Japan in California
by Peter Clark, in "Collier's," June 7, 1913
The Japanese--without meaning any disrespect to the little brown man-- does not commend himself to the average American farmer family as a desirable neighbor. He isn't overly clean. He is accused of being unmoral. It is claimed the Japanese have no marriage tie as we know the institution. Women, if scarce, may be held pretty much in common. The white farmer's wife does not run in and sit down to gossip with the Japanese farmer's wife and she does not want the Japanese farmer's wife running in to gossip with her. Their children cannot play together. Jenny Brown cannot go for a buggy ride with Harry Hirada. The whole idea of social intercourse between the races is absolutely unthinkable. It is not that the white agriculturist cannot compete with the Japanese agriculturist. It is that he will not live beside him.
So, in the fruit-growing districts of California, when the Japanese get a foothold through ownership or a long term lease, there is nothing for the American family to do but to move. The Jap has found that out. He knows he may have to pay an exhorbitant price for the first piece of real estate in a community, but he knows also that his presence will depress the value of the next and the more he buys the cheaper the land around him becomes. This is very well for him. It is not well for the American farmer who helplessly sees the value of his property impaired without power to remedy, since once the Japanese gets title to that property there is no way of ousting him.
In consequence the California fruit farmer in the threatened communities seeks a law prohibiting the Japanese from acquiring agricultural lands. To make this protection real, there must ultimately be a law forbidding him to lease agricultural land; but in order to give the farmer time for adjustment to the new conditions that must come, the right to make leases for terms not exceeding three years was provided for in the bill enacted. Again the hoped for relief is immigration from Europe by way of the canal.
But still the question recurs: since Japanese laborers are now excluded from the country, why does the question not abate instead of becoming more acute? The answer is that the very fact of exclusion has tended toward provision for permanent residence in this country. Up to that time the Japanese communities were more or less in the nature of temporary camps. Men came over for a few years, engaged in business or labor, made money, and went back. The new disposition to permanent settlement is strikingly revealed in the increase in the number of Japanese women immigrants. Up to 1904, when there was little or no serious talk of exclusion by the so-called Gentelmen's Agreement of 1908 is by the familiar device of a "picture marriage." By this process the Japanese in America sends his picture home, some woman marries the photograph, and then the Japanese Government issues a passport to the picture bride. It is reported that the Japanese Government favors in passport issuance the picture bride of the man who has effected a lodgment upon California soil.
The extent to which this colonization is going on in Sacramento County, for instance, is shown by the fact that for the year ending May 1, 1913, 118 leases and 122 deeds to Japanese were recorded. For the month of April alone 26 deeds to Japanese were recorded, or one-fifth as many as in the whole year previous, indicating the hurry to get transfers recorded before the Anti-Alien Land Law could shut them off. Increased activity in buying and leasing was one reason why the proponents of the legislation were unwilling to suspend action for two years. They did not believe the Japanese land buyers would also suspend activity. On May 8, the very morning of my inquiry at the Recorder's office, on ten-year lease to Japanese and six deeds came in.
...A still more startling piece of information gleaned from the Recorder's office was that the number of births for the year in the county of Sacramento, outside the corporate limits of the city of Sacramento, was 274, of which 107 were Japanese. This bears out the assertion made in Florin and other districts that, since the great influx of women, Japanese babies are beginning to rain down.
...The Democratic State platform of 1912 had declared:
"We favor the passage of a bill that will prevent any alien not eligible to citizenship from owning land in the State of California."[The reporter goes on to explain how the Caucasian citizens of Elk Grove and the town Florin were rallying against Japanese settlement in their locales. Hugh Bradford, running for the State Assembly in the district which counted both Elk Grove and Florin within its boundaries, ran a campaign almost solely around the Anti-Alien issues. A bill sponsored Bradford was then passed in the State Assembly with 60 votes in favor and 15 votes against. This created a national debate on Anti-Alien legislation pending in California.]
First there was the seemingly paradoxical position* of President Wilson himself on the matter at issue. Both Roosevelt and Taft had hammered California legislators hard when they attempted to discuss anti-Oriental legislation. But President Wilson had been made to appear committed to the other side.
The Democratic State Campaign Committee of 1912 had circulated widely a card, on one side of which was printed "Wilson and the Japanese," and reading:
[* The paradoxical position was that though the words above could be attributed to Wilson, a Democrat, the party which sponsored the bill in California, and the national party which stood for state rights, Wilson asked lobbied Governor Johnson to kill the legislation."Woodrow Wilson is for the exclusion of the Japanese from the United States. On May 3, 1912, he said: In the matter of Chinese and Japanese coolie immigration, I stand for the national policy of exclusion. The whole question is one of assimilation of diverse races. We cannot make a homogenous population out of a people who do not blend with the Caucasian race. Their lower standard of living as laborers will crowd out the white agriculturists, and is in other fields a most serious industrial menace. The success of free democratic institutions demands of our people education, intelligence, and patriotism, and the State should protect them against unjust and impossible competitions. Remunerative labor is the basis of contentment. Democracy rests upon the equality of the citizens. Oriental coolieism will give us another race problem to solve, and surely we have had our lesson."The following section was taken from the beginning of the article by MacFarlane in "Collier's."]
...When the issue was finally raised there were but five men in the whole legislature who dared to go home to their constituents and say:
The line was drawn between the white man and the brown, and we voted for the brown.
The details fo the final vote were in the Assembly seventy-two for, three against; in the Senate, thirty-five for, two against; both houses together, one hundred and seven for, five against.
This vote is the best possible answer to the charge that there was no class character. Legislative districts of California probably represent a greater variety of social and industrial order than those of any other state in the Union; yet upon the subject there was almost perfect unanimity.
The extent of this sentiment is further witnessed by the quotation of a single sentence from an edition in the San Francisco "Chronicle," a paper which was strongly against the bill, that sentence reads:
"With perfect friendliness to the Japanese nation, the people of this state are overwhelmingly opposed to their, or any Orientals' owning our land."This unanimity shows that it was not a class but a race issue. It was the clash of two races meeting upon the frontiers of their respective civilizations. It is not a question of inferiority or superiority. It is a question of existence and of social existence at that...Socially the two races will not co-exist...
[from Anti-Alien Legislation in California. Circa 1913-17. Allied Printing, San Jose, Cal.]