Anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States
Anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States has existed since the late 19th century, especially during the Yellow Peril, which had also extended to other Asian immigrants.
Anti-Japanese sentiment against American citizens of Japanese descent in the United States would peak during World War II, when the country of Japan became involved in the Pacific War theater. After the war, the rise of Japan as a major economic power was seen as a widespread economic threat to the United States and also led to a renewal of anti-Japanese sentiment, known as Japan bashing.[1]
Origins
In the United States, anti-Japanese sentiment had its beginnings well before World War II. Racial prejudice against Asian immigrants began building soon after Chinese workers started arriving in the country in the mid-19th century, and set the tone for the resistance Japanese would face in the decades to come. Although Chinese were heavily recruited in the mining and railroad industries initially, whites in Western states and territories came to view the immigrants as a source of economic competition and a threat to racial purity as their population increased. A network of anti-Chinese groups (many of which would reemerge in the anti-Japanese movement) worked to pass laws that limited Asian immigrants' access to legal and economic equality with whites. Most important of these discriminatory laws was the exclusion of Asians from citizenship rights. The Naturalization Act of 1870 revised the previous law, under which only white immigrants could become U.S. citizens, to extend eligibility to people of African descent. By designating Asians as permanent aliens, the law prohibited them from voting and serving on juries, which, combined with laws that prevented people of color from testifying against whites in court, made it virtually impossible for Asian Americans to participate in the country's legal and political systems. Also significant were alien land laws, which relied on coded language barring "aliens ineligible for citizenship" from owning land or real estate, and in some cases from even entering into a temporary lease, to discourage Asian immigrants from establishing homes and businesses in over a dozen states.[2] These laws were greatly detrimental to the newly arrived immigrants, since many of them were farmers and had little choice but to become migrant workers.
After the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 stopped immigration from China, American labor recruiters began targeting Japanese workers, triggering a rapid increase in the country's Japanese population, which in turn triggered the movement to decrease their number and restrict their economic and political power.[3] Some cite the formation of the Asiatic Exclusion League as the start of the anti-Japanese movement in California, where, along with the Japanese American population, the exclusion movement was centered.[4] Their efforts focused on ending Japanese immigration and, as with the previous anti-Chinese movement, nativist groups like the Asiatic Exclusion League lobbied to limit and finally, with the Immigration Act of 1924, ban Japanese and other East Asians from entering the U.S. However, in the process they created an atmosphere of systematic hostility and discrimination that would later contribute to the push to incarcerate 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.[3]
Early 20th century
Anti-Japanese racism and fear of the Yellow Peril had become increasingly xenophobic in California after the Japanese victory over the Russian Empire in the Russo-Japanese War. On October 11, 1906, the San Francisco, California Board of Education passed a regulation whereby children of Japanese descent would be required to attend racially segregated and separate schools. At the time, Japanese immigrants made up approximately 1% of the population of California; many of them had come under the treaty in 1894 which had assured free immigration from Japan.
In 1907, Californian nativists supporting exclusion of Japanese immigrants and maintenance of segregated schools for Caucasian and Japanese students rioted in San Francisco.
Anti-Japanese organizations
- California Farm Bureau
- California Joint Immigration Committee
- Committee of One Thousand
- Japanese Exclusion League of California
- Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West
- Anti-Japanese League of Washington[5]
Alien land laws
The California Alien Land Law of 1913 was specifically created to prevent land ownership among Japanese citizens who were residing in the state of California. In State of California v. Jukichi Harada (1918), Judge Hugh H. Craig[6] sided with the defendant and ruled that American children – who happened to be born to Japanese parents – had the right to own land. California proceeded to strengthen its Alien land law in 1920 and 1923.[7][8][9]
Other states passes similar laws including Washington in 1921[5] and Oregon in 1923.[10]
In State of California v. Oyama (1948),[11] the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that California's Alien Land Law was anti-Japanese in concept, and deemed unfit to stand in America's law books. Justices Murphy and Rutledge wrote:
This measure, though limited to agricultural lands, represented the first official act of discrimination aimed at the Japanese. . . The immediate purpose, of course, was to restrict Japanese farm competition.
The more basic purpose of the statute was to irritate the Japanese, to make economic life in California as uncomfortable and unprofitable for them as legally possible.
Vigorous enforcement of the Alien Land Law has been but one of the cruel discriminatory actions which have marked this nation's treatment since 1941 of those residents who chanced to be of Japanese origin.
Can a state disregard in this manner the historic ideal that those within the borders of this nation are not to be denied rights and privileges because they are of a particular race? I say that it cannot.
It took four years for California's Supreme Court to concede that the law was unconstitutional, in State of California v. Fujii (1952). Finally, in 1956, California voters repealed the law.
Anti-Japanese immigration agreements and legislation
In 1907, the Gentlemen's Agreement was an informal deal between the governments of Japan and the U.S. It ended the immigration of Japanese laborers, though it did allow the immigration of spouses and children of Japanese immigrants already in the United States.[12]
The Immigration Act of 1924 banned the immigration of all but a few token Japanese. Passage of the Immigration Act contributed to the growth of anti-Americanism and ending of a growing democratic movement in Japan during this time period, opening the door to Japanese militarist government control.[5]
Japanese military activity prior to American entry in World War II
The Japanese invasion of China in 1931 and the annexation of Manchuria was roundly criticized in the US. In addition, efforts by citizens who were outraged by Japanese atrocities, such as the Nanjing Massacre, led to calls for American economic intervention to encourage Japan to leave China; these calls played a role in shaping American foreign policy. As more and more unfavorable reports of Japanese actions came to the attention of the American government, embargoes on oil and other supplies were placed on Japan, out of concern for the safety of the Chinese populace and concern for the safety of American interests in the Pacific.
Furthermore, the European American population became strongly pro-Chinese and strongly anti-Japanese, an example of which was a grass-roots campaign to ask women to stop buying silk stockings, because the material was procured from Japan through its colonies. European traders sought access to Chinese markets and resources. Chinese Americans were again distressed when an estimated 150,000
When the
World War II
The most profound cause of anti-Japanese sentiment outside of Asia had its beginning in the attack on Pearl Harbor, as it propelled the United States into World War II. The Americans were unified by the attack to fight against the Empire of Japan and its allies, the German Reich and the Kingdom of Italy.
The bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan on the neutral United States without warning and the deaths of almost 2,500 people during ongoing U.S./Japanese peace negotiations was presented to the American populace as an act of treachery, barbarism, and cowardice. Following the attack, many non-governmental "Jap hunting licenses" were circulated around the country. Life magazine published an article on how to distinguish a Japanese person from a Chinese person by the shape of the nose and the stature of the body.[14] The Guadalacanal Diary, which was published in 1943, wrote about the accounts of American soldiers, collecting Japanese 'gold teeth' or body parts such as hands or ears, to keep as trophies.[15] The diary became extremely popular within the United States during the Second World war.
U.S. historian James J. Weingartner attributes the very low number of Japanese in U.S. POW compounds to two key factors: a Japanese reluctance to surrender and a widespread American "conviction that the Japanese were 'animals' or 'subhuman' and unworthy of the normal treatment accorded to POWs."[16] The latter reasoning is supported by Niall Ferguson, who says that "Allied troops often saw the Japanese in the same way that Germans regarded Russians [sic] — as Untermenschen."[17] Weingartner believes this explains the fact that a mere 604 Japanese captives were alive in Allied POW camps by October 1944.[18]
Jap hunts
The attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 plunged the United States into war and planted the notion that the Japanese were treacherous and barbaric in the minds of Americans. The hysteria which enveloped the West Coast during the early months of the war, combined with long standing anti-Asian prejudices, set the stage for what was to come.[20]
After the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, much anti-Japanese paraphernalia and propaganda surfaced in the United States. An example of this was the so-called "Jap hunting license", a faux-official document, button or medallion that purported to authorize "open season" on "hunting" the Japanese, despite the fact that over a quarter of a million Americans at that time were of Japanese origin. Some reminded holders that there was "no limit" on the number of "Japs" they could "hunt or trap". These "licenses" often characterized Japanese people as sub-human. Many of the "Jap Hunting Licenses", for example, depicted the Japanese in animalistic fashion.[23]
Edmund Russell writes that, whereas in Europe Americans perceived themselves to be struggling against "great individual monsters", such as Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Joseph Goebbels, Americans often saw themselves fighting against a "nameless mass of vermin", in regards to Japan.[24] Russell attributes this to the outrage of Americans in regards to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Bataan Death March, the killing of American POWs in the hands of Imperial Japanese forces, and the perceived "inhuman tenacity" demonstrated in the refusal of Imperial forces to surrender. Kamikaze suicide bombings, according to John Morton Blum, were instrumental in confirming this stereotype of the "insane martial spirit" of Imperial Japan, and the bigoted picture it would engender of the Japanese people as a whole.[25]
Commonwealth troops also employed rhetoric of "hunting", in regards to their engagement with Imperial Japanese forces. According to T. R. Moreman, the demonization of the Japanese served "to improve morale, foster belief that the war in the Far East was worthwhile and build the moral component of fighting power". Training instruction issued by the headquarters of 5th Indian Division suggested, "The JAP is a fanatic and therefore a menace until he is dead!... It will be our fanatical aim to KILL JAPS. Hunt him and kill him like any other wild beast!"[26]
US Professor of Japanese History, John Dower, introduces his 'War Hates and War Crimes' by quoting American Historian, Allan Nevins, that 'no foe has been so detested as were the Japanese', in his essay about the Second World War.[27] Dower highlights how the Japanese were more despised than the Germans by the American public, and he claims that it was a result of racial hatred. This racial element separated Japanese and Germans, as Dower presents how Germans could be distinguished as "good" or "bad", whereas the 'savage' and 'brutal' traits associated with the Japanese military in the war, were just seen as being "Japanese". Magazines like Time hammered this home even further by frequently referring to "the Jap" rather than "Japs", thereby denying the enemy even the merest semblance of pluralism.[28]
Strategic bombing of Japan
Author John M. Curatola wrote that the anti-Japanese sentiment probably played a role in the strategic bombing of Japanese cities,[29] which began on March 9/10, 1945 with the destructive Operation Meetinghouse firebombing of Tokyo to August 15, 1945, with the surrender of Japan.[30] Sixty-nine cities in Japan lost significant areas and hundreds of thousands of civilian lives to firebombing and nuclear attacks from United States Army Air Forces B-29 Superfortress bombers during this period.[31]
Internment of Japanese Americans
An estimated 112,000 to 120,000 Japanese migrants and
In 1942, with the Japanese incarcerated in ten American concentration camps, California Attorney General Earl Warren saw his chance and approved the state takeover of twenty parcels of land held in the name of American children of Japanese parents, in absentia. In 1943, Governor Warren signed a bill that expanded the Alien Land Law by denying the Japanese the opportunity to farm as they had before World War II. In 1945, he followed up by signing two bills that facilitated the seizure of land owned by American descendants of the Japanese.
In a December 19, 1944 opinion poll, it was found that 13% of the U.S. public were in favor of the extermination of all Japanese, as well as 50% of American GI's.[32][33] Dower suggests the racial hatred of the front-lines in the war rubbed off onto the American public, through media representation of Japanese and propaganda.
Since World War II
In the 1970s and 1980s, the waning fortunes of heavy industry in the United States prompted layoffs and hiring slowdowns just as counterpart businesses in Japan were making major inroads into U.S. markets. Nowhere was this more visible than in the automobile industry, where the then-
Other highly symbolic deals—including the sale of famous American commercial and cultural symbols such as Columbia Records, Columbia Pictures, and the Rockefeller Center building to Japanese firms—further fanned anti-Japanese sentiment. When the Seattle Mariners were being sold to Nintendo of America, 71 percent of Americans opposed the sale of an American baseball team to a Japanese corporation. [36]
Popular culture of the period reflected American's growing distrust of Japan.[
As argued by Marie Thorsten, however, Japanophobia mixed with Japanophilia during Japan's peak moments of economic dominance during the 1980s. The fear of Japan became a rallying point for techno-nationalism,[
Both the animosity and super-humanizing which peaked in the 1980s, when the term "Japan bashing" became popular, had largely faded by the late 1990s. Japan's waning economic fortunes in the 1990s, known today as
Nevertheless, there are areas that have recently proven to be an issue such as for Asians accessing higher education in the US. For example, in August 2020, the US Justice Department argued that Yale University discriminated against Asian candidates on the basis of their race, a charge the university denied.[38]
In 2023, a top Japanese diplomat was assaulted in
See also
- Anti-Americanism#Japan
- Anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States
- Anti-Japaneseism
- Japan–United States relations
- Japanese American Citizens League
- Nativism (politics) in the United States
- Stereotypes of East Asians in the United States
- Killing of Vincent Chin
References
- ^ Walter, Russell Mead (4 June 1989). "Japan-Bashing, an Ugly American Tradition". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 4 January 2022.
- ^ Lyon, Cherstin M. "Alien land laws," Densho Encyclopedia. Retrieved 15 July 2014.
- ^ a b Anderson, Emily. "Anti-Japanese exclusion movement," Densho Encyclopedia. Retrieved 15 July 2014.
- ISBN 978-0-8160-2680-7..
- ^ a b c Neiwert, David (May 10, 2022), "The xenophobic career of Miller Freeman, founding father of modern Bellevue", International Examiner
- ^ Harada House
- JSTOR 3477375.
- ^ Kurashige, Scott. (2008). The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
- ^ Bunje, Emil T. H. (1957). The Story of Japanese Farming in California. Saratoga, California: Robert D. Reed.
- ISBN 978-0253011022.
- ^ State of California v. Oyama, 332 U.S. 633 (1948).
- ISBN 9780295740409
- ^ Staff Reporter (1978). "Taishan, Home of Overseas Chinese" (PDF). China Reconstructs. 27 (7): 15.
- Luce, Henry, ed. (22 December 1941). "How to tell Japs from the Chinese". Life. Vol. 11, no. 25. Chicago: Time Inc. pp. 81–82. Retrieved 19 February 2010.
- ^ Tregaskis, Richard (1943) Guadalacanal diary. Random House. pp. 15–16
- ^ Weingartner 1992, p. 55
- S2CID 159610355.
- ^ Weingartner 1992, p. 54
- ^ ISBN 978-0-295-98336-3
- ^ A More Perfect Union. 1990–2001. Smithsonian Institution
- ^ "Manzanar National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Service)". nps.gov. Retrieved 10 April 2015.
- ^ Various primary and secondary sources list counts between 110,000 and 120,000 persons.
- ^ Boggs, Jeremy. Open Season. 06 Mar. 2004. 15 Oct. 2007. <"Introduction". Archived from the original on 2011-09-28. Retrieved 2012-04-01.>
- ISBN 9780521799379.
- ISBN 0156936283
- ISBN 0714649708
- ^ Nevins, Allan (1946) How we felt about the war. Simon and Schuster, p. 13.
- ISBN 0-394-75172-8
- ISBN 978-1-2492-8348-5.
- ^ Craven, Wesley F.; Cates, James L. (1953). "THE PACIFIC: MATTERHORN TO NAGASAKI JUNE 1944 TO AUGUST 1945 – The Army Air Forces in World War II. Volume V." ibiblio.org. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. p. 617. Retrieved February 10, 2019.
...the physical destruction and loss of life at Tokyo exceeded that at Rome (where ten out of fourteen wards of a much smaller city were consumed) or that of any of the great conflagrations of the western world—London, 1666 (436 acres, 13,200 buildings) ; Moscow, 1812 (38,000 buildings) ;Chicago, 1871 (2,124 acres, 17,450 buildings); San Francisco, 1906 (4 square miles, 21,188 buildings).39 Only Japan itself, with the earthquake and fire of 1923 at Tokyo and Yokohama, had suffered so terrible a disaster. No other air attack of the war, either in Japan or Europe, was so destructive of life and property.
- ISBN 978-0-8014-8311-0.
- ISBN 0-19-512389-1.
- JSTOR 3023943.
- ^ Sanger, David E. (1988-08-04). "Japan Protests Trade Sanctions in the Bill". New York Times. Retrieved 29 January 2021.
- ^ Novak, Matt (2016-05-09). "That Time Republicans Smashed a Boombox With Sledgehammers on Capitol Hill". Gizmodo. Retrieved 29 January 2021.
- ^ Egan, Timothy (1992-02-04). "Wave of Japan-Bashing Stings Pacific Northwest". New York Times. Retrieved 29 January 2021.
- ISBN 978-0415414265.
- ^ Shortell, David; Romine, Taylor (13 August 2020). "Justice Department accuses Yale of discriminating against Asian American and White applicants". CNN. Retrieved 2020-08-14.
- ^ "Top Japanese diplomat shoved to the ground in downtown Portland". FOX12. 17 July 2023.
- ^ "Japanese diplomat attacked in downtown Portland. Prosecutors file bias crime charges". KGW8. July 17, 2023.
Cited sources
- Weingartner, James J. (February 1992). "Trophies of War: U.S. Troops and the Mutilation of Japanese War Dead, 1941-1945". from the original on 11 August 2011. Retrieved 30 November 2014.
U.S. Marines on their way to Guadalcanal relished the prospect of making necklaces of Japanese gold teeth and "pickling" Japanese ears" as keepsakes.
- Bagby, Wesley Marvin (1999). America's International Relations Since World War I. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-512389-1.
- Schaffer, Ronald (1985). Wings of Judgment: American Bombing in World War II. New York: Oxford University Press. OCLC 11785450.
Further reading
- August, Jack. "The Anti-Japanese Crusade in Arizona's Salt River Valley: 1934-35." Arizona and the West 21.2 (1979): 113-136. online
- Buell, Raymond Leslie. "The development of the anti-Japanese agitation in the United States." Political Science Quarterly 37.4 (1922): 605-638. online
- Daniels, Roger. The politics of prejudice: The anti-Japanese movement in California and the struggle for Japanese exclusion (Univ of California Press, 1977).
- MeGovney, Dudley O. "The anti-Japanese land laws of California and ten other states." California Law Review 35 (1947): 7+ [MeGovney, Dudley O. "The anti-Japanese land laws of California and ten other states." Calif. L. Rev. 35 (1947): 7. online].
- Okihiro, Gary. Cane fires: The anti-Japanese movement in Hawaii, 1865-1945 (Temple UP, 1992).
- Shim, Doobo. "From yellow peril through model minority to renewed yellow peril." Journal of Communication Inquiry 22.4 (1998): 385-409. online
- Tamura, Eileen H. "The English-only effort, the anti-Japanese campaign, and language acquisition in the education of Japanese Americans in Hawaii, 1915–40." History of Education Quarterly 33.1 (1993): 37-58.