SUMMARY

The symposium is designed to bridge the international and language divide between scholarship on migration and race in the US and in Japan. The focus is on new, cutting-edge research on Japanese migration and assimilation dilemmas.

Co-sponsored by Kyoto University

Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (S) by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science

Flyer | Please RSVP online

DESCRIPTION

9:00AM-9:30AM Introduction- Duncan Ryuken Williams (University of Southern California), Lon Kurashige (University of Southern California), and Yasuko Takezawa (Kyoto University)

9:30AM-11:00 AM - PANEL 1: Migration and Empire
Chair: Yasuko Takezawa

Mariko Iijima, Sophia University
"Japanese Diasporic Network beyond/across the Imperial Borders: Coffee Production in the Asia-Pacific Region before World War II"
This paper discusses the relationship between imperial Japan and colonial Taiwan, which epitomises a typical role of a colony as a source of supply to satisfy metropole's appetite. Taiwan's subjugated situation is parallel to other coffee-producing colonies in Latin America. However, there is a striking difference between Taiwan and Latin America in the process of transmission of skills, information and coffee plants that reached Taiwan. In order to achieve a successful production, Japanese agricultural experimental stations in Taiwan obtained several different kinds of coffee plants from Hawai'i and Brazil, where many Japanese had worked on coffee plantations as migrant labourers since the early 20th century. In addition, Tajiro Sumida, a Japanese businessman, set up a large-scale coffee plantation in the eastern part of Taiwan by employing skills and knowledge he obtained during his sojourn in Hawai'i. Thirdly, a group of Japanese coffee farmers in Hawai'i sponsored a coffee production company in Nan-yo Gunto (another colony of the Japanese Empire, 1919-1945) in 1926, which eventually led to mass cultivation of coffee in Taiwan in the 1930s. Thus, coffee production within the territory of the Japanese Empire was not achieved without the "diasporic network" established by those Japanese immigrants who connected the outside and inside of the Japanese territory. In other words, a history of coffee production in colonial Taiwan not only reflects the two different faces of Japan in the Asia-Pacific region as an "economically depressed" immigrant-sending nation as well as colonizers of Asia, but also how these two were intertwined through the Japanese diasporic network.

Michael Jin, Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi 
"Americans in the Japanese Empire: The Nisei Transnational Generation in the Pacific before World War II"
From the 1920s to the 1940s, 50,000 American migrants of Japanese ancestry-all of whom U.S.-born children of Japanese emigrants-lived and worked in Japan and its colonial world in Asia-Pacific. Many young Japanese Americans educated in Tokyo were in a metropole where they interacted with students, workers, and sojourners from all corners of the Japanese empire. Other young Nisei migrants and students witnessed and experienced colonies first-hand as they traveled through Korea and northeast China for educational and employment opportunities or for the pleasure of touring the colonial frontiers. For many Nisei migrants in Japan, however, the relationship between their two ancestral lands blurred the cultural, political, and legal boundaries of their citizenship and national allegiance. From the discriminatory social and legal institutions in the U.S. to Japan's aggressive colonial expansion in Asia to the Pacific War, the Americans of Japanese ancestry were mired in events across multiple regions in Asia-Pacific that forced them to navigate complex legal and political currents in their efforts to protect their citizenship. This paper examines how the presence of these second-generation Japanese Americans (Nisei) in the Japanese colonial world during the time of growing tension between the U.S. and Japan became a critical diplomatic issue between two competing Pacific empires. The experiences of Japanese Americans who emigrated from the United States can reveal unexpected transnational implications of Japanese colonialism in the Pacific, as well as the two nations' policies on citizenship, immigration, and naturalization.

Chikako Kashiwazaki, Keio University
"Colonial Migrants as Subjects: Koreans under the Japanese Empire"
This paper explores the discursive milieu in which research in Koreans in Japan has evolved, and identifies major ideas and orientations that have shaped research agenda and perspectives. Whereas the interment during WWII is central to the collective memory of Japanese Americans, Japan's colonialism is at the core of historical narratives of zainichi (resident-in-Japan) Koreans.Studies on zainichi Koreans began in postwar Japan with a sense of mission to uncover the facts and realities of the Japanese colonial rule and its ramifications.Works of pioneer scholars reflected the political terrain of the postwar period, including the division of the homeland, ascendance of ethno-nationalistic organizations within the zainichi Korean community, and antagonistic and exclusionary attitude toward former colonial subjects on the part of the Japanese government and society.Either explicit or implicit in many of the historical inquiries on zainichi Koreans are condemnation of colonialism, national self-determination of the Korean people as an ultimate goal, and anti-assimilationist thrust.With generational shift and social change, research on Koreans in Japan has significantly diversified since the 1990s in terms of academic disciplines and the breadth of subject matter.There is also increasing acknowledgement that the framework of colonial oppression and Korean resistance cannot capture the complexities of the lives of Koreans in prewar and immediate postwar Japan.Nevertheless, heightened animosity between Japan and Korea today and concomitant growth in xenophobic attacks on Korean minority urges scholars of zainichi Korean history to reiterate the basic character of Japanese colonialism and to communicate to the public the contemporary relevance of colonial history.

11:00 AM - COFFEE BREAK

11:15AM- 12:45 PM - PANEL 2: The Economics and Politics of Race
CHAIR: Duncan Ryûken Williams

Yuko Konno, Sophia University
"'Localized' Problems of National Consequences: Exclusionist Discourse about Japanese Fishermen in Southern California, 1907-1948"
Who owns the Pacific Ocean? From the perspective of coastal security, Japanese domination of the local fishing industry may have aroused a real sense of danger in white Californians, but their unfounded fear and indignation served as yet another cover for excluding a whole category of people they considered to be unwelcome. This paper offers an analysis of anti-alien fishing bills as well as exclusionist discourses about Japanese fishermen, beginning in the year when the Gentlemen’s Agreement launched the process for complete Japanese exclusion, and ending when the Supreme Court decided that restricting licenses on the basis of citizenship status was discriminatory. While anti-Japanese activists tackled this problem of originally local nature, they also presented it as a matter of national import by sugar coating their racism in the language of security, illegality, and ineligibility. Ultimately they failed to achieve the same level of exclusion as they did with alien land laws, for which they blamed greedy capitalists. Historicizing racist discourses in the ebb and flow of hostility against Japan and the Japanese, the paper shows how emotionally charged local politics defeated economic realism and fed fodder to fears of espionage at the national level.

Yu Tokunaga, University of Southern California
"Transnational Divides of Race, Class, and Nationality: The Japanese-Mexican Conflict in the 1933 El Monte Berry Strike" 
In June 1933, the El Monte Berry Strike took place in the Los Angeles area. Launched by Mexican farmworkers against Japanese farmers, the strike became one of the largest interethnic conflicts in Los Angeles during the 1930s. Most importantly, the impact of this local interethnic conflict came to involve the Japanese and Mexican consuls and their respective governments. By applying a transnational frame of reference that draws on English, Spanish, and Japanese language sources, and by expanding the scope to include not only participants in Los Angeles but also the peoples and governments of Mexico and Japan, this paper demonstrates that what happened as a local strike in Los Angeles soon evolved into an international problem that involved three nations, while creating intragroup divides within ethnic Japanese and Mexican communities in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

Previous studies tend to pay little attention to the Japanese-Mexican interethnic conflict, and more recent studies emphasize interethnic cooperation created through the labor movement of the 1930s. Yet, the El Monte Berry Strike of 1933 demonstrates that when economic interests were at stake, interethnic cooperation was superseded by interethnic conflicts. And it was primarily the immigrant generation in both Japanese and Mexican communities who played a central role in the Japanese-Mexican labor conflicts in the early 1930s Los Angeles. Regarding the Mexican side of story of the 1933 strike, Chicano studies have revealed the political and ideological relationship between Mexican strikers and the Mexican consulate in Los Angeles, and how these relations involved Mexican nationalism as well as communism. However, the Japanese side of story has not been fully explored.

This paper reveals the Japanese side of story in the El Monte Berry Strike and considers the impact of the strike not only in Los Angeles but also in the Mexican border city of Mexicali, where Japanese residents lived among the Mexican majority. While Japanese farmers were determined not to compromise with Mexican strikers, the Japanese consulate in Los Angeles was increasingly concerned about the international impact of the strike. Meanwhile, anti-Japanese sentiment became stronger in Los Angeles as well as in Mexicali. This posed a serious problem to Japanese farmers in Mexicali who had nothing to do with the strike in Los Angeles. To appease anti-Japanese sentiment, Japanese farmers in Mexicali decided to support Mexican farmworkers in Los Angeles, not their fellow Japanese farmers. By combining my findings with the Mexican side of story revealed by Chicano studies scholars, this paper tries to understand the local and transnational nature of Japanese-Mexican interethnic conflict in the 1930s Los Angeles.

Christen Sasaki, San Francisco State University
"Equality on a Global Stage: The 1893 Fight Over Japanese Voting Rights in Hawai'i"
On January 17, 1893 a coalition of descendants of American missionaries and other European and American immigrant businessmen and planters staged a coup and overthrew the Hawaiian Monarchy. Leaders of the coup immediately announced the establishment of a provisional government, whose purpose was to maintain order until a more permanent union with the United States could be arranged. On January 31, 1893 the former Hawaiian Kingdom was declared an American protectorate.

Members of the oligarchy, who orchestrated the overthrow and held political control over the Hawaiian Monarchy since 1887, expected an easy incorporation into the United States. They soon discovered, however, that in 1893 U.S. politicians and populace had not yet come to terms with an imperial overseas agenda and the “barbarian others” that this expansion would bring into the body politic. In the tumultuous years that followed, members of the oligarchy dealt with both domestic and international sources of contention as different centers of power fought to define what Hawai‘i would become.

This paper examines what was at stake in determining Hawai‘i’s political future through one of the first diplomatic entanglements the provisional government faced: Meiji politicians’ and issei laborers’ push for voting rights in the islands. The examination of the push for Japanese immigrants’ right to vote by Meiji politicians and laborers alike questions why the former was so concerned with the rights of a class of people who would not merit the same attention at home.  This paper reveals that contention over voting rights moved members of the Hawaiian oligarchy, Meiji Government, and immigrant laborers to define who had access to the political protections associated with national membership and highlights the processes through which late-nineteenth century articulations of nation-state and racialized citizenship were often defined in locations far away from home, and centered around populations which would not merit the same consideration in their place of origin.

12:45PM-1:45PM - Lunch

1:45PM-3:15PM - PANEL 3: Race and Cultural Concepts
CHAIR: Brian Hayashi

Yasuko Takezawa, Kyoto University
"Repositioning 'Race' and 'Class' in Transpacific Geopolitical-Historical Contexts"
This paper derives from my extensive collaborations with scholars in the U.S. and Japan that have raised questions about epistemological differences between the two cultures. It focuses on the translation of “class” and “race” in the field of Japanese American Studies in the U.S. For “class,” I will reexamine the well-studied letters exchanged between Sutemi Chinda, Consul General of Japan in San Francisco, and Foreign Minister Shuzo Aoki in 1891. I argue that in analyzing this correspondence regarding rural Japanese immigrants, scholars have mistranslated ‘katō shakai’ to mean ‘lower class.’ The more accurate phrase for ‘lower class’ at this time in Japan was ‘kasō shakai’, not ‘katō shakai’. “Lower class” became a social issue only in the mid-Meiji era after a massive number of wage laborers were employed in metropolitan areas such as Tokyo and Osaka. The term was not applied to the rural populations that contributed most of the immigrants to the United States.

I will examine the interpretation of “race” in the famous Takao Ozawa vs. the U.S. case in 1922. Ozawa’s claim that he was a “free white person” and therefore qualified for naturalization was dismissed on the ground that he was “not a Caucasian.”  Given that most Americans did not see Japanese immigrants as white, why did Ozawa appeal his case all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court? I will explore this question by considering schooling in early Meiji Japan because Ozawa, and the immigrant leaders who supported his case, learned about ‘race’ as school children in Japan.

Jeannie Shinozuka, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
"Racial Formations Across the Pacific: Japanese Plant, Insect, and Human Immigrants"
This presentation is on the circulation of plant, insect, and human immigrants across American borders, especially their journey that crisscrossed the Pacific Ocean at the turn of the twentieth century. This research intervenes in current debates about the relationship between plants, insects, and humans, providing an analysis of how fears of contagion and its regulation led to the development of new ideas about race at the intersection of science, public health, and public cultures.  Racialized plants, insects, and bodies redefined racial categories. Nativist policies increasingly regulated foreign peoples and plants, seen as a yellow peril penetrating biotic American borders. Here, the arguement is that the emergence of biological nativism in the East and Hawaii turned on the erasure of the American empire, the erection of biotic borders, and the regulation of plant, insect, and human immigrants.

Together, the Northeast and Hawaii serve as critical sites for understanding how the mechanism of settler colonialism and bio-nativism shaped racial formations during American empire-building. The spread of chestnut blight in the Northeast paralleled dominant images of environmentally destructive and cheap Japanese agriculturalists that imperiled the nation’s well-being. As a plant disease that devastated and continues to devastate virtually all native American chestnuts, the menace of chestnut canker illustrates the particular ways government officials and the mass media appropriated the language of settler colonialism as a way to obscure the forced removal of not only Indians, but their attempts to take on the mantle of nativism. In Hawaii, a similar yet different form of settler colonialism took root in the context of a dominant sugar plantation system and transpacific trade. While neglecting Native Hawaiians who suffered disproportionately from leprosy, public health officials actively sought to regulate Asian cargo, belongings, and even passengers themselves for fear they carried deadly diseases and insects. By the 1920s, when calls for anti-Asian immigration legislation grew strident, a number of newspapers issued warnings about the white ant or Oriental termite purportedly from Japan, which they deemed "the worst insect pest" and "by far the most destructive." Examining how Asian plant, insect, and human immigrants are interwoven into US colonial sites, such as the East Coast and Hawaii—entangled not only in the history of the US continent but the very fabric of its environment-we can better see how racial formations across the American empire was not only about economic profit or geopolitical factors but also the reconfiguration of white American colonizers as natives alongside the decimation of indigenous ecologies and construction of Asian immigrants as perpetually foreign.  Focusing on these two regions shed light on the complexities of the agrarian bases of not only anti-Asianism but also the regional landscape of racial formations.

Lon Kurashige, University of Southern California
"Before Exclusion: Congressional Hearings on Japanese Immigration, 1920"
The exclusion of Japanese immigrants to the United States in 1924 confirmed for many at the time, and even more since, that white supremacy reigned supreme in American society.  This paper explores the assumption of a racist consensus by looking at the period “before exclusion,” when a large number of Americans opposed discrimination against Japanese immigrants. The focus is on Congressional hearings held on the West Coast in the Summer of 1920.  Over half of the 150 witnesses giving oral testimony favored treating Japanese immigrants fairly and opposed singling them out for exclusion.  This finding clearly shows that anti-Japanese racism did not go uncontested.  The analysis highlights five factors motivating the opposition and gestures towards a more nuanced framework for understanding  Japanese exclusion and American racism.

3:15 - COFFEE BREAK

3:30PM-5:00PM - PANEL 4: War and National Security
Chair: Lon Kurashige

Brian Hayashi, Kyoto University
"Wavering Racialists, Hysterical Scholars, and Inept Leaders: Re-examining the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians' Interpretation of the Japanese American Mass Removal Internment"
Told from a Civil Rights perspective, a seeming necessity for so many non-west coast Japanese Americans, many scholars portray the Japanese American mass removal and internment largely devoid of its trans-Pacific context. Directly as a result of their domestic-only focus, these writers present a view of Japanese American experience in the camps largely devoid of the perspectives of the adult Japanese nationals who dominated the pre-war and wartime community. Similarly, when explaining why the camps took place, their domestic-only focus has largely blinded us to a fuller and more complete understanding of the event even though they provide us with a valuable lesson on civil rights.

This conference paper seeks to grapple with a more complex understanding of why the mass removal and internment took place. It re-examines the causes behind this tragic event and analyzes the evidence thus far offered for why the tragedy took place-Yellow Peril or racialist thinking, hysteria, and a failure of leadership-as articulated by the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC)'s findings published in A Personal Justice Denied (1997). It then contrasts such evidence with evidence the author has culled from newly discovered sources, such as General John DeWitt's papers, unexamined records (Office of Civilian Defense, Judge Denman Papers), and underutilized documents (Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, Military Intelligence Division, etc.) found for his on-going research project on the rise, decline, and transformation of the Yellow Peril.

While not by any means definitive, this study suggests some new directions for further research on the Japanese American mass removal/internment. It strongly disputes the commonly-held view that the story has already been told and no further research needs to done on the topic-the closing of the canon so to speak-is at best premature.

Lane Hirabayashi, UCLA
"Lest We Forget: The Quakers, AFSC, and Japanese American Community, 1941-1945"
Recapitulating lesser-known aspects of Gordon Hirabayashi's resistance to both curfew and the mass removal of Nikkei from the West Coast, this presentation draws from primary sources, including official WRA photographs, 1943-1945, to recount the tremendous commitment of the Religious Society of Friends who generously offered support, housing, and employment to the Hirabayashi family, as well as to many in the JA community at large. Lest we forget...

Duncan Williams, University of Southern California
"Buddhism and Nationalism(s) during World War Two: The Incarceration of Buddhist Priests in the DOJ/Army Camps"
Unlike the well-known mass incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans in the WRA camps during World War Two, the selective internment of thousands of Japanese nationals and a handful of Japanese Americans in Hawaii under martial law and the entirety of the continental U.S. into Army and DOJ-run camps has received relatively less scholarly attention. One of the largest contingents among the Japanese community leaders forcibly placed into these camps were Buddhist and Shinto priests (though not Christian ministers).  This paper examines the reasons why Buddhist priests were targeted and the competing nationalisms (American and Japanese) that undergirded both the views of the U.S. government and the Buddhist priests themselves.

5:00 PM- Final Discussion and Closing Remarks
Lon Kurashige and Yasuko Takezawa

Biographies

Brian Hayashi, Kyoto University
Brian Masaru Hayashi is a Professor in the Human & Environmental Studies Graduate School at Kyoto University in Kyoto, Japan. He was a former Assistant Professor at Yale University with appointments in American Studies, History, and East Asian Studies (courtesy) as well as a co-founder and director of its Ethnicity, Race, and Migration Program. His research work on Japanese Americans resulted in For the Sake of Our Japanese Brethren (Stanford University Press, 1995), winner of the Kenneth Scott Latourette Award; Democratizing the Enemy (Princeton University Press, 2004), winner of the Robert Athearn Award; and his co-edited volume with Yasuko Takezawa, New Waves (Kyoto University, 2004). His archival-based study, under contract with Oxford University Press, is on Asian Americans and the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner to the CIA). His current research work is on the rise, decline, and transformation of the Yellow Peril.

Lane Hirabayashi is core faculty in the Asian American Studies Department at UCLA, where he is also the inaugural "George and Sakaye Aratani Professor of the Japanese American Incarceration, Redress, and Community.”  Lane recently published A Principled Stand: The Story of Hirabayashi v the United States (University of Washington Press, 2013), as well as a cycle of research articles, co-authored with Marilyn Alquizola, about the life and writing of the Filipino activist Carlos Bulosan. Lane is currently completing a new book dealing with ideologies of resettlement, revolving around ethnographic interviews taken with Issei and Nisei who moved to the cities and hinterlands of Colorado during and after the war.

Mariko Iijima is an associate professor at Department of English Studies at Sophia University. She received her D.Phil in modern history from University of Oxford in 2006. She specializes in history of Japanese immigration and history of coffee production, particularly in the Asian-Pacific region.

Michael Jin is an Assistant Professor of History at Texas A and M University-Corpus Christi. His areas of specialization include migration and diaspora studies, Asian American and Pacific Islander history, and critical race and ethnic studies.

Chikako Kashiwazaki is a professor in the Faculty of Economics, Keio University, Japan. She received a Ph.D. in sociology from Brown University in 1998. Her major research fields include immigration and citizenship, ethnicity and nationalism, and immigrant integration policies and programs in Japan. She has contributed book chapters in Diaspora without Homeland: Being Korean in Japan (Sonia Ryang and John Lie eds., University of California Press, 2009) and Migration and Integration: Japan in Comparative Perspective (Gabriele Vogt and Glenda Roberts eds., Iudicium Verlag, 2011). Her article on multicultural politics in Japan appeared in Citizenship Studies Vol. 17, No. 1 (2013). She has also worked with local governments in developing immigrant integration policies and programs.

Yuko Konno is a lecturer at the Center for Language Education and Research, Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan. She received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Southern California in 2012. Her research interests include Asian American history, Pacific fishing history, migration, U.S.-Japan relations, and modern Japan. She is the author of "Transnationalism in Education: The Backgrounds, Motives, and Experiences of Nisei Students in Japan before World War II," Journal of American and Canadian Studies 27 (2009), "Trans-Pacific Localism: Prewar Village Ties that Connected Taiji, Wakayama, to Terminal Island, California," Journal of American and Canadian Studies 29 (2011), and a Lucie Cheng Prize winning essay, "Localism and Japanese Emigration at the Turn of the Twentieth Century," Amerasia Journal 38: 3 (2012).

Lon Kurashige, University of Southern California

Christen Sasaki is an Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University.  She received her Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests include 19th century U.S. and Hawai‘i relations, Japanese American history, American empire in the Pacific, and militourism.

Jeannie Shinozuka received her doctorate from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in American history and studies.  She is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and she has published an essay in American Quarterly.  She is the recipient of the 2012 Pressman-Burroughs Award from the American Association for the History of Medicine for her current book project, "Biotic Borderlands, Constituting Race in Transnational Public Health and Agriculture, 1880-1950."

Yasuko Takezawa is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University. She currently leads a multi-/interdisciplinary collaborative research project, "A Japan-based Global Study of Racial Representations", funded by JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science). Her major English publications include Transpacific Japanese American Studies: Conversations on Race and Racializations (co-edited with Gary Y. Okihiro, University of Hawai'i Press, in press), Racial Representations in Asia (Takezawa ed. Kyoto University Press/ Trans Pacific Press, 2011), Breaking the Silence: Redress and Japanese American Ethnicity (Takezawa, Cornell University Press, 1995), and Special Issue: Rethinking Race/Racism from Asian Experiences of a London-based journal, Japanese Studies (co-edited with Koichi Iwabuchi).

Yu Tokunaga is a third year doctoral student of the Department of History at the University of Southern California. In 2006, he graduated from Kyoto University, presenting B.A. thesis on the experience of Japanese and Korean Americans during World War II. Then, he began to work as a newspaper reporter in the Asahi Shimbun. In 2010, he entered the graduate school of Kyoto University to engage in the study of U.S. immigration history focusing on undocumented Mexican immigrants in California from the 1960s to 1980s. In 2012, he entered the University of Southern California with Fulbright grant. Now he is studying the interethnic relationship between the ethnic Japanese and ethnic Mexicans in the Los Angeles area from the 1930s to 1950s in a transnational context.

Duncan Williams is an Associate Professor of Religion and the Director of the USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and previously held the Shinjo Ito Distinguished Chair of Japanese Buddhism at UC Berkeley and served as the Director of its Center for Japanese Studies. He is the author of a monograph entitled The Other Side of Zen: A Social History of Soto Zen Buddhism in Tokugawa Japan (Princeton, 2005) and co-editor of a number of volumes including Issei Buddhism in the Americas (Illinois, 2010), American Buddhism (Routledge, 1998), and Buddhism and Ecology (Harvard, 1997). He has also translated four books from Japanese into English including Putting Buddhism to Work: A New Theory of Economics and Business Management (Kodansha, 1997). He is currently completing a monograph titled, Camp Dharma: Buddhism and the Japanese American Incarceration During World War II (forthcoming, UC Press).