Japanese Americans

Significance: Japanese Americans have been one of the most discriminated against groups in US history. Before World War II, they were barred from becoming US citizens and owning land on the West Coast. During World War II, more than 100,000 Japanese Americans were placed in internment camps in the western United States and in Canada. However, the fighting spirit of the Nisei (second-generation Japanese American) army unit during World War II contributed to a greater acceptance of Japanese Americans by other racial and ethnic groups in the postwar period. By the end of the twentieth century, Japanese Americans had received an official apology and reparations for the internment.

In the 1890s, a few of the Japanese who had moved to Hawaii in the 1880s migrated to California, but large-scale Japanese immigration did not take place until 1900. From 1900 to 1910, more than 100,000 Japanese moved to the West Coast, first and primarily to California but eventually as far north as Vancouver, British Columbia. By 1930, about 275,000 people living in the United States were of Japanese origin or descent. By the end of the twentieth century, this number had reached about 1.8 million.

Early Reaction to Japanese Immigration

In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, primarily at the insistence of Californians who claimed that the Chinese could not be assimilated into American culture. Many Californians, therefore, were outraged when after Chinese immigration was virtually stopped by the 1882 act, Japanese immigration began. These citizens simply could see no difference between Chinese and Japanese immigrants, although, in fact, the Japanese, who had been carefully screened by the Japanese government, were generally better educated than the earlier Chinese immigrants.

Milestones in Japanese American History

Soon after 1900, politicians and journalists agitated to stop Japanese immigration, speaking of the “yellow peril.” They maintained that the Japanese could not be assimilated into American culture and represented an outside group that would attempt to control the United States. In 1905, the public schools of San Francisco banned Japanese children from attending school with white children, causing the Japanese government to become very angry. The issue of San Francisco’s school segregation was resolved in 1908 when President Theodore Roosevelt signed a Gentlemen’s Agreement with the Japanese government, requiring that it not issue any more visas for workers to come to the United States. The San Francisco school board then allowed Japanese children to attend school with whites.

California and other states continued to harass Japanese immigrants. In 1913, California passed the Alien Land Act, which stipulated that Asians who were ineligible for citizenship could not own land. This meant that the Japanese immigrants, who were mostly agricultural workers, could work only as tenant farmers and could not own the land on which they worked.

Miscegenation laws, making marriages between people of different races illegal, were also enforced against the early Japanese immigrants, most of whom were men. Unable to find wives in the United States, these men turned to matchmakers in Japan. Often the immigrants would marry brides whom they had seen, before the wedding, only in a photograph. White Californians were angered by the Japanese practice of marrying “picture brides.” They pointed to this behavior as further evidence that the Japanese could not be assimilated into American culture.

Japanese Americans During World War II

By the start of World War II, two generations of Japanese Americans (Issei, or first-generation Japanese Americans, and Nisei, second-generation Japanese Americans) lived in the United States and Canada. In 1942, members of the American and Canadian governments felt that the Japanese Americans posed a threat to security. Therefore, on February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, requiring people of Japanese origin or descent living in the western part of the United States (California, Oregon, Washington, and the southern part of Arizona) to be placed in internment camps; this order affected more than 100,000 people. The Japanese Americans were given very little time to gather their property or to take care of businesses before they were interned. Property that actually belonged to Nisei (who were American citizens) was seized. Areas such as Japantown (Nihonmachi) in the Fillmore district of San Francisco and Little Tokyo in Los Angeles became nearly deserted. What is more, within twenty-four hours of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the United States government detained one thousand Japanese American community leaders and teachers.

In Canada, the 1942 War Measures Act placed Japanese aliens and Japanese Canadians in camps and required them to pay for their housing. Those who objected to having to live in these camps were placed in prisoner-of-war camps along with captured German soldiers in northern Ontario. In the United States, various court cases were brought to challenge the government’s treatment of Japanese Americans, but this treatment was deemed to be legal in decisions such as Korematsu v. United States (1944) and Hirabayashi v. United States (1943). In the decision handed down in Hirabayashi, the Court suggested that because Japanese Americans had chosen to live together as a group and had not assimilated well into the mainstream culture, the US government was justified in being suspicious of them.

In January, 1945, Japanese aliens and Japanese Americans were allowed to leave the camps. Unable to live in the western United States, these people and their families settled in the East. Soon after the United States released the detainees from camps, the Canadians followed suit.

Japanese Americans After World War II

For a variety of reasons, life for Japanese Americans improved after World War II. The bravery of the Nisei soldiers during World War II had impressed upon many other Americans how loyal Japanese Americans actually were. Having seen firsthand the racial hatred practiced by the Nazis, Americans and Canadians did not want this sort of prejudice practiced in their home countries. Finally, much of the original prejudice and hatred against the Japanese and Asians as a whole stemmed from white Americans’ fears of economic competition. The strength of the postwar US economy lessened these fears and created advancement possibilities for many racial and ethnic groups.

In 1952, with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act (also known as the McCarran-Walter Act), it became possible for Japanese immigrants to become naturalized citizens. Although many Japanese citizens had entered the United States as wives of US servicemen under the 1945 War Brides Act, many more entered under the 1952 act. From 1947 through 1975, 67,000 Japanese women entered as wives of US servicemen, thus, becoming Japanese Americans. These new Japanese Americans encountered a very different United States from the one experienced by earlier immigrants. After 1952, it was much less likely that Japanese Americans would isolate themselves in areas where only people of Japanese heritage lived. In 1956, California, by popular vote, largely through a campaign orchestrated by Japanese American Sei Fujii, repealed its Alien Land Law, making it possible for people born in Japan to own land in California.

Japanese Americans in the Mid- and Late 1900s

In the latter part of the twentieth century, Americans became interested in all things Japanese. Japanese influences could be found in American music, fashion, architecture, philosophy, and religion. Japanese Americans were able to lead the way in introducing other ethnic and racial groups to Japanese culture and philosophy. In the 1960s, recognizing that expressions of cultural heritage were becoming popular, the Japanese Americans in the Fillmore district of San Francisco organized the first annual San Francisco Cherry Blossom Festival to share Japanese philosophy and culture associated with the cherry blossom with other Americans. Other cities such as Seattle, Washington, also organized cherry blossom festivals. One of the better-known festivals is the National Cherry Blossom Festival, held in Washington, DC, each spring to celebrate the donation of more than three thousand Japanese cherry trees to the American people by the mayor of Tokyo in 1912.

Led by Japanese American citizens’ groups, Japanese Americans for many decades attempted to obtain justice from the US government for its treatment of them during World War II. Finally, in 1988, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act. The American government acknowledged that an injustice had been done, apologized for that injustice, and agreed to pay reparations of twenty thousand dollars to each eligible Japanese American. In 1990, President George H. W. Bush began the reparations process.

Bibliography

Hoobler, Dorothy, Thomas Hoobler, and George Takei. The Japanese American Family Album. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. Print.

Iida, Deborah. Middle Son. Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 1996. Print.

Kitano, Dorothy. The Japanese Americans. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Print. Peoples of North America.

Long, Robert Emmett, ed. The Reference Shelf: Immigration. New York: Wilson, 1996. Print.

Reeves, Richard. Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment in World War II. New York: Holt, 2015. Print.