Japanese Americans

Japanese Americans constitute one of the oldest Asian American groups in the United States; they are also the only group to experience a decline in numbers, beginning in the 1980s. This decline is mainly because of the lack of new, large-scale immigration from Japan and because of the high rate of out-marriage, that is, interracial or intra-ethnic marriages. Japanese Americans have made substantial contributions to American literature, politics, music, law, and other areas of culture and society.

On May 5, 1806, Japanese survivors of the disabled Inawaka-maru arrived in Hawai'i, which at that time was still an independent country. According to Paul Spickard, the first attempt in 1868 to bring Japanese laborers (from Yokohama) to Hawai'i ended in failure. Another attempt, in 1869, to establish a settlement in Gold Hill, near Sacramento, California, also failed. Large-scale importation of Japanese labor to the Kingdom of Hawai'i—eventually the 50th state of the United States—began in the 1880s, after Japan legalized emigration, and when the modernizing effort of the Meiji Restoration brought unprecedented social and economic upheaval and distress to the Japanese. Farmers lost their land and merchants their businesses as the country painfully adjusted to its [Page 1259]entry into a global capitalist system by veering from inflation in the 1870s to depression in the 1880s. City wages were low, and the government attempted to suppress labor unrest.

Beside labor activists, emigrants also included political refugees opposed to Meiji policies and draft dodgers after Japan established national conscription in 1873, and then entered a series of foreign wars: the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 to 1895, and the Russo-Japanese War from 1904 to 1905.

Samurai lost their positions and had to subsist on government pensions; some ex-samurai began to emigrate later in the Meiji period, when their fortunes further declined. Recent scholarship indicates that women composed 20 percent of earlier emigration. Many of the emigrants were Christian, establishing communities in Brazil and Peru.

Japanese immigration to the continental United States took place mainly in the 1900s and 1910s, with numbers increasing after passage of the Chinese Exclusion Acts of the 1880s. They came from Hawai'i or directly from Japan, and they took the place of Chinese labor in the mines, fish canneries, and lumber industry. Increasingly, they also took up small-scale farming. The first port of entry in the United States was Seattle; eventually, Japanese migrants could be found throughout the western states.

The rise of Japan affected Americans’ perception of Japanese laborers, in that they were more highly regarded than the Chinese. The Japanese government actively sought better treatment for the Japanese in the United States. Nonetheless, virulent anti-Asian agitation resulted in the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907, which included the stipulation that the government would limit even further its issuance of travel documents to Japanese wanting to come to the United States.

In the 1910s, the number of female Japanese immigrants increased, while the total number of Japanese immigrants began to decline. With more women arriving, this first generation—the Issei—changed from predominantly male to female family units. The second generation is known as Nisei (born between 1915 and 1940), the third generation is called the Sansei, and the fourth generation is Yonsei. Immigration legislation in 1924 banned all new Japanese immigration.

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