Rev. Albert E. Day, pastor of the First Methodist Church in Pasadena, preached in the wake of the Japanese American relocation, “You may have race prejudice if you want it; you may have Jesus Christ if you want Him. You can’t have both.”[1] The following accounts, which are by no means exhaustive, represent the racial prejudice against Japanese Americans before, during, and after World War II. Christians can learn by observing history how to avoid the pitfalls of the past.
Prior to War
As Japanese immigration to America increased, disparate groups prior to World War II banded together to form an anti-Japanese coalition. Politicians, labor unions, newsmen, farmers,[2] and pressure groups[3] such as the American Legion fought side-by-side against “the yellow peril” and used a playbook similar to their opposition against the Chinese. Many of the West Coast papers habitually used derogatory terms such as “Nips,” “mad dogs,” “yellow men,” and “yellow vermin.” One Native Daughter of the Golden West inquired, “Did God make the Jap as he did the snake, did you hear the hiss before the words left his mouth? Were his eyes made slanting and the hiss put between his lips to warn us to be on our guard?”[4] C. O. Young spoke on behalf of the American Federation of Labor: “The menace of an Asiatic influx is 100 times greater than the menace of the black race, and God knows that is bad enough.”[5] In addition, Chester H. Rowell, owner-editor of the Fresno Republican, said of the Japanese problem,
Japanese coolie immigration is of the most undesirable class possible, and we are quite right in objecting to it and in demanding that something be done about it. . . . There is simply nothing to do but accept the inevitable, until we can arouse the sentiment of the East, not on the Japanese question alone, but on the whole menace of unfit immigration.[6]
Such fear-mongering was rampant as James D. Phelan, then mayor of San Francisco, claimed:
The Japanese are starting the same tide of immigration which we thought we had checked twenty years ago. . . . The Chinese and Japanese are not bona fide citizens. They are not the stuff of which American citizens can be made. . . . Personally we have nothing against Japanese, but as they will not assimilate with us and their social life is so different from ours, let them keep at a respectful distance.[7]
Then in early 1905, beginning on February 23, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a whole series of anti-Japanese articles. Some of the outrageous headlines read: “THE JAPANESE INVASION, THE PROBLEM OF THE HOUR”; “CRIME AND POVERTY GO HAND IN HAND WITH ASIATIC LABOR”; “BROWN MEN ARE MADE CITIZENS ILLEGALLY”; “JAPANESE A MENACE TO AMERICAN WOMEN”; “THE YELLOW PERIL—HOW JAPANESE CROWD OUT THE WHITE RACE”; “BROWN ARTISANS STEAL BRAINS OF WHITES.”[8] Christian churches such as the Methodist clergy of San Francisco and the Pacific Coast Japanese Mission of the Methodist Episcopal Church led by Dr. H. B. Johnson decried such rhetoric, but the Chronicle remarked that “while it respected the motives of the protesting pastors it felt that their judgment was biased by their missionary zeal.”[9]
The Asiatic (later Japanese) Exclusion League was formed by sixty-seven different organizations on May 14, 1905 to work tirelessly toward the exclusion of the Nikkei from America.[10] By 1909, Grove Johnson, who had become the leading anti-Japanese orator, demanded action:
I know more about the Japanese than Governor Gillett and President Roosevelt put together. I am not responsible to either of them. I am responsible to the mothers and fathers of Sacramento County who have their little daughters sitting side by side in the school rooms with matured Japs, with their base minds, their lascivious thoughts, multiplied by their race and strengthened by their mode of life.[11]
Johnson’s son, Hiram, leader of the Progressive California Republicans, claimed that intermarriage between a Japanese and a White would be “a sort of international adultery. . . . The instinct of self-preservation of our race demands that its future members shall be members of our race.”[12]
The Japanese problem soon became a tempestuous political issue as Phelan wrote to the nominee for President, Woodrow Wilson, that if Japanese immigration continued “California would be a plantation and the white population would for a period of time, possibly, remain as overseers, but, indeed, with my knowledge of the Japanese, that would be for a very short time. The end would soon supervene.”[13] Wilson, a known racist himself, was thus forced to state his own position: “In the matter of Chinese and Japanese coolie immigration I stand for the national policy of exclusion. We cannot make a homogeneous population out of a people who do not blend with the Caucasian race.”[14]
The Alien Land Law was passed in 1913, but did not greatly affect the situation because Issei farmers were still able to place land holdings in the names of their American-born children.[15] Then “between 1913 and 1924 a decided change in American public opinion toward Japan and the Japanese took place. The ‘California position,’ . . . which did not win national favor in either 1906-1907 or 1913, was written into the statute book in 1924.”[16] In 1922-1923, Valentine S. McClatchy, the leader of the Japanese Exclusion League of California, had “organized anti-Japanese groups in Los Angeles [and] started a ‘Swat the Jap’ campaign designed to make life miserable for all Japanese residing there.”[17] Then in March 1924, McClatchy argued his racist position before the Senate Committee on Immigration:
The Japanese are less assimilable and more dangerous as residents in this country than any other of the peoples ineligible under our laws. . . . With great pride of race, they have no idea of assimilating in the sense of amalgamation. They do not come here with any desire or any intent to lose their racial or national identity. They come her specifically and professedly for the purpose of colonizing and establishing here permanently the proud Yamato race. They never cease being Japanese. . . They have greater energy, greater determination, and greater ambition than the other yellow and brown races ineligible to citizenship, and with the same low standards of living, hours of labor, use of women and child labor, they naturally make more dangerous competitors in an economic way.[18]
Ulysses S. Webb, the longtime California Attorney General, also testified before the U.S. Congress in 1924 that the Japanese “are different in color; different in ideals; different in race; different in ambitions; different in their theory of political economy and government. They speak a different language; they worship a different God. They have not in common with the Caucasian a single trait. . . . This is a Government of the white race.”[19] Webb, the principle author of California’s 1913 Alien Land Law, had explicitly declared its exclusionist intent at the time:
The fundamental basis of all legislation upon this subject, State and Federal, has been and is, race undesirability. It is unimportant and foreign to the question under discussion whether a particular race is inferior. The simple and single question is, is the race desirable. . . . It [the law] seeks to limit their presence by curtailing their privileges which they may enjoy here; for they will not come in large numbers and long abide with us if they may not acquire land. And it seeks to limit the numbers who will come by limiting the opportunities for their activity here when they arrive.[20]
“The Federal Council of Churches (FCC), the Catholic Maryknoll Missionary Society, and the Quaker American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) denounced the immigration act of 1924 on grounds of racial justice, human dignity, and Americanism.”[21] Their outcries, however, went largely unheeded as racial prejudice only increased with the looming war. For example, the American Defender reported, “Wherever the Japanese have settled, their nests pollute the communities like the running sores of leprosy. They exist like the yellowed, smoldering discarded butts in an over-full ashtray, vilifying the air with their loathsome smells, filling all who have misfortune to look upon them with a wholesome disgust and a desire to wash.”[22] These anti-Japanese sentiments were like a powder keg waiting to explode.
[1] Albert Day, “God’s Design for Living or Americanism and Christianity Begin at Home,” (7 November 1943), Box 8/Fld 10, Gillett Papers, UCLA. Day also preached on another occasion: “A Jap is a Jap, is he? If you mean that as a way of identifying him in a crowd of white men or brown men, yes. But there are some Japanese like Kagawa or Michi Kawai, or honest, faithful George, who used to mow my lawn and trim my flowers, who gave a boy to the United States Army before he himself was shut up behind barbed wire, and whom I would trust with my life as quickly as I would any of the ministers on this platform” (Japanese American Relations Committee, Pasadena AFSC Information Bulletin 12 [2 January 1944]).
[2] The president of the Los Angeles County Farm Bureau would testify that his organization opposed “Japanese being permitted to lease, rent or own agricultural land . . . or own any lands whatsoever” (U.S. Congress, House, Japanese Immigration Hearings, 66th Congress, 2nd session, part 3 [Washington, D.C., 1921], 940).
[3] One pressure group, the Native Sons of the Golden West, was led by William P. Canbu who would declare, “California was given by God to a white people, and with God’s strength we want to keep it as He gave it to us” (April 1920). The N.S.G.W. even denounced the Methodist Church as “thoroughly pro-Jap and has been more active in the interests of the yellow pests in California than any other agency” (Grizzly Bear [March 1922], 22).
[4] Cited in Geoffrey S. Smith, “Racial Nativism,” in Relocation to Redress, 81. Another Native Daughter, Cora M. Woodbridge, who also served in the state legislature, decried Japanese picture brides: “The Issei mother was not entitled to any consideration on account of her sex, since she was a “beast of burden up to the time of the birth of her child and, within a day or two at most, resumes her task and continues it from twelve to sixteen hours a day” (Cora M. Woodbridge, “Now’s the Time to Take a Stand against the Japs,” Grizzly Bear [October 1920]).
[5] C. O. Young, Special Representative of the American Federation of Labor, cited in Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1962).
[6] Chester H. Rowell, Fresno Republican (28 April 1900). Rowell MSS, Bancroft Library.
[7] James D. Phelan, remarks on 7 May 1900, cited in the San Francisco Examiner (8 May 1900) and the San Francisco Chronicle (8 May 1900).
[8] Cited in Daniels, Prejudice, 25.
[9] Ibid., 26, citing the San Francisco Chronicle, February 21 and March 1 and 21, 1905.
[10] Daniels, Prejudice, 27. Isidor Golden, a justice of the peace, declared boldly, “We have been accustomed to regard the Japanese an inferior race, but are now suddenly aroused to our danger. . . . They are equal in intellect; their ability to labor is equal to ours. They are proud, valiant and courageous, but they can underlive us. . . . We are here today to prevent that competition. . . . We cannot, we must not, we will not permit the free entry of a race that will cheapen and lower our standard of living” (“Representative Men Tell of Danger,” San Francisco Chronicle, 8 May 1905).
[11] Cited in Franklin Hichborn, The Story of the Session of the California Legislature of 1909; . . . 1911; . . . 1913; . . . 1915 (San Francisco, various publishers, 1909-1916), 207.
[12] Daniels, Prejudice, 49. Hiram Johnson would also write a letter to Theodore Roosevelt on 21 June 1913 concerning the passage of anti-Japanese legislation (Ibid., 112-117). Johnson would solicit testimonies from farmers such as Ralph Newman, a former Congregational minister, to be used as fodder for exclusion (Ibid., 59).
[13] Letter from James Phelan to Professor Woodrow Wilson (20 April 1912), Phelan MSS. In 1919 and 1920, Phelan would run for Senate re-election under the campaign platform: “Keep California White.” To Phelan “a Jap was a Jap,” and it was his opinion that “the native Japanese are as undesirable as the imported” (Letter from James Phelan to V. S. McClatchy [22 November 1923], Phelan MSS). He even quoted Acts 17:26 out of context to support his position: “The Lord made of one blood all the races of the earth [but He also] appointed the places of their habitation. This continent belongs to us. That continent belongs to them” (Grizzly Bear [March 1911], 13).
[14] Woodrow Wilson, candidate for president of the United States (3 May 1912).
[15] One reason was that Japan and America were allied against Germany during World War I. Another reason is that Christians had begun to advocate for their fellow Nikkei Christians. A leading Protestant periodical spoke out against the Alien Land Law, calling it “unfortunate” and inspired by the “rudimentary race hatred and race prejudice” that was “deeply embedded in the social life of California” (California Christian Advocate [8 May 1913]). Beginning in 1914, Protestant missionaries working across denominational lines and through the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, helped organize the opposition against the anti-Japanese movement. “The central figure in this movement was Sidney L. Gulick, a Congregational missionary who had lived for many years in Japan. . . . Between 1914 and 1924 he wrote at least twenty-four books and pamphlets, besides dozens of magazine articles, and gave hundreds of lectures and sermons [arguing that] prejudice against the Japanese was un-Christian” (Daniels, Prejudice, 79-80). Gulick (1860-1945), fluent as a Japanese interpreter, “committed himself to the life of a missionary. He was assigned to a post in Kumamoto, Japan, arriving in January 1888, where he assumed the role of missionary and Japanese expert to the West until 1913. . . . Reassigned to Matsuyama in 1897, he later took a position in theology at Doshisha University, a renowned Christian school in Kyoto. . . . He saw the discriminatory treatment of Issei as un-Christian and morally wrong.” Gulick argued that “among the forces working powerfully for the assimilation of the Japanese is that of Christian missions.” He claimed that Issei pastors were “leaders in local reforms, scholarly in their reading and thinking, and adaptable in their methods.” Japanese churches worked to quickly become financially independent and made considerable efforts “to adapt themselves to the conditions of life here, to learn our ways, and conform to our standards” (Sidney L. Gulick, The American Japanese Problem [New York: Scribner’s, 1914], 114, 117; See Sandra C. Taylor, Advocate of Understanding: Sidney Gulick and the Search for Peace with Japan [The Kent State University Press, 1984]).
[16] Daniels, Prejudice, 65.
[17]Ibid., 97. “McClatchy, former publisher of the Bee newspaper in Sacramento, Fresno, and Modesto, had organized the Joint Committee [on Immigration] in 1921 to oppose Japanese immigration and warn of the specter of a ‘Yellow Peril’ threatening white Christian culture in the Pacific Basin. By 1941, the group included official representatives of the Native Sons of the Golden West, the American Legion, the California Grange, the State Federation of Labor, and the Associated Farmers” (Wollenberg, “Dear Earl,” 26). McClatchy’s son, Leo, was also a newspaper columnist who spread his father’s message of hate.
[18] U.S. Congress, Senate, Japanese Immigration Hearings, 68th Congress, 1st session, Report 350 (Washington, D.C., 1924), 5-6, 34.
[19] The Kikuchi Diary: Chronicle from an American Concentration Camp, ed. John Modell (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993).
[20] War Relocation Authority, People in Motion (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1947), 37.
[21] Blankenship, Social Justice, 8.
[22] American Defender (27 April 1935).
