The Allure of Empire by Chris Suh

Author:Chris Suh
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

From the 1920 Alien Land Act to the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, internationally framed arguments for Japanese exclusion played a crucial role in securing the California exclusionists’ victory. As American perception of the Japanese empire took a negative turn, McClatchy and his followers exploited the news of Japanese violence against other Asian peoples and Japanese restriction of Asian laborers to convince the California electorate and the US Congress that they should deprive the Japanese of the right to own land and prohibit further Japanese immigration. By appearing sympathetic to the Asian victims of the Japanese empire, and by arguing that Japan’s own immigration restriction was a rational policy based on economic factors, the exclusionists came to reject Japan’s request for racial inclusion based on its own actions against Asian immigrants, thereby making the American motivation for Japanese exclusion appear as anti-imperial and race-neutral. Against this strategy, the American friends of Japan such as Sidney Gulick were often left helpless. Gulick’s report on Japanese colonial violence did little to change the American perception of Japan, and by the time he began to counter McClatchy’s claims about Japan’s immigration policy, belatedly in 1925, the Johnson-Reed Act had already gone into effect.137 The exclusionists also set the terms of the transnational politics of Japanese and Korean immigrants. While Korean immigrants mostly sided with the exclusionists, Japanese immigrants, with few exceptions, were forced to defend their own case against the exclusionists, by defending the actions of Japan or insisting that they had few ties to the Asian empire.

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