Transpacific Convergences

Race, Migration, and Japanese American Film Culture before World War II

Denise Khor

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781469667980
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Despite the rise of the Hollywood system and hostility to Asian migrant communities in the early twentieth-century United States, Japanese Americans created a thriving cinema culture that produced films and established theaters and exhibition companies to facilitate their circulation between Japan and the United States. Drawing from a fascinating multilingual archive including the films themselves, movie industry trade press, Japanese American newspapers, oral histories, and more, this book reveals the experiences of Japanese Americans at the cinema and traces an alternative network of film production, exhibition, and spectatorship. In doing so, Denise Khor recovers previously unknown films such as The Oath of the Sword (1914), likely one of the earliest Asian American film productions, and illuminates the global circulations that have always constituted the multifaceted history of American cinema. Khor opens up transnational lines of inquiry and draws comparisons between early Japanese American cinema and Black cinema to craft a broad and expansive history of a transnational public sphere shaped by the circulation and exchange of people, culture, and ideas across the Pacific.

CHAPTER ONE Owned, Controlled, and Operated by Japanese

Racial Uplift and Japanese American Film Production, 1912–1920

I neither drink liquor of any kind, nor smoke, nor play cards, nor gamble nor associate with any improper persons. My honesty and industriousness are well known among my Japanese and American acquaintances and friends.… So I have all confidence in myself that as far as my character is concerned, I am second to none.

—TAKAO OZAWA, 1917

Recalling my experiences in making this picture [The Cheat (1915)] brings to mind the opposition of my playing the role of the villainous Japanese stirred among those of my nationality in Los Angeles and throughout the country after the film was released. For portraying the heavy, as screen villains are called, as a Japanese, I was indignantly accused of casting a slur on my nationality.

—SESSUE HAYAKAWA, in Zen Showed Me the Way

Takao Ozawa stood before the Supreme Court to declare that he deserved American citizenship. He first filed his petition in 1914 in Hawaii, and the case came before the United States Supreme Court three years later. In one of two legal briefs submitted to the court, Ozawa yearned to show that he was a reputable member of the community—a person of moral conduct, respectability, and public esteem. Leaders of the Pacific Coast Japanese Association Deliberative Council recognized that Ozawa represented the ideal public character for Japanese American citizenship. Ozawa was educated at the University of California, Berkeley. He was married, with a family. He spoke English and practiced Christianity. He was, as suggested in his brief, a person of exemplary moral character. He neither drank, smoked, gambled, nor “associated with any improper persons.” After the case was referred to the Supreme Court, the Japanese Association undertook leadership in what they assumed was an ideal test case to advocate for the naturalization rights of all Japanese in the United States. In the 1922 landmark case, the United States Supreme Court ruled against Ozawa, which ultimately codified the status of the Japanese in the United States as “alien ineligible for citizenship” until the 1952 McCarran Act. The declarations made by Ozawa, nevertheless, demonstrated the growing concern among many Japanese Americans over their public presentation. As the Ozawa case made clear, at stake in the performance of respectability and propriety was nothing less than the worthiness to the full rights to American citizenship.

Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, Japanese Americans developed a racial politics of respectability and uplift as a strategy to advance their community’s interests and well-being. As a part of a mounting tide for Japanese exclusion, “Keep California White” campaigns contributed to the election of anti-Japanese politicians while groups like the Asiatic Exclusion League and Native Sons of the Golden West agitated to halt all immigration from Japan. San Francisco passed segregation orders to exclude Japanese schoolchildren, and in 1907, the federal government reached an agreement to limit Japanese immigration. Even before the Supreme Court ruled against Takao Ozawa and barred citizenship for all Japanese in the United States, state legislatures approved laws restricting Japanese from owning property and marrying whites. In response to the escalating anti-Japanese agitation, Japanese American leaders mobilized to advocate for rights and community betterment. The Japanese Association, in particular, was initially established as a mutual aid society to coordinate social services and provide rotating credit, among other resources. However, as Yuji Ichioka notes, many of the Japanese Associations also attempted to serve as moral guardians over the community by promulgating varying practices of racial uplift.¹

In some ways, Japanese American racial uplift converged with African Americans’ race-centered campaigns to promote the advancement of “the race.” Writing about Los Angeles in the interwar years, Scott Kurashige notes that both Black and Japanese American elites advanced models of racial uplift based in white notions of Progressive social reform. Leaders believed that maintaining the moral integrity of their communities was critical to not only making their own individual members virtuous and productive but also in demonstrating their races’ overall fitness for citizenship. Organizations like the Japanese Association worked in coordination with the Japanese consulate (although the relationship was also at times fraught) to encourage acceptable behavior and norms. These shared models of racial uplift also advanced concepts of self-help and entrepreneurialism, which were important for both Black and Japanese American communities facing barriers to the labor market.²

At the same time, the efforts of Japanese in the United States to advance the race was profoundly shaped by Japanese imperial modernity. As Eiichiro Azuma notes, racial uplift for Japanese Americans not only sought to repudiate exclusion but also to uphold the vision of Japan’s ascendency as imperial nation-state. From the onset, Japan’s modernization (known as the Meiji Restoration) sought to build a modern monarchy based on Western models. Not only were Japan’s leaders motivated to signal to the West that Japan was not a candidate for colonization, but they were also actively engaged in their own imperialist practices.³ Within this context, the campaigns for racial uplift in the United States converged on the imperialist ideology of Japan’s honorary white status. At the crux of Ozawa’s bid for respectability and citizenship, after all, was his claim of whiteness. Ozawa petitioned the Supreme Course for citizenship on the basis of several criteria: his good character, American acculturation, that Japanese were not Chinese (as the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 established Chinese as “aliens ineligible for citizenship”), and that his skin was ultimately white.⁴

It is worth noting that Japanese American racial uplift was itself a campaign over the image of the race. Leaders and advocates sought self-transformation; to not only reform but to remake the racial self. Calling for the banishment of gambling and prostitution, proponents of racial uplift sought to distinguish the respectable classes from laborers, who were often castigated for their “uncivilized” habits. Consulate officials even issued conduct guides for Japanese emigrating to the United States. Japanese were encouraged to adopt “modern” appearance and Western style clothing and bodily comportment while women were urged to avoid nursing babies in public.⁵ Thus, Japanese American racial uplift was a sort of screen for shaping a public self. It was a project based in refashioning the look of the race. Within this vein, there was perhaps no better means to engage in such endeavors than the modern technologies of the camera. As early as 1900, Japanese in the United States were involved in such professions as photography. According to Peter Palmquist, commercial photographers of Japanese ancestry abounded in Seattle, San Francisco, Sacramento, Fresno, and Los Angeles. The numbers of Japanese listed as workers employed in a “Kodak store” in the 1910 census suggest that Japanese also joined in the era’s craze in amateur photography.⁶ As Amy Sueyoshi notes, many early twentieth-century photographs served to document Japanese adoption of Western-style clothing. These images often featured Japanese men and women donning Western-style suits and dresses and posing to signify whiteness and social respectability. The photographs reflect the optimistic belief in the permeable categories of “being American” as well as Japanese nationalism.⁷

Given its development as a far-reaching mass commercial industry, the cinema offered perhaps the most significant screen through which to refashion a public self and uplift the race. For Japanese Americans, cinema’s association with modernity and its growing ubiquity made for an opportune canvas for self-fashioning and reimagining the look of racial progress. Many Japanese increasingly recognized the possibilities of the cinema as a surface for representing the race and charting a future in the United States. Against this backdrop, Japanese in the United States adapted their campaign for racial uplift and respectability to the American screen. In the year after Ozawa first filed his court case, the American film The Cheat (1915) was released amid an uproar in Japanese American communities. Community leaders and newspaper editors mobilized a campaign against the film and denounced the film’s star, Sessue Hayakawa, as a “race traitor.” These protests erupted across multiple sites and as a part of organizing campaigns in California and even reverberated across the Pacific Ocean to spur publicly expressed outrage in Hawaii and Japan. These campaigns also coincided with the more well-known protests by African Americans against the landmark film The Birth of a Nation (1915). Most significantly, amid these overlapping media campaigns, Japanese Americans established one of the first Asian American media advocacy organizations to call for new film images and roles for Japanese actors. The Japanese Photoplayers’ Club of Los Angeles was founded in 1917 to foster the “dignity of the race” in motion pictures.

Recognizing the role of the screen image in shaping the possibilities for Japanese in the United States, the first companies and studios to support independent Japanese American filmmaking were formed. Drawing on extensive archival research in historical newspapers and the trade press, I uncover the initial forays into filmmaking by Japanese in the United States. Japanese established film production companies that worked independent from or adjacent to the major studio system. Sessue Hayakawa’s Haworth Pictures, perhaps the most well-known of these film companies in the United States, was first established in 1918 and produced nineteen feature-length films. However, as this chapter reveals, Hayakawa’s company was predated by several other independent and lesser known ventures. In 1912, Japanese in Portland, Oregon, a place known more for its strawberries than its filmmaking, established an independent film company called the Yamato Graph Motion Picture Company. Gravitating closer toward the hub of American filmmaking in Los Angeles, Japanese producers also established the Japanese American Film Production Company in 1914 and the Fujiyama Film Company in 1916. Other ventures were also developed, yet their appearances in the archive remain scant.

As filmmaking concerned with the optic of the race, these early Japanese American filmmaking enterprises coincided with many facets of the race film industry in the United States. Race filmmakers formed independent production companies and developed an alternative network of film production and exhibition by and for African Americans. Working mostly outside of Hollywood, race filmmakers like Oscar Micheaux capitalized on the major studios’ disinterest in Black viewership and filmmaking. Between 1915 and the late 1940s, race filmmakers made over five hundred films that circulated across a sprawling network of independently operated theaters and exhibition venues. Typically featuring all-Black casts, race films were dynamic and varied but often, as Barbara Lupack describes, “portrayed uplift achieved through education, exposed and punished race betrayal, and revealed black aspiration.”⁸ Against this context, I explore the only surviving print of The Oath of the Sword, which I first located in 2016 in the George Eastman House Archives. Closely reading the extant materials, I argue that the film provided a double view for audiences: a familiar and recognizable Japan-themed melodrama, on the one hand, and an aspirational story built on the possibilities for racial uplift, respectability, and modernity, on the other.

The Campaign against The Cheat (1915)

In 1915, Paramount Pictures released The Cheat, a film directed by Cecil B. DeMille and featuring a relatively unknown actor at the time, Sessue Hayakawa. The Japan-born actor appeared in several earlier films, but The Cheat was his star vehicle and catapulted his extraordinary career. While American audiences praised and admired the acting of Hayakawa in The Cheat, the Japanese American community decried the rising star and generated a widespread campaign to ban the film. Debates over the film’s representational politics, a political demand as modern as cinema itself, were played out in the major Japanese American newspapers. Many denounced the portrayal of Japanese treachery by Hayakawa. With the film’s release and popularity, Japanese in the United States and elsewhere fiercely debated the portrayal of the race and the implications of these filmic representations at the height of the anti-Japanese movement in the United States. S...