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DEBUNKING ANTI-JAPANESE RHETORIC
It was claimed in the Bulletin of the Asiaic Exclusion League, November, 1912, that Japanese owned and controlled fertile land in California equal to a strip five miles wide the entire length of the State. It also predicted that within ten years, at the then current rate of increase, the Japanese would be in absolute possession of the entire agricultural resources of the State of California.
Such a strip of land, measuring some thousand miles by five miles, would come to 2,496,000 acres or 8% of all land in California under cultivation. At the zenith of their prosperity, the Japanese of California owned only 74,769 acres and leased 383,287 acres, which, together, represent only 1.5% of all the farm land in the State.
[from The Real Japanese California by Jean Pajus, James J. Gillick Co., Inc., Berkeley, CA, 1937]
It was a common practice among the Issei to snatch up strips of marginal unwanted land which were cheap: swamplands, barren desert areas that Caucasians disdained to invest their labor in. Often it included land bordering dangerously close to high-tension wires, dams, and railroad tracks. The extraordinary drive and morale of these hard-working, frugal Issei who could turn parched wastelands, even marshes, into lush growing fields-usually with help from the entire family-became legendary. In the course of the years, notably during the periods of economic crisis, a hue and cry arose of "unfair competition" and accusations that "the Japs have taken over the best land!"
Then, with the wild tales of resident Japanese perfidy that Pearl Harbor unleashed, rumors flew back and forth that Issei landowners had settled in stealth and with diabolical intent near vital installations. Their purpose: a "second Pearl Harbor." At the Tolan Committee hearings, then ostensibly weighing the pros and cons of evacuation, impressive documentation was unfurled by the top law officer of California, Attorney General Earl Warren (later to become the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court), purporting to support his theory of a possible insurrection in the making: that, with malice aforethought, Japanese Americans had "infiltrated themselves into every strategic spot in our coastal and valley counties."...
There was no possible way of separating the loyal form the disloyal, insisted the Attorney General: "...when we are dealing with the Caucasian race we have methods that will test the loyalty of them ...But when we deal with the Japanese we are in an entirely different field and we cannot form any opinion that we believe to be sound." Warren urged speed removal.
[from Years of Infamy by Michi Nishiura Weglyn, University of Washington Press, 1996, p. 38-39]