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161 c h a p t e r f i v e Freedom amongst Aliens Jack London, Lafcadio Hearn, and the Alternative Modernity of Japan A lthough most Americans tended to fixate on the so-called “new immigrants” from Southern and Eastern Europe when they discussed immigration in the early twentieth century, as the previous chapter demonstrated, immigration from other regions of the world was by no means insignificant. Between December 1, 1905, and November 30, 1906, for example, over seventeen thousand Japanese entered the United States, many of them settling in San Francisco.1 The presence of these Japanese, as well as immigrants from other parts of Asia, produced their own anxieties , especially among Californians. While the U.S. Congress had passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 and an 1894 U.S. district court ruling denied citizenship to Japanese immigrants, California’s state legislature went even further and, in 1913, enacted the Alien Land Law, which prohibited Japanese from owning land because they were ineligible for citizenship.2 Perhaps the most notorious literary expression of these anxieties about Asian immigrants appears in Jack London’s short story “The Unparalleled Invasion,” which was originally published in the July 1910 issue of McClure’s Magazine. London’s story imagines a future rendered dystopian by an overpopulated China, which periodically sends out its excess populace to colonize neighboring regions. By the 1970s, the Chinese outnumber the entire West— “there were two Chinese for every white-skinned human in the world”— and begin to overrun territories in East Asia under European control.3 In the face of such an overwhelming threat, the Western nations set aside their differences and collectively launch a genocidal war against China, wiping out the Chinese with biological weapons and colonizing their now empty land in a “vast and happy intermingling of nationalities.”4 Most critical discussions of London’s story center on its apparent racial anxieties. A few critics argue that this futuristic fantasy of racial 162 Jack London and Lafcadio Hearn extermination was intended to satirize the West’s racist and imperialist assumptions about China, but most contend that its exploitation of American anxieties regarding Asian immigrants indicates that the racism of the story was probably London’s own.5 I suggest, however, that the anxieties that the story exhibits have less to do with race per se than with a particular conception of modernity. Although China serves as the target for London’s genocidal fantasy, the specter of Japan hovers over the story’s pseudo-historical background. Whereas the Western nations are unable to “awaken” China because “between them and China was no common psychological speech,” Japan, transformed by “her victory over Russia in 1904 [into] the freak and paradox among Eastern peoples,” succeeds at “awakening” China because “the Japanese thought with the same thought-symbols as did the Chinese” (original emphasis).6 What London seems to mean by the verb “awaken” is modernization. Japan builds railroads and factories in China, which frees the Chinese from an agricultural economy and thus enables their population to explode. At the same time, London does not expect an “awakened” China to adopt Western values because cultural differences continue to obtain: China remains isolationist and self-sufficient and pays no attention to the “comity of nations.”7 For London, in other words, the future may become dystopian precisely because of the rise of alternative forms of modernity in Asia—an alternative modernity that assimilates such Western technologies as railroads and factories but does not entirely conform to the West’s notion of international society. London’s reference to Japan’s “victory over Russia in 1904” and his decision to set the West’s biological attack on China on May 1, 1976, are crucial. For many Americans of London’s era, the Battle of the Yalu River denoted a decisive turning point in world history. Fought on April 30 and May 1, 1904, exactly seventy-two years before the climax of London’s story, the first major land battle of the Russo-Japanese War resulted in a dramatic victory for the Japanese army and marked the first time in modern warfare that an Eastern nation had defeated a Western power. In the months following the battle, Japan would issue a series of stunning victories against the Russian army and navy, ultimately precipitating the Russian Revolution of 1905 and forcing Czar Nicholas II to sue for peace. The outcome of the Russo-Japanese War transformed Japan into an...

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