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Between Two Empires: Race, History, and

Transnationalism in Japanese America

EIICHIRO AZUMA

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Between Two Empires

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Between Two Empires Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America

e i ichiro azuma

1 2005

1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education.

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Azuma, Eiichiro. Between two empires : race, history, and transnationalism in Japanese America / Eiichiro Azuma.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13 978-0-19-515940-0; 978-0-19-515941-7 (pbk.) ISBN 0-19-515940-3; 0-19-515941-1 (pbk.) 1. Japanese Americans—West (U.S.)—History. 2. Japanese Americans—West (U.S.)—Social conditions. 3. Japanese Americans—Race Identity—West (U.S.) 4. Immigrants—West (U.S.)—Social conditions. 5. Children of immigrants—West (U.S.)—Social conditions. 6. West (U.S.)—Race relations. 7. Transnationalism—History. 8. Japan—Relations—United States. 9. United States— Relations—Japan. I. Title.

F596 .3.J3A98 2005 973'.04956—dc22 2004050145

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permissions to reprint portions of my articles that appeared in the following journals.

“Racial Struggle, Immigrant Nationalism, and Ethnic Identity: Japanese and Filipinos in the California Delta,”Pacific Historical Review 67:2. Copyright � 1998 by the Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association. Reprinted by permission of the University of California Press.

“ ‘The Pacific Era Has Arrived’: Transnational Education among Japanese Americans, 1932–1941,” History of Education Quarterly 43:1. Copyright � 2003 by History of Education Society. Reprinted by permission.

“The Politics of Transnational History Making: Japanese Immigrants on the Western Frontier, 1927–1941,” Journal of American History 89:4. Copyright � 2003 by the Organization of American Historians. Reprinted by permission.

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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To My Teachers and the Memory of Yuji Ichioka

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Acknowledgments

This book is the culmination of research and writing that took nearly eight years. At every stage of this project, many people and organizations have sup- ported me in different ways. Without their generous time, understanding, and advice, as well as financial assistance, this project could not have been com- pleted. From the start, my dissertation committee and other UCLA mentors helped me to organize my disparate ideas into a tangible shape, which became the foundation of this book. Fred G. Notehelfer took a genuine interest in my project, even though it did not directly concern his own field. With good will and professionalism, he steered me—morally, scholarly, and logistically. Valerie J. Matsumoto and Don Nakanishi provided me with a strong grounding in Asian American studies, as well as in the history of the American West. Herman Ooms and Miriam Silverberg were instrumental in fostering my interest in social and cultural theories. The late Yuji Ichioka, the foremost specialist in Japanese American history, has been my sensei not only in scholarship but in life as well. Ever since I started out as a graduate student in Asian American studies more than a decade ago, Yuji, together with his partner, Emma Gee, has been a guiding force and model for my transformation into a historian. Anyone who is familiar with his scholarship will see the impact he has had on my methodology, framework, and mode of interpretation.

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A historian cannot do his work without the help of librarians and archivists. Special acknowledgment is extended to the staff of the UCLA Young Research Library, especially those at the Department of Special Collections and the Mi- crofilm Room. Marjorie Lee of the Asian American Studies Center Reading Room always led me to appropriate source materials when I was at a loss. I also benefited from valuable assistance from the staff at the U.S. National Ar- chives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland, and in Laguna Niguel, California. The Japanese American National Museum was another stomping ground, where Grace Murakami, June Oyama, Nikki Chang, and Theresa Manalo ably directed me to necessary materials. Other libraries and archives in the United States, including the University of California Bancroft Library, California State Library, Sacramento County Recorder’s Office, Uni- versity of Hawaii’s Hawaiian Collections, Oregon Historical Society, and Uni- versity of Washington’s University Archives, proved to be important sources of information for this book.

Because my project is transnational in nature and much of the immigrant- language sources had been lost during the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans, I conducted lengthy research in Japan to supplement what I could not get here. I thank the following institutions, which allowed me to use their materials: Waseda University History Room and Library, Keisen Women’s Col- lege Library, National Archives of Japan, Nihon Rikkokai, Shibusawa Memorial Archives, National Diet Library of Japan, Japanese Overseas Migration Mu- seum, and Diplomatic Records Office.

In the course of my research and writing, I have received financial assistance from many institutions. At UCLA, the Institute of American Cultures, Asian American Studies Center, Center for Japanese Studies, and History Department provided me with research grants and fellowships. As a member of the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, I have been fortunate to enjoy generous support from the University Research Foundation and Center for East Asian Studies. The Civil Liberties Public Education Fund also offered me a substantial grant at a critical time.

The University of Pennsylvania has been a wonderful place, making the laborious task of turning a dissertation into a book manuscript almost enjoy- able. The History Department and Asian American Studies Program have given me opportunities for constructive intellectual exchange and learning, as well as much-needed comfort and support. Kathleen Brown, Fred Dickinson, Barbara Savage, Thomas Sugrue, and Beth Wenger shared their valuable time with me, read portions of my manuscript, and gave me critical but helpful comments. Constant encouragement from Lynn Lees, Sheldon Hackney, Thomas Childers, Jonathan Steinberg, Ann Moyer, Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, Lee Cassanelli, Ro- sane Rocher, Grace Kao, Ajay Nair, Mark Chiang, Karen Su, Josephine Park,

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Milan Hejtmanek, Cappy Hurst, and Matthew Sommers has enabled me to carry on when it was especially difficult. Debra Broadnax, Joan Plonski, Paula Roberts, and Kusum Soin have assisted me in navigating through the admin- istrative labyrinths of the big institution.

Many other friends and colleagues rendered valuable support in the re- search, conceptualization, and writing of this book. They are: Henry Yu, Gail Nomura, Lane Hirabayashi, Gary Okihiro, Franklin Odo, Mae Ngai, David Yoo, Lon Kurashige, Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Sucheng Chan, Gordon Chang, Arif Dirlik, Roger Daniels, Greg Robinson, Takashi Fujitani, Scott Kurashige, John Stephan, Margaret Kuo, Richard Kim, Brian Hayashi, Naomi Ginoza, Yoonmee Chang, Arleen de Vera, Glen Omatsu, Eileen Tamura, Stacey Hirose, Lili Kim, Chris Friday, and Russell Leong. Thanks especially to Brian Niiya who helped to edit various parts of the manuscript, always believing in this project despite its controversial nature. Hiromi Monobe has encouraged me at every step of the way, albeit often having to listen to my half-baked ideas and wild interpre- tations.

Scholars in Japan have been a source of encouragement, too. To name some, Yui Daizaburo, Sakata Yasuo, Shoji Keiichi, Iino Masako, Kumei Teruko, Hirobe Izumi, Utsumi Takashi, Sakaguchi Mitsuhiro, and M. William Steele. At the Japanese American National Museum, where I worked as a part-time curator/researcher while writing the dissertation, Akemi Kikumura-Yano, Jim Hirabayashi, Lloyd Inui, Art Hansen, Karin Higa, Krissy Kim, Sojin Kim, Jim Gatewood, Masayo Ohara, Glenn Kitayama, and Emily Anderson shared the challenge of doing public history—an experience that has taught me why his- tory writing is as much a pursuit of knowledge as it is a commitment to social justice and public education.

A few chapters of this book are drawn from my previously published articles in the Pacific Historical Review, the History of Education Quarterly, and the Journal of American History. I would like to thank the editors and journal staffs, especially David Johnson, Carl Abbott, Bruce Nelson, Joanna Meyerowitz, and Susan Armeny, for allowing me to reprint portions of the articles, as well as for their editorial advice and assistance, which sharpened my arguments. I am grateful to anonymous readers for these journals and for Oxford University Press, since in tangible and intangible ways the book reflects their contributions as well.

My editor at Oxford, Susan Ferber, has been simply amazing. Not only did her precise advice save me from errors and weak arguments during some critical stages of this project, but her professionalism has kept me on schedule despite the fact that I had to cut my original manuscript by more than a third. She painstakingly went through the entire manuscript and provided helpful comments and suggestions, which guided me through the difficult process of

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the final revision. Thanks to other Oxford University Press staff for their work in getting this book published. In particular, Tracy Baldwin designed the book and its jacket, making my work visually attractive. Linda Donnelly, the pro- duction editor, coordinated the production of the book. And I must acknowl- edge the important role of Merryl Sloane, who carefully copyedited my man- uscript. My book would not have been as readable without their able assistance.

Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Tetsuya and Takako, for their unfailing support. Although they do not have the foggiest idea about my re- search and writing, they have always been my greatest supporters, keeping faith in me and my project. Even with this book, they will still not understand what I do because of the language difference, but this material object, I hope, is good enough to put an end to their parental worries.

Contents

Note on the Translation and Transliteration of Japanese Names and Words xiii

Introduction: Immigrant Transnationalism between Two Empires 3

Part I Multiple Beginnings

1. Mercantilists, Colonialists, and Laborers: Heterogeneous Origins of Japanese America 17

Part II Convergences and Divergences

2. Re-Forming the Immigrant Masses: The Transnational Construction of a Moral Citizenry 35

3. Zaibei Doho: Racial Exclusion and the Making of an American Minority 61

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Part III Pioneers and Successors

4. “Pioneers of Japanese Development”: History Making and Racial Identity 89

5. The Problem of Generation: Preparing the Nisei for the Future 111

6. Wages of Immigrant Internationalism: Nisei in the Ancestral Land 135

Part IV Complexities of Immigrant Nationalism

7. Helping Japan, Helping Ourselves: The Meaning of Issei Patriotism 163

8. Ethnic Nationalism and Racial Struggle: Interethnic Relations in the California Delta 187

Epilogue: Wartime Racisms, State Nationalisms, and the Collapse of Immigrant Transnationalism 208

Notes 217

Bibliography 279

Index 299

xiii

Note on the Translation and Transliteration

of Japanese Names and Words

In this book, the names of Japanese persons are written with the family names first, followed by the given names. For the names of Japanese immigrants and their American-born children, I adopt the customary Western form (the given names first, followed by the family names), because it was the way they trans- literated their names in their daily lives. The macrons for long vowel Japanese sounds are not provided in the main text in order to preserve readability. The notes and bibliography offer the complete forms of Japanese names and words with macrons for the benefit of researchers. All translations from Japanese- language sources are mine unless otherwise noted.

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Between Two Empires

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Introduction

Immigrant Transnationalism between Two Empires

“East is West and West is East,” wrote Jizaemon Tateishi, a Japanese immigrant student at the University of Southern California in 1912, criticizing the bipo- larities of the Orient and the Occident. “By this I do not mean that the outward manifestations of the two are similar,” he continued. “I mean if you go deep into the very heart of the people of Japan, the inner life in which we live, and move, and have our being, is essentially Anglo-Saxon.”1 Riichiro Hoashi, an- other USC student, challenged the same “too broad generalizations” that failed people like Tateishi and him:

Born in Japan and educated in America, we are neither Japanese nor Americans but are Cosmopolitans; and as Cosmopolitans we may be al- lowed to express our opinions, freely and frankly, for nothing but Cos- mopolitanism can be our ideal since we have transcended the narrow bound of nationality and race.2

Thought-provoking and even postmodern as these statements may sound, nei- ther Tateishi nor Hoashi became a famous intellectual or a leader in the Jap- anese immigrant community; indeed, their lives in America are scarcely known. But their personal trajectories are not as important as what their utterances signified in the context of their time and place. In the early twentieth century, whether they lived as merchants and store clerks in the urban ghettoes of “Little Tokyos,” as farmers and field hands in the remote valleys of California, or as

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railroad and mine workers in the rugged mountains of the Sierra Nevada, immigrants from Japan formed a group of “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” and they were collectively under pressure to justify their presence in the United States. As college students, Tateishi and Hoashi happened to have an ability to present their shared quandary intelligibly in the public discourse and ask for reconsideration of the terms in which their American existence was understood.

Their lives form the story of how Japanese immigrants (Issei) generally made sense of the dilemma of living across the purported East-West divide and related binaries. Not only did the disavowal of bounded national and racial categories by the two students crystallize the heterodox attributes of the Issei under the established orders of the American and Japanese states, but their “cosmopolitanism” is also akin to what scholars have recently celebrated as “transnationalism.” Despite the claim to transcend the confines of nation and race, the Issei’s transnational thinking was nonetheless constantly counter- checked by orthodoxy that was closely linked to nation-building and the dom- inant racial politics. The psychic and political engagements that these Japanese had with white America and imperial Japan complicate the meaning of trans- nationalism, which necessitates a new paradigm of analysis and approach to the usual saga of immigrant struggle.

From the viewpoint of America’s racial doctrine, the “Orientals” were sit- uated beyond the pale of nationhood, as enshrined in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the U.S. Supreme Court ruling against Japanese naturalization four decades later. Accusations of Japanese immigrant communities being “out- posts of [the Japanese] empire” were not uncommon in the public discourse. In 1938, a popular travelogue writer contended that even though the Issei had lived in California for years and their sons and daughters (Nisei) were born as U.S. citizens, “there is something that persists in the Japanese heart” that al- legedly made them forever loyal to Japan—and, by implication, hostile to America. The blind allegiance that the two generations of Japanese Americans owed to the “Divine Emperor . . . has been there [in their racial heart] for more than two millenniums,” the writer asserted, “and it will not be stamped out in a few generations.”3 In much the same way, on the other side of the Pacific, the foreign minister of Japan declared proprietary rights to the Nisei according to that nation’s own racial ideology: “I hold their Japanese blood dear and essential. . . . To preserve their racial strength, the Japanese government must exert itself the best it can.”4 The hegemonic constructions of racial and national belonging or nonbelonging, emanating from both states, posed fundamental challenges to the Issei (and Nisei) in terms of how they defined their relation- ships to, and actually engaged with, both their adopted country and their native land.

This book examines the development of transnational ideas, practices, and

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politics among Japanese immigrants in the American West prior to the Pacific War. Specialists in European immigration history and African American history have already produced an array of such works that have led to the development of “transatlantic studies” and “African diaspora studies.” In the early 1990s, historian Sucheng Chan issued a call to Asian American scholars for a new international paradigm, but it is still uncommon in historical studies of the Asian American experience.5 To date, most scholars have kept Japanese Amer- ican history within the confines of the American domestic narrative, treating the subject only as a national(ist) story and disregarding significant parts of the Japanese American experience, which actually extended beyond the boundaries of a single polity.6 In order to truly appreciate the Issei’s insistence on cosmo- politanism, historians need to confront the bounded meanings of nation and race through close analysis of the discursive strategies and everyday practices that the immigrants adopted and deployed relative to the different hegemonic powers.

To present a more complete picture of the Issei’s transnational past, I em- ploy what can be termed “an inter-National perspective”—one that stresses the interstitial (not transcendental) nature of their lives between the two nation- states. The findings of this study reveal that Japanese immigrants generally accepted the legitimacy of the meanings and categories upheld by the dominant ideologies of both the United States and Japan. The Issei operated under the tight grips and the clashing influences of these state powers, each of which promoted its respective project of nation-building, racial supremacy, and colo- nial expansion. Although they constantly traversed, often blurred, and fre- quently disrupted the varied definitions of race, nation, and culture, Issei were able neither to act as free-floating cosmopolitans nor to enjoy a postmodern condition above and beyond the hegemonic structures of state control. Their strategies of assimilation, adaptation, and ethnic survival took shape through the (re)interpretation, but not repudiation, of the bounded identity constructs that had their origins in the ideological imperatives of each state.7 My analysis primarily focuses on the basic integrity and potency of the two national he- gemonies and modernities, which jointly helped to mold the perceptions of Japanese immigrants, as well as the range of their social practices, in their daily lives.

Though a version of the transnational approach, the inter-National per- spective is not limited to viewing the Japanese American experience as one extending across the two nation-states, societies, and cultures. Like other the- oretical formulations, transnationalism has acquired different definitions and orientations.8 Culturalist-oriented transnationalism tends to highlight the heter- ogeneity, hybridity, and creolization of cultural objects and meanings in the context of a diaspora.9 Its advocates, such as cultural theorists and postcolonial

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literary critics, stress the constant movements of “transmigrants,” the fluidity and multiplicity of their identities, and their simultaneous positioning in a politicocultural sphere inclusive of two or more nation-states. Influenced by Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems perspective, structural-based transnation- alism focuses more on the process by which migrants emerge out of contradic- tions in international capitalism, and how they move, work, and construct new forms of social relationships within the network of a global economic system.10

These sets of transnational contexts constitute equally important components of this study’s conceptual framework, but in light of the interstitial nature of Japanese immigrant experience, the term transnational—when casually used— can be quite misleading, for it may connote something “deterritorialized” or someone “denationalized.” In order to avoid such inferences, I specifically define my approach as inter-National.

Since the consciousness of Japanese immigrants was wedged firmly between the established categories of Japan and the United States, the relationships that they developed and maintained in the interstices were ambivalent, unsettled, and elusive. Because they were always faced with the need to reconcile simul- taneous national belongings as citizen-subjects of one state and yet resident- members (denizens) of another, the Issei refused to make a unilateral choice, electing instead to take an eclectic approach to the presumed contradiction between things Japanese and American. Japanese immigrant identities, too, moved across and between the bounded meanings and binaries of race and nation that each regime imposed upon them, rejecting exclusive judgments by either. As such, their ideas and practices were situational, elastic, and even inconsistent at times, but always dualistic at the core. The analysis of Japanese immigrant eclecticism illuminates the intricate agency of these historical actors, who selectively took in and fused elements of nationalist arguments, modernist assumptions, and racist thinking from both imperial Japan and white America.11

This is the process by which the Issei tried to transform themselves into quasi whites, despite their ancestry, in an effort to present themselves as quintessential Americans.

Notwithstanding its transnational framework, this study highlights the em- beddedness of Japanese immigrants within one national order, and hence the limits of their cosmopolitanism. Despite the dynamic interactions that the im- migrants and their descendants had with Japan and the United States, their daily physical existence was under the sovereign power of the latter. In other words, while they were caught between the conflicting ideological and often repressive apparatuses of the two nation-states, their bodies were anchored in America, their interests rooted in its socioeconomic structure, and their activities disciplined by its politicolegal system. Giving primacy to the actual physical

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location of Japanese immigrants, this study pays special attention to the do- mestic aspect of the otherwise transnational subject.

In considering Japanese immigrant transnationalism, it is essential to ask why and how Japan really mattered. It was in the realms of knowledge pro- duction, and of the social practices which the ideas accompanied, that Japan mattered most to the Issei. Their native country—another hegemonic power to which they continued to belong due to the denial of naturalization rights in the United States—strove to control them from afar, but it had fewer appa- ratuses to achieve that goal. In negotiating their relationships with the home- land, Japanese immigrants were afforded a smaller degree of material nexus than with American society. Ironically, this distance allowed many Issei to use “Ja- pan” as a resource to fight the challenges surrounding their racial standing in the United States and as a point of reference to make sense of their restricted existence there. The command that Japan and the United States exercised over the Issei, albeit unevenly, as well as the mooring of their everyday lives to the American political economy that defined the terms of their engagement with the homeland, form twin themes of the inter-National paradigm.12

In dissecting and narrating the transnational history of Japanese immi- grants, this book’s domestic focus carefully considers the processes of racial formation, by which the combined effects of structural and representational control homogenize the experience of members of a minority group in a given “racial project.”13 The case of Japanese immigrants offers no exception. In terms of class background, the Issei population was diverse, ranging from wealthy entrepreneurs to migrant laborers, educated urbanites to rural farmers, but their racial position and image in American society were so undifferentiated that varied classes of Japanese immigrants came to share a similar, if not identical, collective racial experience. Inasmuch as Issei came to be treated like pariahs in American society, class diversity among them was effectively inconsequential.14

While race was central to structuring and representing their overall social world, gender also played a role in the processes of racial formation for the Issei. In Japanese immigrant history, the intersectionality of race and gender was manifested in ways that attached gendered meanings and nuances to the prevailing condition of the Issei’s subordination to white America, as well as their reactions to it.15 In the United States, race inscribed “inferiority” in the identity and positionality of all Japanese, but because it was so cardinal and arbitrary, Issei were quick to learn the politics of manipulating and transforming race for the purpose of their survival in the American West. In this general context of racial formation and transformation, gender ubiquitously prescribed the sexual division of labor and societal roles. In Japanese America, immigrant women concentrated on the construction of ideal domesticity commensurate

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with the middle-class white model, while their husbands tackled the more pub- lic dimension of racial politics, like propaganda, court battles, and economic struggles. By analyzing the interplay of race, class, and gender in Issei lives, this study elucidates the essentially American underpinning of Japanese immigrant transnationalism.

The Issei’s embeddedness in the political economy of the United States does not mean that they lived a homogeneous American experience, however. This book often examines the local context—the patterns of social relations and practices within varied regional confines—as opposed to a uniform national context. Recently, the question of the local versus the global has attracted much interest from theorists of transnationalism, who attempt to understand the am- biguous positioning of the Asian American subject in society, economy, nation, culture, and history. This study emphasizes the preponderance of everyday ex- periences and reality in the immediate surroundings, interpreting identity for- mation and behavior as “a matter not of ethnic destiny, but of political choice” in the microlevel entanglements of power.16 As much as Japanese immigrants were situated in the transnational space as a result of their crisscrossing the Pacific Ocean, they also negotiated their in-betweenness through politics that grounded their concerns and agendas in the welfare of each local community dotting the American West. Against the context of international, domestic, and local social locations, Japanese immigrants projected manifold, regionally di- vergent identities upon their collective self as an American minority that was, at the same time, part of the Japanese nation-state.