The Gentleman's Agreement with Japan

From the book, "An American Legacy: Racism, Nativism, and White Supremacy," by David R. Morse

IT WAS within a decade of Chinese exclusion that immigration from Japan began to take hold. For two centuries, between 1623 and 1841, under the Tokugawa Shogunate, Japan was essentially closed to foreigners, and Japanese were prevented from leaving. However, with the Meiji Restoration of 1868, which marked Japan’s entry into modernity, Japan borrowed the concepts of “emigration” and “colonization” from the West, which the Japanese political and intellectual elites began to use interchangeably in the context of nation building and expansion.

A leader in the move toward Meiji modernization was Fukuzawa Yukichi, who saw emigration as a means of promoting commerce with the United States, and he viewed Japanese immigrants in American trading ports as a “commercial linkage between their homeland and their new country of residence.” In a commentary entitled “Leave Your Homeland at Once,” Yukichi appealed to Japanese patriotism, stating that Japanese traders living abroad would add significantly to Japan’s national assets. He wrote:

[A Japanese emigrant] shall be regarded as a loyal subject. For while sacrificing himself at the time of national crisis is a direct way of showing loyalty, engaging in various enterprises abroad is an indirect way of discharging patriotism.… When examining the example of Englishmen, no one would fail to see [that emigration] shall lead to the enrichment of Japan as well.1

Following Fukuzawa’s directive, some Japanese went to New York City to enter the silk trade as early as 1876, and others ventured to West Coast cities; after the establishment of San Francisco’s first Issei (first generation) import businesses, a number of individuals followed in the ensuing decades and formed a small but central merchant class in early Japanese America. One of the earliest guides on “going to America,” written by Issei already living on the continent, stated: “The United States is a land for new development, which awaits the coming of ambitious youth. Come, our brethren of 3,700,000! … When you come to the United States, you must have the determination to create the second, new Japan there, which also helps enhance the interest and prestige of the imperial government and our nation.”2

However, what they found in America was a rigid racialized hierarchy with Whites at the top and cheap Asian labor at the bottom, a pecking order that became especially harsh after Chinese exclusion. “With no possibility of Japanese ascendancy in the game of mastering the Western frontier,” historian Eiichiro Azuma writes, “the Issei’s Americanized rendition of peaceful expansionism primarily sought … the building of a collective economic base, the control of farmlands, and the construction of Japanese settlement ‘colonies,’ under the established order of the White racial regime.”3

While the early Japanese immigrants were largely entrepreneurs, beginning in the mid-1880s, most were either students evading conscription or, importantly, dekasegi, emigrants of rural origin, who were inspired by a “success boom,” which swept Japanese popular culture and exalted self-made men such as Andrew Carnegie, Theodore Roosevelt, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John D. Rockefeller, who became symbols for the boundless opportunities that America allegedly offered workers. The dekasegi laborers were largely immune to the valorization of emigration extolled by the elite, and most came to either Hawaii or the United States between 1885 and 1908, based on, as one worker put it, the “rumor that [it] would pay off handsomely.” One large contributing factor to the exodus of dekasegi, as in the case of many Mexicans, was the commercialization of agriculture, which left many farmers in Japan landless and sent them in search of wage labor. At the same time, the entry of free market forces into villages opened the minds of many to opportunities of which they had never dreamed.

Though most arriving on Hawaiian or American shores were entrepreneurial laborers, many were so-called “private-contract emigrants” whose initial expenses were paid for by employers; prior to 1894, the Japanese government had sponsored worker emigration. In 1898, nine emigration companies were in operation. By 1906, there were 30, plus nine individual brokers, who transported Japanese workers to Australia, Peru, Mexico, the Fiji Islands, and Brazil, as well the United States and Hawaii.4 Between 1895 and 1908, 130,000 Japanese left for the continental United States and Hawaii, though many of the latter went to California at the termination of their contracts, where they could expect to earn twice as much as did field hands in Hawaii and four to six times what they would have earned as common laborers in Japan.5

Complicating the issue of Japanese workers arriving to the United States was the issue of contract labor. In 1885, the United States, in response to anti-slavery and anti-coolie concerns, had outlawed the importation of contract laborers. Many would-be immigrants were denied entry to the U.S. because officials mistook agreements with emigration companies as labor contracts. As historian Shelley Sang-Hee Lee notes, “The lines between ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ … were always blurrier than officials portrayed, for it was rare that any immigrant traveled completely on their own resources.” Despite this, beginning in the late 1890s, American steamships were the primary mode of passage from Japan to Hawaii and the U.S. mainland, and Japanese continued to arrive in large numbers.6

By 1905, Japanese immigration exploded into a national and international issue, as fears of the “Yellow Peril,” which built on a well-worn narrative that had been applied to the Chinese but took on greater urgency given Japan’s rise as an economic and military power. As historian John Dower observed, “The vision of the menace from the East was always more racial rather than national. It derived not from concern with any one country or people in particular, but from a vague and ominous sense of the vast, faceless, nameless yellow horde: the rising tide, indeed, of color.”7 On February 23, a full-page article in the San Francisco Chronicle exclaimed: “The Japanese Invasion, The Problem of the Hour,” and warned that “once the [Japanese] war with Russia is over, the brown stream of Japanese immigration” would grow to a “raging torrent.” Scare headlines proliferated at the time, including: “Japanese: A Menace to American Women,” “The Yellow Peril – How Japanese Crowd Out the White Race,” and “Crime and Poverty Go Hand in Hand with Asiatic Labor.”8

As had been the case with the Chinese, Japanese were declared to be “unassimilable,” and the press was replete with exaggerated examples of how Japanese were unlike Americans, indeed worse than the Chinese who had come before them. Chester H. Rowell, editor of the Fresno Republican, a so-called racial moderate, declared in 1909:

The Chinese will keep a contract; the Japanese will not. Chinese business, like American business, is based on the assumption of the inviolability of contracts. Therefore the American and the Chinese can understand each other, on this point. But the Japanese seems to have no comprehension of the contract as a fundamental obligation, while the American cannot understand how a man can have any virtue who lacks this one … The Japanese does not recognize a contract as a moral obligation, and the American therefore assumes that he has no sense of any moral obligation. In an industrial system based on contract the Japanese must acquire a new sort of conscience, or he will remain an industrial misfit.9

In an influential 1904 essay entitled “The Yellow Peril,” author Jack London bemoaned the differences between the Japanese and American soul, Americans being, says London, “a religious race, which is another way of saying that we are a right seeking race.” London continues:

“What do you think of the Japanese?” was asked an American woman after she had lived some time in Japan. “It seems to me that they have no soul,” was her answer. This must not be taken to mean that the Japanese is without soul. But it serves to illustrate the enormous difference between their souls and this woman’s soul … This Western soul did not dream that the Eastern soul existed, it was so different, so totally different.…10

In 1900, with the rise of anti-Japanese sentiment on the West Coast, the Japanese foreign ministry ended the departure of Japanese laborers to the U.S., relaxing it in 1902 only for those who had previously worked abroad. However, this law was widely defied, as many dekasegi workers posed as businessmen, and others entered the U.S. by way of Canada or Mexico.11 White nativism grew without check, driven by the rapid increase in the Japanese population, particularly following the arrival of more than 40,000 after the 1898 annexation of Hawaii, and White forces coalesced around the government, demanding an exclusion act similar to what had been done in the case of the Chinese. In Seattle, in 1906, a cartoonist, Arthur E. Fowler, launched a magazine called “The Yellow Peril” and organized a Seattle branch of the Japanese-Korean exclusion league, which generated 10,000 signatures on an “anti-Japanese coolie” petition.12

However, officials in Washington were aware that Japan, which had demonstrated its military prowess in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, would not submit to a humiliating exclusion law. In May 1905, delegates from 67 labor and political organizations formed the Japanese-Korean Exclusion League with the slogan “Absolute Exclusion of the Asiatic.” In October 1906, they succeeded in convincing the San Francisco School Board to force Japanese and Korean students to attend the city’s segregated Oriental School, which was already being attended by Chinese. In February 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt, though privately sympathizing with the exclusionists but fearing a reaction from Japan, ordered that the order be revoked. However, the segregationists held firm, and the next month, an agreement was reached. On March 14, Roosevelt issued an executive order that excluded from the continental United States any aliens arriving from Hawaii, Canada, or Mexico. Additionally, the President began diplomatic negotiations with Japan to restrict any further immigration of workers from Japan.

Japanese ascendency in Asia in the early twentieth century also led to the departure of thousands of Koreans from Korea to the United States, many fleeing Japanese rule. In 1905, Japan had defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War, and it declared Korea a protectorate, formally annexing the country in 1910. The Japanese-controlled government banned emigration of Koreans in order to prevent them from competing with Japanese laborers in Hawaii and to keep them at home to support Japanese initiatives.13However many did manage to leave Korea, some to be free of the “Japanese enemy,” others to improve their economic condition, particularly in 1901 and 1902, which brought a cholera epidemic, drought, floods, and a locust plague. Between 1903 and 1920, about 8,000 Korean sailed to the United States, especially between 1903 and 1905, and many landed in Hawaii to work on plantations.14

In California, where most Korean immigrants settled on the mainland, they found work as farm laborers, often working in cooperative Korean “gangs” or alongside California’s diverse agricultural labor force. The agricultural towns of Dinuba, Reedley, Sacramento, and Delano attracted nearly 83 percent of the early Korean population in the United States. Others went inland, working in mines in Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming and on the railroads in Arizona. Like other Asian immigrants they were predominately young and male, but many were also clergymen, former soldiers, and students. About 70 percent were literate and 40 percent were Christian, having been converted by American missionaries.15

Koreans retained strong ties to their homeland. However, because of Korea’s status as a Japanese colony, these ties took on a passionate nationalism focused on Korean independence. An editorial in the San Francisco Korean language newspaper Sinhan Minbo declared: “We have no country to return to. We are a conquered people.”16 Because they had no intentions of returning to Korea, given its occupied status, Korean males, who made up the bulk of the population, sent for picture brides. The Korean National Association, whose founding resolution was “All Koreans in America regard Japan as an enemy nation,” played a leading role in building the cause of Korean independence and held mass protests to condemn Japan’s annexation of Korea. In 1913, in Hemet, California, after a mob of Whites descended on a group of Korean laborers and expelled them, the Japanese consulate in San Francisco offered the victims assistance and began negotiations with Secretary of State Williams Jennings Bryan.17 Still, Koreans were subjected to much of the same discrimination as were Chinese and Japanese. They were condemned by the Asiatic Exclusion League as undesirable aliens and, like the Japanese, were prohibited in President Roosevelt’s 1907 executive order from migrating from Hawaii. Indeed, as Takaki notes, most Whites associated Koreans with Japanese. Like the Japanese, they were often barred from renting housing by White landlords, and refused service in public recreational facilities and restaurants.18

In San Francisco, violent attacks on Japanese residents became the norm; in the summer and fall of 1906, there were nearly 300 attacks on Japanese in the city. In the spring of 1907, tensions erupted. On the night of May 20, a mob of about 20 Whites destroyed the Horseshoe Restaurant, a Japanese establishment, and then attacked a Japanese bathhouse across the street. The following night, a mob attacked Japanese homes and businesses across the city. Police were called, but none came, and the violence lasted for several nights. The Japanese Association of San Francisco protested: “Hardly a day goes by … that some threatening demonstration is not made by roughs and hoodlums against the Japanese,” and it reached such proportions that President Roosevelt stationed troops nearby with orders to quell future riots.

Roosevelt’s order barring Japanese migration from Hawaii provoked a large influx of Japanese workers into Canada. In Vancouver, newspapers reported that Japanese were “swarming in by shiploads from Japan and Honolulu,” and that “feeling[s] of panic” were strong in the cities. “White Canada Forever” became a popular song: “For White Man’s land we fight. To Oriental grasp and greed we’ll surrender, no never. Our watchword be ‘God save the King.’” Violence directed at Japanese in cities in both Canada and the United States continued unabated, and as a result, both countries began to negotiate with Japan to restrict Japanese immigration.

On January 25, 1908, the United States signed the Gentleman’s Agreement with Japan, so named because Japan agreed to the terms voluntarily rather than be subject to a humiliating Japanese exclusion bill. It was an informal agreement, whereby the United States would not impose restriction on Japanese immigration, and Japan would not allow further emigration to the U.S. Three days later, Canada and Japan signed a nearly identical agreement.19

As Japanese in the U.S. began to make the transition from sojourners to permanent residents, Issei made extensive efforts to adapt themselves to American society. Immigrant leaders undertook moral reform campaigns to help contradict negative perceptions of Japanese among Whites, attacking Japanese patronage of Chinese gambling houses, Japanese prostitution, and other elements that might cast Japanese in a negative light. For instance, in 1918, after it was revealed in a survey that Japanese were losing an estimated $3 million annually, largely in Chinese gambling establishments, the Japanese Association of America ordered newly formed anti-gambling committees to encourage Japanese immigrants to report the names of gamblers to their home towns in Japan, and publish their names and photos in the Issei press. Additionally, Japanese community leaders, in order to counter arguments that Japanese were not able to adapt to American customs, began to make strong arguments in favor of what was called gaimenteki dōka, or outward assimilation. According to historian Yuji Ichioka, these leaders advocated that:

All Japanese immigrants, regardless of sex, had to adopt American clothing. They had to refrain from wearing Japanese garments in order to avoid being perceived as foreign interlopers … It also involved adapting one’s physical living environment to conform to American ways. Living quarters and furnishings had to meet specific American standards as much as possible. Conversely, things visibly and conspicuously Japanese, such as large signs written in Japanese, had to be eschewed as much as possible … Wives were advised to walk alongside their husbands, not behind them, so as to avoid reinforcing the negative stereotype of Japanese women as being enslaved by Japanese men … Instead of celebrating Japanese national holidays, they had to commemorate American ones like Independence Day and Thanksgiving day.20

One notable feature of the Japanese experience in the United States, which provoked the contempt of Whites, was the “picture bride” system. To Japanese, the system was analogous to the traditional custom of arranged marriage, whereby parents worked with go-betweens to help in the selection of suitable partners for their sons and daughters. Additionally, compared to Chinese women, Japanese women were more receptive to the idea of traveling overseas; they were more educated. The Meiji government required the education of girls, which included instruction in English, and Japanese custom stipulated that women should enter their husband’s family. As a result of picture brides, by 1920, women represented 46 percent of the Japanese population in Hawaii and 35 percent in California.21

Yet Whites were outraged by the arrival of picture brides, and major West Coast newspapers published flurries of articles calling it a “barbaric practice” in which women were coerced into marriage without regard to love or morality. “Japanese Picture Brides Are Swarming Here” was a typical headline directed at the boatloads of “strange-looking” and “simple-minded” women arriving on American shores.22 In the words of a Japanese woman interpreter at Angel Island, San Francisco’s port of entry for most immigrants from Asia:

People have a great many wrong ideas about Japanese picture brides and Japanese women coming to America. I know that Japanese do not send women to be prostitutes. They are married and usually they are happy. Sometimes when the age is very different they are not so happy, but with us Japanese, love comes after marriage.23

In addition to the cries of immorality, which the picture bride system reputedly fostered, Californians, led by State Senator James D. Phelan, labeled the practice as a Japanese ploy to secure land. The Alien Land Law, passed by the California legislature in 1913, prohibited immigrants from owning or leasing land; to circumvent the law, many Issei obtained picture brides and subsequently purchased land in the name of their American born Nisei children. Phelan charged: “These women are not only wives but laborers; they go to work with their children strapped upon their backs and accomplish the dual purpose of defeating the [immigration] law by getting in actual laborers and of defeating the land law by getting [through] the birth route persons eligible to hold land.” Write Lee and Yung, “Phelan raised the alarm that California was rapidly becoming a Japanese colony and he vowed to change the laws and “exterminate this menace as a matter of self-defense.”24

Despite their attempts to assimilate, Japanese experienced constant discrimination from White Americans. Writes Ronald Takaki:

The newcomers were usually viewed and treated as a distinct group. Racist curses repeatedly stung their ears: “Jap Go Home,” “God Damn Jap!” “Yellow Jap!” “Dirty Jeff!” Ugly graffiti assaulted their eyes at railroad stations and toilets: “Japs Go Away!” “Fire the Japs!” On the street corners of Santa Monica Boulevard and Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, scribblings on the sidewalks threatened: “Japs, we do not want you.” Outside of a small town in the San Joaquin Valley, a sign on the highway warned: “No More Japs Wanted Here.” The term “Jap” was so commonplace it was even used unwittingly … “Hello, Jap,” or “Hello, Mr. Jap,” in a friendly way whenever he saw us … He didn’t know that “Jap” was not the correct word …

But discrimination went beyond words … When the newcomers tried to rent or buy houses, they were turned down by realtors who explained: “If Japanese live around here, then the price of the land will go down.” At theaters, Japanese were often refused admittance or seated in the segregated section … In the cities they were pelted with stones and snowballs, and the businesses were vandalized – the store window smashed and the sidewalks in front smeared with horse manure.25

In the definitive example of Japanese assimilation, Takao Ozawa, born in Japan, filed for naturalization in Alameda County, California on October 16, 1914. In his brief, Ozawa declared his unswerving allegiance to the United States: “In name, General Benedict Arnold was an American, but at heart he was a traitor. In name, I am not an American, but at heart I am a true American.” Ozawa then stated the circumstances of his life. He had not registered his marriage or the birth of his children with the Japanese Consulate, but rather to the American government; he had no connections with any Japanese churches or schools; he sent his children to an American church; he spoke English at home and his children could not speak Japanese; he and his wife were both educated in American schools, and he had lived continuously in the United States for 28 years. Additionally, Ozawa argued that his skin was White in tone. Ozawa concluded that he had “steadily prepared to return the kindness which our Uncle Sam has extended to me … so it is my honest hope to do something good to the United States before I bid farewell to this world.”26

Ichioka observes:

Ozawa fulfilled all the nonracial requirements for naturalization set by the [Immigration] Act of 1906. According to this statute, an applicant had to file a petition of intent to naturalize at least two years prior to formal application … he had filed his petition of intent on August 1, 1902 … He satisfied the five-year continuous resident requirement. He had lived in the United States and Hawaii for more than twenty years. His personal character and English fluency … met the requirements related to moral fitness and knowledge of the English language. Fully qualified … his case was impeccable from a legal point of view.

What stood in the way of citizenship was his race. He was unsuccessful in the lower court and was subsequently turned down by the District Court for the Territory of Hawaii. The Supreme Court took up the Ozawa case in 1922. In its ruling, handed down by Justice George Sutherland, the Court rejected Ozawa’s claim that his skin was white, since “even among Anglo-Saxons … [there are] swarthy brunette[s] who are … darker than many of the lighter hued persons of the brown or yellow races.” Rather, Sutherland argued that the intent of the constitution was to convey citizenship only on Caucasians:

On behalf of the appellant it is urged that we should give to this phrase [“free White person”] the meaning which it had in the minds of its original framers in 1790 and that it was employed by them for the sole purpose of excluding the Black or African race and the Indians then inhabiting this country. It may be true that those two races were alone thought of as being excluded, but to say that they were the only ones within the intent of the statute would be to ignore the affirmative form of the legislation.

The provision is not that Negroes and Indians shall be excluded, but it is, in effect, that only free White persons shall be included. The intention was to confer the privilege of citizenship upon that class of persons whom the fathers knew as white, and to deny it to all who could not be so classified. It is not enough to say that the framers did not have in mind the brown or yellow races of Asia. It is necessary to go farther and be able to say that had these particular races been suggested, the language of the act would have been so varied as to include them within its privileges.27

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NOTES

1.??????Azuma, Eiichiro. Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America. (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2005), 23.

2.??????Ibid.

3.??????Ibid., 24.

4.??????Lee (Shelley Sang-Hee), 42.

5.??????Azuma., 31.

6.??????Lee, (Shelley Sang-Hee), 44.

7.??????Dower, John W. War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1987), 156.

8.??????Ibid.

9.??????Rowell, Chester H. Chinese and Japanese Immigrants – A Comparison,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 34, No. 2, 5.

10.???From Jack London, “The Yellow Peril” (1904); reproduced with Lon Kurashige and Alice Yang Murray, eds. Major Problems in Asian American History. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003.

11.???Lee, (Shelley Sang-Hee), 43.

12.???Lee (Erika), The Making of Asian America, 126.

13.???Ibid., 113.

14.???Lee, (Shelley Sang-Hee), 45.

15.???Lee (Erika), 115.

16.???Ibid, 120.

17.???Ibid., 121.

18.???Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 271.

19.???Lee (Erika), The Making of Asian America, 102.

20.???Ibid., 185.

21.???Takaki, A Different Mirror, 247.

22.???Lee, Erika and Judy Yung. Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America. (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2010), 130.

23.???Ibid., 121.

24.???Ibid., 130.

25.???Takaki, Strangers From A Different Shore, 181.

26.???Ichioka, 219.

27.???U.S. Supreme Court, Takao Ozawa v. U.S., 260 U.S. 178, 1922. https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/260/178.htm