Japanese & Chinese Immigrant Activists: Organizing in American and International Communist Movements, 1919–1933 (review)

To excavate the lives of early twentieth-century communists within Chinese and Japanese immigrant communities in America, Fowler went, of course, to Moscow. How else could someone, without Chinese or Japanese language abilities, learn about this small group of activists who have largely been forgotten by historians of communism, labor, Asian Americans, and Asian revolution?

Fowler, who was fluent in Russian, found tantalizing bits and pieces of the story in the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, especially in the papers of Katayama Sen, the famous Japanese communist, in files on the U.S. Communist Party, and in other Moscow collections. Memos, reports, letters, and directives, along with rare published material such as newsletters and flyers, provided her with evidence of the activities, interrelationships, and connections with Moscow through the Comintern and other organizations. Sympathetic to the iconoclasts, Fowler understands them as facing virtually insurmountable odds: In addition to the social isolation and legally enforced racism of the United States, they had to contend with Great Russian chauvinism, prejudice and ignorance within the ranks of American communism, poverty, repression, the rightwing in their own communities, and endemic sectarianism.

Using approaches from historical geography, Fowler sees the communists as struggling to break away from “spaces of dependence” to “spaces of engagement” in an attempt to advance their own notions of proletarian and national liberation. Bourgeois and Leninist conceptions of state borders could not stop them from trying to forge connections that spanned the Pacific, Euro-Asia, and cities across the North American continent. They rebelled not only against the capitalist order but also against the strictures of international communism. At one point, Fowler calls Moscow the “metropole” and the Asian communist cells “colonies.” Geographies, she reminds us, are constructed and are continually contested. Her methodology helps to unify a story of disparate individuals, places, and activities and thus to supplement scholarship on international communism and Asian Americans.

Unusual and intriguing characters abound in Fowler’s narrative. Maniwa Suekichi, a Japanese sailor who had jumped ship to try the life of a cowboy in the western United States, eventually became disillusioned and joined New York City’s socialist movement. Eiitaro Ishigaki, a young artist, befriended Katayama and became his confidante. H. T. Tsiang, a Stanford student from China and a radical journalist, collected a group of young Chinese intellectuals around him, even as his associates suspected his fidelity to Leninism. Unfortunately, these and many other colorful individuals make only brief appearances in Fowler’s book. She fails to mention that Ishigaki later became one of the leading social-realist artists in the country and that Tsiang tried his hand at creative writing and acting in Hollywood. By the end of Fowler’s impressive work, many names have cropped up, but few of them are accompanied by a full identity or insight into motives, ideals, or intentions.

Nonetheless, Fowler’s work is an ambitious effort to break from the confines of traditional intellectual approaches, craft a transnational history, and “liberate” the stories of those who had fallen within the crevices of established scholarship. Regrettably, Fowler ends her account in 1933, on the eve of the greatest period of communist activity among Asian Americans.