A Tragedy of Democracy

Japanese Confinement in North America

Greg Robinson

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780231520126
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Geschichte

The confinement of some 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, often called the Japanese American internment, has been described as the worst official civil rights violation of modern U. S. history. Greg Robinson not only offers a bold new understanding of these events but also studies them within a larger time frame and from a transnational perspective.

Drawing on newly discovered material, Robinson provides a backstory of confinement that reveals for the first time the extent of the American government's surveillance of Japanese communities in the years leading up to war and the construction of what officials termed "concentration camps" for enemy aliens. He also considers the aftermath of confinement, including the place of Japanese Americans in postwar civil rights struggles, the long movement by former camp inmates for redress, and the continuing role of the camps as touchstones for nationwide commemoration and debate.

Most remarkably, A Tragedy of Democracy is the first book to analyze official policy toward West Coast Japanese Americans within a North American context. Robinson studies confinement on the mainland alongside events in wartime Hawaii, where fears of Japanese Americans justified Army dictatorship, suspension of the Constitution, and the imposition of military tribunals. He similarly reads the treatment of Japanese Americans against Canada's confinement of 22,000 citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry from British Columbia. A Tragedy of Democracy recounts the expulsion of almost 5,000 Japanese from Mexico's Pacific Coast and the poignant story of the Japanese Latin Americans who were kidnapped from their homes and interned in the United States. Approaching Japanese confinement as a continental and international phenomenon, Robinson offers a truly kaleidoscopic understanding of its genesis and outcomes.
The confinement of some 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, often called the Japanese American internment, has been described as the worst official civil rights violation of modern U. S. history. Greg Robinson not only offers a bold new understanding of these events but also studies them within a larger time frame and from a transnational perspective. Drawing on newly discovered material, Robinson provides a backstory of confinement that reveals for the first time the extent of the American government's surveillance of Japanese communities in the years leading up to war and the construction of what officials termed "concentration camps" for enemy aliens. He also considers the aftermath of confinement, including the place of Japanese Americans in postwar civil rights struggles, the long movement by former camp inmates for redress, and the continuing role of the camps as touchstones for nationwide commemoration and debate. Most remarkably, A Tragedy of Democracy is the first book to analyze official policy toward West Coast Japanese Americans within a North American context. Robinson studies confinement on the mainland alongside events in wartime Hawaii, where fears of Japanese Americans justified Army dictatorship, suspension of the Constitution, and the imposition of military tribunals. He similarly reads the treatment of Japanese Americans against Canada's confinement of 22,000 citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry from British Columbia. A Tragedy of Democracy recounts the expulsion of almost 5,000 Japanese from Mexico's Pacific Coast and the poignant story of the Japanese Latin Americans who were kidnapped from their homes and interned in the United States. Approaching Japanese confinement as a continental and international phenomenon, Robinson offers a truly kaleidoscopic understanding of its genesis and outcomes.

[1] BACKGROUND TO CONFINEMENT

JAPANESE IMMIGRATION AND SETTLEMENT

Although the confinement of Japanese Americans was clearly a war measure, its roots reach as far back as the beginnings of Japanese immigration to North America and to the growth of prejudice against these settlers, the so-called Issei (first generation).

Japan had remained almost completely closed off to the world for more than two centuries when a United States Navy fleet commanded by Commodore Matthew C. Perry was sent to the island empire in 1853. Under the threat of destruction from Perry’s gunboats, the Japanese agreed to open their ports to American trade and friendship. The “opening up” of their country and the entry of Americans and other Westerners prompted the Japanese leaders to implement a large-scale strategy of “catching up” with Western technology and ideas in order to protect Japan from foreign domination. In 1868 a group favoring modernization deposed Japan’s shogun (military governor) and took power under the aegis of the emperor, whom they restored as official head of the government. In the generation following the so-called Meiji Restoration, Japan developed into a modern industrial state. The leaders of the new government at Tokyo built a powerful military machine, and Japan soon displayed its new prowess in two victories over China in wars during the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Under the impetus of the modernizers, the Japanese government began sending students and government observers abroad to study Western societies, and laborers soon followed. In 1868, the very same year as the Meiji Restoration, the then-independent kingdom of Hawaii recruited a pioneer group of some 150 Japanese artisans (who were dubbed the Gannen-mono, or “first-year men”) to come work on the sugar plantations of Oahu. Resentful over their treatment by plantation overseers, the Japanese soon left the plantations and settled in Honolulu, whereupon the experiment was abandoned.¹ A year later, a group of Japanese sailed to California and established a short-lived agricultural settlement, the Wakamatsu colony.² A few years after, in 1877, a Japanese sailor named Manzo Nagano left his ship to settle in British Columbia and is thereby credited as the first Japanese immigrant to Canada.³ Emigration nonetheless remained formally illegal in Japan, and few Japanese workers settled in other countries in the immediately succeeding years.

The situation was drastically altered in 1882 by events in the United States, namely, the passage by Congress of the first of the Chinese Exclusion Acts. These acts, born of anti-Chinese racism and pressure by labor unions, journalists, and politicians to end labor competition by Chinese immigrants, barred all laborers of Chinese ancestry from entering the country. For the next sixty years, only a few protected categories of Chinese, such as accredited merchants, students, and ministers, could enter the country legally, and all Chinese were forced to carry passes as proof of legal residence.⁴ In 1885, following the completion of the transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railroad upon which masses of Chinese workers had labored, the Canadian government followed suit by imposing the notorious special Head Tax on each Chinese immigrant who wished to enter the country. The amount of this tax rose by 1903 to $500, a vast sum by the standards of the day, and severely limited the number of individuals, especially working-class, who were able to move east to Canada.⁵

The cutoff of Chinese immigration meant that landowners in Pacific Coast areas such as California, where Chinese made up one-half of agricultural laborers by 1884, began to search desperately for other newcomers to take up the arduous and low-paid farm labor work that brought prosperity to the region. Meanwhile, in Hawaii, whose economy depended on production of sugar, planters sought to attract a reliable surplus labor force. Japanese laborers, they concluded, would counterbalance the islands’ largely Chinese worker population. Planters would profit from national-based hostility between the two groups, which would work to keep laborers from organizing too closely. With close supervision by the Japanese government, which regarded itself as the protector of its overseas nationals, thousands of young Japanese were recruited by labor contractors for work in Hawaii after 1885. They soon became the dominant group in the islands’ plantation labor force.⁶ To better assure a stable and controlled worker group, plantation owners ordered recruiters to bring over a significant percentage of women among laborers and encouraged development of family groups. Plantation owners also (for a time) subsidized the implantation of Buddhist temples in Hawaii, as they were thought to encourage morality and docility in workers.

By the early 1890s, numerous individual Japanese began arriving in the United States. Since contract labor was illegal, they came as independent immigrants, often borrowing the price of their tickets. Many more transmigrated from Hawaii after finishing their contracts there, a movement that expanded once the islands were annexed by the United States in 1898. (Ironically, the white officials and businessmen who favored annexation conjured up the menace of Japanese domination of the islands as the main pretext for supporting a takeover by the U.S. government.)⁷ By 1900 there were 24,326 people of Japanese ancestry in the United States, and an estimated 127,000 more Japanese arrived to join them in the seven years that followed.

The emigrants who went to Hawaii and the United States were a fraction of a larger international movement of migrants who left Japan in the early twentieth century. Many of them came from a cluster of prefectures in the southwest of the Japanese island of Honshu that had been hard hit by industrialization.⁸ Other Japanese emigrated to escape conscription for military service, especially during Japan’s wars. In addition, Okinawans, a disdained minority group whose home islands had been annexed by the Japanese Empire in 1879 and settled by “mainland” Japanese, emigrated in large numbers after the turn of the century, first throughout Asia and the Pacific, then to Hawaii and the North American mainland. Beyond those who went to the United States, a few thousand Japanese immigrant farmworkers and fishermen (many of them having previously settled in Hawaii) entered Canada during the first years of the twentieth century and took up residence on Vancouver Island and the West Coast of British Columbia. Other Japanese immigrated to South America—from 1899 to 1924, some 17,000 immigrants arrived in Peru—or to Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, or the South Pacific. For example, several thousand Japanese were recruited as migrant labor on the French South Pacific island colony of New Caledonia, where they worked as miners. The largest number embarked within Asia and settled in Japan’s annexed colonies of Korea and Formosa, and later in Japanese-occupied Manchuria.⁹

The newcomers to the West Coast of North America took up jobs at first as farm laborers in rural districts or as domestics and laborers in urban areas. Large groups worked on fishing boats or in fish canneries, and they formed Japanese-style villages in cannery districts such as Steveston near Vancouver and Terminal Island near Los Angeles. As time went on, significant numbers of Japanese were recruited for seasonal labor in lumber mills or in salmon canning factories in Alaska. Once they had toiled for a number of years in North America, where they could learn new skills and draw much higher wages than in rural Japan, many immigrant laborers were able to save money from their wages in order to buy or lease agricultural land. Through drainage and fertilization techniques inherited from their ancestral homeland, and through intense physical labor, Issei farmers succeeded in transforming marginal land into thriving farms. With help from their growing families, they were successful in growing crops such as strawberries that required too much onerous stoop labor for white farmers to produce. Issei who settled in U.S. West Coast cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle, or the Canadian cities of Victoria and Vancouver, established themselves in business as fishermen or opened hotels, boarding houses, restaurants, and curio shops.¹⁰ A number worked in gardening and domestic labor (including many students who supported their studies by working as houseboys for elite whites). Although they were barred from liberal professions such as medicine and law, a small fraction of the immigrants did establish themselves as professionals—teachers, newspaper editors, or ministers—within ethnic communities. A tiny handful of the West Coast immigrants, such as actor Sessue Hayakawa, playwright Ken Nakazawa, and political scientist Yamato Ichihashi, found professional employment in the larger community.

The Japanese laborers, even those who did not sign fixed-term contracts, generally came over as dekasegi (sojourners), intending to remain for a limited period, and many did go back to Japan. (For example, Yosuke Matsuoka, Japan’s foreign minister in the period before Pearl Harbor, lived several years in Oregon as a young man). However, most of those who established themselves on the West Coast gradually abandoned their plans to return home. Their desire to remain was reflected in the powerful body of ethnic institutions they developed, including branches of the Japanese Association (Nihonjinkai) and the Canadian Japanese Association, in Japanese-language (and a few English-language) newspapers, and in religious congregations. They retained a strong sentimental attachment to their Japanese homeland, sent money to bank accounts or relatives in Japan, and kept close ties with the network of consulates maintained by the Japanese government that served to organize and protect overseas communities. Nevertheless, the immigrants demonstrated an ardent desire to adapt themselves to the customs and life of their new home. For example, a significant minority of Issei adopted Christianity—a faith that barely existed in Japan—and even the majority who remained faithful to various strains of Buddhism evolved a hybrid form unknown in Asia, including Western-style elements such as congregational services, Sunday schools, and ministers.

Issei joined in patriotic demonstrations and proclaimed their love for their adopted lands, although they were limited in their claims to belonging. In the United States, the 1790 Immigration Act limited naturalization to white (and, after 1870, African) immigrants and barred Japanese and other Asian aliens from becoming citizens. A few Japanese did succeed in taking out citizenship papers on the grounds that they counted as “white,” before the question was definitively decided. Since Issei were unable to naturalize, they could not vote or be licensed for certain professions. By contrast, all native-born children were automatically granted citizenship regardless of their parents’ status, a constitutional provision affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1898 case of Wong Kim Ark. In Canada, where naturalization remained open, some 16 percent of the total Japan-born population adopted British nationality in the period before World War II, which gave them (at least nominal) citizenship in Canada. However, in part because at that time Canada had no written constitution or bill of rights, Japanese Canadians in British Columbia, like black Americans in the Jim Crow South, faced legal discrimination notwithstanding their status as British subjects.¹¹

BEGINNINGS OF ANTI-JAPANESE MOVEMENTS

For the balance of the nineteenth century, most elite whites on the Pacific Coast welcomed the Japanese, who seemed willing to work hard for modest wages, and who were eager to learn. Still, there was from the beginning a certain amount of nativist hostility in the Anglo-American world to the overseas Japanese because of their racial and cultural difference from the majority—their “heathen” religion, their poor English, and their tendency to congregate in separate communities (often out of necessity). Australia, whose states had restricted Chinese immigration beginning in the 1850s, was the first nation to legislate Japanese exclusion, and its policy served as a precedent and model for other nations. In 1896, one year after Japan’s defeat of China in the second Sino-Japanese War demonstrated Tokyo’s growing military progress, various Australian states enacted Japanese exclusion laws. Japanese officials responded by protesting to Australia’s imperial masters in Great Britain, who were engaged in forming military and naval alliances with the new power and were anxious not to alienate Japan. The British Parliament disallowed the discriminatory laws, whereupon in 1901 the new Australian Commonwealth government voted an Immigration Restriction Act requiring all immigrants to pass a dictation test in a European language—a version of the “Natal Law,” developed by the British for use in South Africa, which restricted Asian immigrants unable to speak European languages. Under further British pressure, the Australians ultimately altered their law to accept the dictation test in any language. In return for this change, and for the Australians’ pledge not to pass further discriminatory immigration legislation, the Japanese agreed to an informal “Gentleman’s Agreement” (modeled on a deal they had made with the Australian state of Queensland in 1896) through which Tokyo agreed to restrict future visas to a few special categories of workers.¹² The result was a virtual cutoff of Japanese immigration to Australia for the next half-century.¹³

Another British possession, Canada, went through similar wrangling over immigration with the mother country. In 1897, following pressure from a newly formed “Anti-Mongolian Association,” British Columbia’s legislature passed a law barring Chinese and Japanese aliens from public employment. Two years later, the legislature voted the first of a series of race-based laws that used various stratagems to restrict Japanese immigration. The Dominion government of Prime Minster Wilfrid Laurier disallowed all these laws in order not to disturb British imperial foreign policy toward Britain’s Japanese ally.¹⁴ Although officially Japanese subjects had the right of free entry into Canada as a result of Japan’s treaty with Great Britain (to which Canada became a signatory in 1906, albeit with expressed reserves on the immigration question), Tokyo agreed to use administrative measures to limit Japanese immigration to Canada in order to calm the situation. As a result of the agreement, and the Russo-Japanese War, Japanese immigration to Canada fell to almost nothing from 1901 to 1905.¹⁵

In stark contrast to the immigration question, where Japanese and British imperial interests were involved, Laurier did not intervene on purely domestic matters. Most notably, he brought no challenge to British Columbia’s 1895 law barring all Chinese and Japanese, regardless of place of birth or citizenship, from voting rights and entry into certain professions. In 1900 Tomeichi Homma, a naturalized Canadian citizen, successfully challenged the law in a British Columbia court. However, two years later the British Privy Council overturned the court’s ruling on appeal and upheld the ban, which remained in effect until 1949.¹⁶

There was pressure for similar restrictive action against Japanese immigration to the United States. Labor unionists and elected officials—many of whom owed the development of their organizations and their political influence to the earlier movement to stigmatize and exclude Chinese immigrants—seized the opportunity to take a position against the Japanese, employing the same racial stereotyping that had worked so well in the case of the Chinese. By 1900 the American Federation of Labor issued a resolution formally opposing immigration of all Asians. Labor leaders asserted that Japanese were a racially inferior horde that threatened the standard of living of white workers (who nevertheless refused to admit Japanese workers to their unions or assure higher pay for all). Soon after, a coalition of groups in San Francisco staged a mass meeting advocating exclusion of Japanese immigrants, on the grounds that they were racially “unassimilable” and thus incapable of citizenship in a democratic society. In May 1905 labor groups combined to found a joint lobbying and propaganda group, the Japanese Exclusion League.¹⁷ Still, public opinion, especially outside the West Coast, was generally favorable toward Japan as a modern country, while Japanese immigrants were considered cleaner and more intelligent than the despised Chinese. Since the American West Coast was more heavily populated, popular fears of Japanese takeover were less plausible than on the Canadian and Australian frontiers.

After 1905, however, elite opinion about Japanese began to shift, in large part because of the interplay between two factors. One was the self-interest of white farmers and businessmen, who tolerated Japanese immigrants as laborers but were threatened by the growth of Japanese enterprise. The Issei who established farms and businesses on the West Coast shrank the pool of available labor and offered economic competition to elite whites. In addition, their success challenged widespread and accepted notions of white supremacy—their failure to “keep to their place” infuriated whites of all classes. The other catalyst of the anti-Japanese movement was Japan’s military strength. In 1904–1905, Japan decisively beat Russia in the Russo-Japanese War and thereby became the dominant naval power in the western Pacific. Jap...