The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion - 1966

The book covers the time period up to and including the 1920's.The book starts out examining the origins of Japanese immigration into Hawaii as contract laborers and the into California as farm workers. The goal of many of the workers was to try to save enough money to buy their own farms.

One of the things that made an anti-Japanese movement easy to get underway was the anti-Chinese movement that had been under way for years. The first large-scale protest of the Japanese in California was in May of 1900 in San Francisco. This was largely a result of activity by labor unions and the major of the city. The national political parties were more concerned at the time with maintaining the anti-Chinese policies of the government.

The next major period of anti-Japanese undertakings was in 1905 and was started by one of the San Francisco newspapers. They carried on a series of attacking articles which even influenced the California legislature to come up with a resolution asking Congress to limit Japanese immigration. The Asiatic Exclusion League was formed in May of that year in San Francisco. Such movements in one form or another existed without break until the end of the second world war, some 40 years later.

A detailed explanation of what happened before and after the San Francisco school board forced the Japanese to be educated with the Chinese follows. This was the year of the great earthquake and, interestingly enough, the largest single source of monetary aid given to the city was from Japan.

By June physical attacks against Japanese were taking place. This included Japanese scientists studying the effects of the earthquake. The Asiatic Exclusion League than complained about laborers eating at Japanese-run restaurants and called for a boycott of them. Such wonderful placards as "White men and women, patronize your own race" began to be used.

The book describes how the segregation of the students was picked up by Tokyo newspapers then became widely known in the U.S. because of that. it also discusses Theodore Roosevelt's views.

The situation worsened. Woodrow Wilson became president in 1913 and the Japanese ambassador talked to him about what was going on in California, so concerned was the Japanese government. On April 17th a crowd of 20,000 in Tokyo protested the way the Japanese were being treated in California and called on the Japanese government to send warships to California to protect the Japanese there which would, very likely, have led to war with the U.S.

A very interesting thing the book points out is that Lenin, in some writings of his in 1920, predicted a Japanese-American war was inevitable.

The "Yellow Peril" fear gained impetus with the defeat of Russia by the Japanese, the first ever defeat of a white nation by a colored nation in modern times (that's the way people looked at it then, anyhow.) Once again California newspapers helped push the fear of the Japanese ever higher with headlines such as "Japan May Seize the Pacific Slope."

Even anti-Japanese films began to appear, starting in 1916 with a film called Patria. There were some groups that opposed the California views about the Japanese, though, so the anti-Japanese legislation and activities calmed down a little for a short time.

The peace didn't last long, and the Alien Exclusion Law was passed in California in 1920. In 1922-23 groups in Los Angeles started a "Swat the Jap" movement to try to make life miserable for any Japanese living there.

The book then talks about the work of the "exclusionists" and about a fourth of the book consists of appendices.



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