The first Japanese in the United States arrived sporadically and in small numbers; the earliest known settlement, the Wakamatsu Colony north of San Francisco, disintegrated a few years after its founding in 1869. The majority of immigrants came from rural areas at a time when Japan was changing rapidly in an effort to enter the modern world as a social, economic, and political power. Many settled initially in Pacific Coast cities, often taking low-wage service jobs, with some engaging in small-scale entrepreneurship, such as workingmen's restaurants; some turned to prostitution or gambling. Many others found minimum-wage work with railroads, as field laborers, and in fish canneries, mines, and lumber camps, extending the Japanese American presence to the Rocky Mountain and northern-tier states. Immigration to the United States increased significantly in 1886, once a ban on emigration was lifted by the Japanese government, and by the end of the century a shift toward agricultural occupations was also apparent. In 1900 there were approximately twenty-four thousand Japanese Americans in the contiguous United States, about eighteen thousand living on the West Coast.
The anti-Chinese movement of the later nineteenth century spilled into the twentieth, sustained by politicians, labor organizations, irresponsible journalism, nativists, and racism generally. "Anti-Oriental" hostility took the form of harassment, assaults, and murders but was systematized in a series of anti-immigration measures and legislation against ownership of land, including the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed by Congress in 1882. Such restrictions took on a pointedly anti-Japanese tenor in the 1890s and found a focus in the San Francisco school segregation controversy, which culminated in the so-called Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907�1908 between the Japanese government and President Theodore Roosevelt. This carefully negotiated diplomacy ostensibly halted emigration from Japan. In 1911 the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization ruled that courts could refuse naturalization applications from Japanese immigrants, echoing a 1790 federal statute that limited citizenship to "free white persons," and in 1913 California passed an Alien Land Bill that denied ownership to "aliens ineligible to citizenship." The 1920 census recorded 111 thousand Japanese Americans, twenty-seven percent of whom were native born. The 1924 Immigration Act ended immigration by foreigners ineligible for citizenship; the immigrant Issei (first-generation Japanese) were to remain ineligible until the passage of the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act in 1952.
Because the Gentlemen's Agreement allowed for the emigration of parents, wives, and children of Japanese already in the United States, immigration continued in altered form until 1924, many women arriving as "picture brides," whose arranged marriages were based on family negotiations and the exchange of photographs. The picture-bride phenomenon enabled the sex-ratio of the Japanese American population to approach parity and the Nisei (second generation) to emerge. Community life was sustained by Japanese-language newspapers, social organizations linked to Japanese heritage and affiliations, and ongoing association with Japanese culture, especially among the Issei. Early Japanese American literature appeared in publications such as the newspaper Rafu Shimpo in Los Angeles. Japanese-language schools taught traditions and values as well as language to the Nisei; at the same time, many Japanese Americans joined Christian religious denominations in their communities.
Following the Gentlemen's Agreement, the Japanese government's awareness of the exploitation and mistreatment of Asians, knowledge of the disreputable occupations of some immigrants, and aversion to the negative linkage of the Japanese with the "coolie labor" Chinese led it to closely monitor emigration. A desire to maintain the national pride and image of Japan prompted efforts to allow only the fit, educated, and relatively skilled to emigrate and to encourage educational achievement and exemplary behavior by Japanese living in America. Such efforts were rendered moot when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, precipitated the forced removal from western Washington and Oregon and all of California of over 110 thousand Japanese Americans, two-thirds of them native-born citizens. This has been called the defining moment of Japanese American experience.
Removal was followed by internment in ten "relocation centers" and several smaller Justice Department camps and isolation units. The internment camps, most in inhospitable desert locations, were Tule Lake and Manzanar, California; Minidoka, Idaho; Topaz, Utah; Poston and Gila River, Arizona; Heart Mountain, Wyoming; Granada, Colorado; and Rohwer and Jerome, Arkansas. The exclusion-internment process began with President Franklin Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, and was implemented through a series of military proclamations. Imposed on extremely short notice, internment was completed with the general compliance of Japanese Americans but resulted in catastrophic financial losses (probably underestimated at several hundred million dollars) and long-term emotional damage. Many Issei and Nisei refused to talk about their traumatic experience until several decades after the camps closed in 1946. The most commonly given justification for internment was "military necessity" and the fear of sabotage, but no Japanese American was ever charged with committing subversive acts, and in 1983 a congressional commission concluded that racial bias and a failure of political leadership were among the primary causes of this clear violation of constitutional rights. Redress legislation authorizing an apology and monetary compensation, strongly supported by the third-generation Sansei, was passed into law in 1988. By this time Japanese Americans were serving as members of Congress and the U.S. Senate�representation that had begun only with Hawaiian statehood in 1959.
The controversy among Japanese Americans regarding how to respond to exclusion and internment orders was long underreported but became a focus of discussion by the end of the century. In 1942 the Japanese American Citizens League, an unapologetically patriotic Nisei organization, had urged cooperation with the government; its "accommodationist" position was challenged, with little immediate effect, by individuals such as Denver journalist James Omura and the test-case lawsuits of Minoru Yasui, Gordon Hirabayashi, Fred Korematsu, and Mitsuye Endo. Similarly, the "go for broke" combat record of highly decorated (but segregated) Japanese American military units contrasted with draft resistance in the camps and the refusals to serve in the military by the so-called No-No boys, as well as violent assaults and antigovernment demonstrations in several locations, most notably Tule Lake.
The prevailing image of Japanese Americans�dominated by an ethos of hard work, cooperativeness, educational achievement, and upward mobility�contributed to the post�World War II formation of the "model minority" stereotype. This problematic representation has been sustained at the expense of individuals within the group and has been used as a point of reference in negative commentary directed toward other ethnic-minority populations. In this way Japanese Americans continue to find themselves wedged between white majorities and various other populations of non-European origin.
Immigration and Immigration Law
Japanese American National Museum
A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans and the U.S. Constitution (Smithsonian)
Documented Rights: This Land is Your Land (National Archives)
U.S. Census Bureau: Facts on the Asian Population
Immigration to the United States: Japanese
Encyclopedia of American Studies, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), s.v. "Japanese Americans" (by Neil Nakadate), http://eas-ref.press.jhu.edu/view?aid=392 (accessed August 23, 2018).
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