Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890–1950 by Jeannie N. Shinozuka

Author:Jeannie N. Shinozuka [Shinozuka, Jeannie N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: SOC000000 Social Science / General, SOC043000 Social Science / Ethnic Studies / Asian American Studies, HIS036060 History / United States / 20th Century, NAT045000 Nature / Ecosystems & Habitats / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2022-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

A rapidly growing population of Japanese beetles signaled a new era of perpetual chemical warfare.

The history of the Japanese beetle “virtually repeats, stage for stage, the history of other invasions by foreign pests.”77 In 1916, only twelve beetles had been found. Three years later, the number had multiplied to 15,000 beetles collected by a single person in a single day. In 1925, the number in New Jersey and Pennsylvania had exploded to the “tubful.” By 1927, “clouds of beetles of the Japanese variety” had settled on streets and even alighted upon pedestrians in numbers so great in the East, notably Philadelphia, that they had to pick the insects off one another. So common was the sight of Japanese beetles on people’s clothes that one newspaper writer likened it to a “fad from France for beetle jewelry,” where Parisian artisans made insect accessories, such as earrings, brooches, and necklaces.78 Agriculturalists who worked for the USDA, however, did not find the Japanese beetle beneficial in any way, and on January 1, 1933, they extended the Japanese beetle quarantine to parts of New Hampshire, Vermont, and enlarged quarantine areas in Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.79

By the 1920s, the discourse about the Japanese beetle—commonly called the “Jap beetle” in the press—took on a militaristic tone.80 Having colonized Formosa (Taiwan) and Korea in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Japanese military turned its attention to China in the late 1920s. Many Americans who viewed Japan’s hostile actions in negative terms linked the beetle to the Japanese. In 1929, an article that decried the denuding of golf greenery angrily recommended, “If any California golfer sees a Japanese beetle on the links there are but two things to do—hit him on the head with a niblick and declare war on the Mikado.”81 In 1939 articles such as “Japanese Beetles About to Strike” and “New Fields Invaded by Japanese Beetles” overtly alluded to an actual attack and invasion by Japan.82

The link between chemical-warfare techniques employed to control perceived insect and human pests was not new. The historian of science Sarah Jansen posits that the rhetoric and practice enabled the field of entomology to use chemical warfare as a way to exterminate forest insects and humans in the Holocaust. She traces how the adoption of such warfare by economic entomologists permitted them to take a technique used in one field and apply it to another, from zoology beginning in the nineteenth century to forest hygiene and then finally to the “militarized field” of economic entomology:

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