The Japanese Crisis

1916

James Scherer lived in Japan for five years, was in the educational service of the Imperial government, lived in California for seven years, and was an authority on race problems in the South.

He says there is a serious Japanese-American problem as is shown by the “yellow press” on both sides, by the publication of various books on the subject, and by the various societies and groups that have developed on both sides of the issue.

He starts by going into the history of how Japan was forced to open to the West. He has a lot of material on Commodore Perry's visit to Japan. He quotes the first article in the treaty that was signed:

Somebody named Chester Rowell says some nasty things about Chinese

immigrants:

He has nice things to say about the Japanese, though:

The author then goes on to talk about how anti-Japanese prejudice really got underway when the paper San Francisco Chronicle started an anti-Japanese series in 1905.

Later, he talks about the Japanese population in California, and how it is in specific communities, but not in Southern California where there then isn't much anti-Japanese prejudice.

On farms operated by Japanese, about 96% of the labor is Japanese. On farms run by whites, 36% of the labor is Japanese. (This doesn't specify what kinds of farms they are, though. Are they very large farms, or do the size of the farms differ between the groups? For example, if most Japanese farms are small, then it's not surprising that they would be heavily Japanese in labor.)

Is Japan Militant?

He talks about hara-kiri (the proper name of which is seppeku):

Later he talks about people on the West Coast being worried about the ambitions of Japan. He says Japan's main problem is economic, and can be solved “on the adjacent mainland of Asia.” This, unfortunately, is one thing that they did try to do when they invaded China, took over Manchuria and named it Manchuko, and then tried to take the rest of China, along with a bunch of other countries in Asia. The idea of any country solving its economic problems by taking over other countries should have bothered the author of the book, but it didn't seem to at all.

Are the Japanese Assimilable?

Much of the discussion about this problem has always been about the Alien Land Law, but this author says the most vigorous alien land law was “that by which Japan in 1624 banished all Europeans utterly from the Empire, except for a handful of Dutch traders insulated at Deshima.”

The law endured for 208 years.

He then quotes some guy named Walter Macarthur:

Another writer tackles the subject of intermarriage. The guy's name is Herbert Spencer, and he wrote to some Japanese by the name of Baron Kaneko on August 26, 1892.

The author does believe that the Japanese “may be spiritually assimilated to our manners of thought and action, so as to make good citizens,” but he still opposes intermarriage.

The Alien Land Law

He talks very briefly about agriculture, and then gets on to a discussion of the Alien Land Law. One of the things he does that almost no one else does is bother to actually reprint at least some of the law.

---

Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page