Seven—
The Japanese Exclusion Act:
Washington, D.C.: Spring 1924

Representative Johnson Proposes an Immigration Law

The flowering cherry trees lining the banks of the Potomac River in Washington were a gift from the Japanese government in 1911 to symbolize the friendship between Japan and America. In the spring of 1924, four years after the Oahu strike, when those same Japanese trees rooted in foreign soil were scattering their petals, both houses of the U.S. Congress were debating new immigration legislation. On December 5, 1923, Rep. Albert Johnson, chairman of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, had submitted to the House a new immigration quota bill. A member of the committee for nine years and an expert on immigration issues, he might not have proposed the bill had it not been for the committee's hearings on Chinese immigrant labor. Having heard about the "Japanese conspiracy" over and over from Walter Dillingham and other Hawaiian representatives, Johnson finally decided to propose a new law prohibiting the immigration of all Asians.

Johnson had listened intently to the testimony at the hearings not because he was concerned about a temporary renewal of Chinese immigration. As a congressman from a state that was worried about "the Japanese problem," he had been interested in finding out about the Japanese in Hawaii. Despite the conveniently optimistic observations of Walter Dillingham, it was clear from the first day of the hearings that Johnson did not pay much heed to Hawaii's request for renewal of the importation of Chinese labor. As head of a U.S. eugenics research center, he was undoubtedly interested in the restriction of immigration from that perspective.

In June 1923, two months after debate on the Chinese labor question had been shelved, Albert Johnson went on an inspection tour of Hawaii, On his return to the mainland, he announced, "The Japanese problem in Hawaii remains. An attempt at solutions cannot be long deferred."^[1] Having witnessed conditions more serious than he had imagined, Johnson felt that his apprehension about the Japanese could no longer be ignored.

In 1920, when the second Oahu strike took place, more immigrants than ever before had arrived at Ellis Island from impoverished European nations in the wake of World War I. The majority, who could not speak English, came from Italy and other southern European countries and from Eastern European countries in the throes of revolution. Many of these new immigrants were also Catholic or Jewish, and many were poor. Their arrival presented many social and economic problems, and in Congress demands for a new look at immigration law grew stronger. In 1920 Johnson, as chairman of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, guided the passage of a temporary immigration quota law limited to a period of two years. Johnson's bill was an amendment to a bill proposed the year before by Senate Committee on Immigration and Naturalization chairman William Dillingham, who had chaired the hearings on the Hawaiian petition. Dillingham's bill set yearly immigration quotas at 5 percent of the immigrant population from each nation as recorded in the 1910 census. Johnson's bill in the House had decreased the quota to 3 percent, but it was vetoed by President Wilson, and it did not become law until the following year, when Warren Harding became president.

The main targets of Johnson's immigration quota were the southern and Eastern Europeans whose numbers had increased dramatically after World War I. For the first time the United States, an immigrant nation that had always opened its doors to people who had crossed the Atlantic to Ellis Island, was limiting the number it would let in. Representative Johnson became the central figure in the formulation of a new immigration law, to be enacted in 1924, when the time limit on the quota system would run out. The enthusiasm he had shown at the hearings on the renewal of the importation of Chinese labor stemmed from his interest in a new immigration law.

In early December 1923, six months after his trip to Hawaii, Johnson submitted a new immigration bill to the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. It proposed to lower quotas to 2 percent and to

base them on the 1890 census figures. This was clearly meant to give an advantage to the Anglo-Saxon Protestants who were then the majority in the population. The Johnson bill also stipulated "the absolute exclusion of the aliens ineligible to citizenship." This provision meant total exclusion of all Asians, including the Japanese.

On the day after the Johnson bill was submitted to the House Committee, the Senate Committee on Immigration and Naturalization proposed an amendment to the Federal Constitution that would deprive the right of citizenship to children born in the United States to aliens ineligible for citizenship. This amendment would mean a denial of citizenship to second-generation Asians, including Japanese American nisei. The amendment, proposed by a senator from Washington, was immediately voted down. Sen. William Dillingham had passed away a few months earlier.

Concerned about these actions in Congress, the Japanese ambassador, Masanao Hanihara, who had arrived a few days earlier, met with Secretary of State Hughes. With the Christmas recess approaching, movement on the immigration law slowed down in both houses, but on January 12, 1924, after the Congress reconvened, Foreign Minister Keishiro^[*] Matsui cabled Hanihara directing him to tell Hughes that even pro-American elements in Japan were denouncing the "Japanese Exclusion Act." Three days later Hanihara handed Hughes a memorandum noting the anxiety felt by the Japanese government in its expectation of an outcry of public opinion in Japan should Congress pass Johnson's new immigration bill. Hughes, also apprehensive about what was going on in Congress, replied that the American government would pay close attention to the matter.

After some revisions, Johnson's immigration quota bill cleared the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization on January 31, and on February 1 it was sent to the House floor as the new immigration bill. Hughes sent a message to chairman Johnson and others urging reconsideration. He expressed concern that the Japanese people, who tended to react in a volatile manner to pressure from other nations, would undoubtedly express anger at what they would perceive as a national humiliation, and that would nullify the outcome of the Washington Conference.

The new immigration bill was front page news in the Japanese-language newspapers in Hawaii, but the Japanese community still perceived the bill as a "fire on a far shore," of no great concern to them. They were embroiled in the Japanese-language schools issue, and they

were excited about the celebration of the marriage of the crown prince of Japan. At the grand ceremony held in the garden of the Japanese consulate in Honolulu, decorated with large crossed rising sun flags, crowds of Japanese residents spilled through a gate draped with red and white bunting inching their way to the room displaying a photograph of the imperial couple. In the next room Consul General Keiichi Yamazaki, decked out in his gold-braided dress uniform, received their congratulations.

Ambassador Hanihara's "Veiled Threat"

The Senate as well as the House was considering several new immigration bills. On February 16, Sen. David A. Reed, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, proposed a bill not very different from the House's Johnson bill for consideration by the Senate Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. Secretary of State Hughes sent a message urging its chairman, LeBaron B. Colt, to heed his concerns. The committee hearings on the Senate bill reached a climax during the four days from March 11 to March 15, when witnesses from various circles testified.

Sen. Samuel M. Shortridge of California, who took over where the late Senator Dillingham had left off, was active in pushing through this immigration legislation. Virgil S. McClatchy, the first witness to appear, was introduced by Shortridge as "a gentleman who has devoted many years of earnest and intelligent study to this problem."^[2] McClatchy began by saying that the new immigration bill had the wholehearted support of the American Legion, the American Federation of Labor, the Grange, and the Native Sons of the Golden West. "The yellow and brown races do not intermarry with the white race," he said, "and their heredity, standards of living, ideas, psychology, all combine to make them unassimilable with the white race."

When Colt pointed out that members of the black race were admitted to citizenship, McClatchy replied, "[This is] on account of conditions which I shall not consider at this time." He then spoke at length on his views of the Japanese.

I have a very high regard for the character and ability of the Japanese nation and the Japanese people. And I realize that it is in effect their strong racial characteristics which make them so dangerous a factor if admitted to this country as permanent residents. [I.e., even U.S.-born second-generation Japanese were not assimilable because they had been raised by Japanese parents.]

With great pride of race, they have no idea of assimilating in the sense of

amalgamation. They never cease to be Japanese. They do not come to this country with any desire or any intent to lose their racial or national identity. They come here specifically and professedly for the purpose of colonizing and establishing here permanently the proud Yamato race.

Chairman Colt responded with some irritation: "Here is this great question of racial discrimination. Now, I thought Japan said to the United States, 'Don't pass a law which would denote our inferiority. Leave it to our honor' and that that was the essence of the Gentlemen's Agreement—that is, the absence of a statute of exclusion, leaving it to the honor of Japan." Colt indicated that it was necessary to pay careful attention to relations with Japan. But McClatchy, citing population statistics, did not budge from advocating total exclusion of Japanese immigrants. "Hawaii will be hopelessly Japanese," he said. "What has happened in Hawaii has already happened in some districts of California."

James Phelan, former senator from California and current chairman of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, appeared a few days later. He also commented on the conditions he had observed in Hawaii when he went there to investigate at Dillingham's invitation. "The people of California object to the Japanese," he concluded, "and I say it involves the whole question—because of racial and economic reasons."

For several days testimony was heard from those strenuously opposing the new immigration bill, including businessmen who opposed it on the grounds that it made no sense to restrict the source of a cheap labor force. Others opposed the bill because it violated the principle that the United States was a country that did not discriminate on the basis of race and gave equal opportunity to people of all countries. Well-respected academics and Christian leaders, such as Quakers, testified against the bill. Among them were missionaries from Hawaii who had lived many years in Japan. When Senator Shortridge said one of them had allegedly been "employed by the Japanese government," the hearings erupted in a heated clash between supporters and opponents of the bill.

The letter from Secretary of State Hughes was read. It stated, "My desire was to avoid an unfortunate violation of our international obligations by provision in the bill which I believed to be inconsistent therewith." The Italian and Romanian governments had expressed objections, but it was Japan that Hughes meant when he wrote of "an unfortunate violation of our international obligations."

In early April, after revision, the Johnson Reed Immigration Quota Law was sent to the floor of both houses. The bill did not have the full

support of the administration. As it undermined the idea that the United States is an immigrant nation, neither could it expect overwhelming support in Congress. What turned Congress in favor of the bill was a letter of protest sent by Ambassador Hanihara to Secretary of State Hughes on April 10, 1924.

Masanao Hanihara, forty-eight, was an experienced diplomat who was fluent in English. He had served in Washington for eleven years and had assisted Foreign Minister Jutaro^[*] Komura in the negotiation of the Portsmouth Treaty that ended the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. Hanihara had also dealt with immigration issues as consul general in San Francisco. Promoted to vice foreign minister, he had been a member of the Japanese delegation to the Washington Conference two years earlier, and he had been on board the Taiyo-maru^[*] with Honolulu Consul General Chonosuke^[*] Yada on his return to Japan.

Hanihara's letter to Hughes at the direction of Foreign Minister Matsui began by referring to the Gentlemen's Agreement. Under the agreement, he said, Japan "voluntarily undertook to adopt and enforce certain administrative measures designed to check the emigration to the United States of Japanese laborers." It was reached because discriminatory immigration legislation proposed on the part of the United States would naturally "wound the national susceptibilities of the Japanese people." The letter went on:

The important question is whether Japan as a nation is or is not entitled to the proper respect and consideration of other nations. In other words, the Japanese Government asks of the United States Government simply that proper consideration ordinarily given by one nation to the self respect of another, which after all forms the basis of amicable international intercourse throughout the civilized world. . . . In other words, the manifest object of the [section denying citizenship to ineligible aliens] is to single out Japanese as a nation, stigmatizing them as unworthy and undesirable in the eyes of the American people. . . . It is indeed difficult to believe that it can be the intention of the people of your great country, who always stand for high principles of justice and fair play in the intercourse of nations.

In his conclusion Hanihara reminded Hughes that he had pointed out "the grave consequences [emphasis added] which the enactment of the measure retaining that particular provision would inevitably bring upon the otherwise happy and mutually advantageous relations between our two countries."

It was this line of the letter that hardliners seized on to push the new immigration bill through both houses of Congress. Senator Shortridge,

who had introduced McClatchy, president of the Oriental Exclusion League of California, as a "true patriot" at the Senate hearings, was the first to question the phrase "grave consequences." Others in both the House and the Senate suggested that "grave consequences" amounted to a veiled threat by the Japanese government, and the furor became front page news in papers around the country.

Taken aback, on April 18, Foreign Minister Matsui directed Ambassador Hanihara to clarify his meaning to Secretary of State Hughes and to announce publicly:

We did not intend it to mean war or a threat. The Japanese Exclusion Act tramples on the prestige of our nation, and gives to Japanese citizens' minds the impression of deep resentment that can never be eradicated. As a result the Japanese government's effor. . . . to maintain good relations between Japan and the U.S. will be nullified. . . . This is of grave consequences for the Imperial government which has been upholding the ideal of harmony among the peoples of the world and placing great weight on Japan-U.S. relations toward that end. This is the context which the term "grave consequences" was used.

The Japanese government was certain that President Calvin Coolidge, who had taken office after Harding's death, would invoke his veto power to block the new immigration bill if it passed. It was also proposed that Eiichi Shibusawa, who was highly respected in American political and economic circles, be sent as a special envoy to Washington, but in an era when it was not yet possible to travel rapidly by airplane, he would not have been able to arrive in time to have any effect.

In the end, the "veiled threat" resulted in the passage of the Johnson Reed Immigration Quota Act in both houses of Congress with overwhelming majorities: in the House 308 to 58 and in the Senate 69 to 9. In the Senate Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Colt, its chairman, was one of the nine senators who voted against the bill. Some politicians in Congress, who accurately saw through the motives behind the hearings on the renewal of the importation of Chinese labor, were not swayed by the virulent anti-Japanese criticisms by the Hawaiian sugar planters that were fueled by self-interest. But President Coolidge did not use his veto power, dashing the hopes of the Japanese government. Nineteen twenty-four was a presidential election year, and competition within the Republican party was particularly intense. Having been thrust unexpectedly into the presidency, Coolidge had an advantage, but his power base was not yet solid. Yielding to strong pressures from West Coast congressmen, President Coolidge, despite Hughes's

urging, was unable to come up with a compromise plan. The prospect of a national election, which jolted American politics once every four years, was the backdrop for the passage of the new immigration law that took effect on July 1, 1924.

Protest in Japan

Despite his advancing years, Reverend Takie Okumura of the Makiki Church continued to promote his Americanization movement. After the passage of the new immigration act, Okumura distributed a pamphlet entitled "What Do We Do Now?" The pamphlet read, in part:

It is important to resolve to cultivate one's own destiny by oneself. . . . There are two paths we can take. (1) Pack up and make a neat parting from Hawaii to return home, and start anew in places like South America or Manchuria. (2) Patiently endure until the U.S. awakens to justice while patiently showing the results of assimilation to make efforts until Americans recognize that we are essential elements to a prosperous society.

I am taking the second path. On this occasion we should reflect deeply on our own conduct and become fully awakened to our circumstances in order to "do in Rome as the Romans do." We should be as the smile of the dandelion that blooms even when stepped upon.

The Japanese immigrant community in Hawaii reacted calmly to the new immigration law. This pleased even Okumura, who had often criticized the immigrants. "The Japanese language newspapers on the islands treated this issue calmly and seriously, and their discourse did not go beyond the bounds of common sense," he noted. In contrast, reports from Japanese consulates on the West Coast noted that passage of the law was discouraging news to local Japanese residents. The San Francisco consul general reported, "As to psychological impact, for most of the general residents it is very difficult for them to avoid being dejected." As most immigrants already had brought over their families, however, "the actual impact was felt most strongly by some 2,000 unmarried males who still had the possibility of becoming married."^[3]

The Japanese community in Hawaii felt this "actual impact" less than the Japanese on the West Coast. For some time Japanese had constituted close to half of the Hawaiian population, and immigrants no longer needed to seek marriage partners from Japan. The total exclusion of Japanese immigrants posed no immediate threat to the influence of the Japanese in Hawaii. As usual, the Hawaii hochi^[*] printed inflammatory editorials but showed no intention of launching a movement to protest

the law; and the Hochi^[*] 's president, Kinzaburo^[*] Makino, was still busily involved with the Japanese-language school dispute.

When the new immigration act passed, 88 of the 146 Japanese-language schools in Hawaii had joined the suit led by Makino. In the spring of 1924 these schools formed the Honolulu Education Association (Honolulu Kyoikukai^[*] ) and decided to commission scholars in Japan to write new textbooks suitable for Hawaiian nisei. Indeed, the schools were in the midst of arguing over who should be sent to Japan for this purpose. To the Japanese in Hawaii, the immediate issue was the Japanese-language school question rather than developments in the capital. It was much easier for them to understand how this issue affected their rights than to understand the ramifications of the new immigration law.

It was not the Japanese immigrants who opposed the passage of the new immigration act in Hawaii. The first voices of protest rose from the haole community, not only from expected sources such as Reverend Palmer and the University of Hawaii's president Dean but also from those who had not been known to be protective toward the Japanese, including members of the territorial legislature and many sugar planters. In fact, one of the first organizations to send a telegram of protest to President Coolidge was the mission board whose predecessors had sent the ancestors of the sugar planters to Hawaii.

Takie Okumura, who had begun his Americanization movement in 1921, wrote in 1922, "[The] bad feelings left by the 1920 strike have not disappeared" and "[The planters] held no little feeling of displeasure toward me." By 1924, when the immigration law was passed, this attitude was greatly improved, and he felt a "spirit of cooperation" throughout Hawaii. Although the Hawaiian governing elite, with the sugar planters as its apex, attempted to "teach the upstart Japanese a lesson" after the 1920 strike by renewing the immigration of Chinese laborers, the complete exclusion of all Japanese immigrants went far beyond what they had intended.

In the summer of 1923, when anti-Japanese activists from California, former Senator Phelan and McClatchy, then Congressmen Raker and Johnson, visited Hawaii to investigate the "crisis" in Hawaii, the English-language press was fed up with their anti-Japanese agitation. Even the Honolulu Advertiser , the original proponent of the Japanese conspiracy theory, declared sarcastically, "'We are going to be saved.' Congressman Raker and Johnson are going to do it! From what? 'Save' us

rather from the snap judgement of these little men of narrow vision and imperfect understanding!"^[4]

For the Hawaiian governing class, despite the labor strife, Hawaii remained the paradise of the Pacific that had prospered by following the Christian principles taught by their forebears and the traditional aloha spirit. The kamaaina were offended to have their "paradise" tarred by the same brush as California with its Oriental Exclusion League and other racist groups. Were they upset that while they had thought they were using the Californians for Hawaii's end, it was they who had been used by the anti-Japanese movement on the West Coast?

Whatever the case, the Japanese community in Hawaii, its attention absorbed by the Japanese-language school furor, left it to the haoles to protest the new immigration law. Only Walter Dillingham and the other members of the Hawaii Emergency Labor Commission maintained silence on Congress's decision.

Reverend Okumura was appalled by the reaction to the immigration act in Japan: "The Japanese exclusion immigration act has excited public opinion to such an extent that calls for war against the U.S. are heard in Japan. Such anti-American feelings and movements are minutely reported." He saw early on the danger that could befall Japanese immigrants such as himself: "There are those who are showing patriotic indignation and resentment in vain, engaging in radical arguments and ridiculous movements, even those who behave shamefully in an attempt to commit suicide to die in indignation. . . . Some call for the dispatch of warships to repatriate the Japanese residents."

The Japanese in Hawaii began to see the new immigration act as a "national humiliation" only after feelings of victimization reached them from their homeland. Terasaki's diary did not mention the reactions of the Japanese in Hawaii, but it did note on nearly a daily basis the reactions in Japan. On May 27, the day after the president signed the immigration law, he wrote, "In Japan, public opinion has erupted on the Japanese Exclusion Act, and military troops are clamoring." Five days later he wrote, "Upset by the Immigration Act, six people have committed suicide."

On May 31, more than four hundred Shinto priests from all over Japan gathered at Meiji Shrine in Tokyo to pledge their "opposition to the U.S. Japanese Exclusion Act." On the same day, a man in his forties, leaving a note signed by "an anonymous citizen of the Empire of Japan"

that called on the American people to "repent" (hansei ), slit his throat with a razor in the shrubbery across the street from the American Embassy in Tokyo. The Metropolitan Police Agency refused the request of the Kokuryukai^[*] (Amur River Society), a "patriotic" society, to claim the corpse of this "indignant martyr," but his funeral on June 8 was attended by some eight hundred prominent politicians, military personnel, and businessmen, including the liberal politician Ryutaro^[*] Nagai and several army generals. Funerary wreaths were sent by Mitsuru Toyama^[*] , a venerable right-wing nationalist, as well as by the leaders of the two major political parties, Takaaki Kato^[*] , president of the Kenseikai, and Korekiyo Takahashi, president of the Seiyukai^[*] . An anti-American rally organized by political parties to "display the resolute national unity of the Japanese people against the measure taken by the U.S." had already been held at the sumo wrestling stadium in Tokyo.

On the eve of the funeral, a group of "patriots" invaded the newly completed Imperial Hotel, the first international-class hotel in Japan, designed by the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright and considered one of his masterpieces. One of the registered guests was Yasutaro^[*] Soga^[*] , president of the Nippu jiji in Honolulu, who had been staying at the hotel for some two months on a visit to his homeland. On the evening of June 7 a dance party attended by more than one hundred Japanese and foreigners in the hotel's main banquet room was disrupted when a group of about a dozen men calling themselves adherents of the ultranationalist Taigyosha^[*] barged in wearing crested Japanese-style full kimono dress. Unsheathing swords, they engaged in some menacing swordplay, danced a sword dance, and demanded that the band play the Japanese national anthem. Some foreign women guests fainted dead away in their formal gowns. This "Imperial Hotel Incident," reported by the Associated Press, appeared in newspapers across America. Ambassador Hanihara cabled from Washington, "This story, published in newspapers with eye-catching headlines calling it an insult to Americans in Japan, has stirred great attention."^[5]

Since he had been out late to dinner elsewhere, Soga had not witnessed the incident, but he did note that "those on the hotel staff seemed to be keeping it as quiet as they could" and saw it as "an expression of the pent-up anti-American feelings among the general Japanese populace."^[6]

The Tokyo newspapers (Niroku shinpo^[*] , Tokyo nichinichi shinbun, Tokyo maiyu^[*] shinbun, Tokyo yukan^[*] shinpo, Chuo^[*] shinbun, Yomiuri shinbun, Kokumin shinbun, Jiji shinpo, Hochi^[*] shinbun, Tokyo asahi ,

Chugai^[*] shogyo^[*] shinbun, Manchoho^[*] , Yamato shinbun, Miyako shinbun ) had issued a joint statement condemning the "injustice and unfairness of the Japanese exclusion act" on April 21, a month before the president signed it. A rally organized by a league of university students in Tokyo issued a statement promising "to uphold the dignity of Imperial Japan to our utmost," and meetings protesting the law were held by university students in other cities.

Soho^[*] Tokutomi, founder of the Kokumin shinbun , and considered the dean of the press, called July 1, the day that the new immigration law went into effect, a "day of national indignation" and urged a patriotic anti-American patriotic Asianism. Kanzo^[*] Uchimura, a major Christian intellectual and founder of the nondenominational "no-church" movement, declared himself "angered at the trampling of universal justice" and urged an anti-American boycott: "At all costs, do not go to America, do not use American goods, do not accept American aid, do not read Americans writings, do not enter American churches."

The April 21 Tokyo newspapers' statement urged the exclusion of American materials and contractors from the reconstruction work on Tokyo and Yokohama. The Great Kanto^[*] Earthquake had destroyed 220,000 homes in Tokyo the previous summer but reconstruction was not moving very fast due to delays in official action. Moreover, prices were soaring, and children were being abandoned because of unemployment and lack of jobs. The passage of the new American immigration law provided an outlet for popular dissatisfaction about the domestic situation in Japan.

The magazine Tokyo's September issue ran a special entitled "Japan and America: Should They Fight?" Opinions from artists and entertainers were presented to reflect the voices of the general public. Ritsuko Mori, an actress, said, "Really, if our country were richer and we had more confidence, we wouldn't have to bear such indignity. Though I'm a woman, it makes me angry." And Hakusan Kanda, a professional storyteller, said, "Discriminatory treatment of races is something strange, isn't it. Of course, cats and dogs dislike each other. When the Taiko^[*] [Hideyoshi] was ruling Japan, there was no United States of America. It seems that the newcomer country has not yet really become cultivated."

An anti-American mood spread rapidly through the country, almost as though it had been orchestrated. Starting with local provincial political and commercial groups, it spread to student groups, labor groups, and religious groups. Citizens' rallies passed resolutions to "stop the im-

porting of American goods, and effect a thorough boycott of American goods," to "abolish the importing of American cotton," or to "absolutely prohibit the viewing of American movies." The following anti-American rallies were just some of those held during the two weeks following the passage of the new immigration act: Asahikawa citizens rally; Otaru citizens rally; Muroran citizens rally; anti-American citizens rally sponsored by the Hakodate city chapter of the veterans association; lecture meeting sponsored by the Muroran Mainichi Shinbun newspaper company; lecture meeting sponsored by Hirosaki Higher School students; Kofu^[*] reformists' standing committee; Tsuchiura City, Ibaraki prefecture, citizens rally; Akashi citizens rally; lecture meeting sponsored by the Yokohama Christian youth group; lecture meeting to impeach the U.S. Congress sponsored by the Osaka Kinno^[*] Resshi party; lecture meeting to criticize Japan-U.S. issues sponsored by Kanazawa city Christian pastors; lecture meeting sponsored by Toyohashi town Christian pastors; emergency meeting of the Kanazawa City young lawyers group; Sakai City lecture meeting; Omiya^[*] town lecture meeting; lecture meeting sponsored by the Kawagoe chamber of commerce and commerce and industry association; lecture meeting on Japan-U.S. problems held jointly by the cities of Ueda and Nagano; lecture meeting sponsored by the Osaka port construction youth group with the support of Kyokuto^[*] Renmei Kyokai^[*] (Far Eastern Federated Association); Maebashi City lecture meeting; lecture meeting the Kobe Asians Federation; Koriyama^[*] town, Fukushima prefecture, lecture meeting; Nagasaki citizens rally; Sasebo newspaper reporters lecture meeting.

Those who resented American criticism of Japan's Siberian intervention and its demands for special interests in China used the passage of the new immigration law as an opportunity to attack pro-American elements in Japan. The anti-American movement in Japan spread, buoyed by inflammatory rhetoric: "national disgrace," "righteous indignation," "inhumanity," and "outrage against the Yamato spirit." At the time of the Washington Conference, many patriotic groups held rallies in Ueno and Shiba parks in Tokyo to protest the arms reduction agreement. It was almost like a rehearsal for this new wave of intense anti-American protest.

What had most alarmed the HSPA during the 1920 strike was the nationalistic solidarity of the Japanese laborers. The response in Japan to a new immigration act that besmirched the honor of the Japanese people

seemed to underscore this concern. An extreme nationalism that saw America as its enemy spread like mass hysteria throughout Japan. There was a general public backlash against a cultural and social infatuation with America, from its sought after consumer goods such as Ford motor cars through Hollywood movies and baseball to the lifestyles of the moga mobo , the "modern girls" and "modern boys" who embraced Western fads.

As Goro^[*] Sogobeya, an actor, said,

There is too much of an American wind blowing in Japan these days: it is America first and America second. When it seems that the sun doesn't rise or set without America, we need to reconsider our situation. We can't help but have misgivings about the future of our Japanese state. The America we yearned for, longed for, and adored, has rebuffed us strongly, showing us that they dislike us and are anti-Japanese. Those of us who have even a smidgen of manly feelings must wake up to reality. I think the anti-Japanese issue in America is a good lesson for those Japanese who have come down with a fever of excessive adoration for America.^[7]

Meanwhile in the United States, politicians in both houses of Congress focused on the coming election. Apart from the Imperial Hotel incident, the extreme Japanese reactions to the new immigration law hardly attracted their interest. But on July 1, 1924, the day the immigration act took effect, the American stars and stripes flown on the U.S. Embassy grounds in Tokyo was pulled down and stolen. (The perpetrator was arrested in Osaka, and the flag was returned a week later.) Former ambassador to the United States, Kijuro^[*] Shidehara, who had become the new foreign minister, immediately sent to the U.S. government an expression of regret at this "unfortunate incident."

This apology was not enough to satisfy many on the West Coast, especially the Hearst newspapers, which used the incident as new evidence to justify their anti-Japanese position. It was Japanese immigrants on the West Coast, especially those in California, who bore the brunt of the American reaction. Shortly after the American flag incident, two Japanese were beaten to death in San Pedro, outside Los Angeles. In the same area, a large mob attacked the house of a Japanese automobile dealer and beat up the man and his wife. In a town north of San Francisco, a mob of some thirty people with rifles and pistols in hand forced themselves into the building of a Japanese cannery contractor, firing about a hundred shots into a shed where twenty-five Japanese laborers were sleeping. It was said that the local Ku Klux Klan was involved in this in-

cident. The San Francisco consulate reported that it was "miraculous" that there were no injuries.^[8] The Japanese consulate in Honolulu, in contrast, reported no incidents of violence directed at Japanese immigrants because of the new law, nor were there any other anti-Japanese incidents on the islands.

It is interesting to note that Japanese residents in Japan's colonial territories were no less fervid in their patriotic reaction to the immigration law than their compatriots in the home islands. Patriotic rallies were sponsored by Japanese nationalist groups in Korea and other overseas territories. But the Japanese colonial authorities were more concerned about the reaction of their colonial subjects than about the actions of Japanese residents. Any sign of anti-Japanese sentiment in a powerful country like the United States was bound not only to weaken Japan's image but also to encourage anticolonial nationalists in the colonies.

Despite official efforts at suppression, independence movements were stirring in Korea, supported by the overseas Korean community. The majority of Koreans overseas were laborers and political refugees who had emigrated to Hawaii and the United States, and their enmity toward Japan was also aimed at Japanese immigrants. During the 1920 strike Korean laborers, many of them said to have been political refugees, were quick to go to work as scabs for the plantations.

Sangoro^[*] Yanagiya, a comic storyteller, expressed his reactions to the passage of the immigration law: "This is a time when we should endure all things and wait for peace. . . . However, in the unfortunate instance that diplomatic relations are broken, it won't be settled by war against just Germany, it will be a major war of the entire world."^[9]

What "national indignity" had the Japanese as a nation risen up to cry out against? What "justice" did Japan demand, even though it had brought Korea and Taiwan under its rule, trampling human rights with military boots?

The 1924 immigration act restricted immigrants from all countries on a quota basis. Only immigrants from Asia were "aliens ineligible to citizenship" excluded entirely. The law was clearly racially discriminatory, pushed through by hard-line anti-Japanese congressmen from California and other West Coast states. Yet Japan itself had implemented racially discriminatory policies toward its own neighbors in Asia.

The Japanese government did not protest the new immigration act on behalf of all Asians, nor did it base its appeal on the humanitarianism

embodied in America's founding spirit of equality and fairness. Rather than confidently advance an argument based on ethical principles, the Japanese simply asserted they should be given the same "special treatment" as Caucasians. While affirming that the immigration act was racially discriminatory, the Japanese government insisted that an exception be made for Japan. Since American immigration policy had always given special treatment to Japanese in contrast to other Asians, the Japanese government simply pushed for recognition of its special rights by emphasizing its loyalty and friendship to the United States.

But American politics no longer permitted such an appeal. The burgeoning anti-Japanese movement on the West Coast, fueled by charges of Hawaii's Japanese problem made by the Hawaiian sugar planters who wanted to import Chinese laborers in the wake of the 1920 strike, had made it difficult for Congress to give Japan the same special treatment it had in the past. The failure of diplomatic exchanges between Japan and the United States on the new immigration act revealed not merely a gap in perception but also Japan's misperception of the situation.

The passage of the 1924 immigration law set loose an unhealthy nationalism in Japan. Although the law used the term "aliens ineligible to citizenship," and it avoided referring to the "Japanese," Foreign Ministry documents immediately called it the "Japanese exclusion act." The Japanese press followed suit, reporting on the law as though it prohibited only Japanese immigrants. The predictable reaction of the general Japanese public was that the American Congress wanted to shut out Japanese immigrants. New right-wing groups, focusing only on Japan and attacking the law as a "national humiliation," formed to take advantage of the public's emotional reaction, and older right-wing organizations like the Kokuryukai^[*] tried to expand their bases.^[10]

Shortly after President Coolidge signed the 1924 immigration law, the director of the Europe/America Bureau in the Foreign Ministry received a document entitled "An Opinion on Establishing Our Basic Foreign Policy Principles on the Occasion of the Japanese Exclusion Act." "While the Japanese Exclusion Act was a great error on the part of the U.S., I believe it provides Japan with a heaven-sent opportunity ," it began.

Should we let this opportunity go by, it would inevitably mean the perishing of Japan and the Japanese people. . . . I rejoice greatly because I believe this occasion points the way to Japan's future path. . . . Now is the time for the Japanese people to stop riding on the coattails of the Anglo-Saxons and feed-

ing at the same trough. Instead, Japan should bravely define itself as a savior of the Asian people, and expend our utmost sincere efforts from a humanitarian position. . . . It is clearly folly to confront the U.S. as an enemy when we do not clash on vital interests. However, we should strongly protest the Japanese Exclusion Act. This protest should not simply be based on technicalities, such as a treaty violation, but rather emphasize the racial discrimination inherent in the act.

The real purpose of the protest, the document concluded, was not the United States: "The target is countries other than the U.S., specifically in Asia , for whom we should use this as a 'trick' to unite the peoples of Asia."

The author of this memorandum, Tadakazu Ohashi^[*] , was a thirty-one-year-old diplomat who had graduated from Tokyo University and was serving as Japanese consul in Seattle. Following service in Seattle, Ohashi was posted to the Chinese mainland, eventually serving as consul general in Harbin. When Manchukuo was established in 1934 he became diplomatic affairs section chief of the state ministry, then director of the foreign affairs bureau and councillor of the foreign affairs bureau. One year before war broke out between Japan and the United States, he became vice minister in the Foreign Ministry in Japan.

The suggestions of one young diplomat could hardly have swayed Japanese policy, but one thing is certain: the ultranationalistic reaction, heightened at a stroke by the passage of the 1924 immigration act, made more plausible the utopian vision of an Asia united under the Japanese emperor. Distrust of America that took root in 1924 began to spread, and the saber-rattling of the military grew louder. The public reaction to the "Japanese Exclusion Act" was an important psychological step leading toward the epithet "American and British devils" (kichiku Bei Ei ) that took hold in Japan after the outbreak of the Pacific War seventeen years later in 1941.

Yasutaro^[*] Soga^[*] of the Nippu jiji , who learned about passage of the law while in Tokyo, was angered at the time by the stamp of "humiliation that the Japanese people felt at being slapped in the face." Yet, after he had completed a tour of China and Korea, Soga's reaction changed. "As soon as I entered Korea," he later recalled, "I felt great apprehension about Japan's political policies. As I went to Manchuria and China, I was forced to think whether Japan's foreign policy toward its neighbors would be able to keep peace in its current form."^[11] After Soga returned to Honolulu a month after the law passed, he thought, "I was struck by

how beautiful Honolulu was." It was then that Soga^[*] reaffirmed his determination to live out his life in Hawaii.

The Supreme Court Denies the Defendants' Appeal

To the residents of Hilo, on the island of Hawaii, the eruption of Kilauea was of more concern than the congressional debate over the new immigration act. The eruption was so dangerous that residents on a part of Olaa Plantation located south of Kilauea were ordered to evacuate. In mid-May another major eruption sent a river of lava flowing down from its fissures. Observers near the mouth of the volcano were killed by the spewing rocks and molten ash. By June the volcano had quieted down, and there were fewer days when the sky was gray with ash over Waiakea Plantation.

After Tsurunosuke Koyama, one of the 1920 strike leaders, went to prison for his part in the Sakamaki house dynamiting, his thirty-six-year-old wife, Teru, ran their store at Waiakea. Outwardly, Teru was a typical Japanese woman—soft-spoken, with a fair-skinned, round face—but she had a keen eye for business and was a good employer, so she was able to keep the Koyama store profitable while Tsurunosuke was away. Following her husband, who was baptized while in prison, Teru also became a Christian. Her younger brother, a well-known baker in Honolulu, had become a Christian years before and had been donating surplus bread from his bakery to the Oahu prison each day.

Magotaro^[*] Hiruya, the second son of Teru's youngest brother, had come from Teru's hometown, Nakatsu in Kyushu^[*] , to go to school in Honolulu while staying with his uncle, whose bakery he later inherited. He recalled how his Aunt Teru visited Honolulu nearly every week while Tsurunosuke was in the Oahu prison. The Koyamas were known at Waiakea Plantation as a loving couple. Teru's sole luxury was the kimonos that a dealer brought to the store, and Tsurunosuke gladly bought what she wanted. Even a half century later, her nephew could clearly remember Teru, dressed in one of these kimonos, dashing off to the prison. On each visit, Teru carried as many box lunches or sweets as she could for her husband to share with his friends. Those like Noboru Tsutsumi, who had no families to visit them, must have looked forward to Teru's visit as eagerly as her husband did.

Ala Moana, a major shopping center crowded with Japanese tourists, was one of Walter Dillingham's business projects, but in the 1920s it was

the site of a refuse dump where inmates from the Oahu prison were often sent to work. When visiting her husband, Teru Koyama preferred the garbage dump to the prison visiting room. The Hawaiian guards were willing to look the other way for a bit of money.

Since Tsurunosuke had been drawn into the 1920 labor struggle as a community leader on Waiakea Plantation, Teru never felt ashamed being the wife of a prisoner. Even so, after chatting with her husband about the store as they sat on the beach near the garbage dump, Teru would feel renewed energy when she returned by boat to Hilo.

Perhaps Teru heard from her husband about the final decision made in Washington on the Sakamaki house dynamiting case. On June 2, 1924, one week after President Coolidge signed the new immigration act, the U.S. Supreme Court case no. 463. The case of I. Goto, et al., Appellants, was summarily denied. The Japanese community in Hawaii showed no interest in this final decision.

What is most noteworthy about the Supreme Court decision on the Sakamaki dynamiting case is not the decision itself, which was expected. More significant is that the plaintiff's brief was not submitted by a territorial official. Rather, it was submitted under the signature of HSPA attorney Frank Thompson, making it amply clear that the territory had brought charges against the leaders of the Federation of Japanese Labor involved in the 1920 Oahu strike under pressure from the sugar planters.

The expenses later charged to the territory of Hawaii by the Supreme Court for the appeal on the Sakamaki case totaled $118.40: $53.40 for administrative expenses, $45 for printing costs, $20 for summary preparation by the attorney. Since the trial had been for the HSPA's benefit, these expenses should have been billed to the HSPA, but they were submitted to the accounting department of the territory of Hawaii. What the thirteen defendants, including Goto^[*] , owed remains unknown.

In early March 1925, nine months after the Supreme Court decision, Pablo Manlapit, the president of the Filipino Labor Union, joined Tsutsumi and the other former Japanese federation leaders at the Oahu prison. Just before the passage of the new immigration law, another major labor struggle had broken out in the cane fields. No doubt the new strike was what caused many Hawaiian sugar planters to send telegrams to Washington protesting the exclusion of Japanese immigrants by the new law. During the new strike the planters had to rely on the Japanese laborers, whom they looked at with new eyes. In contrast to the 1920 strike, the new strike, at the very least, was not a "bloody struggle."

In early April 1924 Pablo Manlapit, supported by George Wright's Hawaii Central Labor Council, led the Filipino laborers on Oahu plantations in a strike for wage increases. The number of Filipino laborers had increased since the 1920 strike, and more than 19,000 Filipinos worked in the cane fields. Outnumbering the Japanese laborers by 6,000, the Filipinos had become the largest ethnic group in the sugar plantation workforce. At its annual meeting in late 1920, the HSPA had decided not to rely on one nationality for its labor force in order to avoid a repetition of the 1920 strike. By the time they realized it, however, the Filipino workers had the majority.

The HSPA did not take the threat of a Filipino strike seriously. Because very few Filipinos in Hawaii were financially successful, the source of support funds for the strikers was limited. With all the federation leaders in jail, the organization had been destroyed, and the planters expected that Japanese workers would not sympathize with a strike led by Filipinos. Even as the strike spread to all the islands, the Japanese continued to work in the fields. The Filipino laborers had to carry on the fight by themselves, but in contrast to the disciplined solidarity of the Japanese in 1920, the Filipinos were fragmented, and violent incidents broke out frequently as they fought among themselves along ethnic lines.

What dealt the final blow to the 1924 strike was a confrontation with plantation security guards in mid-September. The Filipinos were armed with rifles as well as large hoes and knives used at work. It was the most violent labor clash in Hawaiian history. Four security guards and sixteen Filipino laborers were killed, and many others were wounded. One hundred sixty-two striking laborers were arrested, 72 of whom were convicted. Since the Philippines were American territory, the HSPA could not claim that the 1924 strike involved a foreign conspiracy. It was Pablo Manlapit who became their sole target. The HSPA aimed at arresting Manlapit and knocking the props out from his supporter, George Wright's Hawaii Central Labor Council.

Manlapit was arrested in a case involving the death of a Filipino laborer's child on Waipahu Plantation. The father of the dead child, who testified as a prosecution witness, said that Manlapit had forced him to tell others that the child had died because the company told him if he did not go back to work on the plantation, his gravely ill child would not be treated at the plantation hospital. It was revealed later that the father gave false testimony in return for a payment of $110, but Manlapit had already been found guilty of suborning perjury. After his release

from prison two years later, the territory of Hawaii ordered his deportation. Since his children were born in the United States, he chose to go to California rather than return to the Philippines. Five years later, after the strike furor had died down, he returned to Hawaii and attempted to rebuild the Filipino Labor Union that had fallen apart after he had entered prison. This time he was arrested for "suspicion of fraud" and was forcibly deported to the Philippines.

Noboru Tsutsumi Returns Home

For the first time in three years an Imperial Navy training fleet visited Hawaii in late February 1925. The fleet, which was secretly gathering intelligence on the United States as a potential enemy, had sailed to the Marianas and other South Seas islands, the Panama Canal, Central America, and along the west coast of the United States to Vancouver, Canada, and was on its way home. The Japanese community in Hawaii turned out to greet the fleet, enthusiastically waving rising sun flags at the ports of Honolulu and Hilo, almost as though eager to put behind them the rancor built up since the passage of the immigration act the year before. To the nisei, and to younger Japanese such as Seiei Wakikawa, a student at the University of Hawaii, this hearty welcome appeared to reflect an insensitivity to the current situation. (Wakikawa, who later studied at Tokyo University, returned to become editor-in-chief at Nippu jiji .)

Less than two months after the visit of the Imperial Navy training fleet, American army and navy forces engaged in a massive exercise in Hawaii at the end of April. A total of 137 warships were lined up in the seas from Pearl Harbor to Waikiki, including 11 battleships, 10 light cruisers, 60 destroyers, and 11 submarines, with 45,000 men participating, including two admirals. The exercise was unprecedented in scale. Army troops stationed in Hawaii played the role of defenders while American army and navy forces from San Francisco and the West Coast as well as Australia and New Zealand played the role of potential enemy forces attacking Pearl Harbor. The exercise, which began on April 27, lasted nearly a month. According to Yasutaro^[*] Soga^[*] of the Nippu , the Japanese in Hawaii saw the exercise as a demonstration of strength vis-à-vis Japan.

After the exercise ended, aloha welcome festivities lasted for several days. American servicemen participated in sports and other activities with the local residents. Walter Dillingham, whose firm had constructed

the naval base at Pearl Harbor, was a central figure in the welcoming festivities. In 1926 Dillingham's Hawaiian Dredging Company signed a new contract with the U.S. Departments of the Army and Navy. The Washington Conference had put a brake on the construction of warships, but to provide for the day when the disarmament treaty might be abrogated, expansion of docking facilities for large warships at Pearl Harbor was to begin in 1927. Dillingham had won the contracts for expansion of a submarine base, the building of a diesel oil refinery, and other construction.

To observe the exercises, not only a congressional delegation but also a huge contingent of journalists visited Hawaii. The May 25 San Francisco Chronicle carried a story by one of its reporters who, seeing Japanese fishing boats and motorboats moving freely about the port at Pearl Harbor, reported with alarm: "Foreign Spies Swarm Navy Base in Hawaii! Parties aboard the sampans are able to secure first-hand knowledge of every new activity within Pearl Harbor, the chief defense link of the island of Oahu." He was voicing doubts later linked to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

In June 1925, while Honolulu was full of uniformed American navy men, Noboru Tsutsumi and Chuhei^[*] Hoshino, two of the former leaders of the Federation of Japanese Labor, were released from the Oahu prison early for good conduct, after serving three years of their four-year sentences.^[12] As soon as they were free, the two men boarded a ship for their homeland. When Tsutsumi's eldest daughter, eleven-year-old Michiko, went to meet her Daddy at the pier in Yokohama, she was in the fourth year of elementary school. Michiko's younger brother, Toshio, whom Tsutsumi saw for the first time, was seven years old. It had been eight years since Tsutsumi had left Japan.

While he was gone, his wife, Chiyo, had lived with her parents at the Tsutsumi clinic in Nagahama, as she had when Tsutsumi was studying at Kyoto University. She spent her days talking to her mother, wondering when Noboru-san would return. Masao Tsutsumi, the eldest son of Chiyo's eldest brother, who now heads the Tsutsumi Hospital, lived there at the time. His aunt had been able to wait eight years for her husband's return, he recalled, because of her easygoing personality. When she received word that her husband was finally coming home, she happily headed for Yokohama with her two children.

When Michiko first saw her father, whom she had longed for for so long, she was disappointed. He seemed so different from the "handsome

Daddy who looked like a foreigner in his photographs." Her father was terribly thin and even to a child's eyes looked tired in his rumpled suit. Her mother had promised that he would bring lots of unusual things from Hawaii, but the only present he pulled out of his single bag was a necklace made of walnuts. As he patted Michiko's bobbed head, he said, "You've gotten so big."

Michiko recalled, "Father got off the ship with some women who accompanied him from Hawaii." The reunited Tsutsumi family stayed for a while with Chiyo's sister, who had married a doctor in private practice near Waseda University in Tokyo. The women accompanying her father were visiting Japan from Hawaii, and they stayed with them a few nights. Her father spoke to them as though they were close friends, but young Michiko had no idea what kind of acquaintances they were. When the women departed, the family was together again for the first time in many years.

"Father never spoke about his life in Hawaii," Michiko recalled. "I had heard from Mother that he was put in prison in Hawaii, but since it was for something he did for other people, not for stealing or anything like that, he did not have a criminal record in Japan."

Seeing his homeland for the first time in eight years, Tsutsumi must have been amazed at how much daily life had changed. Many more women were wearing Western clothes on the street, and politics had taken a new turn. A universal manhood suffrage law had been passed by the Imperial Diet in 1925 after five years of effort, but the coalition cabinet that proposed the law was splitting apart. Amid this turmoil, Tsutsumi's attention must have been drawn to the labor strife in China. Since earlier in the year, labor struggles against Japanese businesses had erupted in the Chinese treaty ports. In late May, during a strike at Nihon Naigai Cotton Company in Shanghai, police fired on the striking workers, killing and injuring many. Laborers and students were joined by Shanghai merchants in a general strike to protest this treatment, and anti-Japanese protests spread to other cities, including Hong Kong. To suppress this movement, ground troops from Japan, Britain, the United States, and France landed in Shanghai.

For a year or so after his return, Tsutsumi quietly helped out with clerical work at Chiyo's sister's husband's clinic, but in December 1926, just about the time that the Showa^[*] emperor began his reign, Tsutsumi paid a visit to Toyohiko Kagawa. Many religious leaders had visited Hawaii, but, according to Yasutaro^[*] Soga^[*] , Kagawa had "left the deepest impression."^[13] Kagawa, a Christian socialist, was known to be more in-

terested in solving social problems than in simply saving souls. He had organized the Kansai branch of the Yuaikai^[*] with Bunji Suzuki and others, and he was arrested and imprisoned as a result of his leadership in the 1921 Mitsubishi Kobe and Kawasaki dockyard strikes. Kagawa was involved in a wide range of causes, including the universal manhood suffrage movement and the organizing of tenant farmers. When Tsutsumi had heard Kagawa speak in Hawaii, it had opened his eyes. Here was a man he wished to be like. Indeed, Tsutsumi's baptism in prison may have been a result of Kagawa's influence.

Shortly after his visit with Kagawa, whom he venerated, Tsutsumi left his brother-in-law's clinic to rent a house in Honsho Fukagawa, a district of Tokyo filled with tenements where low-income laborers lived. During the day he helped out at a consumers' cooperative for laborers, and in the evening he taught English at a night school for working youth associated with Kagawa. Chiyo, who had been raised in comfort, experienced poverty for the first time in her life. Tsutsumi was kind to his wife, perhaps to make up for the long time he had been away. Happy at his caring nature, Chiyo did needlework, with her baby on her back. A year after Tsutsumi's return, a second son, Norio, was born.

Tsutsumi never raised his voice in harshness to his children. He called Michiko "Michibo^[*] ," and he never tired of listening to her chatter. Michiko went to greet him every night when he returned by streetcar from teaching his night classes. But their life as a close-knit family did not last long. On many nights Tsutsumi brought home young workers who attended his night school classes, and it was not unusual for some of them to stay for several nights. Chiyo showed little interest in their discussions, peppered with words like "capitalist," "struggle," "demonstration," and "strike." She was concerned about how to feed these extra people on their meager household budget. In September 1927, two years after Tsutsumi's return to Japan, a major strike broke out at Noda Shoyu^[*] Company. Tsutsumi joined in the strike, which lasted eight months, and his absences from home grew more frequent than before.

It was in 1927 that Sacco and Vanzetti were executed by electric chair in Boston. In prison they had fought for retrial, and their appeals had gained wide public support. The state of Massachusetts, however, ignored the president's pleas for clemency and forced an end to the case seven years after it started. The execution of the two men caused a worldwide outcry. Intellectual and cultural leaders, including Nobel laureates, denounced it. In major American cities as well as in European capitals, there were demonstrations for clemency and meetings to protest the

execution. In Tokyo anarchists held a lecture meeting as part of their movement for "release of Sacco and Vanzetti and opposition to troop intervention in China," resulting in some arrests by the authorities. It must be pointed out, however, that the majority of the American public believed in the authorities and accepted the execution of the "Reds" as just. Many volumes have been written about the Sacco and Vanzetti case, some of which claim their guilt. But in 1977, fifty years after their execution, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis publicly acknowledged that the trial had been a mistake.

The Fate of the Federation Leaders

News of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti was reported briefly in the Japanese-language newspapers in Hawaii. It is doubtful, however, that many in the Japanese community were interested in the fate of these two Italian immigrants. They were still savoring the success of the campaign against the foreign-language school law. A news story in the Hawaii hochi^[*] crowed, "Glorious victory in unprecedented suit against the foreign language school control act targeting the eradication of Japanese language schools. Banzai, Banzai, Banzai. Faith is heard in heaven, justice is ultimately victorious."

The decision against the territory of Hawaii was handed down five months before the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. The Supreme Court ruled that because "freedom of education" was guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, the territory had no right to meddle in the management of the Japanese-language schools as they were privately operated institutions. The outcome of the five-and-a-half-year suit ended in defeat for the territory of Hawaii. When the news arrived from Washington, Makino and others in the Hochi^[*] editorial room hugged each other and cried tears of joy. The Hochi hired an airplane to drop copies of its "Victory Extra" edition from the sky that day.

The "Victory Extra" chided the competition: "What will the Nippu jiji faction, who belittled the cause by refusing to contribute even five cents, say against the decision?" Makino finally had a chance to attack his rival paper, which always took a "reasonable" editorial stance. For Makino, victory on the Japanese-language school suit meant the defeat of his old enemy Yasutaro^[*] Soga^[*] , of the Nippu jiji , a central figure in the faction accepting control over the language schools.

The victory was also a victory for the Honganji sect in Hawaii, and a defeat for the Christians who did not support the suit. For five years

Hawaii's Japanese community had been deeply divided over the issue. Families were ostracized, and children taunted each other. Discord surrounding the Japanese-language schools furor continued for years, leaving a deep wound that the Japanese community found difficult to heal.

The Japanese-language school suit support association placed a full-page announcement in the Hawaii hochi^[*] , "We express our heartfelt feelings of respect and gratitude to the sincere efforts for the struggle shown over many years by the Hawaii hochi company." Kinzazaburo^[*] Makino, the troublemaker in Hawaii's Japanese community, had finally achieved the hero's status that he had not during the 1920 strike. Some, like Reverend Takie Okumura, who feared the decision would reverse the efforts of his Americanization movement, cautioned against excessive rejoicing in the Japanese community. The Japanese consul general warned, "I would hope that on this occasion care would be taken as to behavior so that the relations between the peoples of Japan and America that have deteriorated due to this issue will not further deteriorate." Makino completely ignored them.

For the next few months Makino toured the islands lecturing on the victory of the lawsuit. Everywhere he was applauded. Parents of children who attended the Japanese-language schools welcomed him as a champion who had fought for their rights. They adorned Makino with colorful flowered leis and shouted choruses of "Banzai" at his lectures at the Japanese-language schools. It stirred their patriotism all the more. For Makino, the lecture tour was also an opportunity to increase circulation of the Hawaii hochi: he sold company bonds to the Japanese-language school parents. When the Hochi^[*] victory commemorative issue was published a few years later, it alleged that the bonds took the form of donations to the Hochi for a "renewed show of gratitude to President Makino." According to Kiyoshi Okubo^[*] , Hilo bureau chief for the Hawaii hochi at the time, a more accurate description of the situation was that Makino ordered the staffs of local Hochi bureaus to make the rounds coercing purchasers into treating the bonds as donations to the company.

After the news of the victory came from Washington, Ichiji Goto^[*] , former secretary of the Federation of Japanese Labor and a defendant in the Sakamaki house dynamiting case, answered congratulatory telephone calls in the editorial department of the Hochi . In May 1926, one year after Tsutsumi and Hoshino returned to Japan, Goto and eleven other defendants were released early on good behavior. Tsunehiko Murakami,

named by two prosection witnesses as the man who had set and lit the fuse of the dynamite, was released one month after the others because of a violation while in prison.

Goto^[*] had been a reporter for the Nippu jiji before he became involved in the strike. After his release from prison, Yasutaro^[*] Soga^[*] refused to rehire him because of his prison record, but Makino told him, "If you feel like working, come on by." Although Makino was overbearing, he had a warm heart. Makino also hired George Wright, who had earned the even greater ire of the HSPA by helping the Filipinos' strike in 1924, when no one else would. He added an English-language page to the Hochi^[*] and put Wright in charge of it.

Like Goto none of the former federation leaders participated in the labor movement after release from prison. Neither did they speak much about the strike or about the trial to their families. Indeed, more than two-thirds of them were divorced while in prison. Unable to make a living while their husbands were in prison, some wives returned to Japan with their children. But since it was not difficult for women, fewer in number than men in the Japanese immigrant community, to find a new mate, others simply abandoned their husbands and divorced them. The powerful HSPA had sought to disarm the leaders of the Federation of Japanese Labor, who had stood up to them, by charging them with the Sakamaki house dynamiting, but it ruined their family lives as well.

Hiroshi Miyazawa, who along with Noboru Tsutsumi and Ichiji Goto was a secretary of the federation, was one of those divorced by his wife. As a man with a prison record, he could not return to his work as a pastor. Using his facility in English, he eked out a living as an interpreter and an agent.

The only two defendants able to resume their former occupations were Tsurunosuke Koyama and Chikao Ishida, both members of the Hawaii Island union. With the help of his wife, Teru, who had faithfully waited for him, Koyama made his business at Waiakea Plantation more successful than before. After World War II, Koyama returned to live in Miyazaki in the hometown of his second wife, whom he married after Teru's death. He died there at age seventy-four.

Ishida returned to his position as principal of a Japanese-language school at his former plantation on Hawaii, but his wife had returned to Japan with their son while he was in prison, then divorced him. His school backed the lawsuit, and he was active locally on its behalf. When Goto accompanied Makino on his victory tour of the island, Ishida, who led the welcome party, met Goto again for the first time since they

were in prison. The other defendant from Hawaii, Sazo^[*] Sato^[*] , died in a traffic accident shortly after his release.

Honji Fujitani had organized the first union on Oahu at Waialua Plantation, but his wife was evicted from plantation housing. She was able to survive somehow with four children, the oldest of whom was five. Fujitani could not return to the plantation after his release, so he worked at various jobs in Honolulu. Tokuji Baba, also from Waialua Plantation, went to work as a head clerk at a small inn in Honolulu.

The leaders from the Waipahu Plantation union, where trouble with scabs often occurred during the strike, could not return to their plantation. Kan'ichi Takizawa made his living by assisting a group that sponsored Japanese performing artists, such as storytellers, singers, and sumo wrestlers, and after World War II he returned to Japan. Unable to settle in his hometown, Nagano, he moved to Hokkaido, where he died. Fumio Kawamata, also from the Waipahu union, whom the prosecution accused of being a gigolo during the trial, was welcomed back by the woman innkeeper he had lived with before.

Shoshichiro^[*] Furusho^[*] , another defendant from Waipahu Plantation, left Hawaii in 1932, a year after the Manchurian incident, to return to his hometown in Kumamoto prefecture with his wife and children. Leaving work on the family fields to others, he opened an American-style supermarket in front of the railroad station, a venture that had great success. Furusho liked being involved in local politics. According to his granddaughter, he was always busy running around at election time, and he died at age sixty-five after World War II.

The fish farm run by Seigo Kondo^[*] , who had become involved with the security pickets while aiding evicted laborers in Pearl City, fell on hard times while in prison. He was married and had a daughter, but after a divorce he returned to his hometown in Niigata, where he ran a factory making ropes to tie barrels for the Kikkoman^[*] Shoyu^[*] (Kikkoman Soy Sauce) company. During election campaigns, he was so busy supporting local candidates that he spent hardly any time at home. Only Kondo and Furusho occasionally spoke of their involvement in "a strike that stunned the capitalists in Hawaii" during their later years. Kondo, like Furusho, known as a curmudgeon, died at age eighty-one.

Of the remaining defendants in the Sakamaki dynamiting case, Shunji Tomota of Waimanalo Plantation was listed in the Hawaii Nihonjin meibo (Hawaii Japanese Directory) three years after his release from prison as "Honolulu resident; odd jobs." In the same directory, Tsunehiko Murakami, released a month after the others, was listed as "Hono-

lulu resident; store owner." Their names do not appear in later directories, or in any other materials, and their subsequent lives remain unknown. Chuhei^[*] Hoshino's whereabouts after he returned to Japan with Tsutsumi remain unknown as well.

On May 23, 1930, eight months after the start of the worldwide depression triggered by the October crash of the New York stock market, a farewell party was held in Tokyo for U.S. Ambassador William R. Castle. Masanao Hanihara, the former Japanese ambassador to the United States, warned the departing Castle that the only way to restore amicable relations between Japan and the United States was to amend the Immigration Act of 1924. He continued to feel answerable for his statement that passage of the law would have "grave consequences."

Shortly after Hanihara's remarks were reported in Washington, Rep. Albert Johnson, the author of the act and still chairman of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, held a press conference. He announced that he wished to wipe away the hard feelings aroused between the United States and Japan by passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 and that he hoped in the near future to present an amendment that would permit a proportionate quota for immigrants from Japan. In effect, Johnson announced that he had reevaluated the law that he had pushed through Congress six years earlier, causing a major rift between the United States and Japan. The statement stunned congressmen.

Johnson was a representative from the state of Washington, where lumber was the main industry. As the depression spread, causing major social problems, the export of lumber to Japan took on increasing importance to the state. The Japan-America Society in Seattle, which had not been pleased by Johnson's role in the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, encouraged lumber industry leaders interested in trade with Japan to put pressure on Representative Johnson to amend the law.

An old school conservative on the right wing of the Republican party, Johnson had fought a tough campaign to win his previous election. He foresaw that his next one would be even more difficult, and he needed to promise local leaders that he would propose an amendment to the 1924 Immigration Act at the right time. Given his previous position on the issue, however, he had to find an appropriate way to bring it to Congress again. Hanihara's plea to Castle had given him the chance to state his intention to do so. When Ambassador Castle bid farewell to Foreign Minister Shidehara on May 25, 1930, he said that since understanding

of the issue was gradually spreading throughout America, a satisfactory solution to the immigration issue was possible.

Two weeks later, on June 10, the Honolulu Chamber of Commerce, which had strongly supported the importation of Chinese labor when Walter Dillingham had been its president, backed Johnson's proposal to amend the Immigration Act. It sent a telegram to President Herbert Hoover urging that Japanese immigrants be given a quota. Following the lead of the Honolulu Chamber of Commerce, other chambers quickly issued similar statements in Seattle, Tacoma, and other cities in Washington, as well as in Portland, Oregon. Even in California, the chambers of commerce in San Francisco and Los Angeles announced resolutions supporting the amendment.

The strength of American politics is the willingness to admit past mistakes and to learn from them. Many recognized the role that racial discrimination had played in passage of the Immigration Act six years earlier. The American Legion and the AFL both continued to view Japanese immigrants as a potential threat and firmly opposed any amendment, but by the summer of 1931, a year after Johnson's announcement, pressure to revise the law had reached the point that the Japanese embassy in Washington reported to Tokyo, "Most of the informed people in the U.S. are favorably disposed to the movement to amend the Immigration Act to give Japanese a 'quota.'"^[14]

Unfortunately, on September 18, two months later, the Kwantung Army launched its plans to occupy Manchuria, the three northeastern provinces of China, by blowing up a section of track on the South Manchurian Railway at Liutiaogou, just outside Mukden. Claiming that the explosion was the work of Chinese saboteurs, Japanese military forces made an all-out assault on the Mukden barracks and arsenal, the main fortification of the Chinese troops. In less than a day the Kwantung Army occupied Mukden, and within the next five months it gained control over most of Manchuria. The invasion, proclaiming a new phase of Japanese imperial aggression, killed any chance for the passage of an amendment to the Immigration Act of 1924. Those who had backed the amendment in the hope of improving U.S.-Japan relations would not support the actions of the Japanese militarists. The Manchurian incident was a turning point when a "sense of crisis toward Japan" spread from the West Coast to the rest of the country.

It could be said that the Manchurian incident also ended Representative Johnson's political career. In 1932, the year Japan recognized the

new "independent" state of Manchukuo and Japanese emigration to Manchuria was encouraged, Johnson lost his bid for reelection to a young, liberal Democratic candidate, ending a twenty-year career in Congress. Returning to work at his newspaper, Johnson energetically wrote pieces from his nationalistic perspective until he died thirty-six years later at the age of eighty-eight.

War between Japan and the United States

The only reference in the literature of the Japanese left to Noboru Tsutsumi's history of the 1920 Japanese plantation workers' movement in Hawaii (1920nen Hawaii sato^[*] kochi^[*] rodo^[*] undoshi^[*] , jo^[*] ) is a brief mention in Suzuki Mosaburo^[*] zenshu^[*] (The Complete Works of Mosaburo Suzuki). After working with Sen Katayama's left-wing group in New York, Suzuki visited postrevolution Moscow, and on his return to Japan, he worked as a newspaper reporter while joining a movement to launch a proletarian party. The proletarian party movement went through several splits and mergers among its rightist, leftist, and centrist factions before the formation of the National Masses party (Zenkoku Taishuto^[*] ) in 1930. Among the party's advisers were Toyohiko Kagawa and Toshihiko Sakai. Mosaburo Suzuki, along with Kanju^[*] Kato^[*] , Chozaburo^[*] Mizutani, Jotaro^[*] Kawakami, and others, became a member of the central executive committee. It is most likely that that is when Suzuki and Noboru Tsutsumi became acquainted.

Tsutsumi was closer to Ryusuke^[*] Miyazaki, a left-wing politician better known for having eloped with the poet Byakuren Yanagihara rather than for his radical socialist activities at Tokyo Imperial University. Tsutsumi damaged his throat so badly while campaigning for Miyazaki that he took to bed. His daughter, Michiko, who later became a doctor, thought his throat problem must have been a symptom of tuberculosis, an illness that he may have brought back with him from Hawaii. When he returned to Japan, Tsutsumi was already quite thin and often perspired in his sleep. Tuberculosis was a major cause of death in Hawaii, as it was in Japan.

Since his involvement in the Noda Shoyu^[*] company strike, Tsutsumi's movements had come under police surveillance. After his health deteriorated, the family had trouble feeding itself, so they moved to Chiyo's family's clinic in Nagahama. Tsutsumi's older brother, Ekan Kurokawa, who had returned from his studies in Germany, had opened up his

medical practice near Kyoto University. When Tsutsumi recovered somewhat in 1932 he did administrative chores at his brother's clinic. In May 1932 Chiyo died of acute meningitis. Tsutsumi wept aloud, not minding that his children saw him, as if to apologize for having acted selfishly for so long. In 1933 Shigenao Konishi, Tsutsumi's mentor during his student days, became president of Kyoto University, and through his influence Tsutsumi became director of administration at his alma mater, but he had to sign a statement promising not to involve himself in labor movement activities.

In November 1933 Sen Katayama died in Moscow, just before the Stalinist purges began. Although called stubborn and narrow-minded, Katayama had lived his life according to his ideology.

One year later, in December 1934, Japan announced that it would abandon the Washington Naval Limitation Treaty. In this same year Tsutsumi married his second wife, Tsuruyo, who had just graduated from a women's normal school. She was just three years older than his daughter. According to Tsuruyo, her husband's health was so delicate that she wondered if she had married him simply to become his nurse. Yet it was Tsuruyo who had sought out Tsutsumi, drawn by his calm gentleness and the erudition with which he answered her every question. By this time, in addition to his duties at Kyoto University, Tsutsumi had also become business manager of Kitano Hospital in Osaka, which was affiliated with Kyoto University.

Spirited and cheerful, Tsuruyo did not want to be Tsutsumi's nursemaid. Unlike Chiyo, she had the intelligence and interest to respond to his talk of politics and the world. It was the first time that he had found a partner willing to enter his world. In 1938, the year that the National General Mobilization Law was decreed, Tsuruyo gave birth to a son, Tamotsu, the third son for Tsutsumi.

In the summer of 1933, the year Japan withdrew from the League of Nations, Franklin D. Roosevelt became the first American president to visit Hawaii. He was making an observation tour to check the country's front line of defense in the Pacific, but publicly it was reported that he was on a fishing vacation with his sons. The Japanese community in Hawaii, seeing this as a good opportunity to improve strained relations between Japan and the United States, participated with enthusiasm in the events welcoming the president. When the cruiser Houston , with the president aboard, and several accompanying vessels first put in to the port of Hilo, they were greeted offshore by a fleet of more than fifty Japa-

nese fishing boats colorfully decked out. This seemed to have the opposite effect of what was intended, for it gave the impression that the Japanese immigrants in Hawaii were boasting of their influence.

Yet the Japanese immigrant community was making an all-out effort, and the stars and stripes were flown from all the Japanese shops along the road through Olaa Plantation as the president's convertible passed on its way to Mount Kilauea. Nisei schoolchildren and Japanese laborers at Olaa took the day off to wave small American flags by the roadside. Despite the midday heat, elderly immigrants of the Olaa Buddhist association stood at the roadside clad in black formal dress kimonos.

Juzaburo^[*] Sakamaki, the company interpreter on Olaa Plantation, was not among those paying their respects to the president. Sakamaki had arranged for his eldest son, who as a high school student had stood guard with a pistol until dawn on the night of the dynamite blast, to take over his work as interpreter and postmaster. Shortly after his retirement Sakamaki suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed and bedridden. Six years after the president's visit to Hawaii, Sakamaki died at the age of seventy-one.

President Roosevelt received an even more elaborate welcome in Honolulu. On the last night of his visit a group of Japanese girls in cotton yukata danced a "Banzai dance" during a lantern parade. The president, whose legs were paralyzed by polio, pulled himself higher in the open car to watch them with great interest. The Nippu jiji noted that he was smiling throughout "like a doting father." When President Roosevelt toured the facilities at Pearl Harbor, the sole civilian among the high-ranking officers of the army and navy who escorted the president was Walter Dillingham, the former chairman of the Hawaii Emergency Labor Commission.

Eight years later the surprise attack by Japanese air forces on Pearl Harbor, the base of the U.S. Pacific fleet, sank five battleships, including the Arizona , and damaged three more. Casualties numbered 2,403 deaths and 3,478 wounded. A declaration of war from Japan arrived in Washington thirty-five minutes after the attack formally opened hostilities with the United States. In 1924 Soho^[*] Tokutomi had called the day that the Immigration Act of 1924 took force a "day of national humiliation." President Roosevelt now called December 7, the day of the Pearl Harbor attack, a "day of infamy."

Roosevelt appointed a commission to determine why the U.S. Navy was unable to foresee the Japanese attack and requested a thorough review of U.S.-Japan relations leading to "this cowardly attack." The first

item the commission checked out of the Library of Congress as a reference was the transcript of hearings of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. It is not difficult to imagine that the Hawaii Labor Committee's opening statement on "Labor Problems in Hawaii" must have attracted the most attention in the record. The commission's allegation that the 1920 strike was a Japanese conspiracy once again came to the attention of the federal government. This transcript was sent to FBI Director Hoover who was charged with overseeing domestic security issues.

In February 1942, two and a half months after the Pearl Harbor attack, President Roosevelt signed an executive order requiring evacuation to relocation camps of some 110,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans, including many American citizens, from states on the West Coast. The Hawaiian Islands had already been placed under martial law, and a military administration was established. A document proposing relocation of Japanese in Hawaii was sent to the military governor, Lieutenant General Delos C. Emmons, but Hawaiian leaders, who appealed to the aloha spirit and a sense of fair play, took quick action to assure that the Japanese community in Hawaii was not relocated. Pastors, academics, and the major kamaaina industrialists without exception opposed the internment of Japanese. Even Walter Dillingham was among them.

On the day after the Pearl Harbor attack, however, local FBI agents acting under orders from headquarters in Washington arrested Japanese community leaders thought to be loyal to their homeland, Japan, the new enemy. Buddhist and Shinto priests, Japanese-language school instructors, members of the chamber of commerce, and members of prefectural organizations were sent to Sand Island, where the Bureau of Immigration was located, and some seven hundred of them were then dispatched in ten different groups to internment camps on the mainland.

The Japanese and Japanese American population of Hawaii at the time was 160,000, of whom only 35,000 were first-generation Japanese. It was they who occupied leadership positions in the Japanese community. After the FBI roundup leadership inevitably shifted to the nisei. The first measure taken by the younger generation was voluntarily to close the Japanese-language schools, whose numbers had increased after the victory in the suit against the territorial control law. The Japanese-language schools in Hawaii were destroyed by this act, and even after the war ended they did not reopen.

One of those arrested by the FBI was Nippu jiji president Yasutaro^[*] Soga^[*] . Since he was an earnest Christian, known for years to be pro-

American, news of his arrest shocked the Japanese community. Soga^[*] had many friends in haole society, but he faithfully attended events such as welcoming parties for the Imperial Navy fleet and he was also close to influential Japanese in Hawaii, such as the consul general, the branch heads of the Sumitomo Bank, the Specie Bank, and so on. Such "suspicious" behavior may have prompted the FBI to arrest him. During the war Soga was forced to live behind barbed wire in a desert camp on the mainland. When he regained his freedom at war's end, he returned to Hawaii. The Nippu jiji had been shut down at the start of the war, but he started publishing it again under a new name, the Hawaii Times . Turning his work over to his only son, he obtained U.S. citizenship and died at age eighty-three.

The most well known Japanese in Hawaii, Reverend Takie Okumura, was not arrested by the FBI. Until the start of the war he had single-mindedly pushed for Americanization, and he was too frail to arrest due to his advanced age. He died five years after the war ended, at age eighty-six, without witnessing the right of naturalization granted to Japanese. Since Okumura had constantly regarded the Buddhists as the enemy of his Americanization movement, the Japanese community in Hawaii remains reluctant to show much appreciation for his efforts.

Among those sent on the first ship to the U.S. mainland relocation camps from Sand Island was former Waialua union president Tokuji Baba, who had made a meager living as an innkeeper after his release from prison. He was one of eighty Hawaiian internees who chose to return to Japan during the war. Although he had given up his inheritance to his nephew, who succeeded to the family business, as an eldest son Baba retained his rights to become the head of the family. After spending twelve years idling away his days at his family home, he returned to Hawaii where he died at the age of ninety-two.

Chikao Ishida, who had returned to his post as Japanese-language school principal after release from prison, was relocated to the mainland along with his second wife and two preschool children. As the Japanese-language schools remained closed after the war, he had to put his children through school by working in a Honolulu macaroni factory. Ishida died at age seventy-nine, after obtaining American citizenship.

Many in the Japanese community in Hawaii wondered how Kinzaburo^[*] Makino, president of the Hawaii hochi^[*] , evaded arrest by the FBI. He led the campaign on behalf of the Japanese-language schools suit, and he constantly badgered the haole governing class by asserting the rights of Japanese residents. In contrast to Soga of Nippu jiji , however,

Makino was not involved with the Japanese consulate, nor did he have any dealings with the elite Japanese businessmen who looked down on immigrants. According to Yoshimi Mizuno, who served as a maid in the Makino household for many years (and was treated like a daughter), Makino packed his necessities in a suitcase in the trunk of his car so that he would be prepared in case he was arrested.

According to Mizuno, after the war began a "Mr. Shivers" often visited the Makino house. Robert Shivers, head of the FBI's Hawaii office, had been posted to Hawaii as relations between the United States and Japan declined. "Mr. Shivers would drop by on weekend evenings on his way back from a drive with his wife," she recalled. "He would talk for a bit with Uncle [Makino] and then go home. He never did stay for dinner." Mizuno took these lightly, as casual visits by a friend, but no one at Makino's newspaper knew of his association with Shivers, not even Kumaichi Kumazaki, who for decades worked closely with Makino and was in charge of accounting and other matters. Makino's residence, an isolated house facing the ocean at a distance from central Honolulu, was far from the gaze of others, ideal for clandestine meetings. Kinzaburo^[*] Makino had personally invested the profits from his Makino law office in real estate, not in the Hawaii hochi^[*] newspaper company. When he died at age seventy-six, eight years after the war, Makino left a large inheritance for his wife, far greater than others had imagined he had. If, at the end of his life, he thought that he had lost to Soga^[*] , his main regret must have been that, despite being very fond of children, he did not leave any successors.

Ichiji Goto^[*] , who assisted the aging Makino until the end, shouldered the editorial work of the Hawaii hochi . Goto never forgot his debt of gratitude to Makino for hiring him after his release from prison. He too evaded arrest after the war began. Shortly after Makino's death, Goto left with his second wife to retire to Kannawa hot springs in Beppu City, Kyushu^[*] . A deeply religious man, he spent each day reading a verse from the Bible until his death at age eighty-eight.

Hiroshima was the home prefecture of the greatest number of Japanese immigrants in Hawaii, so many returned there before the war broke out. Many experienced the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, among them Hiroshi Miyazawa, secretary of the Federation of Japanese Labor during the 1920 strike, and Jiro^[*] Hayakawa, who was secretary general of the association after the strike. Unable to work as a pastor after his release from prison, Miyazawa had left Hawaii for Hiroshima, his wife's hometown. During the war he found himself under harsh police surveil-

lance because he had lived abroad, but the atomic bomb liberated him. Fortunately Miyazawa survived the blast to live nearly twenty years more; he died at age seventy-seven.

After Japan's defeat, the Allied Occupation forces arrived in Japan to bring democracy to Japan's burned out cities and devastated population. The first general election under democracy was held in April 1946. In the first electoral district of Shiga prefecture thirty-five candidates ran for six seats, numbers that reflected public enthusiasm for the new political era. Seven of these candidates belonged to the newly organized Japan Socialist party. Two of the Socialist candidates won. One was Kizaburo^[*] Yao, president of Shiga Nichinichi Tsushin^[*] press, who had been in the prefectural assembly for many years; the other was Noboru Tsutsumi, an unknown candidate.

Tsutsumi ran as a Socialist but was not officially recognized as a candidate by the party. When Tsutsumi saw his comrades from the prewar proletariat movement declare their candidacy (Mosaburo^[*] Suzuki in Tokyo, Suehiro Nishio in Osaka, and Chozaburo^[*] Mizutani in Kyoto), he could not remain a bystander. Although he had neither campaign funds nor physical strength, he wished to be part of the new era. He declared his candidacy from his childhood home, the temple at Kozuhata^[*] . Carrying rice balls in a lunchbox tied to his waist, he campaigned on a bicycle with a megaphone in hand. His eloquence of twenty-six years earlier came to life again, as he spoke of his experience leading the Hawaiian sugarcane workers in their demands for a wage increase. At first his only ally was his wife, Tsuruyo, but later his second son, then a university student, and the cousins he had grown up with plunged in to help with the campaign. In the end, beating all predictions, Tsutsumi won election with 39,225 votes, the third largest number.

Since food was still scarce, Tsutsumi, the newly elected Diet member, left his wife and family in Kyoto. He boarded the packed train to Tokyo alone, carrying rice and soy sauce on his back and finding a seat only in the rest room. His throat, which he injured in the campaign, never recovered. At the end of the year, he collapsed in the National Diet building. Tsuruyo, who had just given birth to a daughter, Mihoko, in January 1947, rushed to Tokyo with the new baby on her back. With difficulty she purchased penicillin on the black market, but Tsutsumi's tuberculosis had progressed too far. On February 20, 1947, Noboru Tsutsumi died at age fifty-seven. The inscription on his gravestone at the temple at Kozuhata, his family home, reads "Remains of Noboru

Kaishinin Shakuho^[*] , third son of fifteenth-generation head priest Reizui." Tsutsumi had never told Tsuruyo that he had been baptized as a Christian.

Widowed at the age of thirty-four, Tsuruyo decided to fulfill her husband's dreams as a politician, despite opposition from those around her who thought it ill-advised. Undiscouraged by defeat in her first attempt, she was elected to the Diet two years later, her little daughter Mihoko at her side. She carried on her husband's political legacy for three terms. From a woman's perspective she pursued such issues as the repatriation of Japanese emigrants from abroad, aid for war widows and surviving families, and the curbing of prostitution. She also served as director of the Socialist party's Shiga prefecture union women's department.

In 1951 Tsuruyo Tsutsumi was a member of the Japanese delegation to the signing of the San Francisco Peace Treaty and the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty that marked the end of the six-year Occupation of Japan. On her trip back to Japan Tsuruyo was able to realize her husband's dream of visiting Hawaii once again.

More than thirty years had passed since the second Oahu strike. Although the six-month strike had shaken the haole governing class in Hawaii, Tsuruyo could not find anyone who remembered Noboru Tsutsumi's name. The Hawaii that Tsuruyo saw on her visit was no longer the Hawaii that Noboru had known. During the war Hawaii's military-dependent economy had grown, with accompanying rapid changes, such as new roadways on a par with the mainland. Thousands of American servicemen had passed through the islands during the war, and on the mainland the public now saw Hawaii as a "tropical Paradise." Air travel accelerated Hawaii's growth as a tourist mecca, and from 1945 income from tourism grew 20 percent per year on average. At the time of Tsuruyo's visit tourism was about to overtake the sugar industry as the major source of revenue for Hawaii.

In the cane fields mechanization progressed, resulting in annual decreases in the labor force. The number of Japanese laborers declined drastically. The issei who had gone to Hawaii to work the cane fields were now elderly, and the nisei had acquired education that freed them from backbreaking physical labor. The vast majority of nisei employed on the sugar plantations now worked in the company's business office or as skilled workers in the mills.

The majority of the field laborers were Filipino, many of whom had left the plantations during the war to work on military construction sites.

Construction jobs were plentiful and pay scales were the same as on the mainland. In 1946 organizers sent by the International Longshoremen Workers' Union (ILWU) to unionize the sugar plantation workers in Hawaii staged a major strike. It centered on Olaa Plantation, the site of the Sakamaki house dynamiting, where second-generation Japanese Americans organized a local labor struggle. The strike victory telegram sent to ILWU headquarters on the mainland declared that Hawaii was no longer a "feudal" territory and that paternalism had been over-thrown.

As the labor union movement spread, the wages in Hawaii's sugar plantations became the highest in the world for sugar industry labor. Indeed, rising wages were a major factor in the decline of the Hawaiian sugar industry, which had to compete with cheap labor elsewhere. As tourism supplanted the sugar industry in economic importance, plantations were reduced in size or closed down. All over the Hawaiian Islands, cane fields were turned into housing developments, airports, golf courses, and resort facilities. By the 1980s many of these projects were financed by Japanese capital.

Olaa Plantation (now called Puna Sugar Company), one of the few plantations left on the island of Hawaii, closed down in 1984. It was not only the Japanese community that changed as leadership passed from one generation to another after Pearl Harbor. With Hawaii placed under military control after the war began, the kamaaina, the plutocracy that dominated prewar Hawaii, lost their clout overnight.

Walter Dillingham was an exception. After the war he expanded his businesses even further. Not only did he sell his land and plantation to the military at an opportune time, he developed the Hawaiian Dredging Company into a construction company to build tourist facilities. Many high-rise hotels and major shopping centers that Japanese tourists have visited over the years were built by Dillingham's company. A nine-page article in the February 10, 1961, issue of Life magazine introduced Walter Dillingham's family as "Hawaii's first family." A photograph of the entire clan showed that even at eighty-five Dillingham remained the powerful head of the family. According to the article, Dillingham still went to his office several times a week to look after his various enterprises.

In 1962, the year after the Life article appeared, Dillingham's third son ran for the Senate as a Republican party candidate. The campaign became the most costly ever waged in Hawaii. Despite predictions to the

contrary, he was defeated by the Democratic candidate, Daniel Inouye, a second-generation Japanese American.

When the war began the nisei, despite their American citizenship, were given a draft classification as "enemy aliens," which kept them out of military service. Swallowing this humiliation, many nisei from Hawaii and mainland detention centers volunteered for military service to prove their loyalty to the United States. The 442d Regimental Combat Team, made up of nisei troops, became the most highly decorated unit in the wartime history of the United States and ensured future standing for the nisei as loyal Americans. Dan Inouye, the son of an immigrant field worker from Fukuoka prefecture, was a member of the nisei battalion and lost an arm on the Italian front.

The Walter-McCarran Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952 finally gave to Japanese and other Asians the right to naturalize. What swayed Congress in favor of this bill was the war record of the nisei battalion. Nisei soldiers who returned safely from the front used the GI bill to go to college, opening the way to positions that their parents never imagined possible.

In Hawaii, many nisei veterans used their war records to go into politics. Voted in by the Japanese American population majority in Hawaii, these nisei politicians were so influential that they practically took over the Hawaiian political world. Dan Inouye, the most successful, entered politics as a member of the House of Representatives in the first Congress after Hawaii gained statehood, and two years later, he successfully ran for Senate.

Walter Dillingham, the last surviving member of the powerful kamaaina governing elite, died at age eighty-eight the year after Inouye defeated his son in the Senate race. His entry in the Hawaii Who's Who runs several pages, longer than any other, and it mentions what may be his only failure, the petition for renewal of the importation of Chinese labor. The entry notes that he did his utmost on the issue but does not mention what the result was.

In his autobiography Yasutaro^[*] Soga^[*] described the 1920 strike as follows:

The strike was settled after some difficulties. But the aftereffects of the Olaa dynamiting incident were not allowed to remain untouched. After the earnest effort of investigation by the district attorney's office, fifteen members of the Federation of Japanese Labor including Tsutsumi were arrested for conspiracy. . . . They were all declared guilt. . . . and sent to prison. . . . Not all of the defendants had conspired to commit the crime. Among those Federation

leaders who were imprisoned, apparently some know nothing of the incident. . . . It is unknown how much was gathered during the second great strike for the strike fund from the islands. It was said that the amount was at least $200,000–$300,000.^[15]

The discrepancy between the figures publicly reported by the federation at the time of the strike and the amount noted by Soga^[*] indicates that he had not necessarily checked the facts. Soga was more than seventy years old when he wrote his recollections, based on his memory of the trial twenty-one years earlier, but his comments appear to justify the testimony of Matsumoto and Saito^[*] , the two key prosecution witnesses.^[16] As a record of the recollections of a respected newspaper editor who was knowledgeable about the events of his day, Soga's comments on the 1920 strike and the trial of the Federation of Japanese Labor leaders who led it have been treated as fact by others.

In 1964 members of Hawaii's Japanese-language press published Hawaii Nihonjin iminshi (History of Japanese Immigration in Hawaii) to commemorate the centennial of Japanese immigration to Hawaii. An important volume that traced the footprints of the Japanese immigrants for the first time, it was regarded as historically factual, but it treats the Sakamaki case very much as Soga did: "The Sakamaki house dynamiting case was detrimental as the strike had gone on in a just and fair manner without any incidents of violence. After this incident, the situation changed entirely."^[17] The entry was even shorter than Soga's, and concluded that the federation had certainly been involved in the Sakamaki house dynamiting case. It also noted that reasons for the failure of the strike were "the lack of character and aptitude among some of the leaders [and] misappropriation of funds. . . . The local labor unions organized by them disappeared after the end of the strike." This last sentence is the only one that is close to being accurate.