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Journal of Asian American Studies 4.1 (2001) 80-83



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Book Review

Japanese Conspiracy: The Oahu Strike of 1920


Japanese Conspiracy: The Oahu Strike of 1920. By Masayo Duus. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999.

Masayo Duus is an award-winning writer whose earlier Tokyo Rose: Orphan of the Pacific (1979) added significantly to our understanding of the way in which wartime racial imaging impacted critical decision-making. The recent, problematic, Energy and Justice Departments' handling of Taiwan-born scientist, Wen Ho Lee, as a "suspect" in national security dealings with China, is an extension of this profiling. The original study by Duus was published in Japanese; Japanese Conspiracy comes nearly a decade later and will be of great value to students of Asian American, labor, international, and immigration history.

In January and February 1920, Japanese and Filipino sugar plantation workers implemented a major strike on the island of Oahu. Approximately 6,000 workers, over three quarters of the labor force, walked off the job. On June 3 a small group dynamited the home of Juzaburo Sakamaki, a translator for a plantation on the Big Island of Hawai'i where no one was on strike although Japanese workers clearly supported the Oahu workers. The Territory of Hawai'i charged leaders of the Federation of Japanese Labor with conspiracy to assassinate Sakamaki in order to intimidate opponents of the strike and alleged, further, that the strike was part of a concerted effort to take over the Islands by Japan. A month later the strike ended. This much, while not widely covered by historians, as Duus maintains, is largely accepted. Duus then goes on to suggest that the true significance of the [End Page 80] dynamite incident and the 1920 strike is the momentum they provided to Congress, leading to the 1924 Immigration Act [sometimes called the Japanese Exclusion Act] excluding nearly all Japanese and other Asians from entering the U.S.

The first few chapters cover a smattering of Japanese immigration history, an introduction to Noboru Tsutsumi, the dynamic leader of the 1920 strike, and the strike itself. Much larger chapters are devoted to "The Japanese Conspiracy," "The Conspiracy Trial," "Reopening Chinese Immigration," and "The Japanese Exclusion Act." This book describes the Hawai'i experience primarily as it relates to American immigration and foreign policy and secondarily to the history of Japanese Americans themselves. It is somewhat curious, therefore, for the author to criticize other historians for having marginalized the Hawai'i story. Nonetheless, this is a noteworthy contribution and represents the fullest coverage of the 1920 strike to date.

This book is largely a result of her discovery of the transcripts from the trial of the 1920 strike leaders, accused of conspiring to dynamite the home of Juzaburo Sakamaki. I recall insisting she contact Harry Ball, sociology department professor, who had described the transcripts to me earlier. He took us to a basement room in Hamilton Library on the University of Hawai'i campus and showed us the documents she thought had been trashed. It is apparent that this encounter yielded rich results.

Duus makes a number of contributions here. First, she provides a perspective sensitive to as well as critical of a Japanese perspective, including the use of interviews and documents in that language. Thus we learn that it was Noboru Tsutsumi, not Takashi Tsutsumi, who was the Federation leader and much more about his background, motivation, capabilities, and persecution. Both Ron Takaki's Pau Hana and Roland Kotani's The Japanese in Hawaii, for example, mistakenly use Takashi, an optional reading of the Japanese character. Ed Beechert's Working in Hawaii, on the other hand, does not even mention him. Second, she provides a detailed analysis of the white oligarchy in Hawai'i as it skillfully exploited anti-Japanese racism to distort a labor movement into a foreign conspiracy. While others have described this process, notably Gary Okihiro's Cane Fires, Duus offers fascinating detail and a broader context. Third, she convincingly contradicts the sanguine interpretations of the 1920 strike's legacy proffered...

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