The Politics of Transnational History Making: Japanese Immigrants on the Western 'Frontier,' 1927-1941

Eiichiro Azuma

In 1927 Toga Yoichi, a Japanese immigrant in Oakland, California, published a chronological history of what he characterized as 'Japanese development in America.' He explicated the meaning of that history thus:	1
A great nation/race [minzoku] has a [proper] historical background; a nation/race disrespectful of history is doomed to self-destruction. It has been already 70 years since we, the Japanese, marked the first step on American soil. . . . Now Issei [Japanese immigrants] are advancing in years, and the Nisei [the American-born Japanese] era is coming. . . . I believe that it is worthy of having [the second generation] inherit the record of our [immigrant] struggle against oppression and hardships, despite which we have raised our children well and reached the point at which we are now. . . . But, alas, we have very few treatises of our history [to leave behind].
Thirteen years later, a thirteen hundred-page masterpiece entitled Zaibei Nihonjinshi--Toga himself spearheaded the editing--completed that project of history writing.1 Not the work of trained academicians, this synthesis represented the collaboration of many Japanese immigrants, including the self-proclaimed historians who authored it, community leaders who provided subventions, and ordinary Issei residents who offered necessary information or purchased the product. In this instance, moreover, history writing was synonymous with history making, for the former entailed not only the privileging of specific self-images over others but even the fabrication of historical 'facts.' Over the years, Toga and like-minded immigrant historians, writing in Japanese, together produced a systematic discourse that asserted their compatibility with, and placement within, Anglo-American society while it affirmed the ties they maintained to their homeland state. This study unveils how that collaborative history making forged a collective memory and an undifferentiated identity among groups of Japanese immigrants.
Issei history writing signified a larger change in the immigrant perspective on life in the United States that commenced in the mid-1920s. At that juncture, the success of the Japanese exclusion movement created a situation wherein many Issei groped for something to take pride in and to hope for. Entering the American West in the aftermath of the Chinese exclusion of the early 1880s, Japanese immigrants, too, were soon engulfed by the politics of racial exclusion led by organized labor, the press, and nativist groups.2 Having struggled with institutionalized discrimination since the turn of the century, the society of 188,500 Japanese found themselves under rigid white control a quarter century later. In addition to de facto segregation in their daily lives, the enactment in 1913 and 1920 of California's alien land laws (and of similar laws in other western states) deprived them of tenancy and landownership.3 The denial of naturalization rights provided Issei with no access to the formal political process, rendering them powerless against racist politics at the state and federal level. The Japanese did fight back in the court system with a lingering faith in American justice, but decisive triumphs for racism came in cases testing the alien land laws in 1922-1923 and in a historic 1922 United States Supreme Court decision that upheld the legal definition of the Japanese as 'aliens ineligible for citizenship' on the ground of their 'Mongolian' origin. Less than two years later, the U.S. Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924 that terminated Japanese immigration until 1952.4 As Issei writers often opined in the vernacular press, the mid-1920s marked the end of 'an era,' an end that fostered a sense of oneness and collective destiny among many residents.5	. . .