Japanese Immigration in America: Fleeing Riots,Escaping Imprisonment,and Assimilating

Abstract

When 13-year-old Teruichi Nakayama, my grandfather, came to San Francisco from Osaka in 1906, he was assured of an education in a public school by an 1894 treaty between the United States and Japan that gave the latter most-favored-nation status. In 1906, racist mobs forced a decision by the school board to assign 41 school aged Japanese children, including him, to a segregated school for Asian children in violation of the pact. In 1907, he escaped street violence to work as a migrant laborer on inland farms. Settling in the state’s Central Coast, he started a confectionary, the family business he knew from his childhood in Japan. He eked enough money to raise a family with a wife arranged for him in the traditional manner by a go-between in Japan. The school board action opened a diplomatic rift between the 2 countries that never resolved and ended in war in 1941. Just days ahead of the imprisonment of Japanese living in California in 1942, he and his family fled to Colorado, a sanctuary state where he reestablished the confectionery. He faced every misapprehension of the current immigration crisis: racism, unfair labor competition, the impossibility of assimilation, and suspicion of a fifth column. Now 5 generations later, none of the fearful predictions when he first arrived came true. His legacy proves immigration as an essential rejuvenating force in America.

Farm Laborers and Schoolboys

The rapid industrialization of Japan after Commodore Perry’s gunboat diplomacy in 1853 transformed Japan from an agrarian feudal society into a Westernized industrial power by the end of the century. Recognizing their policies brought on social instability, the Meiji encouraged young unmarried men to improve their lives overseas in the Americas. Most of the diaspora came from the farming prefectures of southern Honshu and Kyushu. ¹

Japanese settled along the Pacific Coast from Canada to Peru and across South America into Brazil. The majority went to California where farm workers were needed after importation of migrant labor from China was barred in 1882 (Chinese Exclusion Act). As the Chinese workforce diminished, Japanese workers replaced them. In stoop-labor jobs, they planted and harvested crops that were close to the ground, such as carrots, sugar beets, and berries. The number of Japanese nationals counted in the Census grew from only 55 in 1870 to 2000 in 1890. In 1900, there were 12 000 new arrivals from Japan, a number that peaked at 30 000 in 1907. ²

Young men of the privileged classes also sojourned in America. Their goals were technical training and higher education. A degree from an American college or university was a sought-after credential in government and business. ³

The promise of education filtered down to the lower classes, which included shopkeepers like the Nakayama family. Husband, wife, and 3 sons ran a neighborhood confectionary shop in Osaka. Making mochi, manju, and other treats for sale was second nature for all 3 sons, including the youngest, Teruichi, at 13 barely a teenager. The business, however, could not support all 3 sons and, when they married, their wives and children.

Horatio Alger stories of Japanese immigrants who succeeded in America confirmed the wisdom of sending sons of lesser promise abroad. For the Nakayama’s, the natural choice was Teruichi. The lure was an American education, but at the more modest level of grammar schools in San Francisco.

Young Teruichi was one of a cohort known as schoolboys. His family gave him a small grubstake and the name of a contact in San Francisco who set him up in domestic work in a white household and a place in the local school alongside white children. He received room and board plus 1 dollar a week spending money, less than the going rate of a dollar-and-a-half because of his youth. Both sums were paltry compared with the wages earned by other Japanese workers in America. ⁴

Conquest of California?

In addition to their jobs, Japanese immigrants inherited from the Chinese the racial animus directed against them. The Japanese and Korean Exclusion League was organized in 1905 to prohibit Japanese immigration the same way the Chinese laborers had been barred from entry. “Exclusion” was the catchword that described the prohibition of immigration, the nominal aim. The real goal was the elimination of Japanese from the country altogether. ⁵

Japanese workers turned from migrant labor to tilling land they leased, often where the ground was too wet, too dry, or the soil thin and poor. They brought the techniques of intensive agriculture from the tiny 3-acre plots of their homeland. Japanese farms were tremendously productive. By the eve of World War II, farms tilled by Japanese accounted for 42% of the state’s acreage of commercial truck crops. Some of their products, such as snap beans, celery, peppers, and strawberries, comprised 90% of the state’s output for marketing. ⁶

At its peak, Japanese-owned stores and businesses dominated entire districts in California towns, not just the farms. “It is generally considered that 90% of all the people … around Vacaville are Japanese,” wrote A. E. Yoell, ⁷ secretary to the newly formed Japanese and Korean Exclusion League.

In San Francisco, Japanese workers were enjoying similar successes in all sectors of the city’s economy: as stevedores, butchers, broom makers, garment workers, cobblers, and cooks. They worked in laundries, restaurants, construction sites, and homes. ⁷

All trades and small merchants in California cities and towns, Yoell and his allies claimed, were at risk of being taken over by Japanese, not just the farms of the state. In the fevered minds of the exclusionists, the Japanese threatened to transform the state as it had in Hawaii, where Japanese comprised 40% of the total population. The strategy was an “orientalization of the character of the working population by the elimination of white mechanics and laborers.” ⁷

The prejudice was that Japanese would always be a foreign presence and never hold allegiance to their adopted country. David Brudnoy, a talk show host and professor of history in Boston-area colleges and universities, wrote that there was a pervasive opinion “that Japanese could not be assimilated.” ⁸ He quoted Olaf Tveitmore, a Swedish immigrant and founder of the Exclusion League:

[The Japanese] will not and cannot amalgamate with our people. It is true that they adopt our clothes, our language, our food, manner of life and all the externals of western civilization, but they remain at heart Mongols still. … The immigration to our country from the south of Europe, in the second generation at least, becomes Americanized. [The Japanese] never. Why should he? … He has no attachment and no affection save for the people and for his own land. … His industry, temperance, and ambition are virtues. But they do not count for America. ⁹

The Japanese on the West Coast was thus a potential fifth column and a direct military threat to the country. “Exclusionists warned that Japanese immigrants were infiltrating the United States in order to pave the way for Japan’s conquest of California and America’s Pacific territories,” wrote Lon Kurashige, ⁵ professor of history at the University of Southern California.

The San Francisco Chronicle began an inflammatory campaign against the Japanese in 1905. Political demagogues in city hall and the California statehouse clamored for Japanese exclusion. The rhetoric triggered a general boycott of Japanese-owned businesses. In the disorder that followed the great earthquake in April 1906, thugs took the opportunity to assault Japanese in the streets. Two visiting seismologists from Japan were struck by rocks thrown during a melee. Anti-Japanese violence increased in frequency and continued into the new year of 1907. ⁵

In May 1905, the San Francisco school board had opened a separate school for Chinese students, “not only for the purpose of relieving the congestion at present prevailing in our schools but also for the higher end that our children should not be placed in any position where their youthful impressions may be affected by association with pupils of the Mongolian race.” ⁸ Prodded by the prevalent anti-Japanese atmosphere, the school board in October 1906 assigned 93 Japanese students to the segregated school, including young Nakayama.

Most Favored Nation

The schoolboard ignored, or was unaware, of the impact of their actions on international relations. Japan had negotiated a treaty with the United States in 1894 that gave it most-favored-nation status. Along with the usual provisions regulating commerce, Japanese nationals received the right to enter America and live there with the rights and protections of the American government. The treaty, in force for more than a decade, guaranteed the rights of young Nakayama and his classmates to sit alongside white children in a public school. ¹⁰

Their education was paramount to the Meiji as it legitimized Japan’s status as a most-favored-nation. Exposed as weakling before Commodore Matthew Perry’s gunboat diplomacy (1853), Japan dismantled its centuries-old social structure (Meiji Restoration, 1868) and withstood civil strife (Boshin War, 1868-1869) to transform itself into a modern western state with an industrial economy and a mechanized military that, in their eyes, made it an equal to the United States and the western powers. ¹¹

They succeeded. Japan won wars against the Chinese (First Sino-Japanese War, 1894-1895), and then Russia, one of the western powers itself (Russo-Japanese War, 1904-1905). The country began to build a colonial empire in the Far East (Taiwan, 1895; Korea, 1910; and Manchuria, 1932) that threatened European colonies in the Far East and contravene America’s “Open Door” policy. ¹¹

The 1894 treaty was a gambit to counter Japanese ambitions in Asia. Roosevelt, anxious for an amicable relationship with Japan, agreed to recognize Taiwan as a Japanese colony, Japan’s hegemony over Korea, and its railways and industries in southern Manchuria. In return, the Meiji promised to observe the Open Door policy for the rest of China. Their most important achievement was most-favored-nation status for commerce and transport, official recognition that Japan had a seat at the highest level of world politics. ¹⁰

Similar treaties were signed in quick succession with twelve other European countries, including Great Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, and Russia. In the words of the editorial writers for the American Journal of International Law:

[It was the] beginning of a new era … [where] … all other evidences of inferiority should disappear within a prescribed period of time so that legally and actually Japan should assume a position of absolute equality with the most favored members of the family of nations. ¹²

Japanese nationals won the right to enter the United States to travel, reside, and trade with the same protections of American citizens. And to young Nakayama and the schoolboys, the right to public school education. ¹⁰

The school assignment of a handful of children held the attention of the highest levels of both governments. In 1907, US Secretary of State Elihu Root, in his role as the first president of the newly organized American Society of International Law, delivered his inaugural presidential address. It was titled, “The real questions under the Japanese treaty and the San Francisco school board.” ¹³

Gentlemen’s Agreement and Saber Rattling

In February 1907, President Roosevelt, faced with a violation of an international agreement, summoned the school board to Washington. In March, the board agreed to reinstate the 41 schoolboys who were appropriate age for their assigned grade (but not 27 who were overage nor the 25 with birthright citizenship). ¹⁴ In return, Roosevelt assured the board of his commitment to end to Japanese immigration. ⁸

The school board officials had no sooner returned to San Francisco than white mobs renewed anti-Japanese ambushes and vandalism. When hoodlums destroyed 2 Japanese businesses in May protests from the Japanese press was immediate. Some in Japan called for war. ¹⁵

In August, Roosevelt ordered the US fleet of 16 battleships to sail from its positions in the Atlantic to the Pacific. Officially it was a training exercise. But it was an explicit display of power, despite Roosevelt’s behind-the-scenes assurances to the Japanese that the cruise was not an aggressive act. ¹⁶ Historian Thomas Bailey wrote that Roosevelt wanted to preserve amity between the 2 countries, yet show the Meiji, in TR’s words, “that the United States will no more submit to bullying than it will bully.” ¹⁵

The fleet made ports of call up the west coast of South America and Mexico before crossing the Pacific by way of Honolulu. In harbors in Australia and Manila, large crowds cheered the Americans, who were given permission by state officials to exercise their guns and conduct target practice. ¹⁵

The Meiji got the message, regardless of Roosevelt’s professed intent. In October, the US fleet arrived in Yokohama to a warm welcome.

The immigration issue resolved in a series of notes exchanged in late 1907 and early 1908 with the Gentlemen’s Agreement, where Japan agreed to voluntarily restrict the emigration at a nominal level to mollify anti-Asian zealots in the United States. The Meiji reserved the right for wives and children to reunite with fathers in America, an important concession that assured the stability of the Japanese settlements in America. ¹⁴

In November 1908, the Root-Takahira agreement reaffirmed Japan’s hegemony over Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria and Roosevelt’s Open Door. War was thereby averted. ¹⁶

Slipping Through an Immigration Loophole

Like nearly all schoolboys, Nakayama didn’t stay as domestic help for long. ⁴ Nakayama escaped the San Francisco riots to relative safety as a migrant farm laborer earning a dollar a day following seasonal work on California farms. He settled in Lompoc, a town in California’s Central Coast with a rapidly growing the Japanese community. They were excited to learn that the newcomer could make the treats and sweet rice cakes of their homeland. He started making mochi and manju as a side business.

Japanese immigration to the United States, which had fallen abruptly in the 2 years after the Gentlemen’s Agreement, increased under family reunification. By the late 1910s, new arrivals reached 10 000, far more than the nominal levels allowed under the Gentlemen’s Agreement. ¹⁷ In 1910, the ratio of Japanese men to women living in the United States was 7 to 1; by 1920, it was less than 2 to 1. Japan succeeded in avoiding the extreme gender imbalance between men and women that undermined the original Chinese communities in America. ¹⁴

Exclusion hawks passed the Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act) that set rigid immigration quotas by nation, specifically targeting Asia, southern and central Europe, and the Slavs. Japan’s quota was 100, the same as every other Asian country. In comparison, the quota for Great Britain and Northern Ireland was more than 65 000. The legislation was an outrage, a brazen violation of Japan’s most-favored-nation status. The delicate negotiations of the Gentlemen’s Agreement were entirely scuttled. ¹⁸

The severe restrictions of the new legislation preserved the loophole that allowed reunification of immigrant families in America. ² It was a fortunate circumstance for the future of the Nakayama family. In 1928, Nakayama used his meagre nest egg for a return trip to Osaka and a purpose: to have an omiai (go-between; a marriage broker) to find a bride with whom he could start a family.

Teruichi and his wife Shizu returned to Lompoc and raised 3 sons. They needed a steady income, so Nakayama husband and wife found a unique niche in the local economy: the assembly of the wooden crates that held the produce for transport to the big wholesale markets in the cities to the south. Surrounded by stacks of wooden slats and end-pieces, they transformed them into boxes in rapid succession, needing only a single swing to hammer each tack in position, another tack suddenly appearing from a ready supply they held in their mouths.

Another Escape

Public sentiment against Japan solidified when the nation seized Manchuria from China in 1931 and installed a puppet state that they renamed Manchukuo in 1932. Condemned by the League of Nations, Japan pulled out of the organization in 1933, an act tantamount to a declaration that the country would not be subject to decisions made by other nations. ⁵ The action can be traced to the clumsy violation of its most-favored-nation status by a city school board and the unilateral cancelation of the Gentlemen’s Agreement by the Immigration Act of 1924. ¹⁹

A militarized Japan embarked on an aggressive strategy of conquest: Mongolia (1936), China (1937-1940), and occupation of French Indochina (1940-1941). The succession of Japanese successes in the Far East and Southeast Asia alarmed Americans already jittery by the presence of thousands of Japanese immigrants in the country.

The belligerent strategy climaxed with the sudden attack on the American Pacific fleet stationed in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The one-sided destruction of American battleships and installations shocked the nation. For the Exclusionists and anti-Japanese zealots, the event confirmed their dire predictions.

In the hysteria, goons beat Japanese and vandalized their businesses. Homes, churches, and social clubs of Japanese near ports and military installations were suspected as espionage cells with no basis in fact. Calls for the forced removal all Japanese from the west coast entered public discourse and the halls of government. In an unprecedented violation of civil rights, President Franklin Roosevelt in February 1942 ordered the imprisonment of more than 110 000 Japanese from California, Washington, and Oregon in inland concentration camps on the high plains in the nation’s interior and swamps of the Mississippi Delta. ⁵

Those that had relatives living inland were given permission to join them provided they had a letter confirming they would be joining family at their destination. A friend with relatives in a farming community outside Denver chose imprisonment with his wife’s family. He gave his documents to Nakayama.

Nakayama, his wife, and their now teenaged sons packed the family car and traveled over two-lane blacktops to Colorado. Ralph Carr, the governor of Colorado, had taken the politically fatal position that the Japanese were American citizens and were therefore welcome in his state. In the political lexicon of the 21st century, he had made it a sanctuary state.

When they arrived, their surprised hosts accepted the road-weary travelers. They set them up in a one-room shack out in the fields. They earned their keep topping sugar beets (pulling the bulbous root from the earth and chopping the leaves off with a machete), a hot, dusty task that made stoop labor in the cool coastal farmlands around Lompoc seem like a pastime.

Assimilation

One by one the boys escaped to Denver. Eventually the entire Nakayama family regrouped in a small ethnic nihonmachi (tr., Japan town) centered around the Buddhist church.

When the war ended, most of the Japanese from California moved back to their original communities. But Lompoc was not an option for the Nakayama family. The white community had taken over the farms, trades, homes, and businesses owned by the Japanese and blocked them from returning to the community. ²⁰

Denver, which by war’s end had an established Japanese settlement, became a favored destination for many Japanese seeking a new start after the war. The families that resumed farming thrived in smaller towns on the plains. Those in the city prospered in the postwar economic boom and sent their children to public school with none of the controversy of San Francisco in 1906.

The Nakayama family structure had flipped. The English-speaking nisei (lit., second generation) sons entered the American mainstream, advanced in the workplace, and moved into comfortable homes in the Denver suburbs. Their issei (lit., first generation) parents, Teruichi and Shizu, were isolated by language and bewildered by a world unimaginably different than the traditions they brought with them long ago.

Teruichi and Shizu found refuge in the 19th century family business of their homeland. They opened a confectionary, working side-by-side in a shop beloved among Denver’s Japanese called Osaka-ya (“Osaka” evoking their native prefecture; “ya,” the suffix used to designate a shop or market). It was strategically located down the block from the church and next door to a market that catered to the Japanese appetite for fresh fish.

The Nakayama nisei sons married well and started the next generation of Nakayama’s, the sansei (lit., third generation), the baby boomers of Japanese in America. The yonsei and gosei that followed (lit., fourth and fifth generations, respectively) are products of intermarriage with non-Japanese spouses. Their physical features and facility with American language and culture reveal complete assimilation. Their surname is their sole connection with a lone immigrant, barely a teenager, who disembarked from a ship into an international imbroglio that set his native and adopted countries on course to nuclear war.