Hollywood and the Image of the Oriental, 1910 - 1950 — Part I

HOLLYWOOD AND THE IMAGE OF THE ORIENTAL, 1910 - 1950 - PART I By Richard A. Oehl ing One rather dispassionate, almost scholarly study of the Japanese problem, published in 1914, contained a bibliography of over fifty books and ninety articles on the subject of Orientals, many of which were themselves anything but dispassionate.! All were written during the previous ten years. Americans, particularly CaI ifornians, were obsessed with two questions, both relating solely to those Japanese who were or would be emigrating to the United States: (1) economic competition and (2) even more serious, the possibility of interracial marriages. San Francisco epitomized and dramatized the issues and the passions—schooling, landowning , marriage. CaI ifornians barely had had time to congratulate themselves on the exclusion of the Chinese in the 1880s when the Japanese problem loomed upon the horizon as a threat to the Occidental character of American society. The Japanese posed not only the threat of racial mongrel ization, but they came to the United States with "vices" not attributed to the Chinese, namely, great adaptability to Western ways, aggressiveness in economic competition, a desire to integrate into American society as soon as possible. Hostility to the Japanese had arisen dramatically in 1900. Japanese immigration had been proceeding at a fairly low and uniform rate for about a decade before this, with 1,000 people a year entering the United States, through California. However, with the annexation of Hawaii, after the Spanish-American War, some 12,000 arrived in 1900 alone. The result was an immediate protest on the part of many Califorians. In March 1900, the Mayor of San Francisco, on the basis of what he knew to be an obvious false rumor, decided to quarantine the Chinese and Japanese Richard A. Oehllng -is Dean ofa Administration at Assumption College In Woncesten , Massachusetts. Several yeans ago he authoned another series ofa articles faon film è Hlstony on the Image ofa Germans In Hollywood fallms. 33 sections of the city upon the pretext of an alleged bubonic plague. In the same year, the labor movement began to put pressure on the Governor of California, Henry Gage, and he stressed the Japanese problem in his message to the Legislature on January 8, 1901. In the 1901 meeting of the Chinese Exclusion League and at the 1904 Convention of the American Federation of Labor, resolutions were passed asking Congress to exclude further Japanese immigration. By 1905, the San Francisco Chronicle, which was violently anti-Oriental, was urging Congress to pass a resolution excluding the Japanese from immigration. The Chronicle, however, observed: "The Chinese are faithful laborers and do not buy land." In other words, the Chinese were no longer a threat as they had been excluded from immigration some years before; the Japanese had now replaced the Chinese as a major threat to Occidental society on the western coast. To review some of the captions of articles which appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle in the years after 1905, reveals a good ''deal about the attitude of this influential newspaper toward the Japanese question: "Crime and poverty go hand in hand with Asiatic Labor" "Brown men are an evil in the public schools" "Japanese are a menace to American women" "Brown Asiatics steal brains of whites" The Chronicle concluded, "Every one of these immigrants, so far as his service is desired, is a Japanese spy."2 Obvious amidst the clamor was the absence of popular concern with the Japanese who stayed behind, with Japan itself as a nation. Statesmen occasionally wrote of the strategic problems posed for the United States by the rise of Japan to great power status, but the American public seemed to be largely indifferent to these aspects. Perhaps it was because they were so much more involved emotionally in the threat at home to the purity of the race. If that is true, American films may offer some supporting evidence, and provide a useful though not infallible guide to the public mood. The earliest years of motion picture production (until 1908) had seen the production of dozens of films with real and imaginary settings in Japan and China, mostly or entirely dealing with the Orientals in their native environment. Some...