ultimately, however, the JAA’s morality campaigns failed as did the Gentlemen’s Agreement. In 1924, displeased with the Japanese government’s handling of the pact, Congress negated the Gentlemen’s Agreement and legally barred Japanese immigration in an omnibus immigration reform bill. The consequences for the JAA and its initiatives were severe. The moral reforms ended in failure. The reasons for this were JAA’s limited outreach, the rise of Japanese gangs, and finally the 1924 immigration legislation.

On the first point, the association could target metropolitan residents with their campaign messages, but many laboring Japanese worked in smaller towns, on farms, and in remote areas. Those Japanese residing in more rural areas continued to live much as they did in Japan, and only had dealings with the local JAA office when they needed something specific. Beginning in the later half of the nineteen teens, Japanese gangs began to compete with Chinese gambling operations, and these gangs were eventually able to supplant the Chinese from gaming houses and in the process changed the racial association of gambling bosses from Chinese to Japanese. This was a huge defeat for the JAA. Worse yet, the Japanese gambling gangs began to compete with the JAA as a recognized power in immigrant communities by providing community services such as giving generous donations, issuing loans, and offering free meals to the poor and elderly. The gangs even enforced a code of justice and conduct in the community, and manipulated JAA leaders with bribes of money or threats of violence.[?]

The final blow for the JAA’s morality campaign was the 1924 immigration bill which barred Japanese from entering the United States with the provision that no person “ineligible for citizenship” would be allowed to immigrate. Two years earlier in 1922, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Ozawa v. the United States, that Japanese were not eligible to become citizens. The defeat was both moral and structural. Many Japanese felt that their efforts had been in vain because they had been institutionally humiliated and rejected. More importantly, when the immigration bill passed, the JAA lost its administrative mandate from the Japanese Government.

The demise of the Gentlemen’s Agreement meant the end of Japanese emigration to the United States which nullified the JAA’s administrative capacity. The JAA was no longer an appendage of Japan performing the critical administrative function of tracking immigrants. The JAA’s influence in the immigrant community, and by extension, the ability to initiate and sustain lifestyle campaigns, like the assimilation, the anti-gambling and anti-prostitution moral reforms, had been contingent upon political power delegated from the government of Japan. Even as “yellow peril” blatantly manifested into law before their eyes, the members of the JAA found that they were inept—unable to act. The old methods would no longer work, for without Japan’s mandate, the JAA was simply an association of elites with very particular ideas of how their countrymen should live in the United States. Just as it had been prior to 1908, the JAA once again became a body which only represented a small segment of the Japanese population and quickly became insignificant.

Studying the cooperation between the Japanese government and the JAA reveals many things about the composition of the immigrant population and how they were received by the United States. A parallel study of the ties between the home government and elites in another country of origin and its ethnic association in the United States would likely yield different results. The extent of the JAA’s activities in the lives of the Japanese immigrants’ as they transitioned to American life is notable. What this shows is a population encountering tremendous adversity and at least some segments of the community turning to the country of origin for assistance in surmounting these obstacles to American life.

[1]“Yellow Peril” was the term sometimes used to describe feelings of anxiety in white populations that Asians would immigrate in large numbers and eventually “take over” the host country. The concept of the “Yellow peril” was a phenomenon in several Western countries and marked by a series of novels featuring bleak storylines of European and American life in the post-Asian conquest period. The longevity of the “yellow peril” in popular fiction proved seductive and Hollywood capitalized on it with its’ own troupes of the “crafty” and “dangerous” Asian in early films.[2] In this article “yellow peril” will be used to express the fear of the native white population that Asians (specifically Japanese) were taking over their communities.

[3] The Gentleman’s Agreement of 1907 between the United States and Japan in 1907 asserted that Japan should stop the emigration of its laborers to the United States and that the United States should stop discrimination against Japanese living in the United States. This agreement was ended in 1924 by the act of Congress excluding immigration from Japan, as immigration from China had been previously excluded.

[4] The author would like to extend her sincere gratitude to Mitsunori Kaibara for his assistance in translating parts of this document.

[i] Ronald Takaki. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston, MA.: Little, Brown, and Co., 1989), 212.

[ii] Yuji Ichioka. The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885-1924 (N.Y.: The Free Press, 1988).

[iii] Ibid., 157.

[iv] Eiichiro Azuma. Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2005).

[v] Ibid., 35.

[vi] Bill Hosokawa. Nisei: The Quiet Americans (N.Y.: William Morrow and Co., 1969).

[vii] Mitziko Sawada, Tokyo Life, New York Dreams: Urban Japanese Visions of America, 1890-1924 (Berkley, CA.: University of California Press, 1996)

[viii] “Chinese Immigration and the Chinese in the United States”, The National Archives.

[ix] Ichioka, 60.

[x]Hosokawa, 81.

[xi] Ichioka, 158.

[xii] Japanese Association of America, Shunichi Takeuchi ed. Zaibei Nihonjin Hatten Shiryo Tenrankai Kinen Shi (1940), 27.

[xiii] Ibid., 34.

[xiv] Ichioka, 158.

[xv] V.S. McClatchy, Remarks before the Honolulu Rotary Club, October 27, 1921, in V.S. McClatchy, ed. Four Anti-Japanese Pamphlets, The Asian Experience in North America (N.Y.: Arno Press, 1978), 11.

[xvi] Ibid., 8.

[xvii] United States Department of State: Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1924.

[xviii] Helen Kaibara. “Guns and God: Christian Missionaries, Internal conflict, and Portuguese Weaponry in Japan, 1542-1639” (Research paper, Eastern Kentucky University, 2009), 14.

[xix] Azuma, 34-35.

[xx] FRUS, “The Japanese Embassy to the Department of State,” Masano Hanihara, 711.945/1063 GPO, (1924), 336.

[xxi] Sawada, 55.

[xxii] Ibid., 5.

[xxiii] Ibid., 348.

[xxiv] Ibid., 163.

[xxv] Ichioka, 158.

[xxvi] Ibid., 186.

[xxvii] Joe Feagin and Clairece Feagin. Racial and Ethnic Relations, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2008), 282.

[xxviii] Ichioka, 195.

[xxix]Ibid., 185.

[xxx] Ibid., 185.

[xxxi] Ibid., 186.

[xxxii] Ibid., 177.

[xxxiii] Ibid., 178.

[xxxiv] Ibid., 178.

[xxxv]Azuma, 49.

[xxxvi] Ibid., 49.

[xxxvii] Ibid., 49.

[xxxviii] Ichioka, 39.

[xxxix] Japanese Association of America, 38.

[xl] Ibid., 38.

[xli] Ichioka, 179.

[xlii] Azuma, 52.

[xliii] Ibid., 53.

[xliv] Ibid., 54.

[xlv] Ibid., 60.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download