One of the things I love about visiting the Obon Festivals in Central California is not just to see old friends but to also learn the stories of many who lived during the time when California, especially in the Central Valley around Fresno, Tulare, Kern counties had a large Japanese American population.
Each person I talked to for years have told me their stories of growing up in California and their families and I am forever grateful that they told me their stories before they passed away.
The stories of the good times when the population was quite high before World War II but also what happened during and after many were locked up in interment camps.
But also learning about the Japanese farmers who moved to the United States to start their new lives in America.
In fact, I have had good friends who were second to third generation and told me the stories of what their father or grandfather or great grandfather told them about beginning their lives in the west of the United States and making their homes in California.
It was one thing to deal with challenging conditions and racial tensions of that era, but I didn’t know the level of vitriol these farmers had received until reading an article from Collier’s National Weekly from March 25, 1916 (which is available for reading online).
In an article titled “California and the Japanese” by Lincoln Steffens it really goes to show the level of racism in America.
Lincoln Steffens is one of America’s well-known investigative journalist at the times. One of the leading muckrackers of the Progressive Era, he was an editor for the New York Times, wrote many articles for McClure’s Magazine and also wrote for Collier’s National Weekly. Known for investigating corruption in municipal government in American cities and his leftist values.
His perspective was nothing unique at the time, his thoughts were the product of that era, filled with sexist and racist attitudes and seeing non-whites as lower races.
The article begins with how the Japanese came to California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia and how California did what they had done to the Chinese and that was “The Japanese must go!”.
For those not familiar with what happened to Chinese in California, many Chinese immigrated to the United States in the beginning of the 19th century to work as laborers especially on the transcontinental railroad. They worked in the mining industry and they also worked in various industries.
American employers at the time loved the fact they can hire these new employees for cheap labor, but because the large numbers of immigrants, the white populations saw it as a threat and called the immigrants presence as “yellow peril”.
Newspapers condemned employers, churches denounced the Chinese immigrants and the hatred towards Chinese immigrants would lead to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which prohibited immigration from China for the next ten years and extended in 1892 by the Geary Act. The act prevented Chinese men who left China to reunite with their wives and children, it also prohibited Chinese men from marrying white women.
In 1924, all Asian immigrants except those from the Philippines (which was annexed in 1898) were excluded by law, denied citizenship and naturalization and prevented from owning land.
In the Collier’s article, Lincoln Steffens writes:
The Japan problem, as one sees it in California, is like the negro problem down South, with three big differences: First, the Japs are not an inferior race; they are our equals and, in some respects, our superiors. They are an esthetic people, for example, the Greeks were, not merely moral. And they are old and intelligent, like the Jews, who are also called imitators; and for the same reason they see through our games: business, politics, war; and, seeing through them plainly, play them easily and hard, without sentiment, without hypocrisy, to win. And they win. Their superiority, their esthetic efficiency, and their maturer mentality make them effective in competition with us, and unpopular and a menace. The South can put p with the incompetence of their colored folk more patiently than the West can with the competence of theirs. ‘The Yellow Peril makes the black look white’.
Steffen’s first listing of differences, he manages to offend numerous races and I can see what he was trying to do is build hostility for the reader that “as equals”, to goad the American government of doing something now about the “problem” of Japanese immigration and taking on farmland. But not just making other races inferior, he tries to elevate the Japanese in order to make them the top threat which the government must take action now. The power of propaganda and fear on Steffens part and the worst thing about it, because he was well-known as a writer, many people took this to heart.
Second, the Japanese are an organized nation, not a mere mass of individuals, as the negroes are, from a continental wilderness, nor, like the Jews, from nowhere everywhere; they are a united people with a strong, armed Government behind them, able and willing to defend them at home or abroad. We cannot be kind to the Japs, burning one now and then, or bating them to hold them down. We have to be just. And we cannot be just alone. We cannot consider among ourselves and decide, as the Californians have, what seems to us to be right and do that. The Chinese stood it; the Japs won’t. In other words, the Japanese question is a Japanese-American question, to be answered by Japanese-American reason and understanding”.
What a racist thing to say? Not surprised but it’s evident that Steffen is threatened because of the Japan and its government. This is not surprise as American’s have written about the challenges of trying to open up trade with Japan in 1853 with the writings of Matthew Perry and American Consul Townsend Harris. There were already fears but the writing was no doubt hostile and really trying to rile up the reader.
The bad thing about this is that we have seen moments of time of this anti-Japanese sentiment, as we see from Steffen’s article in 1916, what transpired during World War II and after but also in the mid-1980s of Americans feeling threatened by Japan trying to be heavily involved in American interests.
Andrea Chronister has a thesis for Lehigh University about “Japan-Bashing: How Propaganda Shapes American Perceptions of Japanese”.
Steffens then goes on a rant for the third reason:
Third, the Japanese aren’t upon us as the negroes are: not in teeming, increasing millions. There are less than 100,000 of them in the United States. The census counted 72,157 in1910. The Japanese-American Year Book said 91,958 in that year and 95,483 in 1913. We might not have to solve this race problem in the sense that negroes are: we and they together, the American and Japanese peoples. And apparently the Japs can do their part. They are proving that right now. They have voluntarily stopped coming here. When the first question first came up hot from California in 1907, the Japanese people’s representative here entered into a “gentleman’s agreement” with ours to put themselves certain restrictions upon emigration from Japan to the United States, and they have kept their word.
The general opinion that the Japanese are a sly, dishonest faithless people, and it is precisely in matter of keeping contracts that they are said to be most untrustworthy.
They have not been taught to hold contracts as sacred as we have.
Professor H.P. Willis, who had charge of the investigation of the Japanese problem by the United States Immigration Commission reports (“The Japanese problem in the United States, pp. 244-246)” – ‘The Chinese are notoriously honest in all contractual relations, and it is with them…that the Japanese are compared. In California, especially there have been many instances in which Japanese have not observed the standard set by the Chinese. The explanations is not far to seek. In some cases, the contracts have not been understood…As other is their rather rweakkly developed sense of contract. Because of the environment in which they have been reared, the Japanese…tenant and laborer are likely to feel that they should not be held to a bad bargain. If the wages of ‘regular hands’ are lower than those paid to ‘temporary help’, the regular hands feel aggrieved…If the prices are low or the crop is poor, the tenant paying cash rent may feel that he should not bear the entire loss and demand the landowner share it with him. It is said that it is customary to reduce rent under such circumstances in Japan’.
The last sentence is only a footnote in the book, but it is a most important statement, suggesting as it does that the Japanese have another ethics than ours.
Steffens then gets to the heart of the article about Japanese farmers and why he feels threatened by them:
The Japs cut wages at first, but they soon raised their prices and themselves too. They are like Americans, ambitious. Young when they came here, they were quick and able to push up and that made trouble. It is alleged that their farming was bad: the soil was overworked for quick profits and exhausted. Florin is pointed out an an example. I used to go to a farm at Florin when I was a boy. The Japs have that town and a lot of the land around. They have improved the appearance of it. Breaking up the big, old-fashioned grain-raining farms, they have intensively grown grapes, other fruits and vegetables scientifically, with knowledge, hard labor and keen intelligence. And that’s what hurts the American farmer next door. The Jap beats him at his ow n game, can rent or, if allowed, buy his land and clear a profit on capitalization the white man can’t pay interest on. As to the exhaustion of the soil, I asked one of the old Florinites whether the Japs did that or not. ‘Them as rents does,’ he said. ‘Them as owns don’t.’
It is charged that the Japanese are patriotic; that they will not give up their allegiance to Japan and become loyal Americans. I can’t answer that, of course. The Japanese already here, speaking for themselves and for possible Jap immigrants, declare that if allowed to become citizens they would transfer their loyalty from the Emperor to the United States. The Californians themselves do not deny that it is the superiority of the Japanese they dread. They admit it. The set granted it, and directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, they all asser it. And that fear of being outdone and run out by them accounts for the intensity of the feeling against the Japs in California.
As I read the article and see the examples pointed out, I’m guessing what was happening is that Japanese would buy crops, offer half the price they would normally get from others and then they would be sold for the same or higher price, which people buy.
We see this as a common practice today, people flip houses, people buy on eBay, selling something and flip it for more.
But it was because the Japanese were becoming successful at it, people were feeling threatened.
But the example used was a Japanese business would offer half the price, they were refused. Someone would come back to buy the whole crop for a little more, they were refused. And then as retribution of not being sold the crop, all the Japanese laborers would quit or go on a labor strike and they had no choice but to sell at the best bid in order to get their workers back.
And how certain companies owned by Japanese also controlled labor and used it to their advantage and Steffens credits this to their “Superiority of their intelligence” and are able to control labor, and control of the product of labor and Steffens felt they were building a monopoly.
And Steffens would build this fear in the article from a comment from Governor Johnson (according to Wikipedia: Hiram Warren Johnson was initially a leading American progressive and then a Liberal Isolationist Republican politician from California. He served as the 23rd Governor of California from 1911 to 1917 and as a United States Senator from 1917 to 1945):
It may be asserted unconditionally that the menace of Japanese ownership in California is not a resent fact, but a fear of the future…The intense interest aroused in the whole (California Land Law) proposal is based upon this imaginative picture of what some day might happen, rather than upon…what has happened. In the case of land holding…the Japanese are practically negligible now”.
Unfortunately, what would happen in the 1940’s to Japanese Americans was the “Civilian Exclusion Order No. 5”, Japanese Americans were forced to leave their home and their businesses which they put their lives and money into.
Densho featured an informative article on what transpired to business owners and farmland owners.
For one family, farmland was leased, the lessee stole everything while the farmers and their families were incarcerated.
While the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 awarded $20,000 to each living survivor of incarceration, President Ronald Regan said:
“No payment can make up for those lost years, so what is most important in this bill has less to do with property than with honor for here we admit a wrong.”
In the history of America, Japanese, African Americans, Native Americans, Chinese, Mexicans and many other ethnicities have endured hatred and when you think people would learn from the mistakes of the past, unfortunately the fear and hate becomes a political platform.
But we must forever become hopeful that the hateful errors of the past will never be repeated.
