The Japanese Conquest of American Opinion - 1917
This book is anti-Japan.
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The author starts right out by saying that the “Japanese question” is “vital” to everyone in the U.S.
The book refers to the American Institute of International Law, and then discusses the first fundamental right of nations.
The upshot of this approach is that the United States has an inherent right to exclude Asiatics from citizenship. This was at a time when people from Asia were not allowed to become American citizens.
The author is basically saying that Japan wants to have its way with the U.S.
The book talks about the San Francisco school board's decision to put all the Japanese students in one school. That is something I've seen in many other books, but this one points out that the problem was not just that the students in question were Japanese, but that they were Japanese and, in many instances, older than the other students.
Some adults were worried about putting older male Japanese students in the same class as young white students. What I can't understand is why, if this was a good part of the problem, didn't it occur to someone to set up a school for adults and over-aged children? That way the older Japanese children would have still been able to go to school, but would not have been in classes with children who were lots younger.
The author than quotes some Japanese sources which were very upset at what was going on in the U.S.
The author then quotes a San Francisco paper that talks about the problem being related to the age of the students.
Hawaii was, already by then, possessed of a large group of Japanese immigrants, and many people on the West Coast did not want their area to become “another Hawaii.”
Again, the author makes Japan appear to be militarily threatening, especially if they don't get their own way.
Much of the argument was over the Japanese farmers. Many white farmers felt that the Japanese were driving them out of the market, simply because the Japanese were not only very efficient farmers, but because they could produce viable crops on land that white farmers had not been able to make usable.
It's exactly the same type of argument that is used today against immigrants, that they will “take our jobs” away.
The author again makes Japan look threatening, then points out that Japan does not treat non-Japanese the same way that they treat Japanese which was quite true then and, to some degree, is still true today. The Japanese used to look down on the Chinese and the Koreans. The Japanese have their own class of people, called the eta or burakumin, who are like the untouchable cast in India. The term gaijin refers to a non-Japanese, the term originally meaning “barbarian.”
The author talks about Korea and Manchuria, which Japan was in the process of taking over or had already taken over. Manchuria eventually became Manchuko, a Japanese puppet state. I recall watching a Korean horror movie about some school kids, and there was a reference in the movie to how the Japanese treated the Koreans in the past.
Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page
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