Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands

2. Contracting Between Empires

54 TWO Contracting Between Empires Imperial Labor Circuits in the Pacific In 1906, executives from the Oriental Trading Company huddled in their Seattle office to come up with a response to the new restrictions on Japanese emigration imposed recently by the Meiji government. Over protests from mercantile houses in Japan and the United States, the Japanese government had made the decision to limit the number of laborers leaving for America to two hundred per month. As one company executive pointedly noted: “This number will hardly more than suffice to maintain the present supply of Japanese in this country.”1 With the decline in overseas Chinese labor, the Japanese had become the labor of choice in the Pacific Northwest. But the new Meiji regulation threatened to choke the labor supply from Japan. Faced with this challenge, company executives turned their eyes to Hawai’i, where they saw tens of thousands of Japanese laborers available for the taking. Having undergone inspection when they first arrived from Japan, Hawaiian Japanese were not subject to the rules or protocols of either the U.S. Immigration Service or the Meiji state and could therefore come freely to the continental United States. Knowing this, the Oriental Trading Company decided to charter the steamship Olympia, which after discharging company cargo at San Francisco, made its way to Honolulu, from “whence she will sail on or about March 7th with not less than six hundred Japanese laborers who will be equally divided between the Great Northern and Northern Pacific Companies.”2 For much of the second half of the nineteenth century, Hawai’i stood at the nexus of two competing empires in the Pacific, where American westward expansion collided and overlapped with a Japanese eastward advance. For U.S. expansionists, Hawai’i was a key link in an imperial chain at the end of which laid the fabled China markets. President Grover Cleveland 9780520271685_ch02.indd 54 19/03/12 11:23 AM Contr acting Between Empires • 55 articulated this vision in his address to Congress in 1886, when he declared: “those Islands, on the highway of Oriental and Australasian traffic, are virtually an outpost of American commerce and a stepping-stone to the growing trade of the Pacific.”3 In Japan, the ruling elite, as historian Eiichiro Azuma explains, imagined Hawai’i as part of a “transpacific eastward expansionism focused on emigration-led colonization . . . envisioning the conquest of the overseas hinterlands through the transplantation of Japanese masses.”4 Indeed, Japan’s “manifest destiny” lay east, spurring the mass migration of Japanese laborers to Hawai’i and the Pacific coast of North and South America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The executives of the Oriental Trading Company developed a labor recruitment strategy at the interstices of these two alternatively competing and cooperating empires in the Pacific, by integrating disparate points mapped by imperial expansion into a system of labor circulation. So much has been written about how the colonies were incorporated into America’s Open Door Empire as stepping-stones to Asia and the mythical China markets .5 But far less attention has been paid to the ways colonies were structured as nodes within an imperial system of labor transfer and exchange that were just as crucial to imperial expansion in the Pacific. If exploiting the colonies for the benefit of the metropole was the sine qua non of empire, then the circulation of imperial labor between the colonies and between the colonies and the mainland constituted the lifeblood of the system. The Seattle-based Oriental Trading Company put some of the networks in place that would knit the colonies into a series of interlocking labor markets. AcrossthemflowedHawaiianJapanesewhosemigrationandsettlementonthe islands were originally spurred on by Meiji visions of an emigration-led colonization but who were now being imported to energize the development of the North American West. Supplanting the Chinese, overseas Japanese merchant contractors reconfigured the imperial circuits through which immigrants and goods moved across the Pacific, and, in doing so, helped to coordinate and synchronize the transnational processes that made empire possible. Competing for Hegemony in the Pacific In 1900, the illustrious diplomat and long-time editor of the New York Herald Tribune, Whitelaw Reid felt it safe to declare the Pacific the exclusive preserve of the United States. “Practically we own more than half 9780520271685_ch02.indd 55 19/03/12 11:23 AM 56 • Contr acting Between Empires the coast on this side...