Japanese Pride, American Prejudice: Modifying the Exclusion Clause of the 1924 Immigration Act

U.S. Congressional action in 1924 blocked Japanese immigration, and one of the regrettable pages in the history of Japan-U.S. relations was opened. The notorious Immigration Act was a scar in a decade of otherwise amicable relations between the Pacific neighbors. It deeply offended Japanese sensibilities. Citizen reaction in Japan was like a small-scale May Fourth Movement-with antiforeign eruptions, intellectual stirrings, and long-term consequences. The Immigration Act contributed heavily in the psychological estrangement of Japan and the United States in the years before Pearl Harbor. It is also a bitter, self-defining moment in the history of Asian ethnicity in America.

The politics of the act and the Japanese and Japanese American reactions to it have been well researched by Roger Daniels, Lee Makela, Miwa Kimitada, and others. Hirobe Izumi, a diplomatic historian at Nagoya University, expands the scholarship on the subject considerably. He probes those American activist organizations that between 1924 and 1941 sought to modify the act and undo its damage. Their specific goal was to enact an immigration quota for Japan. Hirobe's study began as a doctoral dissertation under Akira Iriye at Harvard and is published in a valuable Stanford University Press series on Asian America.

Hirobe's story of campaigns for a quota can be divided into three phases. First is the period of the mid-1920s when Christian leaders tried to stir American conscience regarding discrimination against Japanese and build a political base for rectifying the rules applied to Japan. Prominent in this phase were the Rev. Sidney L. Gulick, a former missionary to Japan, and George W. Wickersham, a former U.S. attorney general. They operated through the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America. They were motivated by moral principles and a desire to remove an impediment to Christian mission in Japan. The second phase begins in the late 1920s and is led by business interests on the West Coast including sugar magnate Wallace M. Alexander and timber barons in Oregon and Washington. Their concern was exports to Japan, which were in steep decline with the onset of the world depression. The third phase takes place in the 1930s despite a loss of goodwill toward Japan following the Mukden and Shanghai Incidents. In this period, West Coast businessmen and intellectuals believed that a more moderate immigration policy would reduce tension between the two countries and encourage commerce. Ultimately, the proquota movement floundered when the Sino-Japanese conflict from 1937 generated sympathy for China and concomitant antipathy toward Japan.

Hirobe reports with considerable detail and careful documentation on a broad set of actors in the post-1924 maneuverings. Besides the Gulick-Wickersham group and West Coast business interests, he documents the positions and activities of Valentine Stuart McClatchy and his California Joint Immigration Committee, Paul Scharrenberg and the California Federation of Labor, and the Native Sons of the Golden West. He also investigates the Japanese press, the Japanese American press, the American mainstream press, the Japanese government, the U.S. State Department, and Congressmen who had interest in the issue. Though the reader would like to know more about the earlier backgrounds of prominent individuals, Hirobe weaves these disparate players together into an engaging story.

A number of consistent themes are found throughout the book. One is the counterproductive nature of proquota activism. Efforts by Gulick and others to publicize their cause served to provoke McClatchy, Scharrenberg, and others to even more ardent politicking to protect the 1924 legislation. The proquota forces had to ask Gulick to stay in the background. The reader might ask why McClatchy's activism-even more strident than Gulick's-was not similarly destructive to the exclusionist cause. One might rightly conclude that the antiquota position struck a chord with the American people and the fundamental racism of American society of the time. Another consistency is the position of the government of Japan. Leading Japanese harbored deep-seated resentment. At the same time, they were reluctant to pressure the United States for fear of igniting anti-Japanese sentiment in that country, and voiced the optimism that the American sense of justice would prevail in the end. More openly concerned than Japan were the European imperialist countries, which feared that the U.S. immigration policy toward Japanese and other Asians would stir antiwhite movements in China and Southeast Asia. A third consistency is the rather passive position of Japanese Americans. While the 1924 law indirectly brought into question their equality as a race in America and directly prevented them from bringing family members permanently to the United States, most Japanese Americans were more interested in the circumstances of daily life than the honor of Japan as a nation. Proexclusion operatives acted in support of the rights of Japanese already present in the country, muting potential Japanese American opposition to the 1924 act. Was the Japanese American community intimidated, or did it perceive that cutting off immigration could raise the status and economic potential of those already arrived? Hirobe does not give a clear answer to this question.

The number and variety of opinion sources quoted is voluminous, most of them adding depth and interest to the discussion. Among Japanese journals, Hirobe most often cites Gaikō jihō (Diplomatic review)-sometimes inappropriately. To say that the journal "argued" a point of view does not mesh with its format as a collection of diverse articles by journalists, international relations scholars, and diplomats. Though the journal was indeed connected with the Foreign Ministry, Hirobe goes too far when he cites it as a voice of the Foreign Ministry. Hirobe might also have sought out opinions in Kokusai chishiki (International understanding), a leading internationalist organ.

A secondary contribution of the book is Hirobe's recording of views in the American proquota community on several key incidents in the interwar period. Among them was a surprising degree of sympathy at the time of the Manchurian Incident for a Japan confronting Chinese instability and insult. The Japanese American press, many missionaries (including Gulick), and some State Department desks withheld judgment until the Shanghai Incident, which created more anxiety in America than earlier Japanese moves in Mukden. The book traces the gradual shift in U.S. public attitudes toward Japan in the volatile later 1930s, attitudes that in the end doomed the quota movement. At the same time, the Japanese Foreign Ministry shifted from mollification to stridency regarding the 1924 act.

In this work, the transition from dissertation to book is not complete. Seemingly endless citations of opinion sources-frequently repeating similar views-tire the average reader. More aggressive editing by the publisher could have given us more polished prose. The treatment of the subject at hand is narrow in that it does not move beyond a particular mode of diplomatic history. It does not transcend the assumption that governmental policy is a consequence of the effective marshalling of public opinion. The study lacks serious theoretical inquiry into the nature of American racism, nor is it explicitly informed by studies of that nature. In the end, it fails to apply its impressive empirical findings in the refinement of understanding of the racist mentality that underlay the debate on quotas. But in the present age of American unilateralism, Hirobe's account serves as a warning of the wages of arrogance.