Nikkeijin opposed to militarism

TABLE OF CONTENTS

IINTRODUCTION
A The US – a Nation of Immigrants
B Japanese in the US
C Militarism in Pre–World War II Japan

II MAIN PART
A Ishigaki Ayako (1903 - 1996)
B Yashima Tarō (1909 – 1994)
C Karl Yoneda (1906-1999)

III CONCLUSION

IV WORKS CITED

V APPENDIX

I INTRODUCTION

This term paper is going to be about people of Japanese origin, or Nikkeijin, who were opposed to Japanese militarism of the 1930s and left Japan to live in the United States as a consequence of their political beliefs. I will talk about Ishigaki Ayako, Yashima Tarō, and Karl Yoneda. The former two were Japanese citizens, whereas Karl Yoneda was a Kibei, i.e. a US citizen of Japanese origin who was educated in Japan. This paper is based on autobiographies of the three persons in question. Since their autobiographies deal only with a certain time period in their lives extensively, and because it was almost impossible to find supplementary material to cover the time not included, my accounts of the life of each individual may not be equally detailed for specific years and may vary in length.

I will begin with a brief introduction of the United States as a nation of immigrants, followed by a short history of the Japanese in the United States. I will end the introduction with a description of militarist Japan of the 1930s. The main part will deal with the three persons mentioned above and will be followed by a conclusion. The appendix includes the translation of ten pages of Ishigaki Ayako’s diary, further documentation, photos, etc.

A The US – a Nation of Immigrants

Many people believe that immigration to the US began in the early 1600s with the first successful English colony in Jamestown, Virginia. However, this is only true for European immigration, and even this has come to be a topic of controversy in recent years. Reasons for more recent immigration from all over the world, i.e. ever since John Smith established the Jamestown colony in 1607, are religious freedom and freedom of speech, educational opportunities, better jobs and working conditions, or the opportunity to earn money to send home to one’s family. However, there are also individuals and families who were forced to leave their homelands as a consequence of wars (such as immigrants from Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos) and famine, as well as for political reasons.

Immigrants, as I define the term in this paper, are people from a certain country who – legally or illegally – enter another country to live there for an extended period of time. In my understanding, the question of whether or not they return to the country they have come from does not matter.

Despite this widely held idea of Europeans as first immigrants to the United States, anthropologists, archeologists, geneticists, linguists, geologists, and certain Native American tribes have been searching for and evaluating new data. Bones and cranes discovered in some parts of the United States have made it impossible to stick to the theory of Native Americans as the original inhabitants of America. Many theories have been developed, the most acknowledged of which is the Bering Strait theory. According to this theory, there existed a land bridge between Asia and North America. About 12.000 years ago, Asians of Mongolian stock followed herds of big game to Northern America. About 11.500 years ago they reached the United States and settled down in different parts of the country. As proof, scientists refer to cranes with an astonishing similarity to Asian, rather than more recent Native American cranes. They have come to the conclusion that Native Americans are the descendants of Asian “immigrants,” and that anyone living in the US about 9.000 years ago must either have had Native American features or at least have resembled their Asian ancestors.

However, in the latter part of the twentieth century, more and more misfits to this theory have been discovered. For instance, bones have been found or restudied, which are either older than 11.500 years or which are different from those of Asians or Mongolians. Altogether, there are more than a dozen Stone Age Americans contradicting the Bering Strait theory¹, such as the Spirit Cave Man found in Churchill, Nevada². Besides, cultures similar to the Solutrean culture of France have been found. Altogether, scientists believe that there existed about four to five different genetic populations and many different Ethnic groups. Some resembled the Ainu of Japan, others central, southwest, southern, or eastern Asians, and again others Ice Age Europeans and Polynesians, as well as mixtures of those types. Ways of arrival (by boat or by foot) vary as much as their respective diets. At any rate, the country seems to have already been pretty crowded when the ancestors of the Native Americans came.³

No matter which theory is more plausible or closer to the truth, America seems to have always been a nation of immigrants, and this long before the first modern immigrants set foot on the continent.

B Japanese in the US

Large-scale immigration from Japan began in 1885. This was shortly after Commodore Perry had opened up Japan after more than 250 years of isolation during the Tokugawa regime (1600-1868). The rapid changes due to the Meiji Revolution of 1868 were the main reason for about 275.000 ⁴ Japanese to leave their country for the United States. The Meiji Revolution created many push reasons for farmers, such as the land tax introduced in 1873 ⁵, as well as the poverty, runaway inflation and following deflation resulting from it. What pulled the Japanese to the United States was a demand for cheap labor caused by the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. At first, most of the new immigrants were male sojourners, i.e. they had in mind to stay in the United States for a limited period of time to make money and to return to Japan once they had made enough money. The largest number came from three prefectures: Hiroshima, Yamaguchi, and Kumamoto. There were two waves of immigration: the first from 1885-1907, the second from 1907-1924 ⁶. From 1885 to 1900 immigration was unrestricted and mostly laborers came. Until 1894, they went almost exclusively to Hawai'i, later rather to the mainland, mostly to California. From 1900 to 1907 restrictions set in because of anti-Japanese movements⁷, and more students and businessmen than laborers came from Japan. The laborers who entered the country at that time migrated from Hawai'i to the mainland. Finally, from 1907 to 1924 immigration was restricted to family members of those Japanese who were already in the United States. Slowly, families developed and when the 1924 Immigration Act stopped all Asian immigration, settlement was the alternative to going back to Japan without the slightest hope of ever being able to return. Apart from these immigrants, there were two groups of Japanese who came to the mainland already as early as the 1880s: political exiles and student laborers. One example of a student laborer is Sen Katayama, one of the founders of the Communist Party in Japan and in the United States. Political exiles managed to emigrate to the United States in very small numbers even after the 1924 Immigration Act (s. II A Ishigaki Ayako and B Yashima Tarō).

The Japanese who had decided to stay in the United States after 1924 lived in small communities and tried – mostly unsuccessfully – to find their place in American society. However, when, in 1941, Pearl Harbor was attacked, anti-Japanese feelings reached a climax and Executive Order 9066 ordered all persons of Japanese origin, if American citizens or not, into internment camps far away from the coastal regions where they had settled down⁸. They had to give up everything they had to stay in deserted areas, surrounded by barbed wire. Years passed until the last internee was released in March 1946 ⁹. Internment scattered the Japanese population slightly, and new communities developed in the Midwest. However, over 50 % of the originally 75 % Japanese in the

US eventually drifted back to the West Coast. When, in 1965, immigration from Asia resumed, Japan only played a minor role. Japan has developed a high standard of living and the Japanese who have immigrated to the United States are often part of the new global economy, i.e. business people. They are sometimes called Shin Issei¹⁰, but also Chuzai-in (transfer people who work in the US for their Japanese companies and eventually retyrn). Today’s Japanese American community consists of mostly American-born persons of Japanese origin. There are still a few Issei (Japanese immigrants) and Kibei (US born Japanese who were partly or fully educated in Japan), large numbers of Nisei (2nd generation) and Sansei (3rd generation), and even some Yonsei and Gosei (4th and 5th generation). However, with the new immigration, even if small in numbers, and with racial and ethnic mixing (hapa children) the designation according to one’s generation has become fuzzy. The Japanese American community is becoming more and more diverse. This is why many Americans of Japanese origin prefer the term Nikkei (persons related to Japan or persons of Japanese origin) to the term Japanese American Nisei, etc..

C Militarism in Pre–World War II Japan

During the reign of Emperor Taishō (1912-1926) the political power had been transferred from the genrō, an oligarchic clique, to a parliament and democratic parties. However, by the 1930s, the military had gained power and almost completely controlled the government. A radical nationalism evolved, facilitated by the public educational system, introduced in 1890, which stressed Confucian values and obedience to the government under the Emperor, and further intensified by the media and state Shintoism. Navy and army officers soon occupied most important offices and expanded their nationalist-militaristic ideas. Political enemies were assassinated, communists persecuted.

Kita Ikki¹¹ and others called for a Shōwa Restoration, state socialism, and a military coup d’état. The Emperor should remain head of state, a state which was to be anti-capitalist, hyper-nationalist and without a parliament.

Militarist expansion began with the Kwantung army invading Manchuria, in 1931, establishing the independent puppet state Manchukuo. Already after the Russo-Japanese war in 1904/05, Japan’s influence on Manchuria had begun to grow. Japan began to impose unequal economic and political treaties on China, just like Western nations. The response to growing anti-Japanese movements in China was the bombing of Shanghai by the Japanese air force. In 1933 Japan withdrew from the League of Nations due to criticism regarding her actions in China. On February 26th, 1936, the army’s First Division committed a mutiny in their bloody attempt to realize a Shōwa Restoration. In 1937 the second Sino-Japanese war began with the Marco Polo Bridge incident, a shooting initiated by Japanese troops in order to cause a war. Japan soon occupied almost the whole coast of China and committed severe war atrocities on the Chinese population, such as the “Rape of Nanking.” In 1940, Japan occupied French Indochina (Vietnam) upon agreement with the French Vichy government, and joined Germany and Italy. This caused a conflict with the United States and the UK, and an oil boycott on Japan. As a consequence, Japan wanted to conquer the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) and prepared for war. In 1941, the attack on Pearl Harbor initiated the Second World War. Initial victories were followed, in 1944, by more and more defeats, and the Potsdam Declaration asked Japan to surrender. In 1945, the US dropped two atomic bombs over Nagasaki and Hiroshima and ended the war and militarism in Japan.

There are many reasons why militarism could develop in Japan. First of all, Japan became more and more disappointed with the United States and the West. In 1919, at the Peace Conference of Versailles, Japan had been rejected when she asked for racial equality. This demand was partly

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¹ s. V Appendix

² s. V Appendix

³ This poses a problem for Native Americans who risk to lose their sovereignty gained in many years of struggle, if it can be proved that they were not the original inhabitants of the country.

⁴ Everything You Need to Know about Asian American History, p. 100.

⁵ This land tax imposed taxes according to the size of a piece of land instead of the amount of what was harvested. As a consequence, taxes were the same for good and bad harvest years. The reason for the new tax system was the government’s need for money to finance its army and militaristic expansion.

⁶ The Issei, p. 3.

⁷ These restrictions were imposed by the Japanese government because it did not want US-Japanese relations to exacerbate

⁸ EO 9066 only applied to mainland Japanese, not their counterparts in Hawai'i, where they were a vital part of the economy.

⁹ Prisoners without trial, p. 87.

¹⁰ There are many controversies in the Japanese American community as to whether or not the new immigrants should be called shin issei. Objectors hold the opinion that those new immigrants cannot be compared at all to the first immigrants to the US. (s. V Appendix)

¹¹ Japanese right-wing philosopher and writer (1883-1937). He came up with a plan for the reorganization of Japan. (Kita Ikki: Kokka kaizōan genri taikō, in: Kita Ikki chōsaku shū, Bd. 2, Tōkyō: 1967, pp. 219-281.)