Two Faces of Exclusion: The Untold History of Anti-Asian Racism in the United States by Lon Kurashige

Author:Lon Kurashige [Kurashige, Lon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2016-09-02T05:00:00+00:00

Textbook Security Fears

A major part of the IPR’s “experiment in understanding” centered on challenging the distorted image Americans had about Asian peoples. This was true even in the “racial paradise” of Hawai‘i, where the fears of Japanese American disloyalty rekindled as U.S.-Japan conflict grew after Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931. Consistent with the educational mission of Japanese studies at the University of Hawai‘i, the IPR, in the fall of 1934, sought to bridge understanding across the Pacific by developing a new textbook about the culture, civilization, and history of Japan. The draft, which consisted of three hundred mimeographed pages, was tested at four Honolulu-area high schools (Punahou, Kamehameha, McKinley, and Roosevelt).57

The textbook was sponsored by the Honolulu branch of the IPR, with the blessing and support from the Territory of Hawai‘i’s superintendent of schools, to create more “authentic” curriculum materials on East Asia at a time when little, if anything, about the region and its peoples was taught at any level of American education. In the late 1920s, Yale historian Kenneth Latourette reported to the IPR that the “great majority” of college and university students were “blissfully ignorant of the existence of the Far East.” In sponsoring the creation of new curricula, the IPR sought to calm America’s hostility and mistrust of Japan that reemerged with each U.S.-Japan crisis. Locally, the IPR was catering to the demand for such a textbook from Honolulu’s large Japanese American population, which saw it as useful for the increasing number of high school graduates seeking schooling and jobs in Japan.58

Seven months into the textbook’s trial period, the McClatchy press learned of it and used mainland papers (including the Sacramento Bee) to sound the alarm about a foreign intrusion into the minds of innocent American students. The press maintained that the textbook was part of a nefarious plot hatched in Tokyo for the “purpose of maneuvering the United States into a position of inferiority [vis-à-vis Japan].” The main concern was that the textbook presented recent U.S.-Japan relations from Tokyo’s perspective by misrepresenting the process and necessity of Japanese immigrant exclusion. The newspapers based their claims almost entirely on press releases from McClatchy’s CJIC. In the fight against the IPR textbook, the exclusionist found common cause with Kilsoo Haan, a Korean immigrant in the Hawai‘i Territorial Senate who already had been condemning the textbook as Japanese propaganda. A Korean nationalist with expertise in the Japanese language, Haan represented a seemingly one-man organization called the Sino-Korean Peoples League that both the IPR and U.S. intelligence officials warned was not to be trusted.59

The story about the IPR textbook quickly spread beyond McClatchy newspapers to the Hearst press (including the San Francisco Examiner) and even to the respected and independent Christian Science Monitor. The Monitor quoted Haan at length, who said that he had been threatened with deportation unless he retracted his criticism of the textbook. But it was McClatchy’s statements that received the bulk of the mainland attention, as the contents of his numerous press releases repeatedly found their way into the Monitor and many other newspapers.

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