University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Beyond nationalism: a history of leisure discourse in and between the United States and Japan, 1910-1940

(USC Thesis Other)

Beyond nationalism: a history of leisure discourse in and between the United States and Japan, 1910-1940

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content i

BEYOND NATIONALISM: A HISTORY OF LEISURE DISCOURSE IN AND
BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND JAPAN, 1910-1940

by
Yuko Itatsu

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(HISTORY)

August 2009

Copyright 2009 Yuko Itatsu

ii

DEDICATION

This is dedicated to those who crossed the Pacific and were on the front line of
negotiating cultures, and especially to the memory of Senko Terri Matsuoka, who
taught me during our many afternoon chats just how personal history is.

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

One of my greatest findings in writing this dissertation was the sense of
humility that comes from realizing that it takes more than oneself to complete a
thesis. This endeavor could not have been completed without the support of many
mentors and friends on both sides of the Pacific who offered warm encouragement
and asked critical questions, which were crucial in improving the thesis. I would like
to thank Mary Althaus, Beth Bailey, Gordon Berger, Casey Nelson Blake, Roger
Dingman, Joanne Edel, Dylan Ellefson, Richard Fox, Seiko Fujii, Fumiko Fujita,
Yoshiko Furuki, Tom Gally, Shinya Hashizume, Tomoko Haruno, Lois Helmbold,
Shigeharu Higashi, Karin Huebner, Ann Igarashi, Masako Iino, Fumiaki Itakura,
Jane Iwamura, Takao Kambara, Hideaki Kaneko, Wakako Kato, Dong Hoon Kim,
Michiyo Kitawaki, Yuko Konno, Hirokazu Kosaka, Mika Kumagai, Lon Kurashige,
Ayako Kusunoki, Senko Matsuoka, Oki Miyano, Toshio Mizuuchi, Kenkichi Nagao,
Hideaki Ogisawa, Eizaburo Okuizumi, Go Oyagi, Joan Piggott, Al and Connie
Takahashi, David Rands, Steven J. Ross, Jane Sakurada, Yoshiko Sakurai, Vanessa
Schwartz, Shizuoka Kenjinkai of Southern California, Yoko Sugi, Stephen Sumida,
Takeshi Suzuki, Yasunari Takada, Yuko Takahashi, Koji Toko, Tadashi Uchino, and
Yujin Yaguchi.
Archivists at the following institutions offered very helpful assistance;
Doheny Library, Cinema Library and the East Asian Studies Library at the
University of Southern California, the Special Collections at the University of

iv

California Los Angeles, the Japanese American National Museum, the Margaret
Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Tsubouchi
Shoyo Memorial Theater Museum at Waseda University, the National Diet Library,
Ohya Soichi Library, the Museum of Kyoto, Osaka City University.
Financial support from the Fulbright Scholarship through the Japan-U.S.
Educational Commission, College Women’s Association of Japan, Tsuda College,
and the Yamane Toshiko Scholarship were crucial in helping me start my graduate
work at USC. Subsequently, USC kindly provided various funding through the
History Department, the ACE/Nikaido Fellowship from the Asian Studies Center,
the College of Arts and Sciences, the Center for International Business Education
and Research, the Los Angeles-Osaka Comparative Urban Studies Project, and the
Project for Pre-modern Japan Studies. The Matsushita Foundation, the Global Center
of Excellence project based at the Urban Research Plaza of Osaka City University
and their Department of Geography provided me with resources needed for research.
The College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tokyo provided me various
resources to finish the dissertation.
Two of the chapters have appeared elsewhere prior to this dissertation. I
would like to thank the Historical Journal of Film, Television and Radio, and the
Japan Debate Association for their permission to reprint the material. In addition, the
following institutions kindly gave permission to reproduce photos and other primary
sources: The Japanese American National Museum, University of California Los
Angeles, and Mainichi Newspapers.

v

When I decided to study at the University of Southern California, little did I
imagine that I would be blessed with such a genuine mentor as in Philip J. Ethington.
A true Renaissance man, Phil’s intellectual curiosity has been infectious and his
breadth of knowledge something to aspire to.
This study was born out of my curiosity to find out more about my
grandparents who epitomized modernity in our family. Shuji and Matsue Itatsu,
Noboru and Kazuko Takasu, Hajime and Nobuko Itatsu and everyone else in my
family have always been positive and encouraging of my pursuits. Lastly, I would
like to thank Kirsten O’Connor for the unconditional support she has given me.

vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
List of Tables vii
List of Figures viii
Abstract xi
Introduction 1

Chapter 1: The Emergence of Leisure as a Problem:
An Intellectual History in the U.S. and Japan 14
Chapter 2: Time For What We Will: The Emergence and Evolution of
Japanese American Leisure Culture 40
Chapter 3:Leisure as a litmus test: Dilemma between International Politics
and Supranational Products during the Anti-American Movement
of 1924 80
Chapter 4: Great Depression, Leisure and Imperialism in the 1930s:
The Intersections in the Pan-Pacific 122
Conclusion 153
References 157

Bibliography 160

Appendix A: Graduate Theses on Leisure Written from 1920 to 1929 181
Appendix B: Graduate Theses on Leisure Written from 1930 to 1940 184

vii

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: Number of Japanese by State, 1900-1920 50
Table 2: Japanese Religious Activities in Los Angeles, 1926 56
Table 3: Leisure Preference by Students in New York City, 1928 57
Table 4: Movies Made by Japanese Immigrants, 1912-1940 62
Table 5: Population of Japanese in America, 1930 146
Table 6: Number of Japanese Families by State, 1930 148

viii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Annual Work Hours in UK, USA, Japan 1870-1970 2
Figure 2: Population Percentage of Urban-Rural Residence of Foreign Born 21
Figure 3: Real Wage Index for Manufacturing Industry in Japan, 1910-1926 30
Figure 4: Number of Participants in Labor Strikes in Japan, 1910-1926 31
Figure 5: Number of Labor Strikes in Japan, 1910-1926 31
Figure 6: A 1915 Advertisement for a Record Seller in Sacramento, CA 46
Figure 7: Population of Japanese Americans in Los Angeles, 1900-1930 52
Figure 8: Event Announcement for a Traditional Music Group,
Los Angeles 1920 60

Figure 9: A Gathering Protesting the Passage of the New Immigration Law
in the United States 86

Figure 10: A Crowd Cheering in Opposition to the U.S. Immigration Law,
1924 86

Figure 11: New-Born Nisei in California, 1912-1935 146

ix

ABSTRACT

This is a history of the negotiation of politics and leisure between the United
States and Japan in the early 20
th
century, as seen in the bilateral intellectual history
of leisure as well as in the nodes of Japanese American communities. It is about the
interaction of global cultures through the examination of leisure and its intellectual,
visual, and material culture in the Pacific Rim.
By exploring the differences and similarities of leisure institutions in
Japanese American communities and by investigating the cultural negotiations in
these communities, I portray the transnational dynamics of intercultural relations in
popular culture. The thesis addresses issues of leisure as a socially constructed
institution, the agency of immigrants in creating their own leisure culture in the U.S.,
and the modes of transnational cultural transmissions. The larger goal of the thesis is
to analyze how inter-national politics (i.e., the mounting tension in U.S.-Japan
diplomacy) affects the trans-national cultural networks (conducted by exhibitors and
cultural brokers) and the ways in which supra-national cultures (such as movies) are
appropriated.
In both the United States and Japan, leisure became a significant and
common problem among intellectuals with the emergence of mass publics, the
shortening of work hours, and the advent of commercial entertainment in the early
twentieth century. While the urban cultural landscape and leisure activities in Japan
became quite similar to counterparts in the U.S., I argue that the foundational

x

ideology and justification for leisure and therefore the appropriation of leisure as a
social institution were different in these two nations, and that these differences were
subsequently contested and negotiated in the Japanese American communities.
Examining the conjuctures as well as disjunctures of economy, culture and
politics in the leisure discourse of the first half of the twentieth century shows the
intricate dynamics of international politics and their influence on transnational
cultural networks, which serves as a vehicle in some cases for nurturing and
disseminating a supranational cultural product. While the urge for consuming
supranational cultural products proved to be stronger than society’s conviction to
adhere to national interests in some cases, it requires careful historical and cultural
analysis to understand how and when these supranational products are able to sustain
a critical mass amidst complex international politics as well as cultural network
politics.

1

INTRODUCTION

This a history of the negotiation of politics and leisure between the United States
and Japan in the early 20
th
century, as seen in the bilateral social and intellectual
history of leisure as well as in the nodes of Japanese American communities. It is a
thesis about the interaction of global cultures through the examination of leisure and
its intellectual, visual, and material culture in the Pacific Rim. The main goal of this
thesis is to analyze the various ways in which leisure culture was institutionalized in
the Japanese American communities in the early 20
th
century through the cultural
influences from Japan and mainstream America. By exploring the differences and
similarities of leisure institutions in key Japanese American communities and by
investigating the cultural negotiations in these communities, I hope to understand the
dynamics of intercultural relations in popular culture. The thesis will address issues
of leisure as a socially constructed institution, the agency of immigrants in creating
their own leisure culture in the U.S., and transnational cultural transmissions.
As Figure 1 shows, the annual work hours in the United Kingdom, the United
States, and Japan were remarkably similar around 1870. By 1929, all three nations
experienced a drastic drop in hours as well, but the similarities in the vicissitude ends
there. While the UK and USA continued its decrease of work hours in a similar pace,
Japan’s decrease slowed down, and hence has received the reputation of being a
workaholic nation. The aim of this dissertation is not to explain this discrepancy

2
after World War II, but to focus on the similar trajectory in the decrement of work
hours before the war. The table above shows a worldwide phenomenon that
transcended national boundaries from the end of the nineteenth century to the eve of
the Great Depression. This phenomenon has been explained as a result of a
progressive movement which helped ameliorate the deteriorating working conditions
due to the acceleration of industrialism.

Figure 1: Annual Work Hours in UK, USA, and Japan 1870-1970
1

0
500
1000
1500
2000
2500
3000
3500
1870 1929 1950 1970
Year
UK
USA
JAPAN

The word “leisure” has occupied different meanings at different times in history,
and as capitalism accelerated in the 20
th
century, leisure came to be understood as the

1
Source: OECD and Becker 1991. In Chris Gratton and Peter Taylor, “The Economics of
Work and Leisure,” Eds. John T. Haworth and A.J. Veal, Work and Leisure (London and
New York: Routledge, 2004), 99. It was only in the 1990s that the annual work hours of
Japanese laborers decreased to the level of Americans, which was just under 2000 hours.
Interestingly the working hours for the Americans and British had increased gradually and
slowly to between 1900 and 2000 hours. Yoshiaki Senuma, Yoka no doko to kanosei [Trends
in Leisure and Its Possibilities] (Tokyo: Gakubundo, 2005), 19.

3
antithesis of work, “a non-productive consumption of time … from a sense of the
unworthiness of productive work and as evidence of pecuniary ability to afford a life
of idleness,” as Thorstein Veblen defined it in 1899.
2
However, the word “leisure”
originated from the Latin word licere, meaning to be lawful or to be allowed.
3
In
other words, contrary to our modern understanding of it being “free” time, it actually
represented a subjection to a form of constraint. Leisure theorist Chris Rojek has
argued, “leisure is not free time, but an effect of systems of legitimization.”
4
For
example, it has been argued that in the Victorian era, it was a necessity for young
women to be interested in hairstyle, dress, dancing and courtship, all of which are
today considered activities that consume leisure time, to legitimize herself as an
“appropriate woman” eligible for a good marriage and secure future.
5
This theory of
leisure activities as a crucial cultural institution applies to any culture. In this
particular dissertation, it deals with the Japanese American experience and how
leisure was an essential vehicle in negotiating their identity as Japanese Americans.
Leisure, race, and nationalism are unequivocally connected in the history of the
early half of the twentieth century. This history of leisure emphasizes the
“chemistry,” or negotiations between Japanese leisure concepts and practices on the

2
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (The
Modern Library, 1899), 46.
3
Chris Rojek, Capitalism and Leisure Theory (New York: Tavistock Publications, 1985), 16.
4
Rojek, 16.
5
S. Griffin, D. Hobson, S. MacIntosh, and T. McCabe, “Women and Leisure,” J. Hargreaves,
ed. Sport, Culture and Ideology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 107. Although
Griffin et al premises this point on contemporary society, one can easily adopt this theory to
the early twentieth century, or argue that it applies more to the Victorian conventions of
thinking.

4
one hand and American leisure concepts and practices on the other, and implies the
possibility of different variations of chemistry based on the historical, geographical,
and temporal conditions that configures the contestation and/or amalgamation of
leisure cultures. The 1924 Immigration Act, also called the Japanese Exclusion Act
known for banning Japanese immigration to the U.S., will be used as a watershed
moment to compare how Japanese American leisure culture may have changed after
the 1924 Act. The 1920s is also a significant turning point decade for the Japanese
American community because of the generational composition shifting from a
community of Issei to Nisei. The larger goal of the dissertation is to analyze how
inter-national politics (i.e., the mounting tension in U.S.-Japan diplomacy) affects
the trans-national cultural networks (conducted by exhibitors and cultural brokers)
and the ways in which supra-national cultures (such as movies) are appropriated.
The early 20
th
century is a crucial period to examine not only because of the
influx of immigrants during this time, but also because of the acceleration of
international communications that occurred. Not only were these communications
becoming more and more important in the unstable world of international politics,
ordinary people were able to access more and more foreign cultural products, such as
film, magazines and books. In other words, the intensity of the global phenomenon
of industrialization and urbanization at this particular historical period had a direct
impact on the everyday lives of ordinary people and their relationship to the
formation of their leisure activities. Incidentally, the notion and purpose of leisure
was vehemently discussed among intellectuals during the early 20
th
century as well.

5
While both American and Japanese intellectuals addressed the issue of leisure from
the instructional standpoint of correcting the growing delinquencies of the urban
mass, Japanese intellectuals also discussed leisure as a means of gaining cultural
cachet among the international powerhouses. While the urban geographical
landscape and the leisure activities in Japan became quite similar to its counterparts
in the U.S., I hope to argue that the foundational ideology and justification for leisure
and therefore the appropriation of leisure as a social institution were different in
these two nations, which were subsequently contested and negotiated in the Japanese
American communities.
There has been an increase in transnational history produced in the last few
decades.
6
This, no doubt, is a reflection of the increasing mobility of people and
materials in the world today. This dissertation intends to illustrate the “continuous,
multidirectional, and circular character of migrations” that Donna Gabaccia
advocates.
7
As Madeline Hsu asks justly, how do we “speak of our own impossible
subjects— Asians who move around and retain and develop the possibility of
multiple directions of belonging socially, economically, culturally and politically?
How do we narrate the stories of subjects who exist beyond the confinements of the
American nation-state?”
8
One viable answer is the “two-shore approach” based on

6
Madeline Y . Hsu, “Transnationalism and Asian American Studies as a Migration-Centered
Project,” Journal of Asian American Studies 11:2 (June 2008): 185-197.
7
Donna Gabbacia, “Is Everywhere Nowhere?: Nomads, Nations, and the Immigrant
Paradigm of United States History,” Journal of American History 86:3 (December 1999):
1116.
8
Hsu, 192.

6
“bi-national methodology” as Augusto Espiritu describes.
9
This “bi-focal writing”
actually is nothing new; scholarship produced by contemporary intellectuals in the
early twentieth century found it necessary to examine the roots of the mother culture
to understand the newly arrived immigrants. In the mid-1980s, historian John Bodnar
revisited this angle by examining the homeland cultures of European immigrants and
correlate the attitude they have towards labor issues in the United States with the
degrees of capitalism their homeland had reached when they migrated.
10

However, as George Sanchez has pointed out, the limitations with many of these
traditional immigration histories had been that they were variations of the bipolar
model which “stressed cultural continuity or gradual acculturation [which] short-
circuited a full exploration of the complex process of cultural adaptation.”
11
In fact,
as Lon Kurashige illustrates through the historicization of the Nisei Festival in Los
Angeles, the Japanese Americans were neither immersed in the idea of “preservation
nor the abandonment of ethnic tradition” but rather were “rearticulating on the basis
of perceived opportunities to gain broad-based acceptance, legitimacy and class
status-- an American dream for any subjugated minority.”
12
Historian Eiichiro

9
Augusto Espiritu, “Transnationalism and Filipino American Historiography,” Journal of
Asian American Studies 11:2 (June 2008): 181.
10
John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1985).
11
George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano
Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 13.
12
Lon Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity
and Festival in Los Angeles 1934-1990 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002),
5-6.

7
Azuma recapitulates this point by transposing it especially onto the Issei’s
engagement with nationalism. He maintains,
Although they constantly traversed, often blurred, and frequently disrupted
the varied definitions of race, nation, and culture, Issei were able neither to
act as free-floating cosmopolitans nor to enjoy a postmodern condition above
and beyond the hegemonic structures of state control. Their strategies of
assimilation, adaptation, and ethnic survival took shape through the
(re)interpretation, but not repudiation, of the bounded identity constructs that
had their origins in the ideological imperatives of each state.
13

This thesis attempts to prove this statement in the realm of leisure culture by
illustrating the choices available to Americans, Japanese people, and Japanese
Americans and by providing a transnational historical context in which the decisions
had to be made.
Chapter 1 discusses the ways in which both the U.S. and Japan developed their
respective leisure discourses. It analyzes the variables of industrialization,
urbanization, and imperialism in each national context as well as the differentiation
of experiences between urban and rural communities. The second component is to
establish whether the rural Japanese American communities can be considered a
satellite community of Japanese leisure culture that is in juxtaposition with rural
communities in Japan.
Chapter 2 discusses the importation of Japanese culture into the Japanese
immigrant culture in the United States, primarily in the early years focusing on the
period between 1900 and until the 1920s. This periodization of breaking Japanese

13
Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese
America (Oxford University Press, 2005), 213.

8
American history to before and after 1930 is more arbitrary than the national
histories in this thesis. Through readings of the Japanese immigrant newspapers in
various areas, the chapter analyzes the patterns of cultural circulations primarily in
the forms of sports events (sumo and baseball), theater troupes, and naniwa-bushi
folk song singers to establish the patterns and variations of cultural circulations.
Chapter 3 addresses the cacophony that is born when international politics and
cultural relations are not in sync. This chapter uses the 1924 Immigration Act, which
banned emigration from Japan, as a litmus test for the ways in which the Japanese
public negotiated between anti-American sentiment and the cultural allure of
Hollywood. Specifically, the chapter discusses a failed attempt at a boycott of
Hollywood films and those involved in it from various viewpoints. While this
chapter on the Japanese public may appear to be a detour in this thesis, it fits into the
larger scheme of the dissertation which is to highlight the reciprocal nature of the
repercussions inter-national politics have on extra-national culture and their trans-
national networks. In addition, through the analyses of this boycott movement, I plan
to contextualize immigration history in a broader pan-Pacific and reciprocal
narrative.
Chapter 4 examines with the shift in leisure discourse especially after the Great
Depression and the problem of increased leisure during this period and Japan’s
incorporation of leisure into her imperialistic national policies. In particular, it
focuses on the shift of argumentation in the connotations of “leisure” in relation to
“nation” from the 1920s to the 1930s in the United States and Japan. Either directly

9
or indirectly, the Great Depression served as a watershed moment for intellectuals to
re-configure the utility of leisure. By dissecting views published in books as well as
newspapers and theses from this era, it discusses the prescriptive argumentations that
various leaders of the society presented in reference to the social scientific surveys
about mass leisure. The chapter showcases the protean yet dialectic relationship
between the perception of labor and leisure influenced by socio-economic forces.
Interestingly, both the U.S. and Japan emulate their leisure policies from European
nations. Through this comparative perspective, this chapter implies that the U.S and
Japanese leisure policies were variations of chemistries as well. The chapter also
deals with the Japanese American community as more of an active agent in the
production of leisure culture rather than merely an importer. It deals with the cultural
creativity and production by Japanese Americans for the sake of ethnic autonomy
and ethnic empowerment, or as “countersites’ to U.S. national memory and national
culture, as Lisa Lowe has described. Specifically it addresses the various sports
leagues, hobby clubs, and performing arts groups to analyze the ways in which the
Japanese American communities negotiated between traditions and newly formed
customs.

Significance in Field
This thesis attempts to make a significant contribution to immigration history in
two fundamental ways. One is to spatially re-imagine ethnic leisure practices from
the periphery to the center. There have been an increasing number of studies on

10
ethnic American leisure practices in the past twenty years. Scholars such as Roy
Rozensweig, Lizabeth Cohen, David Yoo and Valerie Matsumoto discuss the
cultural retention of immigrant groups in the initial stage, but eventually narrate a
story of how immigrants assimilated to the mainstream leisure culture. While these
studies enrich our understanding of ethnic leisure practices, they have continued to
put ethnic American leisure experiences at the periphery of American leisure history.
These studies often lump the pre-migration culture with the post-migration culture,
in which the changes between the two are overlooked. The continuing influence of
the mother culture is often neglected, and analyzed under the assumption that these
ethnic cultures were static and frozen in time from their time of immigration.
My goal is to carve out a different spatial narrative for the history of Japanese
American culture. Re-imagining Japanese American leisure culture as the center of
continuous bilateral cultural negotiations allows for a closer examination of the
ingression of various cultural influences in the Japanese American communities. I
will pay particular attention to the connections of leisure activities and how Japanese
American communities formed orbits of culture through the circulation of leisure.
The comparison of major Japanese American communities both urban and rural,
such as in Seattle, San Francisco, Fresno and Utah, to Los Angeles allows me to
examine the similarities and differences in the chemistries that occur in the cultural
negotiation. It allows me to test my hypothesis that both urban and rural Japanese
American communities can be juxtaposed with rural Japan as satellite communities
orbiting around the entertainment production centers of Tokyo and Osaka. This can

11
open the question of whether the Japanese American case can serve as one model
among other immigrant leisure cultures in the U.S. and their relations to the “home
culture” at this historical moment when similar negotiations were ubiquitous.
Secondly, this thesis hopes to examine immigrant history in terms of the
relationship between supra-national culture, trans-national cultural networks, and
inter-national politics. Supranational is a term often used in political science to
describe a governing entity where representatives of neighboring nation states, such
as the European Union, discuss multilateral issues. In this study, however, the term
will be used to discuss cultural products that have been elevated to a position where
it is considered a global product, and holds the power to transcend national
boundaries. Cultural products such as movies and baseball will be considered
supranational since they have been embraced and appropriated in various countries
and have arguably been divorced from their original American-ness. The circulation
of these supranational cultures is conducted by cultural brokers who negotiate
transnational networks that crossed over politically-defined international boundaries.
This framework is inspired by the various dimensions of global cultural flow that
Arjun Appadurai has introduced.
14
While his theory of ethnoscapes, mediascapes,
technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscape references contemporary global
interactions and the disjuncture between economy, culture and politics, my thesis
will shed light on the disjunctures over a longer period of time on a particular

14
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003) 33.

12
bilateral relationship. The thesis aims to analyze further the disjuncture between
economy, culture and politics in a historical context and by analyzing the trajectory
of a succession of disjunctures. It also aims to show the conjuctures of economy,
culture and politics. Since the “nation” is the primary point of reference in the early
twentieth century, the terms have been called international, transnational and
supranational.
What makes Japanese American history unique among other immigrant histories
in the first half of the 20
th
century is the mounting tension between the U.S. and
Japan as competing imperial powers, and the dramatic influx of Japanese laborers
and the subsequent discriminatory and exclusionary practices in the U.S. I plan to
examine the Japanese American leisure culture with this in mind when
contextualizing this case among other immigrant leisure cultural negotiations. I plan
to take a step further than the connections made between international politics and
cultural diplomacy, and delve into the everyday lives of ordinary people and how
they contributed to the intercultural relations in non-official capacities.
Leisure practices have been studied in various academic fields, such as regional
history, sociological studies on ethnic recreation, instructional and pedagogical
studies on recreation, and historical studies on specific leisure activities or specific
institutions that used leisure activities. I will reorganize the information gathered
from these sources in addition to the primary sources to make a broader claim about
the experience and significance of leisure for the Japanese Americans before WWII.
Since there have not been any major studies of the circulation of ethnic culture

13
between Japan and the U.S., the main historical source will be the ethnic newspapers.
By comparing these cultural circulations in the Japanese American communities with
the circulation and proliferation of popular culture in rural Japan, I attempt to
examine the difference (or the lack thereof) of the relationships rural Japan and the
Japanese American communities (both urban and rural) had with the cultural
productions centers of Tokyo or Osaka. The chapter on the Hollywood boycott
movement in 1924 Japan in an inverted pattern of this formula. That is, that the
circulation of American popular culture represented by Hollywood can claim a
similar relationship to Japan (both urban and rural) as it does to the American
market, even during increasing political antagonism between these two nations.
The difficulty of writing this transnational history has been realizing that each
component of this story can be told in more depth and detail. That is, the intellectual
history of leisure discourse and social history of leisure in America, Japan and the
Japanese American communities are all worthy of and deserving of separate
scholarships. This thesis does not claim to be a comprehensive history nor does it
aim to create a monolithic history of pan-Pacific leisure culture. Rather, my goal is to
reveal important features and dynamics at the nodes of these histories, which are
often neglected and offer some paths on how they can be connected.

14

CHAPTER 1
THE EMERGENCE OF LEISURE AS A PROBLEM:
AN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY IN THE U.S. AND JAPAN

“We work in order to be at leisure.”
15

Aristotle

The quest for a better work-life balance has been a common denominator for
people across time and place in modern society and beyond the vernacular concerns
in respective cultures. While there is a propensity to assign work as the “head” of a
coin and non-work time, or leisure, as the “tail” of a coin, the ways in which one
spends leisure is equally if not more important in the construction of our self identity
and the portrayal of oneself to others. Historically, the significance of leisure
changed dramatically when leisure became available to the mass and not just those in
the upper end of the social stratification with means for conspicuous consumption.
16

This change occurred as a consequence of industrialization and modernization. The
increasing importance of leisure derived primarily from the following factors: First,
non-work hours became clearly distinguished from work hours as the site of work
became separated from residence. Second, as the nature of labor shifted from skilled

15
Aristotle, Politics Book VII, 15 1334a14-16.
16
Veblen.

15
work to semi-skilled and non-skilled work, satisfaction from work decreased and a
need to find meaning in other aspects of their life increased.
The aim of this chapter is to describe the similarities and differences of
leisure discourse in Japan and the United States from around the 1910s to the eve of
the Great Depression. The comparison shows the similar problems many countries
faced that budded from industrialization, urbanization, and modernization, and both
the divergence and common language intellectuals used to describe the “leisure
problem.” Interestingly and surprisingly, leisure discourse became mainstream in
Japan earlier than in the United States. This early maturation of the field in Japan
was a reflection of the context in which Japan was situated, and in turn situated itself
in international politics.

Increase of Leisure Time in America
In early twentieth-century America, many embraced and celebrated the
arrival of the technological advances in the industrial era. There was optimism that
working hours would get shorter and shorter. In fact, some estimates claimed that the
machinery had become equivalent to thirty-five human slaves to each human being,
man woman and child.
17
On the other hand, others condemned the ways in which
humans were succumbing to being mere bodies or robots that facilitated the
machinery. The following passage from This Ugly Civilization (1929) by economic

17
“Four-day week predicted,” Los Angeles Times, (February 14, 1930), 8.

16
theorist Ralph Borsodi illustrates the feelings shared by many about the
shortcomings produced by the mechanical age:
Above all, this civilization is ugly because of the subtle hypocrisy with which
it persuades the people to engage in the factory production of creature
comforts while imposing conditions which destroy their capacity for enjoying
them…. The servitude to the factory which it enforces uniformly upon all
men harnesses skilled workers and creative individuals in a repetitive
treadmill which makes each muscle in their bodies, every drop of blood in
their veins, the very fibres of their being, cry out in voiceless agony that they
are being made to murder time--the irreplaceable stuff of which life itself is
composed. For America is a respecter of things only, and time--why time is
only something to be killed, or butchered into things which can be bought
and sold.
18

Time was indeed of the essence in the workers lives. Between 1890 and 1913, the
average workweek shortened from 58.4 hours to 53.8, and by 1926, manufacturing
industries had their work force labor fifty hours a week.
19
As tragic deaths and
injuries increased in the factories such as the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire,
however, awareness toward working conditions increased as well as measures to
create a more humane working environment. Work hours gradually decreased from
then, from twelve hours to ten, and eventually eight hours. On the other hand, even
as late as in May 1929, industrial organizations such as the National Association of
Manufacturers made adamant cases against the forty-hour workweek. They argued
that the manufacturers could not afford to pay existing wages for a shorter workweek

18
Ralph Borsodi, This Ugly Civilization, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1929). Retrieved
May 13, 2008, from
http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0303critic/030302borsodi.ugly/030302borsodi.toc.html
Emphasis mine.
19
Weaver W. Pangburn, Adventures in Recreation, (New York: A.S. Barnes and Company,
1936), 8.

17
while maintaining competition with Europe. They considered it “illogical and
unreasonable.”
20
But despite the stubbornness of some industries, the trend in shorter
work hours spread across industries thanks to the efforts by labor unions such as the
American Federation of Labor and the International Labor Organization. However,
the labor unions were not the only ones who could claim credit in the shorter
working hours. Some corporations also took initiative in shortening work hours. In
1926, Henry Ford announced the introduction of the five-day, forty-hour workweek
at his plants. He argued that laborers needed to be able to find time to consume the
products in order to absorb the increasing production and maintain prosperity.
21

The products that laborers consumed were not only material goods but also
commercial amusement. City dwellers flocked to amusement parks such as Coney
Island, vaudeville theaters, movie theaters, dance halls, and other commercial
amusement venues. The laissez-faire principle of the business world described also
the manner in which the commercial amusement industry expanded. The desire of
the mass for more stimulation, and the lack of (and difficulty of thorough)
governmental control over these establishments created a popular culture that pushed
the boundaries of conventional norms in social engagement. Victorian virtues were
threatened by the new forms of commercial leisure, and popular culture became
targeted for the increase in various forms of vice and diminishing morals.
22
The

20
L. Stark, “Five-Day Week Makes its Way in Industry,” New York Times, (May 12, 1939),
XX4.
21
Stark, ibid.
22
Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture
Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements:

18
population density in the urban areas accentuated the visibility and magnified the
negative impacts of commercial leisure activities on the everyday lives of the mass.
The playground movement, creations of national parks, recreation
commissions were evidence of efforts to combat and grab control of urbanization as
well as the values changed by industrialization. These were the seeds sown for
leisure administration and government intervention. While the problem of leisure
only became an imminent threat necessary of federal attention after the Depression,
it had already incited major discussions for intellectuals and calls for surveys. The
increased hours of leisure were often numerically described in the additional hours
people had collectively. For instance, one study reported that in normal industrial
conditions, a city of 125,000 would have a million free hours of leisure every day.
23

Another statistic from 1920 said that the people of the City of Milwaukee spend
1000 years of leisure each week.
24
Another wrote, “more people in America are
enjoying a greater amount of leisure than at any period in the history of the world.”
25

The Emergence of Leisure as a Problem in America
It is understandable, then, that the use of leisure time by the masses became
an urgent issue that required attention. One of the ways in which leisure became

Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1986).
23
Weaver W. Pangburn, “The Worker’s Leisure and His Individuality,” The American
Journal of Sociology, 27: 4 (1922), 433.
24
Warren P. Pearson, “The Leisure Time Problem,” (Masters thesis in Sociology, University
of Kansas, 1920), 11.
25
“Is American leisure a god or devil,” Los Angeles Times, (October 17, 1929), 14.

19
legitimized was by overcoming the residual fear of and perceived sinfulness of
leisure. Skillfully and very gradually Americans began to be taught that leisure and
play were not sinful if they could be classed under the label of recreation. In 1934,
for example, Arthur Pack, explained that the perception of recreation changed after
World War I and was in fact:
admitted to the category of acceptable and respectable occupations, since
scientists, luckily had found that neither brains nor bodies can work all the
time and still retain full vigor and efficiency. The corollary was plain: one
must play more in order to work better…. This health and efficiency slogan
became the crowing manifestation of boom times.… In 1926, it even attained
Presidential recognition. Calvin Coolidge called a great national conference
on outdoor recreation in Washington and addressed it himself as spokesman
of the new order. Its sessions lasted a week, and thereafter the nation became
officially recreation conscious and leisure-minded. It signalized the
acceptance of leisure not as an end in itself, but as a valuable handmaiden of
prosperity.
26

A query in the WorldCat search engine shows that hundreds of books,
academic articles and theses were published about leisure during the 1920s. Books
such as Comrades in play, leisure time activities published by the Community
Service Society of New York in 1920, The why and how of leisure-time activities
among younger employed girls (1925) as well as reports such as “The city worker's
spare time in the United States” (1924) published by the International Labour Office
in 1924, show the rising interest in leisure time use. Theses such as “Motivation in
leisure” (1923), “Adolescent leisure time activities in Mississippi”(1925), “Can the
leisure hours of all the boys of a community be properly directed by a volunteer
organization” (1926), as well as countless newspaper articles discussed the problems

26
Arthur Pack, Challenge of Leisure (1934) 16-17.

20
about leisure as well as suggest prescriptive uses of it.
27
Many of the scholars,
writers and journalists made similar arguments about the problem of leisure, that it
was too commercial and too passive. These arguments continued to be made after the
Depression as well.
As historian Richard Hofstadter has argued, what made industrialization and
urbanization more problematic was the heterogeneity of the increasing population.
28

As approximately three quarters of the newly arrived immigrants lived in urban areas
between 1910-1930, the immigrant culture had a stronger chance of surviving in the
burgeoning urban leisure culture. (Figure 2) The leisure problem before the Great
Depression was greatly fueled by the leisure activities of this heterogeneous
population. As leisure time increased, it became a mission for social scientists to
grasp the realities of how leisure time was spent. The sociological study of leisure
was influenced by a variety of social concerns at that time, such as the visibility of
new immigrants and juvenile delinquency. The influx of immigrants from Eastern
and Southern Europe as well as from East Asia incited curiosity over how these
immigrants used their leisure time. After all, it was during leisure time that they were
able to display and enjoy their ethnic culture, build their social networks and

27
H. A. Burkart, “Motivation in leisure.” (M.A. diss., Columbia University, 1923);
Community Service Society of New York, Comrades in Play, Leisure Time Activities, (New
York: The Society, 1920); A.J. July, “Can the leisure hours of all the boys of a community
be properly directed by a volunteer organization,” (Masters Thesis, University of Notre
Dame, 1926). See Appendix A for more titles.
28
Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Vintage Books,
1955), 8.

21
Figure 2: Population Percentage by Urban-Rural Residence for Foreign Born
29

72.1
75.4
79.2
27.9
24.6
20.8
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
1910 1920 1930
Year
Rural
Urban

negotiate their ethnicity amidst racial prejudice and pressure for Americanization,
not in the factory during work hours.
30

Particularly noteworthy were the many masters and doctoral theses that
surveyed the leisure culture of various ethnic groups. In some cases, the theses were
a collective effort by students at the same university. Columbia University was one
of the first universities to produce surveys on the leisure culture various ethnic

29
Table 18. Nativity of the Population by Urban-Rural Residence and Size of Place: 1870 to
1940 and 1960 to 1990 U.S. Bureau of the Census Internet Release date: March 9, 1999
http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0029/tab18.html (Accessed
May 11, 2008); U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division. Nativity of the Population and
Place of Birth of the Native Population: 1850 to 1990.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0029/tab01.html (Accessed
May 11, 2008).
30
Roy Rozensweig, Eight Hours for What We Will Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City,
1870-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

22
groups. In 1910, the first theses was submitted about Chinese immigrants in New
York City, followed by surveys on Czechs in 1914, Italians in 1920, Norwegians in
1921, and the Japanese in 1922 and 1928.
31
The theses on Japanese immigrants as a
whole and a separate study on Japanese students will be analyzed in the next chapter.
While immigrants from major emigrating countries were not considered in
these individual theses, in 1913 another graduate student from Columbia University
conducted a comparative survey on leisure time use among the larger immigrant
communities and Americans. In his study, George E. Bevans examined the working
men’s leisure culture of Americans, Austria Hungarians, British, Germans, Italians,
Russians and others. He interviewed 809 working men in New York City, 75% of
whom were foreign born. Careful scrutiny by how they spent their leisure time on
weekdays and weekends, the difference in leisure time activities between married
and single men, how much time they spent on these activities, the relationship
between their occupation and leisure time, and weekly expenditure on leisure showed
noticeable difference between Americans and immigrants. Bevans concluded from
this study that there was evidence that American social institutions such as movie
palaces, theaters, and pool halls, influenced the ways in which leisure time was used

31
Andrew Yu-Yue Tsu, “The Use of Leisure Time Among the Chinese Immigrants of New
York City,” (MA thesis for Political Science, Columbia University, 1910); May C. Cermak,
“How Bohemians of New York City Spend their Leisure Time,” ( M.A. Thesis, Columbia
University, 1914); Estelle Goldschmidt, “The Use of Leisure Time by Norwegians,” (M.A.
Thesis, Columbia University, 1921); Grace McMillan Challman, “The Use of Leisure Time
by the Italians of New York City,” (M.A. Thesis, Columbia University, 1920); King,
Clarence H. “The Use of Leisure Time by the Japanese of New York City,” (M.A. diss.,
Columbia University, 1922); Noboru Takahashi, “The Use of Leisure Time by Japanese
Students in New York City,” (M.A. Thesis, Columbia University, 1928).

23
for immigrants. While this matches the general narrative of Americanization, it does
not fully consider the leisure culture of the homeland. For instance, one of the
statistics shows that Germans tended more to frequent their church or synagogue
compared to others. In another table, Russians are noted as frequenting public
lectures more often than any other group. However, it does not provide any analysis
on how the home culture may have impacted their leisure culture in New York. In
fact, the difference of leisure time use is more distinct between different occupations,
and the expenditure of money for leisure by occupation. If there had been cross-
tabulations of the occupation by immigrant groups, the study may have shown a
direct connection between ethnic group and their leisure activities.
32

While the theses about specific immigrant groups did not provide an inter-
ethnic comparative perspective, they all spent a considerable amount of the space
discussing the societal background in the “native land” and analyzing the change in
immigrant customs since their arrival in America. On a general level, the case studies
on Chinese, Norwegian and Czech immigrants all emphasized the democratic
traditions they were accustomed to in their native land, which facilitated their smooth
transition. These arguments were inserted arguably in an effort to dismiss the
suspicion that these particular immigrants might be a threat to America. In the
Chinese case study, the leisure culture in China described shows the culturally
different yet fundamentally similar, wholesome and unthreatening leisure practice.

32
George Esdras Bevans, “How Workingmen Spend Their Spare Time,” (M.A. thesis in
Political Science, Columbia University, 1913). The relationship between nationality and
leisure is addressed in Chapter 5 of Bevan’s thesis.

24
Tsu argues that the most favorite pastime for Chinese people is frequenting the tea
garden. In these two or three story buildings, women are excluded and alcohol is not
served, but “the scholar and the farmer, the merchant and the laborer” are all served
equally, which is “another instance of the democratic characteristic of the Chinese
society.”
33

In the cases of Czechs and Norwegians, the commonalities with Americans
leisure practice were emphasized more than differences. Cermak insisted that for the
Czechs, “the changes noted in the traits of these immigrants since they have come to
America were very slight.” But at the same time Czechs were able to strongly
retained their native culture, which was possible “due in large part, no doubt, to their
having culture and education fundamentally similar in spite of being of different
race.”
34
In the case of Norwegians, the differences were mentioned mostly to
highlight the athletic contributions the immigrants have made in their traditional
sports such as tennis, yachting and skiing where they held prominent roles.
All of the theses express dismay about the negative effects American culture
had on the traditional and wholesome customs brought from the native land.
Goldschmidt argued that the downside of the Norwegian tendency to assimilate
“very rapidly often involve[d] a detrimental effect” to adopt “the worst features of
[the] civilization, while the virtues of his own are forgotten.”
35
She mentions the

33
Tsu, 20.
34
Cermak, 23.
35
Goldschmidt, 42.

25
active singing societies and how they have “attempted to counteract the influence of
‘jazz’ and to familiarize the community with classical Norwegian music.”
36

The most drastic and negative change reported was for the Italian immigrants.
Challman argued that while the immigrants lived in communal enclaves in New
York City, the Italian community suffered a loss socially. She pointed out that the
United States “offer[ed] to the Italian men the curse of the saloon, the poisonous
atmosphere of the cheap moving pictures and the dangers of the slum dance hall.”
37

However, she posited, the greatest and “unsuspected evil effect” was the destruction
of the ideal of Italian domestic life. Contrary to the Norwegian and Czech example,
Challman argued that there was a big difference in leisure culture between
Americans and Italian immigrants. She highlighted the threats facing Italian men as
they become unable to exercise their traditional patriarchal role, protecting their
women, especially their single daughters. In America, she argued, “the men cannot
guard the women so carefully as many of them are employed in factories during the
day and consequently away from the father’s supervision.”
38
In addition to meeting
more men in the society, Italian women also had more opportunity to meet men in
their homes, due to the breakdown of the “seclusiveness of the home.”
39
The older
generations in the Italian community had difficulty accepting this form of free
courtship and marriage based on love, when contrasted with the Italian tradition of

36
Goldschmidt, 41.
37
Challman, 21.
38
Challman, 24.
39
Challman, 24.

26
arranged marriage for economic and familial security, which they had taken for
granted.
Another trait that Italian immigrants apparently did not care for was the lack
of taste in American culture. While Challman criticized the Italian American
newspapers for “decrying everything American” and “exalting everything Italian,”
by making generalizations based on “the few wretched specimens of American
manhood whom they meet in public life,” she still maintained that the Italian
immigrants appreciated high art in literature, music, and theater compared to their
American counterparts.
40
She argued the Italian immigrants were not “carried away
with our ‘jazz’,” and took a “very definite stand against cheap vaudeville and
burlesque choruses,” and were “repelled by crudeness, especially in costumes on the
stage.”
41
Instead they read “a great deal more of better books than does the average
American,” were fond of the “better class of plays,” and believed that “America has
less to offer the Italian in the way of good music than he was able to secure at
home.”
42
In fact, the practice of movie-going was explained with a defensive tone,
stating that “it was only natural that people with limited means should frequent the
movies as a way of spending their leisure time,” and that the Italian immigrants went
to the movie theaters “not as a place where he may find unbounded enjoyment bur
rather as a respite from the monotony of the work day.”
43
Fearful of the trend that
native games were being forgotten by Italian children as well as the threat of

40
Challman, 33.
41
Challman, 34, 37.
42
Challman, 33, 36,
43
Challman, 36-37.

27
materialism, Challman hoped for the “Italian gift” of art, music and literature to
increasingly flow into the American national life, which was “admittedly deficient in
them.”
44

International Comparison
This type of comparison, preference, and romanticization of one’s leisure
culture over another was nothing new. For many generations, Greek civilization was
frequently used as a model for ideal leisure. However, leisure reached a world-wide
peak in interest, as laborers around the world experienced similar working conditions
and similar struggles with employers. The movement for shorter work hours
manifested itself in many countries in similar times, and the eagerness to compare
their situation with other modernized urban laborers became common in America,
Europe and Japan.
In 1924, the International Labor Office (ILO) in Geneva published a series of
reports on leisure culture in various European countries in its journal called the
International Labor Review. This was intended to be a preview of the agenda for the
International Labor Conference to be held in June 1924, which included “the subject
of the development of facilities for the utilization of workers’ leisure.”
45
The
foundation of the ILO in 1919 itself is evidence of a necessity to collaborate on labor

44
Challman, 42.
45
F. Rager, “The Utilization of Leisure in Austria,” International Labor Review 9 (Feb.
1924), 227.

28
issues internationally, but the focus on the utilization of leisure indicates the urgency
that the matter had in the mid-1920s.
A few years later, a book called Leisure and Its Use: Some International
Observations was published in the United States. This study was requested by the
Playground and Recreation Association of America in the spring of 1926. They sent
two women, Dorothy Petgen who was the field agent for eighteen months in Europe
and Margaret Lawson who helped Petgen for the first six months. While Herbert L.
May was commissioned for the project, he acknowledges these two women as the
actual interviewers. The book was predicated on the preconceived notion that
somehow Europeans knew how to better enjoy leisure than Americans, such as:
Why do Europeans appreciate good music and singing more than Americans?
The art of conversation… what has caused its decline? Is religiosity
responsible for bad use of leisure (in America)? Why is beauty left out of
American life? Europe still has family life… we do not… why?
46

The influence of these sets of prejudice was strong as they embarked on a
comparative study on leisure in the European nations. While May and Petgen
realized quickly that these were stereotypes of those in the upper class and not
representative of the majority, the project sought to explore the difference of various
European leisure cultures and American leisure culture by contextualizing them in
their historical and socio-economic circumstances. Petgen primarily focused on
France, Germany and England, and spent less time on Belgium, Denmark,

46
Herbert L. May and Dorothy Petgen, Leisure and Its Use: Some International
Observations (New York: A.S. Barnes and Co., 1928) viii.

29
Czechoslovakia, Austria and Italy, ending with a supplementary summary of
recreation in the United States.

Commonalities and Differences between U.S. and Japan
Industrialization was a catalyst for a change in the everyday lives of ordinary
people as modernization and urbanization materialized in many countries including
the United States and Japan. The increase of urban laborers, the hours they spent in
factories, and the move for shorter work hours were similar between Japan and the
United States. In Japan, the number of factory laborers nearly doubled from 820,000
to 1.56 million between 1910 and 1920. The number of people living in urban areas,
defined as 100,000 people or more, increased from 13% to 20% between 1913 and
1920. These statistics represented the increase of urban dwellers in Japan.
Labor history in Japan is tied directly to the fluctuation in its economy.
World War I brought a dramatic surplus in Japan’s trade and ignited economic
prosperity, however the surplus did not show an immediate increase in real wages,
which angered laborers who were quickly learning the value of unionizing. As
Figure 3 shows, the real wages of factory workers decreased towards the end of
World War I, while the economy itself was enjoying a surplus and experienced
inflation.

30
Figure 3: Real Wage Index for Manufacturing Industry in Japan
47

(1934~36= 100)
0
20
40
60
80
100
1910
1912
1914
1916
1918
1920
1922
1924
1926
Year
Real Wage

This paradox contributed to the sudden rise of labor strikes and the number of people
participating in these strikes as Figures 4 and 5 show. These labor disputes brought
attention on economic inequality and the exploitation of laborers, and while the
government oppressed these disputes, they nonetheless gave into passing regulations
that created more favorable conditions for workers fearing the rise of socialism.
48

While the Japanese city-dwellers may not have been as ethnically diverse as
in the United States, they brought with them regional culture to the city and vice
versa. They were partly responsible for the proliferation of urban culture into the

47
A translation and visualization of data from Takashi Hirano, “Taisho-ki no minshu yoka,
goraku chosa [Mass Leisure and Entertainment Surveys in the Taisho Period],” Takao Kawai,
ed., Kindai Nihon shakai chosashi (II) [The History of Social Research in Modern Japan (II)],
(Tokyo: Keio Tsushin, 1991), 145.
48
Minami Hiroshi, Taisho Bunka, 1905-1926 (Tokyo: Keiso Shobo, 1965), 179.

31
Figure 4: Number of Participants in Labor Strikes in Japan, 1910-1926
0
10,000
20,000
30,000
40,000
50,000
60,000
70,000
1910
1912
1914
1916
1918
1920
1922
1924
1926
Year
Participants in Labor Strikes

Figure 5: Number of Labor Strikes in Japan, 1910-1926
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
1910
1912
1914
1916
1918
1920
1922
1924
1926
Year
Number of Labor Strikes

32
rural areas, as those who came from rural areas often kept strong ties with their
families or returned home.
Industrialism and the acceleration of speed in the work place changed the
speed in which the rest of daily life was spent by city-dwellers. Already at the
beginning of the 1910s, the United States had surpassed London in the speediness of
its lifestyle. In a New York Times article in 1911, an American traveler Phyllis
Meltzer discusses the different pace of life she saw between London and the United
States. Here she is impressed with how “the English man, woman and child walk
slower, eat slower, and enjoy things in a more leisurely way than the average
American” and that noting how English people eat their meals putting their “whole
heart and attention on [the] sole and excellent beef, and dawdle over the dessert in an
almost criminal way.” In comparison, she describes Americans as having the “hurry-
up fever” where one “bolts his breakfast down to the tick of his watch lying open
beside his plate.”
49

This speed of modern life and the puritan ethics of diligence led to the
emergence of a kind of leisure culture that valued leisure activities that filled up
time. In a poem entitled “Leisure” published in the 1911, the author’s impatience
towards idle leisure time was expressed:
They say we are hurried and flurried and pressed,
Pursued by the demon of constant unrest,
Since conditions are such that men scarcely dare turn
From the cares that demand all the coin they can earn.

49
“An American Girl’s London Impressions,” New York Times, (Sept. 3, 1911),
AHD23.

33
But various things seem to prove that the pace
Isn’t always a struggle to keep in the race.
For there must be some people who rend the long list
Of problems in checkers, in chess and in whist.
50

The sense of “the fleeting” was common in modern Japan as well. The
Japanese mass media were especially fascinated with the speed and motion of
modern times, where “the word ‘tempo’ beat a constant, contrapuntal rhythm to the
cadences of official documents.”
51

Time was indeed of the essence for the Japanese laborers. Working hours in
the 1920s were about nine or ten hours a day. With a lunch hour, that meant laborers
would have been at their workplace everyday for nearly eleven hours. Since it would
have been hard to imagine any noteworthy leisure time before and after such a long
work day, the amount of leisure time they had directly related to the days they had
off work. Until the First World War, it was common for workers to get the first and
fifteenth of the month off. After the war, as children were let out of school on the
first and third Sundays, factories began to follow the school’s schedules. By the mid-
1920s, half of the workers had four or more days off work every month, which meant
they had Sundays off.
52

Gonda Yasunosuke, the foremost scholar and bureaucrat on leisure,
categorized mass education in four stages. The first stage started initially as an attack

50
The Washington Star (pseudonym), “Leisure,” Los Angeles Times, (December 17, 1911),
III18.
51
Miriam Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern
Times (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2006), 18.
52
Yasushi Miwa, “1920 nendai ni okeru rodosha no seikatsu bunka [Lifestyles of laborers in
the 1920s],” Rekishi Hyoron 477 (January 1990), 88-89.

34
on mass entertainment in the early 20
th
century. In 1911, the Ministry of Education
established the Popular Education Survey Committee to censor and control mass
culture that was considered harmful for the youth. The second phase came around
1920 when mass culture was purposely incorporated into public policy. For instance,
popular art forms such as rakugo, theater, film and traditional rokyoku songs were
used in social education. In the third phase this political use of popular culture
matured. It is epitomized by the 1927 seminar held by the Ministry of Education for
education film specialists. Popular movies with favorable messages were labeled
educational resources, and systematic and statistical analysis was conducted for
efficient educational use of mass culture. In the final phase, this politicization of
mass culture evolved into a full-scale mobilization effort fueled by nationalism.
Gonda called this the transition from “mass” entertainment to “national”
entertainment.
53

While both Osaka and Tokyo served as crucial production centers in the
1920s, some may argue that Osaka went through a more challenging task than
Tokyo. Especially in the field of architecture, while the Kanto Earthquake killed tens
of thousands of people and devastated the capital of the nation, it also created a
“clean canvas” for modern western architecture to be built. Osaka on the other hand,
as Hidetsugu Yamano has argued, had a stronger dilemma of having to negotiate the
modern with the vernacular and traditional culture that preceded it.
54

53
Kaneji Okamoto, “Goraku kyoikuron no shiso: Gonda Yasunosuke,” Shakai Kyoiku 34: 5
(May 1979), 57-58.
54
Hidetsugu Yamano, “1920 nendai Osaka Kobe Dansho [The Osaka Kobe divide in the

35
For railroad magnate Kobayashi Ichizo, the connection between
transportation and cultural production came natural; he introduced a new kind of
consumerism by constructing department stores, theaters and amusement parks along
his train routes. A transportation-based cultural sphere was a unique aspect of
Japanese urban development and its direct relationship with the placing of
commercial entertainment.
55

While some of the leisure culture derived from business strategies, others
derived from national goals of entering the league of “first rate countries.” Christian
socialist Abe Isoo was a professor at Waseda University and a well-known
intellectual. He tended to be self-critical of the Japanese side in international
relations.
56
Regarding leisure, he argued:
The Americans and British like outdoor sports in particular. The Germans
enjoy music and theater as well as beer-drinking. They also enjoy sports, but
compared to the Americans and British, the variety is limited. The main
German sports activities are ice skating and dueling. The French also enjoy
music and theater, but do not engage in any active sports. The Spanish seem
to have festivals through the year and are forever merrymaking. The major
activities of the Chinese are smoking opium and gambling.
57

1920s],” 1920 nendai Nihon ten zuroku [1920s Japan exhibit catalogue], Tokyo Metropolitan
Museum and Asahi Shimbun, 1988, 203.
55
Tamio Takemura, Taisho bunka teikoku no yutopia: sekaishi no tenkanki to taishu shohi
shakai no keisei (Tokyo: Sangensha, 2004), 256.
56
On the discriminatory stance America took to Japanese citizens, Abe argued that there
were propensities in the Japanese immigrant communities that were causing these racial
tensions. Jon Thares Davidann, Cultural Diplomacy in U.S.-Japanese Relations, 1919-1941
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 85.
57
“Abe Iso, “Nihonjinwa naniyue fukenzen naru gorakuni fukeruka [Why do Japanese
indulge in unwholesome leisure activity?]” Seiko 14:1 (June 1, 1908) 7-10.

36
Advocating the utility of baseball for social discipline, he stated, “I learned in
baseball to obey the captain without question.”
58

Japan and Western Countries: Differences and Links
Perhaps the largest difference between leisure in the United States and Japan
at the beginning of the twentieth century was the stance the government took. From
the Meiji to the Taisho period, the attitude changed drastically. While the Meiji
government focused more on monitoring and controlling mass culture with the
intention to maintain social order, the Taisho government interpreted mass culture
and leisure time as an opportunity for social instruction and ideological prescription.
This transition occurred because of a change in the relationship between bureaucracy
and academia. Around 1920, academics and bureaucrats engaged in social policy
found a common ground in their approach, which encouraged the application of
scholarship into policy planning, especially in social and labor issues.
59
In fact, urged
by the fluctuating economy and instability of the everyday lives of the mass,
government spending for social services dramatically increased during the inter-war
period. The amount that the municipal and prefectural governments spent for social
services soared from approximately 1.4 million yen in 1917 to 25 million in 1922.
60

58
Cyril H. Powles, “Abe Isoo: The Utility Man,” in Nobuya Bamba and John E. Howes, eds.
Pacifism in Japan (Kyoto: Minerva Press, 1978), 143-167.
59
Hirano Takashi, “Taisho-ki no minshu yoka, goraku chosa [Mass Leisure and
Entertainment Surveys in the Taisho Period],” Kawai Takao, ed., Kindai Nihon shakai
chosashi (II) [The History of Social Research in Modern Japan (II)], (Tokyo: Keio Tsushin,
1991), 147-48.
60
Sheldon Garon, Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (Princeton:

37
As the Japanese government became increasingly more involved in the
everyday lives of the mass, they also saw the potential that leisure lent itself to guide
and control the everyday lives of ordinary citizens. For example, political scientist
David Leheny has listed three ways in which the Japanese government’s role has
differed compared to their European and North American counterparts in handling
national tourist organizations. First of all, while American and European
governments were involved in he promotion and financial assistance to the tourist
industry, the Japanese government actually began to take on the role of the nation’s
main travel agency in 1915. Second of all, the target transferred from catering to the
needs of foreign travelers to being certain that the Japanese tourists were being
offered and marketed equally appealing trips. Lastly that because of the inception of
the Japanese tourism industry as one purposely designed to lure foreign tourists and
foreign currency, the domestic tourism industry, including the concept of tourism,
the types of attraction and services, was also modeled after western norms.
61

The connection and influences of western social politics in Japanese
intellectuals was quite strong. Obayashi Soshi, inspired by Robert Owen, wrote
about the settlement movement after studying in the United States. Bureaucrat and
leading writer on leisure and the impact of cinema, Nakata Shunzo went to Germany,
the U.S., and other western nations sent by the Ministry of Education. He reported on

Princeton University Press, 1998), 49.
61
David Leheny, The Rules of Play: National Identity and the Shaping of Japanese Leisure
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 57-58.

38
the status of leisure and entertainment in Italy, Germany, US and particularly focused
on how the Nazis utilized entertainment to control the mass.
While these types of stories about Japanese writers learning from the west is
common, the case of Jesse Frederick Steiner is an anomaly. Steiner received his
Ph.D. at the University of Chicago and mentored students at the University of
Washington as a Chicago School sociologist.
62
He spent seven years in Sendai, Japan
teaching at a mission college. While in Japan, Steiner developed an interest in the
budding field of sociology in Japan as well as maintained an interest in the after
WWII. Not only did he become knowledgeable about urban and rural environments
in Japan, but used his knowledge to understand and survey the Japanese immigrants
in the United States.
63
Although he wrote books about race in a strictly sociological
sense, he never connected race with nationalism and leisure. This is especially
enigmatic since Steiner became the forefront leader in surveying American leisure
after the Great Depression. For him not to internally make a connection between race
and leisure indicates how this connection was not a common one to make, and how
his interests were compartmentalized.

62
Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 117.
63
Jesse Frederick Steiner, “ Japanese Population Policies.” The American Journal of
Sociology 43:5 (March 1938), 717-733; Steiner, “The Development and Present Status of
Sociology in Japanese Universities,” The American Journal of Sociology 41:6 (May 1936),
707-722; Steiner, “Some Factors Involved in Minimizing Race Friction on the Pacific
Coast,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 93, (January 1921),
116-120.

39
Conclusion
The development of leisure discourse in each respective country shared common
experiences that were derived from industrialization and urbanization. While there
were some differences based on historical, cultural and ethnic context, the common
denominators were remarkable enough to suggest that a certain kind of supra-
national trajectory of leisure discourse was born in the industrial age. That is to say,
the increase of leisure and the subsequent fear about leisure time use, specifically by
the mass, became an agenda that had intellectuals in both countries grappling for
solutions. Both the Japanese and American intellectuals looked for answers in
Europe initially; they realized, however, that this transnational approach did not
necessarily produce the results they sought in the international political context.

40
CHAPTER 2
TIME FOR WHAT WE WILL: THE EMERGENCE AND EVOLUTION OF
JAPANESE AMERICAN LEISURE CULTURE

The serendipitous nature of transnational interaction for intellectuals
during the turn of the twentieth century was also true of immigrants and their
construction of culture. The emergence and settlement of a particular leisure culture
was determined by the human capital that became available in each respective
community. This chapter is largely an empirical study on what the Japanese
immigrants thought of leisure and what they did for leisure from the turn of the
century to the eve of the Great Depression.
The grand narrative in Japanese American history had been that Japanese
Americans seldom had time for leisure prior to World War II, as they struggled for
economic success. While this particular construction of memory served a useful
purpose, this chapter tells a story of Japanese Americans who not only worked hard
in the strawberry fields and gardens, but also vigorously experimented with ways to
entertain themselves for a few moments of relaxation everyday as they weathered
various hardships of economic difficulty, cultural assimilation, and racial
discrimination.
To be precise, some of the protagonists in this chapter should be addressed as
“Japanese” rather than “Japanese American,” if they were defined strictly by
nationality. However since the goal of this dissertation is to contextualize this

41
particular community within the larger American community as well as with Japan,
this chapter will address the Japanese Americans residing in America as “Japanese
Americans” regardless of their nationality or generation.
The pioneers of Japanese American studies constructed the political and
economic history of the major communities. Yuji Ichijoka, John Modell, and Bill
Hosokawa all focused on struggles of the Japanese American communities based on
racial prejudices and discrimination.
64
However, Ichioka did not neglect to mention
the everyday pastime activities of the first generation in his seminal book The Issei.
65

Upon the base structure that these senior scholars established, subsequent
generations of scholars have worked on the cultural aspects of pre-WWII Japanese
American culture. Valerie Matsumoto’s work on urban Nisei and Lon Kurashige’s
examination of the Nisei Week Festival in Los Angeles have proved the presence
and importance of a vivacious Japanese American culture which needs further
investigation.
66
Embedded in Matsumoto’s and Kurashige’s work is the notion that
leisure culture is not merely an appendix to the everyday experience but that leisure
culture was a crucial institution which was just as essential to everyday life as was

64
Yuji Ichioka, The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885-
1924 (New York: Free Press, 1988); Bill Hosokawa, JACL: Quest of Justice (Los Angeles:
Japanese American Citizens League, 1988); John Modell, The Economics and Politics of
Racial Accommodation: The Japanese of Los Angeles, 1900-1942 (Urbana, IL: University of
Illinois Press, 1977).
65
Ichioka, 82-90.
66
Valerie Matsumoto, “Japanese American Women and the Creation of Urban Nisei Culture
in the 1930s,” Valerie Matsumoto and Blake Allmendiger, eds. Over the Edge: Remapping
the American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 291-306; Lon
Kurashige, “The Problem of Biculturalism: Japanese American Identity and Festival before
World War II,” Journal of American History (March 2000), 1632-1654.

42
the workplace experience. The theory of leisure activities as a crucial cultural
institution applies to any culture. In this thesis, it deals with the Japanese American
experience and how leisure was an essential vehicle in negotiating their identity as
Japanese Americans.
Matsumoto and Kurashige both use ethnic newspapers as their primary
sources. They have made significant investigations on the Nisei generation
particularly through their use of the English sections of these newspapers. The Rafu
Shimpo (Los Angeles Japanese Daily News), one of the oldest and largest Japanese
American newspapers founded in 1903, only started its English section in 1926, even
after which the paper remained largely a Japanese language newspaper.
67
This study
offers a survey of the Japanese section, which can provide important information for
analyzing the earlier period, and can offer a comparative perspective to generational
differences between the Issei and the Nisei.
This chapter does not pretend to exhaust the rich history of each leisure
activity. Nor does it attempt to describe comprehensive leisure cultures of different
Japanese communities in the United States. Rather, the goal is to provide a broad
stroke picture of leisure activities in the first few decades of the twentieth century,
and to flesh out the issues that can be further discussed. The chapter will therefore
illustrate the diverse demographics and the communities of Japanese Americans,

67
The two other major Japanese American newspapers circulated in Los Angeles this period
were the Nichibei Shimbun (Japanese American News) and Kashu Mainichi (Japan-
California Daily). See David K. Yoo, Growing Up Nisei: Race, Generation, and Culture
among Japanese Americans of California, 1924-1949 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois
Press, 2000), 68-91; Norio Tamura and Shigehiko Shiramizu, eds. Beikoku Shoki no
Nihongo Shimbun (Tokyo: Koso Shobo, 1986).

43
how the notion of leisure was transformed within the Japanese American
community, the leisure activities within the Japanese American communities, and
leisure activities as a site for racial interaction. It will also contextualize the
workplace and residential areas with leisure activities.

The Notion of Leisure in the Japanese American Community
As previous narratives on Japanese Americans have rightly noted, leisure did
not occupy a large portion of the immigrants’ lives. Many of them were initially
sojourners to the United States who came to work with intentions only to stay
temporarily and long enough to obtain financial success. During the Meiji
Restoration of 1868, the government declared that rest days would be the days which
had one and six in the dates, for example, the first, sixth, eleventh, and sixteenth of
each month. However since this created problems in trade with western countries, in
1876 the government adopted the idea of half days on Saturdays and whole days off
on Sundays. Depending on when the immigrants moved, their understanding of
“days of rest” or “weekend” would have been quite different, which would have
generated different reactions and adjustments to the American custom of rest. The
fact that immigrants tended to work in non-industrial work, such as in agriculture,
gardening or domestic work, their notion of “rest days,” “weekends,” and the
distinction between working hours and non-working hours could have been less clear
than those who worked in factories.

44
The focus on the quality of life for Japanese Americans in Los Angeles is
believed to have started in 1906. Until then, San Francisco occupied by far the
largest Japanese American community in California. However, San Francisco
became increasingly harder to live as anti-Japanese sentiment grew which
culminated into a legal segregation of Japanese children from public schools in 1906
and in trade unions becoming increasingly militant against Japanese American
laborers. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake was the last straw that was the catalyst
for the mass exodus.
68
Mason and McKinstry speculated that “if Los Angeles did not
welcome the Japanese with open arms, at least the city did not actively campaign
against them, and that perhaps may account for the significant population that moved
to Los Angeles. Once relocated to Los Angeles, these San Franciscans realized that
this smaller community did not have the same kind of amenities that their old home
had. It was not until Gentaro Isogaya moved to Los Angeles from San Francisco that
the city would have a real sushi restaurant. Nor did the city have a drinking bar
owned by a Japanese immigrant.
69
But after the San Francisco refugees migrated
south, Japanese eateries doubled in number and half of them were Japanese style
drinking bars.
70

Several Japanese American newspaper articles from 1912 suggest the
Japanese immigrants were consciously seeking ways to improve their quality of life.

68
William M. Mason, and John A. McKinstry, The Japanese of Los Angeles (Los Angeles
County Museum of Natural History, Contribution 1, 1969), 16.
69
There may have been small gatherings of people at set places for a drink, but there was no
commercial set up of a bar before the San Francisco residents migrated south.
70
Mason and McKinstry, 17.

45
In some cases, the articles emphasized leisure as a means to relax and rest from
work. For instance, an advertisement for a record player read:
One of the largest obstacles in the development of Japanese society is that we
lack the institution of entertainment. Especially those in the farming areas are
experiencing an isolated life, with no friends for peace of mind, and always in
an unpleasant state of mind. Listening to sweet music by musicians from all
over the world will ease all your physical and mental exhaustion and is the
easiest entertainment for the hard working people.
71

It is particularly interesting that this advertisement does not emphasize that the
record player would make available Japanese music, but music “from all over the
world.” It is an indication that the advertiser’s awareness of rural communities
lacking entertainment as compared to urban areas, which was a significant issue
considering the proportion of Japanese immigrants who formed rural communities.
In other advertisements, merchants suggested using leisure time to catch up
on recent events and culture, and possibly strengthen their ethnic community in
America. In an advertisement in 1915, for example, a record seller listed the latest
import from Japan. Among the record titles, the top listing was of the battle between
Japan and Germany over the Qīngdǎo Peninsula. (Figure 6) It included recordings of
a news report on the attack as well as reports by the squadron leader on the aerial
reconnaissance.
In an effort to encourage leisure activities in the Japanese American
community, essayist Hirai Sakurakawa started a series about new theater trends.
Sakurakawa is a pseudonym, as are Kasmukikuhan Ichikanbo and Sasaki Sasabune,

71
Nichibei Shimbun, (Nov. 2, 1912), 7.

46
which appear later in this chapter. Many Japanese Americans, who were literati,
painters, or other kinds of self-identified artists regardless of whether they were
professional or amateur, used pseudonyms for their work, which was a common
practice in Japan. Many of these artists used newspapers as one of their sites for
artistic and intellectual expression. Judging from the Japanese connotations of the

Figure 6: A 1915 Advertisement from a Record Seller in Sacramento, CA
72

series title and the choice of vocabulary, one can assume that Hirai was a well-
educated intellectual.
73
“We are desperately in need of hobbies,” He maintained, and

72
Nichibei, (Feb. 14, 1915), 6.
73
While the author put her best efforts in figuring out the correct transliteration of these
pseudonyms, some may be wrongly spelled unintentionally since the kanji characters often
have multiple pronunciations. For more insight about the Japanese American intellectual
literary circles in Los Angeles, see Kotobuki Tsuruya, Yumeji no mita Amerika (Tokyo: Shin
Jimbutsu Ohrai sha, 1997), 116-199. Takehisa Yumeji was a well-known Japanese painter

47
therefore suggested that theatrical entertainment would be a solution. He stated that
other intellectuals in the Japanese American community have made this point, but he
argued for a democratization of theatrical entertainment. He pointed out,
Theater that the intellectuals and the mass have in mind is more different than
you may imagine. Intellectuals should lead the mass so that they can improve
their taste. After all, theater should not be an exclusive possession of the
limited few, but should be appreciated by the mass as well.
74

As Ichioka argues, most of the earlier immigrants who, arriving in the 1880s, were
student-laborers, had to work to get themselves through school while fulfilling their
ambitions of being educated in the American educational system. As more
emigration brokerage companies were established and the route to America became
more affordable, people with less capital were able to travel to the United States as
laborers. It is interesting how Hirai acknowledges the distinction between elite and
mass culture in the Japanese American community, which echoes the paternalistic
attitude intellectuals were demonstrating in Japan.
75

Hirai continued to preach the importance of women to be involved in
transmitting culture to the Japanese American community. Hirai reminded the reader
that women were the dominant theatergoers in the mainstream theaters. “Look at the
matinee performances,” he asked, “there are only women. Even at the evening
performances, men consist merely forty percent, mostly just as escorts to the
women.” It is interesting how Hirai took women’s role for granted as he stated,

who spent a few years abroad for artistic inspiration. Tsuruya documents Takehisa’s ten-
month stay in Los Angeles as well as his other short-term residences in Europe.
74
Nichibei Shimbun, (Nov. 5, 1912), 1.
75
Ichioka, 7-55.

48
“women are more thirsty for hobbies and leisure,” and since the number of women is
rapidly increasing in the Japanese American community, “I believe women will have
a crucial influence on our theater entertainment.”
76

In the last installment of the six-part article, Hirai argued once again that
women should lead leisure activities, but he also reveals notions of gender hierarchy.
He argued, “Perhaps it is true that women are less able than men, but we shouldn’t
dismiss the probability and possibility that women can excel more than men in some
fields.” He raised the example that women mainly ran the American Drama
Association. “If our women try hard,” he pled, “I believe they can become a strong
force in our theatrical world. I ask our sisters to put their effort in it, believing the
possibility and undoubting the probability.”
77

Kasumikuhan Ikkanbo echoed Hirai’s call for leisure and for women to take
leadership. He believed that “in order to remain optimistic in our struggle in this
strange land,” Japanese Americans should take care of their mental health as well as
their physical well-being. “I think there is no other way of maintaining our mental
health other than having hobbies and entertainment to ease our exhaustion and
recover our strength,” and that “music in the family is the best of all family
entertainment.” His suggestions on what kind of music he believed Japanese
immigrants should listen to reflected his notion of high and low culture and his
preference for Japanese high culture as opposed to western culture:

76
Nichibei Shimbun, (Nov. 10, 1912), 1.
77
Nichibei Shimbun, (Nov. 11, 1912), 1.

49
There is western music and Japanese music. There is sophisticated traditional
Japanese music and folk music. I would like to suggest that we hold musical
concerts of high-brow Japanese music. It is a pleasure to see that a number of
women are mastering the art of the Koto instrument. I ask these women to
share their music with those without hobbies and without entertainment.
78

The Birth of a Leisure Culture
While the Japanese American population may have been smaller than other
ethnic groups in America, it was a diverse group which cannot be described
monolithically in regards to its leisure culture. The leisure activities popular among
Japanese Americans differed depending on their age, gender, where they came from
in Japan, occupation, economic status, social status, location, size of the community,
racial politics of the location, as well as activities that were available to them in
Japan and became available to them in the United States.
On the most basic level, the leisure culture and what was available as leisure
activities depended on the size of the community. As Table 1 shows, there were
Japanese immigrants living in all forty-nine states between 1900 and 1920. While
this particular census data does not indicate whether Japanese immigrants lived in
clusters especially in less populated states, it is possible to imagine the diverse
lifestyles depending on the number of people in each cluster.

78
Nichibei Shimbun, (Nov. 10, 1912), 3.

50
Table 1: Number of Japanese by State, 1900-1920
79

1900 1910 1920
New England 89 272 347
Maine 4 13 7
New Hampshire 1 1 8
Vermont 0 3 4
Massachusetts 53 151 191
Rhode Island 13 33 35
Connecticut 18 71 102
Middle Atlantic 446 1,643 3,266
New York 354 1,247 2,686
New Jersey 52 206 325
Pennsylvania 40 190 255
East North Central 126 482 927
Ohio 27 76 130
Indiana 5 38 81
Illinois 80 285 472
Michigan 9 49 184
Wisconsin 5 34 60
West North Central 223 1,000 1,215
Minnesota 51 67 85
Iowa 7 36 29
Missouri 9 99 135
North Dakota 148 59 72
South Dakota 1 42 38
Nebraska 3 590 804
Kansas 4 107 52
South Atlantic 29 156 360
Delaware 1 4 8
Maryland 9 24 29
District of Columbia 7 47 103
Virginia 10 14 56
West Virginia 0 3 10
North Carolina 0 2 24
South Carolina 0 8 15
Georgia 1 4 9
Florida 1 50 106
East South Central 7 26 35
Kentucky 0 12 9
Tennessee 4 8 8
Alabama 3 4 18

79
Table 35, Japanese Population by Divisions and States, 1920, 1910, and 1900. Increase of
Population in the United States 1910-1920. U.S. Bureau of Census, 1922.

51

Table 1, Continued
Mississippi 0 2 0
West South Central 30 428 578
Arkasas 0 9 5
Louisiana 17 32 57
Oklahoma 0 48 67
Texas 14 340 449
Mountain 5,107 10,447 10,792
Montana 2,441 1,585 1,074
Idaho 1,291 1,361 1,569
Wyoming 393 1,596 1,194
Colorado 48 2,300 2,464
New Mexico 8 238 251
Arizona 281 371 550
Utah 417 2,110 2,936
Nevada 228 864 754
Pacific 18,269 57,703 93,490
Washington 5,617 12,929 17,387
Oregon 2,501 3,418 4,151
California 10,151 41,356 71,952

Even in larger communities, where there were more choices and variety for
leisure, the demographics influenced the kind of leisure activity that was popular. For
example, the demographics between Los Angeles and New York differed quite
dramatically. Those who landed in New York compared to their counterparts in Los
Angeles were generally older, better educated, professional or students, who had
come from urban areas and only intended to stay temporarily rather than
immigrate.
80

80
Sawada, 13-16, 183-193.

52
The population growth of Japanese Americans in Los Angeles contributed to
the geographical expansion of the Japanese American community. As the following
figure shows, the Japanese American population grew 200 times between 1900 and
1910. (Figure7)

Figure 7: Population of Japanese Americans in Los Angeles, 1900-1930
81

0
5000
10000
15000
20000
25000
1895 1900 1905 1910 1915 1920 1925 1930 1935
Population

In 1900, there were only 553 Japanese women in California, whereas by 1910, there
were 6,240.
82
This influx of female population was due to the change in immigration
patterns from “labor immigrants” to “chain migration.” By 1914, women consisted
63.1 percent of the immigrating population to the United States.
83
However, even

81
Data for 1900 and 1905 from Mason and McKinsky, 12, while data for 1910, 1920, and
1930 are from Modell’s chart created from the Census. Modell, 23.
82
Roger Daniels, Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850,
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), 127.
83
Yamato Ichihashi, Japanese Immigration: Its Status in California (San Francisco,
1915), 13.

53
within the greater Los Angeles area, Terminal Island was almost completely self-
sufficient and self-contained as a community. There were few reasons for Japanese
Americans there to go off the island.
84
The mobility and geographical realm of daily
activities would have had an impact on their perceived availability of leisure
activities.

Leisure Interaction Among the Japanese Americans
Around the world, leisure culture in the first half of the twentieth century was
experiencing a large boost with accelerating capitalism, industrialization, and
urbanization. In 1925, it was reported that the annual spending for entertainment in
the Los Angeles counties had surpassed two hundred million dollars.
85

Previous scholarship on Japanese Americans have emphasized the various
social organizations, such as the kenjinkai (organizations consisting of people from
the same prefecture) and religious organizations (Buddhist and Christian churches),
and how these social organizations contributed to the ethnic solidarity of Japanese
Americans; however, the function of these organizations were not so different from
other racial or ethnic groups, including the dominant white society. In fact, the
leisure activities and the way in which leisure activities were organized in the
Japanese American community were not so different from those in the mainstream

84
Kanshi S. Yamashita, 128.
85
Rafu Shimpo, (May 14, 1914), 2. This article reported that the annual tax revenue from the
entertainment industry had dramatically increased. The entertainment industry mentioned
here included theaters, music entertainment, dance halls, and spots games and other
social activities, but excluded revenues from educational and religious organizations.

54
society. As investigator Stella Hartman learned in a 1942 study, when young people
(from eighteen to thirty four) were asked where and how they liked to spend their
leisure time, women preferred church organizations the most, and men preferred
commercial entertainment the most.
86

The demographics of the Japanese American population reflect the leisure
activities popular at that time. Until the 1910s, men outnumbered women eight to
one in the Japanese immigrant community. Ichioka states that these young men who
had entered America spent much of their spare time at bars, gambling places, and
brothels. The largest gambling establishment was called the Tokyo Club, which in
the 1920s netted more than one million dollars.
87
Most pool halls were located near
Little Tokyo, and were popular places for young men to spend their time. Concerned
about the morals of the younger immigrants immersing themselves in gambling and
prostitution, older immigrants encouraged joining sports teams as an alternative way
of spending time. Along with the traditional Japanese sport, such as sumo, organized
baseball leagues, which continued to be popular among the young men the Nisei, and
even during the period at the internment camp. However as the female population
grew in the Japanese American community, leisure activities changed as well for
more wholesome activities in various organizations.

86
Stella Elizabeth Hartman, “A Study of Leisure-Time Habits of Young Men and Women in
Los Angeles,” (Master’s thesis: University of Southern California, 1942), 93. Although the
study does not specify the racial breakdown of the subject group, one can assume it was a
predominantly white population that Hartman had sampled.
87
Alec Dubro and David E. Kaplan, “California’s Yakuza: Foothold in Little Tokyo,”
The Californians (July/Aug., 1987), 34-41.

55
Leisure differed depending on the city and the demographics as well. In Los
Angeles, for example, since religious organizations, both Buddhist and Christian,
were large and active, many of the leisure activities revolved around these
organizations. As Table 2 shows, close to four thousand people belonged to some
kind of religious organization, approximately seventy percent of which belonged to
Buddhist organizations.
On the other hand, in New York, there were only Christian churches and no
Buddhist temples or Shinto shrines that Japanese immigrants could go to worship.
Therefore, the importance of religious institutions as centers for cultural activities
varied by region. In addition, the surrounding environments and history of the
immigrant community influenced the leisure activities enjoyed in different
communities. For example, in New York, students tended to enjoy tennis more than
baseball, and going to various forms of theatrical performances on Broadway. (Table
3.)
Outdoor activities were the most popular leisure activity among Japanese
Americans in the western states. Those who could afford it sometimes went on
longer trips to Yellowstone and Yosemite National Park, for instance, but usually
people enjoyed picnics in the fields. The favorite picnic grounds were White Point,
Brighton Beach, Pico Picnic Ground, Arroyo Seco Park, Lincoln Park, and Luna

56
Table 2: Japanese Religious Activities in Los Angeles, 1926
88

Type Name Members
Average
Attendance
Teachers
Sunday
school
Young
People's
Society
Women's
Club
Men's
Club
Other organizations
and its members
Nichiren 150 25 4 50 25 170 20 Baseball team, 21
Daishi 400 20 4 40 65 Cooking, 15
West
Hongwanji
1200 30 9 250 28 180 30
English Class, 28
Reading, 20 Baseball
Team 24
East
Hongwanji
800 20 42 Baseball Team 23
Shinto 180 15
Beikoku
Shinto
150 12 English Class, 18
Baptist 45 15 5 125 22 English Class, 45
Catholic 75 50 4 90
Christ 50 20 8 125 Sewing, 15
Episcopal 50 25 9 135 20
Free
Methodist
28 25 8 60 English Class, 14
Presbyterian 57 20 2 25 75 English Class, 18
Independent 17 5 3 35
Union 270 30 11 190 70 English Class, 38
Methodist
Episcopal
200 60 9 100 65 50
M.E.S.S. 7 75 55
Toyokyoka 40 20 6 60 12
Reformed 35 29 10 90 53 English Class, 32
Salvation 60 40 3 30
Employment, Legal
Settlement and
Medical Advice
Buddhism 2690 320 21 415 73 537 85 131
Christianity 927 389 85 1140 265 107 50 162
Shintoism 330 27 18
3947 736 106 1555 338 644 135 311
Buddhism
Shinto-
ism
Christianity
Grand Total
Subtotals

Park.
89
Not only did churches and kenjinkais organize picnics, but also agricultural
associations, companies, literary clubs and Japanese language schools organized
these events that often gathered hundreds of people. For those who did not have cars,
the organizations would ask truck owners to transport them to the picnic grounds.

88
Reproduced from Chotoku Toyama, “The Japanese Community in Los Angeles,” (Master
Thesis, Columbia University, 1926) 19.
89
Fumiko Fukuoka, “Mutual Life and Aid among the Japanese in Southern California with
Special Reference to Los Angeles,” (Master’s thesis, University of Southern California,
1937), 20.

57

Table 3: Leisure Preference by Students in New York City, 1928
90

Activities
Number of
people who
enjoy best
Second
best
Third
best
Fourth
best
Fifth
best
Total
Movies 4 3 7 5 1 20
Concert 1 10 4 1 16
Tennis 7 2 1 2 12
Baseball 2 1 3 6
Hiking 3 1 1 5
Wrestling 2 1 2 5
Horseback 1 4 5
Dancing 1 1 1 1 4
Rowing 2 1 1 4
Attending Plays 2 2
Singing 2 2
Discussion 1 1 2
Swimming 1 1 2
Skating 2 2
Golf 1 1
Fencing 1 1
Philately 1 1
Reading 1 1
Haiku 1 1
Billiard 1 1
Ping-pong 1 1
Card-play 1 1
Total 30 25 18 12 10 95

The picnic activities usually included athletic games, long lunches, and children’s
activities. In particular, White Point radium hot springs was a very popular leisure
place at the tip of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. It cost sixteen dollars for one week’s

90
Noboru Takahashi, “The Use of Leisure Time by Japanese Students in New York City,”
(Master’s thesis, Columbia University, 1928), 22.

58
stay with meals and baths.
91
White Point was advertised as the “only heavenly place
for Japanese” and had a fifty-room, two-story hotel with three salt-water pools and a
bathhouse. There was a direct bus service from Little Tokyo and a street car line
from San Pedro.
92
These hot spring spas for Japanese clients were also in the Santa
Monica Mountains and in other places in the western states.
In an attempt physically to remove oneself from the everyday mundane
workspace, traveling became popular among the Japanese immigrants, similar to
how it became popular among mainstream Americans in the early twentieth century.
Even as early as 1913, there were organized tours to visit Japanese tourist attractions.
Named the “Motherland Tour,” the trip cost 165 dollars for a round trip fare and a
ten-day stay in Japan visiting tourist places such as Tokyo, Nikko, Matsushima, Ise
Shrine, Momoyama Palace, and Osaka Castle and getting to spend some time with
family.
93
What makes these trips interesting is that they focused on visiting tourist
attractions just as much, or perhaps more so, than visiting family. It implies an
expansion of a mental map that includes an urge to learn more about Japan. Perhaps
it shows the economic success of some of the immigrants to be able to afford such a
trip, which entailed more than just a visit to their hometown.

91
Rafu Shimpo, (Sept. 22, 1923), 6. Also see, Shiro Fujioka, Beikoku Chuo Nihonjin kai shi
(1941), JANM Hirasaki Collection, 29.A.4. According to Fujioka, when the Tagami brothers
leased a beachside land from Mr. Sepulveda, the California District Attorney indicted them
for illegal possession of land in accordance to the Alien Land Act. The allegations were
cleared by the Los Angeles County Supreme Court.
92
“White Point,” Encyclopedia of Japanese American History, Updated edition, ed. Brian
Niiya, (Los Angeles: Japanese American National Museum, 2001), 411-12.
93
Nichibei, (September 2, 1913), 8.

59
While some leisure activities were seen quite commonly in many of the
immigrant communities, some were more determined by the human and social
capital available at that particular historical time. For instance, art and literature in
the Japanese immigrant communities grew quite organically. The types of arts and
literature as well as the period in which they were vibrant were serendipitous and
depended on the people who happened to be in the community. Nagauta, a form of
traditional song, grew in San Francisco only because of the Kineya Yayoi group.
94

When the grandmaster moved to Los Angeles in 1924, the group and the cultural hub
for nagauta relocated as well. Similarly, senryu, which is a humorous kind of haiku,
had a decade longer history in Seattle than the twenty-five-year history in Los
Angeles.
95

Theatrical plays were very popular among the Japanese American
community. Initially, they invited Kabuki theater troupes and other musical talents
from Japan who often went on tour to Japanese immigrant communities in the same
region. (Figure 8) However, as more people immigrated, larger communities, such as
ones in Honolulu, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, began to create their own
theater troupes, which traveled around the western states.
96
The sustainability of
these theater culture depended greatly on the leading figures of these groups.
There were three movie theaters in the Japanese American community in Los
Angeles before WWII. The first theater, Bankoku-za started its business in 1907 in

94
Beikoku Nikkeijin Hyakunenshi [The Centennial History of Japanese Americans in the
United States], (Los Angeles: Shin Nichibei Shinbunsha, 1961), 145.
95
Beikoku Nikkeijin Hyakunenshi, 144.
96
Beikoku Nikkeijin Hyakunenshi, 153-154.

60
the heart of Little Tokyo, and for a while it coexisted with Toyo-za, the second
theater. However, two theaters were too many for a relatively small community and
led to bankruptcy for both theaters by 1918. The third theater, Fuji-kan, opened in
1925 and kept running as the only Japanese language theater in mainland America
until 1941.
97

Figure 8: Event Announcement for a Traditional Music Group, Los Angeles 1920
98

The movie theaters were not the only places Japanese Americans were able to
see movies from Japan. Buddhist temples, Japanese school halls, and community
halls were often used for screenings and their functions were often different from the
commercial theaters in the sense that most of the times it was a part of a social

97
Junko Ogihara, “The Exhibition of Films for Japanese Americans in Los Angeles during
the Silent Film Era,” Film History 4 (1990), 81-87.
98
Rafu Shimpo, (Feb. 11, 1920), 3.

61
function. Schools and churches often held “movie nights” to raise funds for
equipment, as well as to inform and educate the people about Japanese culture or
religious ideologies.
During the silent film period, narrators often accompanied the screening to
reenact the lines and explain the plot. These narrators, called benshi, were quite
popular and celebrated in their own rights. Going to see a benshi was just as
legitimate a reason to go to a movie. In Los Angeles, there were a handful of popular
benshi, and the advertisement for movie theaters often printed the name of the benshi
larger than that of the star of the movie.
Not only were Japanese immigrants spectators in the film culture, but also
producers. Well-documented in film historian Daisuke Miyao’s study, Sessue
Hayakawa rose to international stardom in the 1920s starring in Hollywood
movies.
99
Others such as Thomas Kurihara and Henry Kotani worked both in front of
the screen as actors and learned the craftsmanship of cinematography and directing.
They were recruited to help build the Japanese film industry, and lured with a
generous salary returned to Japan around 1920, where they set the foundation of
Japanese cinematic art.
In addition to those who left their footprint on Japanese cinema history, there
were countless others who tried to make use of the cinematic arts in the Japanese
American communities. As Table 4 shows, there were at least seventeen movies

99
Daisuke Miyao, Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom (Durham,
North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2007).

62
made by Japanese immigrants before WWII. The table, translated from film historian
Fumiaki Itakura’s study on Japanese American film-making, shows that while many
of the film were made in the emerging center of film production of Los
Table 4: Movies Made by Japanese Immigrants, 1912 -1940
100

No
Production
Year
Production
Company
Location
of
Company
Title Type Notes
1 1912
Yamato
Graph
Portland
Activities
Report of
Bretherns
documentary
Exported
to Japan
2 1912
Nichibei
Films
San
Francisco
Funeral of
Meiji Emperor
and Captain
Nogi
documentary
3 1913
Hirano
Moving
Pictures
Co.
Honolulu Sports Day documentary
4 1913
Nichibei
Shimbun
Stockton
Bureau
Stockton Unknown documentary
5 c.1913
Hokubei
Moving
Pictures Co.
Denver Unknown documentary
6 1914
Nichibei
Film
Los
Angeles
"Picture Bride"
etc
theatrical,
and
documentary
Exported
to Japan
7 1918
Toyo Film
(Sunrise
Film)
Yokohama
"Narikin
[Nuveau
riche]" and
"Toyo no
yume [Dream
of the Orient]"
theatrical
film
Exported
to the US
8 1921
Kawai
Taiyo
(director)
Hawaii
"Koi yori shi
e[From Love
to Death]"
theatrical
film
5 reels

100
Translated from Fumiaki Itakura, “Eiga ni miru Senzen no Beikoku Nikkei Imin [Pre-war
Japanese American Immigrants as Seen in Film],” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Kyoto University,
2006) 140-142.

63
Table 4, Continued
9 1922
Shirahato
Film
Los
Angeles
"Yamiyo no
yado[Inn in the
Dark Night]"
mix of
movie and
stage
performance

10 1927 unknown
Los
Angeles
Unknown
mix of
movie and
stage
performance
Shown at
West Lake
11 1929
Kawai Taiyo
(director)
Hawaii
"Doho no sakebi
[The Cry of Our
Brethern]"
theatrical
film

12 1930
Hollywood
Japan Talkie
Movie Co.
Los
Angeles
"Chijiku wo
mawasu chikara
[Turning the
Earth's Axis]"
theatrical
film

13 1930
Setouchi
Company
Los
Angeles
Unknown
mix of
movie and
stage
performance

14 1931
Nichifu
Films
Hawaii/
Okinawa
"Shunen no
Dokuhebi[The
Poisonous Snake
of
Vindictiveness]"
theatrical
film
About an
Okinawan
returned
from
Hawaii
15 1933
Hollywood
Movie Study
Group
Los
Angeles
"Daichi ni
Shitashimu
[Getting
Aquainted with
Mother Earth]"
16mm; 6
reels
Addressing
Niseis
returning
to farming
16 1935
Hollywood
Movie Study
Group
Los
Angeles
"Iminchi no haha
[The Mother in
the Immigrant
Land]"
16mm
About
Child
rearing
17 1936
Hollywood
Movie Study
Group
Los
Angeles
"Nobiyuku nisei
[Nisei Growing]"
16mm
Addressing
Nisei
Farmers
Organizing

Angeles, movies were made elsewhere as well. In addition, while the early movies
were documentary films as expositions to the Japanese audience the lives of Japanese
immigrants, film making in the immigrant community moved on to theatrical

64
features with a naïve, optimistic hope for mainstream recognition and then as an
educational and political tool for the Nisei. This history demonstrates the vicissitudes
in the attitudes toward film and its place in the immigrant community.
Just as sports was an important leisure activity for Issei men, they became a
crucial part of leisure activity for Nisei boys and girls. The Nisei, who were involved
in YMCA and YWCA activities had the opportunities to interact with other ethic
groups, but many of the sport teams were not allowed to play against white sport
teams. Therefore, they created their own leagues and tournaments. Some of the
popular athletic clubs for Japanese Americans were baseball, basketball and
tracks.
101
Since baseball was also becoming popular in Japan, the Japanese American
baseball teams and Japanese university and high school teams often traveled across
the Pacific to play against each other. On the one hand, this indicates the cultural
exchange between the Japanese and Japanese Americans, but on the other hand, it
indicates the segregation of Japanese Americans from the dominant society. At the
Japanese immigrant community at Terminal Island, sports activities were an
important activity for the many young boys and men who resided. As Kanshi Stanley
Yamashita has argued, in addition to baseball and other western sports, honing
Japanese martial arts skills were ways for boys and young men to experience and
understand “traditional values of endurance, patience, and ability to cope with

101
Brian Niiya, ed. More than a Game: Sport in the Japanese American Community (Los
Angeles: Japanese American National Museum, 2000); Joseph R. Svinth, “A Celebration of
Tradition and Community: Sumo in the Pacific Northwest, 1905-1943,” Columbia (Summer
1999), 7-14.

65
hardships.” Occasionally, they were able to have friendly judo and kendo matches
with Japanese Navy midshipmen training nearby or stopping for provisions.
102

While the Japanese immigrants were segregated in their sports activities from
white groups, and participated in leagues with other ethnic groups, teams from Japan
seemed to have been able to bypass these racial segregations and play against white
teams. Baseball teams from some of the prominent universities in Japan toured the
United States annually, and were able to play against university baseball teams in
America.
103

While some of these Japanese teams were able to play against white teams,
and may have been considered a symbol of admirable cultural exchange, in some
cases, they received some racial discrimination during these exchanges. For instance,
one team from Japan was invited to a game by a team in Scotts Bluff, Nebraska in
1913. The agreement that was reached was the following:
1. That the Japan team would guarantee a 150 dollars deposit for the three
games
2. Regardless of the weather, the Japan team would pay the deposit
3. That whatever profit they make over 165 dollars out of the attendance
fee will be split 40-60.
104

This shows that while teams from Japan were given certain privileges compared to
Japanese American teams in the access they had to white populations, there still were
subjected to discriminations based on race.

102
K. S. Yamashita, 127.
103
Yoichi Nagata, “The Los Angeles Nippons Baseball Club, 1926-1941,” in Niiya, 100-109.
104
Nichibei, (September 2, 1913), 8.

66
What complicated matters in the distinction of high-brow and low-brow
culture in the Japanese American community was that economic and educational
status did not necessarily coincide. Although those who were involved in
photography clubs and 8mm movie clubs had the financial capabilities of doing so,
those involved in literary clubs did not have to be wealthy to participate.
Since some of the first generation immigrants were student laborers, in
some cases there was a paradoxical relationship between the education and economic
status. In other words, although they were often domestic laborers, these students had
more years of education than some of the businessmen. Therefore, there are cases
where gardeners, farmers, cooks, and salesclerks were playwrights, poets, and artists
engaging in intellectual and artistic activities.
105
Cultural activities often associated
with high culture, such as the various types of poetry (haiku, tanka, and senryu),
traditional dance, and flower arrangement, were also enjoyed by many people as
well. Therefore, while there were high and low cultures in the Japanese American
community, they were not easily distinguishable by economic standing or
occupation.
On the one hand, the inconsistencies between cultural taste and socio-
economic hierarchy demonstrated a unique paradox of the immigrant community.
This was certainly true in photograph clubs, where salesclerks from Little Tokyo

105
Naomi Hirahara, ed. Greenmakers: Japanese American Gardeners in Southern California,
(Los Angeles: Southern California Gardeners’ Federation, 2000), 46; Ooka Makoto, Hokubei
Manyoshu [Northern American Tanka Selection], (Tokyo: Shueisha, 1999), 11-26.

67
were sometimes given high distinctions in international photograph competitions.
106

On the other hand, some argue that the interest and engagement in high art did not
necessarily mean that the art produced was in the realm of high art. For example,
poet and literary critic Ooka Makoto argues that while tanka poetry was very popular
in Southern California and had value as informative primary source, many of the
poems produced were short of the artistic merits found elsewhere. Compared with
the tanka produced in Japanese by Taiwanese people during Japan’s imperial
occupation, Ooka argues that the tanka in California were written in more volume by
those with less education.
107
Whether an art form was rendered into a populist
interpretation and proliferated to the mass, or whether those who produced high art
were merely stuck in an lesser occupation than their skill set that they settled for, it
depends on the art form, community and historical context.
No matter how lively leisure culture was among Japanese immigrants, there
were voices which criticized this, and encouraged immigrants to socialize and
interact with Americans. In New York, Noboru Takahashi was a student at Columbia
University in the late 1920s. His Master’s thesis submitted in 1928 addressed the
problem of Japanese immigrants and their use of leisure time. Based on a survey of
thirty students primarily from Columbia and City University of New York, he
analyzed how many hours the students spent at school, studying, working and for

106
Pictorialism in California: Photographs, 1900-1940 (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum
and The Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1994), 83; Dennis Reed, Japanese
Photography in America, 1920-1940, (Los Angeles: George J. Doizaki Gallery, Japanese
American Cultural and Community Center, 1985), 55-63.
107
Ooka, 12-13.

68
recreational activities. He observed that these Japanese students had the propensity of
socializing only within the Japanese community, and had been missing the
opportunity of familiarizing themselves to American culture. In the thesis, Takahashi
observed that the male students tended to be guilty of this shyness and timidness
compared to the female students. He concluded by saying that it was their “privilege
as well as their duty to get acquainted in the true way with American friends and
with friends from other lands.”
108

The rhetoric Takahashi used was prescriptive and nationalistic. He argued:
They must be aware that it is not worthwhile to spend two or three hours with
their friends who are sufficient unto their platitudinous selves and usually
make little effort for higher culture. Though it may be almost impossible to
know everything in America in such a short period as two or three years,
strenuous efforts to get something valuable are far better than wasting time
doing or thinking insignificant things. Good Americans would not hesitate to
express frank and unrestrained opinions. Go and associate with them.
109

In addition to encouraging interactions with Americans, he warned that it was
not just any kind of interaction with American culture he was encouraging, but
“good” “decent” and “high culture” in America that he believed should be leisure
activities for Japanese students. He illustrated what he meant by “good” culture:
Movies, apparently, are the favoured indoor sport of Americans. Some are
good and some are not worth spending time on. The true student should go to
the theaters which offer true American culture of excellent quality. They
should be brought into touch with the educated people who are offering
knowledge to a whole people. They should also seek contact with good
young Americans in order to spend leisure time in most useful ways.
110

(Emphasis mine.)

108
Takahashi, 41.
109
Takahashi, 38.
110
Takahashi, 38.

69

His rhetoric reveals his expectation that these students will be the future leaders both
morally and culturally, whom the rest of the Japan would be modeling themselves
after to become wholesome, first-rate, and respected citizens.
On the other hand, another graduate student at Columbia University drew a
different conclusion from the leisure habits of Japanese immigrants. In his 1922
master’s thesis titled “The Use of Leisure Time by the Japanese in New York City,”
Clarence H. King argued that the Japanese in New York were making do with what
had become available for leisure, and not being too conservative in their choices for
leisure activity. He wrote:
[I]t is generally observed that the Japanese in New York City are not erecting
clannish barriers that tend to keep them a group unto themselves. They
necessarily have a few exclusively Japanese institutions, very few in
proportion to members, but even these are striving not to maintain Japanese
customs, but are following American methods and customs and are aiding in
the adaptation to the American environment.
111

King maintained that the Japanese people living in New York were “benign” and that
the racial tensions in the western states against the Japanese immigrants were
regionally specific issues based on their local geopolitics.

Leisure Interaction with Other Ethnic Groups
Although Japanese Americans were subjected to racial discrimination in Los
Angeles, they were not completely confined to their community. Through businesses

111
Clarence H. King, “The Use of Leisure Time by the Japanese in New York City,”
(Master’s thesis, Columbia University, 1922) 40.

70
and leisure activities, Japanese Americans had many and rich interactions with other
minority communities as well as the dominant white society.
Firstly, the geographical spread of the Japanese American residential area
was clear indication that there were more possibilities of racial interaction. Koyoshi
Uono’s extensive research on the dispersion of Japanese American residential areas
concludes that some of the Japanese Americans resided in very racially diverse
neighborhoods, such as in West Jefferson.
112
John Modell furthers this study and
proves the dispersion of Japanese American residential areas in six districts such as
Little Tokyo, Boyle Heights, West Jefferson, Hollywood, West Los Angeles and
Pico Heights.
113
On the other hand, on Terminal Island the Japanese American
community was virtually isolated, not just geographically, but also socially.
Therefore, there was not much interaction with people living outside the island.
114

In the other Japanese immigrant communities, however, just as businessmen
took initiatives to cross over racial boundaries, ordinary residents took initiatives in
their leisure activities. For instance, social dance lessons were offered by a Mr.
Candler with “several white lady assistants” according to an advertisement by a
group called the Butterfly Club. The ad asked for people to sign up by calling a
Japanese American photo studio, indicating that perhaps the studio owner had made

112
Koyoshi Uono, “The Factors Affecting the Geographical Aggregation and Dispersion of
the Japanese Residence in the City of Los Angeles,” (Master’s thesis, University of Southern
California, 1927). Also see Fukuoka, 13.
113
Modell, 57.
114
Kan’ichi Kawasaki, “The Japanese Community of East San Pedro, Terminal Island,
California,” (Master’s thesis, University of Southern California, 1931), 16-30.

71
an agreement to lend the studio for dance lessons.
115

The fascination with Japonism was one of the ways in which mainstream
America was interested in Japanese Americans. Similar to other forms of art and
literature, growing and trimming miniature bonsai trees was a leisure activity that
gained its popularity and prominence thanks to a small number of Japanese leaders.
The art of bonsai, in particular, was spread by Tameichi Doi who moved from
Tottori Prefecture of western Japan. He spread the art in northern California first, and
when he moved to southern California, the center of bonsai art moved as well.
Bonsai was one of the Japanese art forms that became quickly appreciated by
white Americans even amidst anti-Japanese sentiment in Southern California. People
like the former President of the Art Institute Center in Los Angeles, sculptors, and
garden designers became aficionados. However, rather than sculpting the bonsais
themselves, they mostly obtained bonsai trees that were brought from Japan for the
San Francisco Exhibition.
116

In another example of the fascination with Japonism, the Tuesday Club, a
white women’s social organization in Los Angeles, planned a charity show for the
construction of an orphanage in 1919. The show had a Japanese theme with oriental
decorations, sweets, flower arrangements, Japanese traditional music and other live
performances.
117
According to the newspaper advertisement, the Tuesday Club
contacted the Nichibei Shimbun to promote the event and invite Japanese Americans

115
Rafu Shimpo, (Oct. 6, 1923), 5.
116
Beikoku Nikkeijin Hyakunenshi, 150.
117
For more on the Japonism movement, see Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White
Women and American Orientalism, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

72
to attend for a fifty-cent admission.
118
Whether this was meant to promote cultural
exchange or whether these Japanese Americans were meant to be performing as
“extras” to give cultural flavor, it is unknown.
Women’s arrival to the community scene suggested new channels for
interaction with the white majority community from the Japanese American side as
well. In a 1919 article, the head of the Central Agricultural Association was quoted
to have said that Japanese women should be more involved in interacting with white
women.
119
He argued that while the language barrier might be preventing such
interaction, the lack of such interaction was preventing cultural assimilation. He
argued that it was the “huge responsibility of these women to raise good American
citizens,” and therefore, they must visit American houses and learn the American
customs.” Similar to editorials published earlier, he suggested the dual (and perhaps
paradoxical) task for Japanese American women to become students of American
culture as well as custodians of Japanese traditional culture.
Mainstream dancehalls usually discriminated against minority youths, and
therefore the Japanese immigrant children usually held dance parties in their own
communities. According to a reportage from a Japanese traveling poet based in Los
Angeles, there were only five dance halls on Main Street that allowed “colored

118
Nichibei Shimbun, (May 7, 1919), 7.
119
Nichibei Shimbun, (May 5, 1919), 3.

73
people” to come in, which still excluded African Americans.
120
He reported how
Filipinos, Chinese, and Japanese mingled in these dance halls.
121

However, as Senko Terri Matsuoka, an Issei who migrated in 1924,
remembers, racial hostility and exclusion was not always the case. Matsuoka
remembered her friends were mostly white women in her neighborhood around
Venice Boulevard. She also remembered, however, that when she invited a black
woman working at the grocery store across from hers to lunch, she said she would
not be allowed to go into restaurants with Senko.
122

Although interactions with African Americans were rarely noted in the
Japanese ethnic newspapers, there was one case where a Rutledge R. Rush, a
Chicago black man, wrote to the Rafu Shimpo “Nisei Open Forum” in 1936. He
wrote, “When you have women who want to marry out of the race, I trust you will
engineer them into marrying Negroes, leading professional men who are leaders in
the Negro community who have proper means to support them. We would highly
appreciate it.”
123
Although the context of the letter and response to the letter may
never be discovered, this letter may imply a friendly relationship between African
Americans and Japanese Americans. As Gerald Horne has argued, African
Americans were quite sympathetic to Japan, especially after Japan’s victory over the

120
Tsuruya, 194-199.
121
Kashu Mainichi, (Feb. 2, 1933), 3.
122
Senko Terri Matsuoka, Interview, May 17, 2001.
123
Rafu Shimpo, (October 11, 1936), 4.

74
Russian military in 1905, which symbolized the rise of a non-white imperial power
and the hope for those succumbing to white supremacy.
124

Generally speaking, the Japanese Americans were discriminated against at
the mainstream movie theaters. For instance at the Hippodrome Theater on Main
Street, Japanese American were only allowed to sit in the mezzanine despite having
paid full price, and despite empty seats being available on the first floor.
125

Regardless of these kinds of institutional discriminations, there is reason to believe
the Japanese American audiences were still valued at these mainstream theaters.
On September 1, 1923, when a major earthquake struck Tokyo, it devastated
the larger metropolitan area and brought about over 65,000 casualties. In Los
Angeles, there were many charity organizations that collected relief funds, most of
which were collected at film screenings of documentaries showing the devastation of
the earthquake. In a matter of weeks, these film reels started to arrive to Los Angeles
and circulated through the communities, where the proceeds would be sent to Tokyo.
The Pantages Theater at Hill and Seventh Street, the Miller Theater at Main and
Ninth, and the California Theater at Main and Eighth Street, showed the
documentaries for a week each, along with other feature movies.
126
The next month,
the Mission Theater, another mainstream theater on South Broadway and 8
th
Street,
showed the documentary to people who brought a can of food.
127
The Red Cross

124
Gerald Horne, “The Black Pacific: African Americans and Japan Confront ‘White
Supremacy’” (Talk, University of Southern California, Feb 28, 2002).
125
Ogihara, 83.
126
Rafu Shimpo, (September 28, 1923), 2; (October 3, 1923), 4.
127
Rafu Shimpo, (Oct 12, 1923), 3.

75
organized a charity dance party for the Japanese disaster, as did a Mr. Miller, an
owner of a cap company and “an admirable white man” according to Rafu Shimpo,
who donated six dozen caps to the Hongwanji Buddhist Temple to help the relief
efforts.
128

In addition to these charity functions, the mainstream movie theaters
organized “Japan Night” to welcome the Japanese clientele. The United Artists
Theater on Broadway and Tenth put an advertisement in the Kashu Mainichi
informing readers that Sessue Hayakawa and Michio Ito would make special
appearances on Japan Night. The movie shown that night was “Around the World in
Eighty Minutes” starring Douglas Fairbanks.
129

At the same time that Japanese immigrants were visiting American
mainstream movie theaters, there was evidence to believe that Americans came to
the Fuji Theater to see Japanese movies. Americans were able to get in for a child’s
admissions because, according to Fukuoka, “they didn’t think it was fair to charge
adult admission to those who could not understand Japanese.”
130
Fukuoka interpreted
this decision as “good will” in her Masters thesis in 1937. While some may interpret
this as an infantalization of the white audience, it is not plausible to make such
interpretations from a business point of view. Instead, it is more plausible to interpret
this as an incentive to increase clientele even to those who did not understand the
language.

128
Rafu Shimpo, (Sept. 28, 1923), 3.
129
Kashu Mainichi, (Dec. 1, 1931), 3.
130
Fukuoka, 9.

76
Although the mainstream movie theaters may have discriminated Japanese
immigrants as audience, they were more receptive to the idea of seeing Japanese
immigrants on the silver screen and on stage. The first and only Japanese American
actor who has ever become a Hollywood box office star was Sessue Hayakawa, who
seduced white ladies frequenting movie theaters during the 1910s to the 1930s. The
first and only Japanese American ballet dancer to fill the Hollywood Bowl with an
enthusiastic crowd was Michio Ito, who was prominent in the 1930s and later
choreographed Gloria Swanson movies. In 1929, Fumiko Alice Kawahata, a thirteen-
year-old Nisei girl, made her debut on a Broadway stage showing off her famous
high-kicks, and was called “the amber-colored Josephine Baker.”
131
All three
performers became very popular in Japan as well. Particularly, Kawahata became
well-known for singing the Japanese rendition of “My Blue Heaven,” which became
a big hit and represented the transnational contributions that pan-Pacific entertainers
are often able to make.

Conclusion
Historian David Nasaw argues that Asians and Asian Americans tended to
spend their time within their own communities and were not as visible in public
amusement places as perhaps African Americans were.
132
Although Nasaw made this
statement about the public amusement scene in early twentieth century New York

131
Takao Norikoshi, Alice: Buro-douei wo miryo shita tensai dansa Kawahata Fumiko
Monogatari, (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1999).
132
David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusement (New York: Basic
Books, 1993), 47.

77
City, this proved to be true in Los Angeles as well. While Japanese community
tended to spend their time within their own community, so did the white dominant
society. Similar to Japanese American communities, social and religious
organizations played a major role in leisure for the dominant society. Therefore,
while Japanese Americans were excluded at many amusement facilities, they
constructed their own leisure facilities to cope with the exclusion, and also to
actively build solidarity among the Japanese Americans often modeling similar
tactics as the dominant culture.
The limited but significant interaction with other ethnic groups and the
adaptation of American lifestyle, especially as the Nisei population grew, suggests
that this particular community “digested and domesticated” quintessentially
American cultural patterns and Japanese cultural patterns into powerful vehicles of
its own social changes as Japanese Americans.
133

As the Los Angeles Japanese American community grew in population in the
first half of the twentieth century, their leisure culture was also influenced by that of
the American society. In the beginning, a close-knit community was inevitable
because of the language barrier, the circumstances as newly arrived immigrants, and
racial discrimination. However, as decades passed, leisure activities began to bear a

133
Masako Notoji, “Cultural Transformation of John Philip Sousa and Disneyland in Japan,”
Here, There, and Everywhere: The Foreign Politics of American Popular Culture, eds.
Reinhold Wagnleitner and Elaine Tyler May, (University Press of New England, 2000), 219.
Although Notoji refers to the penetration of American culture in Japan in this particular
article, since her argument concerns the hegemony and adaptation of one ethnic
culture over another, her argument can be applied to Japanese Americans and their
digestion of American as well as Japanese culture.

78
more positive meaning. Although leisure activities were organized by social
organizations, such as religious, political and educational groups, the activities
appealed to the Japanese American community not only because it promoted the
specific purposes of their agenda, but also because it functioned to improve the
whole community. This pattern of social and organizational leisure, as opposed to
individual engagement in commercial leisure, was not unique in the Japanese
American communities, but was common in other racial groups as well.
As the Japanese American population grew and permeated into certain
geographical areas, interactions with other minorities and mainstream society
increased in business, school, and everyday life. Not only were Japanese Americans
penetrating American society, American society also penetrated Japanese American
society initiated mainly by capitalist incentives. In other words, capitalism
contributed in dissolving racial discrimination. However as well have seen,
capitalism did not have as much influence on social-organizational leisure patterns as
it did on business.
In the unpredictable chemistry of location, demography and size of the
community, the perception of Japanese immigrants predicated on the impact they
have on the economy of the host culture, human capital, and political temperament.
These all contributed to the uneven and haphazard development of leisure culture in
different immigrant communities. They did not merely transplant their mother
culture nor did they immerse themselves in the host culture for leisure. Instead, they
weighed their options available and started creating habits of leisure, some of which

79
became institutionalized for the region, some of which did not survive the loss of
leadership. The ephemeral and fragile nature of leisure activity preference was
nurtured by the agency of the immigrants in building a sustainable leisure culture. In
other words, it was only through trial and error by the cultural brokers that
transnational cultural networks were established. Without this groundwork,
supranational cultural products would not have had a chance in proliferating across
national boundaries.

80
CHAPTER 3
LEISURE AS A LITMUS TEST:
DILEMMA BETWEEN INTERNATIONAL POLITICS AND SUPRANATIONAL
PRODUCTS DURING THE ANTI-AMERICAN MOVEMENT OF 1924

On July 1
st
, 1924, major Japanese movie exhibitors initiated a boycott of
Hollywood films. This boycott was one of the manifestations of the anti-American
movement, which occurred in response to the 1924 Immigration Act that was passed
by the United States Congress and signed by President Coolidge on May 26, 1924.
This immigration act was also known as the Japanese exclusionary act, which
banned the immigration of Japanese citizens till 1953. While the boycott movement
was considered to be one of the best organized anti-American activities during this
period, it also only lasted 10 days.
134
At first sight, it is surprising that this boycott
didn’t last longer. After all, the various writings on the Japanese response to the anti-
Japanese immigration act leads us to believe that the anti-American sentiment, full of
fury and antagonism, would have led to a massive support of an American goods
boycott. But this was not the case. This chapter tells a story about why the boycott
movement did not last amidst a strong social sentiment against the United States.
Previous scholars have shown the impact this Immigration Act had on diplomatic

134
Caffery to Hughes, July 11, 1924, Records of the Department of State Relating to
Political Relations Between the United States and Japan, 1910-1929. United States
Department of State Decimal File 711.945/1205. Quoted in Lee Arne Makela, “Japanese
Attitudes towards the United States Immigration Act of 1924,” (Ph.D. Dissertation,
Stanford University, 1973), 197.

81
relations, the Japanese immigrants in the U.S., and the general response by the
Japanese public. Most of these scholars have cited in passing the film boycott as an
illustration of one of the many ways in which the Japanese public responded to the
Act.
135
The most detailed account of this boycott movement was written over three
decades ago by Lee Arne Makela, focusing on the distributors’ point of view.
136

Makela’s account of the boycott also used primarily English sources which skewed
the interpretation of the boycott.
137
This chapter primarily uses Japanese language
sources such as newspapers, film magazines and other popular periodicals to
highlight the contestation and dialogue between the Japanese distributors, theater
owners, American studio representatives, Japanese film magazine publishers, and
Japanese movie aficionados.
Certainly this story joins scholarship on the cultural history of U.S.-Japan
diplomacy and to a certain degree an extended story of American immigration
history. It is also a story about the rising dominance of Hollywood around the world.
Film scholar Andrew Higson suggests we shift our emphasis away from an “analysis

135
See for example, Kimitada Miwa, Nichibei Kiki no Kigen to Hainichi Iminho[The
Origins of the Japan-U.S. Crisis and the Anti-Japanese Immigration Act], (Ronsosha, 1997);
Tadao Yoshida, Kokujoku: Kyojitsu no ‘Hainichi’ Iminho no Kiseki [National Humiliation:
The Trajectory of the Truth and False of the ‘Anti-Japanese’ Immigration Act], (Tokyo:
Keizai Ohrai sha, 1983); Hirobe Izumi, Japanese Pride, American Prejudice, (Stanford
University Press, 2001); Toshihiro Minohara, Hainichi Iminho to Nichibei Kankei [The Anti-
Japanese Immigration Act and Japan-U.S. Relations], (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2002);
Akihiro Yamakura, “’National Humiliation’: Anti-American Reactions in Japan to the
Immigration Act of 1924,” Tenri Daigaku Gakuho 175 (1994).
136
Makela, 189-204.
137
Makela used mostly reports published in the English language newspaper in Japan, such
as the Japan Advertiser and the Japan Weekly Chronicle, which catered primarily to the
foreign population, and American government documents, such a correspondences from the
American Embassy in Japan.

82
of film texts as vehicles for the articulation of nationalist sentiment… to an analysis
of how actual audiences construct their cultural identity” through their engagement
with cinema.
138
This is a response to that call. By reading the film magazines, it is
possible to analyze the cultural identity of the audiences and people in the film
industry. It is possible to interpret the failure of the boycott as a simple story of the
growing domination of Hollywood in the world. But it is also an example of the
complicated manner in which audiences negotiate their cultural and political identity.
In other words, this chapter shows how political antagonism in international relations
does not necessarily translate into cultural antagonism. It also reveals the difference
in geographical imaginations of whether Hollywood films are considered national
products or a form of world art that is not specific to the United States.
The effect of the exclusionary act was limited as far as the actual impact on
the Japanese immigrants living in the United States was concerned. Laborers had
already been denied entry with the 1908 Gentlemen’s Agreement. The most serious
impact it had was that immigrants were no longer allowed to bring their family
members to the United States. But many of the immigrants were able to bring their
wives and children before the July 1
st
execution of the Act. What made the 1924
Immigration Act significant, then, was the symbolic, emotional impact it had on the
people in Japan. Some scholars have argued that this immigration act ignited the
initial spark for the psychological antagonism that became one of the underlying

138
Andrew Higson, “The Concept of National Cinema,” Screen, 30:4 (Autumn 1999),
37.

83
causes of the Pacific War.
139
It was a huge slap on the face for the Japanese because
it demoted Japan to the same level as the Chinese and the rest of the Asian nations,
which the U.S. had banned immigration earlier. This humiliation came after a series
of diplomatic defeats for Japan that seemed to have been based on racial
discrimination from other leading nations. In 1905, while Japanese emerged
victoriously from its war with Russia, and boosted its confidence as the first non-
white nation to join in the major powers of international politics, it was dealt an
unfavorable truce treaty without indemnity. The Riots in Hibiya, Tokyo and
elsewhere across the nation showed the frustration ordinary people felt. In 1906 the
San Francisco Board of Education decided to segregate Japanese children in the
schools. In 1913 and 1920, the California Alien Land Law, which denied Japanese
immigrants from purchasing land, was widely publicized in the Japanese media. At
the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, Japan’s proposal of including a racial equality
clause in the League of Nations was rejected by the other western nations. In the Five
Power Treaty signed at the Washington Conference in 1922, Japan had to accept an
inferior ratio of five to three with respect to capital ship tonnage in relation to the
United States and Great Britain. All of these events created a mounting frustration
towards western imperialist nations including the United States who rejected Japan’s
hopes to join the imperialistic powers of the world.

139
Takubo Tadanori, “Hainichi Iminho de Nichibei ha shototsu no hohkouhe: Ryokoku no
Kanjoron ga zenmen ni [The Anti-Japanese Immigration Act Led to Japan-U.S.
Conflict: Emotional Arguments Predominate in Both Nations],” Jiyuh (2002): 34-42.

84
From the day that Congress passed the Immigration Act till the day that
President Calvin Coolidge was scheduled to sign the act, the Japanese made
vehement pleas asking Coolidge to veto it. While the pleas were made in myriad
forms, an anti-American sentiment grew instantaneously. Over all, the press wrote
sensationally about the anti-Japanese aspect of the act, and induced an emotional and
active response, while others maintained a calm and reserved approach worrying
about the damages it would bring to the bilateral relationship as well as to the
Japanese immigrants in America. But in general, the leaders on both the right and left
were not timid in showing their emotions. Nationalist intellectual Tokutomi Soho
declared July 1
st
, Kokujokubi, or “National Humiliation Day.” The Immigration Act
was especially hurtful for liberal intellectuals who had been sympathetic to the
United States. Uchimura Kanzo, a renown philosopher and devoted Christian who
had studied at Amherst College, could not help but be vocal about his obvious
disappointment to America. Nitobe Inazo, a leading intellectual and the Japanese
representative to the League of Nations at that time, who was also a Quaker married
to a American woman, vowed never to set foot on American soil until the
Exclusionary Act was revoked.
The anti-American movement manifested itself in various forms. There were
mass rallies organized by various groups. The right-wing nationalist organizations,
women’s organizations, Suiheisha (anti-discriminatory group)
140
, and Christian

140
Suiheisha was the major organization created in 1911 (check date) to protest
discriminatory actions against people from the buraku community. The buraku
community has been ostracized geographically, socially and economically for

85
groups organized protest rallies where thousands of people gathered, not just in
Tokyo and Osaka, but in many other cities, especially at prefectures which sent out
the most immigrants. (See Figure 9 and 10) Conspicuously absent were the labor
unions, to whom the 1924 immigration act didn't have a grave impact, because
laborers had already been banned to enter the United States in the 1906 Gentlemen's
agreement between the two nations. While no Americans were physically attacked by
Japanese during this period, there were at least three suicides committed in protest to
the immigration act. On May 31, 1924, a man disemboweled himself at a residence
next to the American Embassy in Tokyo, mistaking it for the Embassy. On June 3
rd
, a
student jumped into the track at Choshi Station leaving a suicide note to boycott
American goods. On June 6
th
, an employee of the Miyazaki Prefecture jumped into
the tracks also leaving a note protesting the anti-Japanese immigration act.
141

The anti-American sentiment took the form of boycotts against American
culture and goods. Not only was Japan offended to be lumped into the exclusion with
the rest of Asia in American immigration policy, it was also hurtful to the nation
because the act was implemented at a time when the Japanese had such a rising

centuries.
141
“Chinurareta Hainichiho [Bloodshed Anti-Japanese Act],” Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun,
(June 1, 1924), Morning ed.; “Beikokuhin wo kauna to kakioki shite funshi su[Dies Enraged
Leaving Note to Boycott American Goods],” Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun, (June 5, 1924)
Morning ed.; “Mata funshi: Kageki na moji wo narabeta isho[Another Death from Rage: A
Suicide Note with Sensational Words],” Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun, (June 8, 1924), Morning
ed. For other articles reporting about the impact of the anti-Japanese Immigration Act, see
Tamai Kiyoshi Kenkyukai, Hainichi Iminho to Nihon no Masu Media[The Anti-Japanese
Immigration Act and the Japanese Mass Media], (Political Science Department, Faculty of
Law, Keio University, 1996).

86
Figure 9: A Gathering Protesting the Passage of the New Immigration Law in the
United States. Photo taken at the Zojoji temple in Shiba, Tokyo in July 1924.
Copyright: The Mainichi Newspapers.

Figure 10: A crowd cheering in opposition to the U.S. Immigration Law, 1924.
Copyright: The Mainichi Newspapers.

87
affection for American popular culture. While the 1920s has been noted for the
influx of American culture in Japan, during these three months, it became more
difficult to support these new customs. Geishas decided to boycott the use of
American cosmetics. Japanese women wearing foreign hairstyles were accosted on
the streets, and a newspaper reported that fewer women were now wearing their hair
in the latest American fashion.
142
Student organizations across the nation formed a
pact for sobriety, especially avoiding American whisky.
143
The boycott of U.S.-made
goods, such as watches, gramophones, tobacco, hats, stationary, tinned fruits,
cameras and musical instruments were successful, and by the third week of June, the
boycott against American goods had gained so much momentum that it appeared at
the brink of seriously affecting Japan-U.S. trade relations.
144

It was only a matter of time that this anti-American sentiment would extend
to movie-going culture. As early as in April, movie fans in Nagoya began to suggest
a boycott of American films, and that sentiment spread to Tokyo.
145
This sentiment
began to materialize into action in June. In Sapporo, a group of young men and
military officers formed the “Association for Refusing to See American Films.” This
association organized monitors to stand in front of movie theaters in an attempt to

142
Uchitsukihai, “Mimikakushi fujin no kohgi [A Protest by an Ear Hiding Lady],” Tokyo
Nichinichi Shimbun, (June 16, 1924). Hiding their ear with their hair was synonymous for
supporting western modern hairstyles.
143
“Kinan no maeni mazu yoshi wo oe: Mushu dei no sakebi [Get rid of foreign liquor
before the disaster: A cry for prohibition day],” Tokyo Asahi Shimbun, (July 2, 1924), 7.
144
Makela, 187-189.
145
“Nihon eiga ni hatten no kouki torai [Great opportunity for Japanese cinema to develop],”
Chuo Koron, (April 26, 1924).

88
deter people away from going in.
146
On June 8, members of Taikosha, a rightist
organization, succeeded in shutting down several theaters showing American films.
Threats were made against theaters that continued to show American films. On June
27
th
, the Chiyoda-kan and Musashino-kan, both major independent theaters in Tokyo
were threatened with arson and was forced to immediately stop showing American
films. At a theater in Chiba, a man slashed the screen that was showing an American
film. Other theaters around Tokyo and in Manchuria were also forced to close. On
June 11
th
and 12
th
, the doors of the Universal Studios office in Osaka were
firebombed. Also in Osaka, an enraged patron cast his shoes at the screen in protest
to the American film flickering on the silver screen.
147
Movie-goers also sent letters
to the movie theaters requesting, sometimes demanding, that they stop showing
American films. One movie house that exclusively showed western movies received
a letter saying “Drop the frivolous American films, and show the serious German
ones.”
148
These people clearly understood Hollywood films to be a product of
America rather than a universal art form and refused this American cultural product
to express political animosity.

146
“Beikoku eiga wo issei ni joei sezu [Organized stop of American movie exhibition],” Jiji
Nippo, June 9, 1924.
147
Makela, 191.
148
“Eiga ni made haibei netsu[Anti-American fever even in movies], Katsudo Kurabu,
(August 1924), 101.

89
Japanese Film Industry
The American film industry was influential in the development of cinema in
Japan in many aspects of the industry from technology, content and the
conglomeration of different branches of the industry.
149
The Japanese movie studios,
like their Hollywood counterparts, were a vertically integrated industry, controlling
production, distribution and exhibition. Most of the Japanese studios started as
distributing companies and expanded their business first by securing exhibition
venues, and secondly by producing movies for domestic consumption. This vertical
integration process was established in the Meiji period (1868-1912). The first
distributing company, Yoshizawa Shoten, was founded in 1900. The company
helped create the first “movie theater” in Japan in 1903, by providing movies to a
run-down vaudeville theater in Asakusa. Yoshizawa Shoten, then built the first film
stage in Meguro, Tokyo to produce their own films, which looked similar to the first
film stage Thomas Edison made.
In 1912, when the Warner Brothers Studio and Universal Studios were
founded, so was the first major studio in Japan.
150
Nihon Katsudo Shashin
Kabushikigaisha [Japanese Moving Picture Company, Inc], commonly known as
Nikkatsu, was created through the merger of four major film companies, namely M.
Pate Company, Yokota Shokai, Yoshizawa Shoten, and Fukuhodo. The same year,

149
For a history of the development of the Japanese film industry, see Sato Tadao, Nihon
Eiga shi[Japanese Film History], Vol. 1, (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995), Yamamoto Kikuo,
Nihon Eiga ni okeru Gaikoku Eiga no Eikyo [Foreign Influences on Japanese Cinema]
(Tokyo: Waseda University Press, 1988).
150
20
th
Century Fox was founded in 1922, Paramount Pictures in 1924.

90
Nikkatsu built their movie studio near the Sumida River. “It was the largest film
stage in Japan, if not in Asia, until Shochiku built the Kamata studio in 1918,”
according to one of the Nikkatsu cameramen at the studio. A Kyoto stage lot
originally built by Yokota Shokai became known for filming period pieces, while the
Tokyo lot shot modern pieces.
151
The two Nikkatsu studio lots shot at the pace of a
movie a week and produced about ninety films in 1913.
152
By 1916, the Nikkatsu
was vertically integrated and managed distribution of foreign films as well. The
revenue from foreign film distribution was vital to finance domestic film
production.
153

Initially, the trade route of Hollywood films to Japan was not clearly
established. Some came in through the legitimate route from the studio and foreign
distributing agents, but others came in as illegal copies through the black market.
Since in Japan, there were no applicable laws that protected either copyright or that
defined a clear distinction between copyright and exhibition rights, distributors who
bought cheap illegal copies from the Shanghai black market were able to make a
larger profit. In 1922, distribution rights of successful movies such as Broken
Blossoms, Way Down East, and The Four Horsemen of Apocalypse, were fought in
the Japanese judicial system. When the American film studios realized the
infringements of copyright, and the lack of legal protection for intellectual property
in Japan, they started to put up offices in Japan in order to directly manage and

151
Sato, 137-38.
152
Sato, 130.
153
Hideaki Fujiki, “The Advent of the Star System in Japanese Cinema Distribution,”
Studies in Informatics and Sciences (Nagoya University), No. 15 (2002), 11-14.

91
monitor distribution in Japan.
154
Because of these legal problems as well as
inappropriate subject matter in some of the foreign films, the Japanese government
implemented the Motion Picture Film Inspection Regulations in 1925.
155
By going
through the centralized censorship of the Home Ministry, the copyright, exhibition
rights and proprietary origins of the films were better documented and resulted in
fewer legal suits.
156

For those in the Japanese film industry, the anti-American sentiment seemed
to have been the opportunity they had been waiting for. Studio heads had expressed
frustration with Hollywood ever since they increased the distributing price after the
1923 Kanto Earthquake, which devastated not just the Tokyo metropolitan area, but
also film production in Japan. In some cases, the exhibition fee for American films
tripled the price since the earthquake.
157
In the meantime, movie-going became an
even more popular leisure activity for the tragedy-stricken and demand reached
record highs. The number of movie theaters in Japan doubled in just one year from
1923.
158
The studio heads felt it was an exploitation of the Japanese market by

154
Tanaka Junichiro, Nihon Eiga Hattatsushi [The development history of Japanese cinema],
Vol. 1, (Chuo Koronsha, 1980), 398.
155
Similar to the case of American film censorship, though, local governments had already
established censorship committees prior to a national organization. In Tokyo, for instance,
the Tokyo Motion Picture Exhibition Regulations was established in 1917. Fujiki, 9. The
Tokyo regulations were subsequently circulated to the police nationwide. Gregory J. Kasza,
The State and the Mass Media in Japan, 1918-1945, (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1988), 55.
156
Tanaka, 407.
157
Katsudo Zasshi, (August, 1924), 35.
158
Statistics from the Metropolitan Police Department. Mamoru Makino, Nihon Eiga
Kenetsu shi [The History of Censorship in Japanese Cinema], (Tokyo: Pandora, 2003),
138.

92
Hollywood distributors to inflate the premium when Japanese film production was
slim.
When the Immigration Act passed in the U.S. Congress and anti-American
sentiment reached its peak in Japan, the Hollywood movie stars were quite aware of
their roles as representatives of the United States. It was already common for
American movie stars to visit Japan as part of their world-wide promotional tour. But
seeing the unfavorable sentiment at that time against Americans, Hollywood stars
such as Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, westerns star Tom Mix, and adventure
flick star Ruth Roland cancelled their trips to Japan. The Fairbanks heard the passing
of the Immigration Act while they were promoting a film in the United Kingdom.
They contacted the Kobe office of United Artists and told them they will be skipping
their stop over to Japan. Fearing they would be antagonized as Americans in Japan,
they also reportedly attempted to make use of their Swedish decent, and promote
themselves as Swedish actors.
159

On the one hand, there were efforts made by the film industry to alleviate
the antagonism between the two nations. Complying with the request of Secretary
Komura and others at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the film industry agreed to
make a film about Japan and export it to the U.S. and European countries. Figuring
westerners would change their opinion and attitude toward Japan if they were better
informed about the culture, the film focused on the society and culture of Japan and

159
“Bei kinema kai no meiyu ra ga nihonrai wo miawasu [American Movie Stars Cancel
Trip to Japan],” Katsudo Kurabu (August 1924), 102.

93
was to be disseminated around the world. The film industry was reportedly
optimistic of the possibility that this promotional film would help even open doors to
setting up distribution routes for exporting other Japanese films.
160

The American and domestic film distributors in Japan also made a joint
effort to ameliorate the immigration problem. Mr. Pearson, the General Manger of
United Artists, and Masaharu Takamura also of United Artists convened with
executives from Shochiku, Nikkatsu, Teikine and Makino and decided to send a
telegram to Will Hayes, the President of the Motion Picture Producers and
Distributors Association in the U.S. This joint petition sent from the Hollywood
representatives in Japan and exhibitors in Japan asked for Hayes’ assistance in the
appropriate resolution of the immigration problem.
161

But as the joint effort turned out to be in vain, the Japanese film industry
decided to take matters into their own hands by creating a sanction on Hollywood
movies. It was the golden opportunity they had been waiting for to get back at the
price gouging from the previous year. On June 9
th
, 1924, the general managers and
executives of the major Japanese movie studios such as Nikkatsu, Shochiku
162
and
Teikine and some independent movie theaters met at the Shochiku office in

160
“Kokujo senden eiga iyoiyo chakushu[National promotional film to be made],” Katsudo
Zasshi (July 1924), 113.
161
“Hainichi mondai to waga eigakai[The Anti-Japanese issue and our film industry],”
Katsudo Zasshi, (July 1924), 43.
162
Rivaling Nikkatsu was Shochiku Kinema, a subsidiary company that branched off of
Shochiku. Shochiku was founded in 1920 to promote Kabuki theater. They sent a technical
engineer to learn the Hollywood production system and recruited Henry Kotani, a Japanese
cinematographer in Hollywood who was referred to by Cecile B. De Mille. Interestingly,
before creating a filming stage, they created an actors studio which was run by erudite
director Osanai Kaoru.

94
Nihonbashi, Tokyo.
163
They announced a three-part resolution to boycott American
films. They decided not to buy or rent any more American films, never to exhibit
American films, and that the boycott would start on July first, the day the
Immigration Act was scheduled to go into effect. This boycott was primarily led by
studios and accepted by some of the theater owners.
164

Technically, a boycott most commonly refers to the consumer’s act of
refusing to buy certain goods at the retail end. This decision by the studios was
technically not a “boycott,” since it was the industry, more specifically the
distributors, who decided to ban American films. It was not an “embargo” either,
because it was not an official legislative decision to shut out American films.
Nonetheless, the word boycott will be used in this chapter because that was one of
the two words used in the media to describe the studio’s actions—boicotto (boycott)
and haiseki (rejection).
Other forms of retaliation manifested itself in the film industry. The day
following the boycott decision, Shochiku Kinema announced its solicitation of
screenplays dealing with this “national crisis.”
165
In the western region, Toa Kinema
produced The Mask of Satan, an anti-American propaganda film which they proudly

163
Similar to the Hollywood distributors, these Japanese studios used “block booking,”
which forced theater owners to rent movies in packs which often included films of mixed
quality. The exhibitors and studios had their own set of tensions about film distribution
practices. Those who were present at the boycott meeting were Negishi and Mizusawa from
Nikkatsu, Shiroto and Tsutsumi from Shochiku, Hashita from Teikine, Tateishi from Takara
Shokai, Kadoma from Musashino Theater, Ikoma Rauyu from Chiyoda Theater. Katsudo
Zasshi, (August 1924), 34.
164
Until 1916, the movie houses were the primary advertisers of new films, but by 1920, the
studios had taken over this role. Fujiki, 8.
165
Katsudo Zasshi, (August 1924), 36.

95
advertised that they used seven ‘actual’ American actors.
166
Inspired by “The Cheat”
(1915), which was considered a kokujoku (nationally humiliating) film in Japan, this
“white peril” movie was about a Chinese tricked by American and British villains,
who was saved by the Japanese hero.
167
Some benshi narrators who usually
interpreted foreign movies on stage refused to narrate American films.
168

It is difficult to give a specific number of how many movies were exhibited
in Japan during this time, but in 1924, there were approximately 410 foreign films
and 470 domestic films shown.
169
It was the first time domestic film exhibition
exceeded foreign films since 1916. The number of American films exhibited in Japan
skyrocketed in the 1910s from approximately 70 films in 1913, to 170 films in 1914,
200 films in 1915, and approximately 460 films in 1916. Movie culture in general
rose in popularity.
170
Between 1921 and 1926, the number of movie theaters in Japan
grew from 694 to 1,056. According to 1921 statistics, the prefectures with the most
movie theaters were eighty-six in Tokyo, fifty-four in Fukuoka (of Southern Japan),
forty-seven in Hokkaido (the northern island), thirty-nine in Osaka, and thirty-four in

166
“Beijin Haiyu wo yatotte haibei eiga kamen no akuma wo Toa Kimena ga tsukutta [Toa
Kinema Makes Anti-American Movie “The Masked Devil” Using American Actors],”
Katsudo Kurabu, (August 1924), 104.
167
Hirobe, 34.
168
A benshi was a narrator who stood in front of the audience during a screening and
interpreted the intertitles as well as described the film in the silent film era. Makela, 186.
169
According to another source, 575 American films were shown, while 537 Japanese films,
and 60 European films were exhibited. Nihon Eiga Nenkan[Japanese Film Annuals] Taisho
13-14 edition, (Asahi Shimbun, 1925). Quoted in Yamamoto, 210-11. Various sources report
different statistics, but roughly the number of American films shown were not too different
from that of Japanese films shown in Japan, giving Hollywood about a 50 percent share in
the Japanese market. This was relatively low compared to other countries such as Australia,
Italy, or Brazil.
170
C.f. Yamamoto, 210.

96
Shizuoka. The other forty-two prefectures also averaged ten theaters per
prefecture.
171

Still, in 1924, Japan was paying approximately ten million yen annually to
the U.S. film industry by buying raw film stock, and Japanese film distributors
paying exhibition fees to Hollywood. Nikkatsu paying American film studios an
average of 1.23 million yen a month, Shochiku 780,000yen, and others paying
100,000yen.
172
According to an inventory check conducted the day after the boycott
decision, there were approximately 130 films in the stock rooms of various film
exhibitors in Japan. Of the 132 films, 57 films belonged to Japanese distributors,
while the rest was distributed by the Japanese branches of Hollywood studios.
173

Having already paid the premium, this boycott was a self-sacrificing economic
decision.
Surely, the Japanese market was much smaller than the American market,
but it was steadily blossoming. While there were approximately 16,000 movie
theaters in the U.S., there were about 600 full-time movie theaters in all of Japan at
this time.
174
Of those 600, 172 were in Tokyo prefecture, and 87 were in Tokyo City,
which meant a little more than one tenth of the movie theaters were in Tokyo City.
175

In Osaka, movie going was the single most popular entertainment attracting more

171
Minami Hiroshi, ed. Taisho Bunka [Taisho Culture] (Tokyo: Keiso Shobo, 2001), 122.
172
“Eiga ni made haibei netsu [Anti-American fever into movies],” Katsudo Kurabu (August
1924), 101.
173
Kinema Jumpo 162 (June 11, 1924), 20.
174
Tamura Yukihiko, “Eiga no kuni Amerika [Movie nation America]” Eiga Shincho (May
1924).
175
Yamamoto, 212.

97
than eight million people annually, which attracted more audience than the other
entertainment venues combined.
176
Still Japan was thriving in its domestic film
production compared to other nations, such as the United Kingdom, Australia,
Canada, Brazil, and other Latin American and European countries, which were
completely dominated by Hollywood in their own markets.
177
While these countries
allowed Hollywood to have more than a ninety percent share, Japan’s domestic film
production competed with Hollywood movie exhibition and allowed Hollywood to
have only half of her share.
178
Still, the rising premiums and the more expensive
ticket prices would most likely have made American films the dominant economic
power in the Japanese film industry.
179

The issue of constructing a distinctly Japanese cinematic culture has always
been important for the Japanese film industry, but the anti-American sentiment could
not have come at a better time for the Japanese film exhibitors. While the decision to
implement the boycott was triggered by the political sentiment, the studio executives

176
Osaka shi Shakaibu Chosa ka [Osaka City Social Department Survey Division] ed. Yoka
Seikatsu no Kenkyu[A Study of Leisure Life]: Rodo Chosa Hokoku no. 19 [Labor Survey
Report, no. 19] (Tokyo: Kohbundo, 1923), 25-26. Reprinted in Yoka Goraku Kenkyu Kiso
Bunken shu[Basic Sources on Leisure and Entertainment Studies] series vol. 4 (Tokyo:
Ohzora-sha, 1989).
177
France and Germany also had a film production culture that succeeded in overwhelming
the number of American films exhibited in the respective countries.
178
William Victor Strauss, “Foreign Distribution of American Motion Pictures,” Harvard
Business Review, 8 (1930): 309, quoted in Ruth Vasey, The World According to Hollywood,
1918-1939 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 70. While the percentage of Hollywood
films shown in Japan is listed as 30% in this particular source, other sources have generally
shown that about half of the movies shown in Japan in the mid-1920s were Hollywood
movies. See Yamamoto, 210.
179
Some have gone as far as requesting expensive premiums of 4,500 yen/week in their
contracts with individual movie theaters. Kokufukumensei, “Hainichi Mondai to Waga
Eigakai [The Japanese Exclusionary Issue and Our Movie Industry],” Katsudo Zasshi (July
1924), 40-43.

98
were candid about their economic motivations as well. In the film magazine Katsudo
Kurabu, or Movie Club, the major studios participating in the boycott published their
statements. Tsutsumi Tomojiro, the Shochiku Kinema representative argued that
American movie distributors were tyrannical, because they had hiked up the
premium. He maintained, “Since Japanese cinema has been flourishing, we will try
to expel American films.”
180

Nikkatsu representative Homma Norikatsu announced that they would
gradually pull out American films from their theaters. Homma disclosed, “We would
like to use this opportunity to advance Japanese cinema. From a business stand-
point, it is better to exhibit Japanese and European films rather than American films
which are very expensive. Last year American movie distributors raised the price
extensively on us.” He assured, “Nikkatsu will not be impacted even if we loose
American films.”
181
In another source, a Nikkatsu spokesman declared it would be
possible to continue business without American films, since sixty percent of our
business is domestic films anyway.”
182
But there seemed to have had some
disagreement within the company at Nikkatsu regarding the boycott. Nikkatsu
general manager Negishi implied in a newspaper interview on June 9
th
that the
boycott was really led by the public and that there was nothing they could do amidst
the strong anti-American sentiment. He argued, “Even if we did continue exhibiting

180
Tsutsumi Tomojiro, “Nihon mono to Oushu mono wo motte [With Japanese and European
Movies], Katsudo Kurabu (July 1924), 38-39.
181
Homma Takanori, “Nihon Eiga ni [To Japanese Films],” Katsudo Kurabu (July 1924), 37-
38.
182
“Eiga ni made haibei netsu [Anti-American fever into movies],” Katsudo Kurabu (August
1924), 101.

99
American films, not only will we loose our popularity among our customers, but
we’ll bring antagonism to our company.”
183

Morioka Kakuo, a representative for the movie theater Asakusa
Teikokukan, argued that the anti-American boycott movement was a great
opportunity to advance national cinema. He stated:
American movies have reached their limits both formally and artistically.
Artistic movies are not American's strong suit. Many of the movies they have
been making recently are situated in the upper class, which no doubt
fascinates the Americans who do not have class. Their movies are shallow
and will not have longevity as movies. Dimly lit German films are no good,
nor the Italian and French films which are quite behind in their development
of film artistry. Fortunately Shochiku already has their Kamata studio, and
another studio in Kyoto. If we invested our best efforts, I believe we should
be able to satisfy the domestic market without foreign films.
184

The boycott movement would have had a significant impact if it had been fully
implemented. While the major distributors in Tokyo agreed to this boycott, the
distributors in western Japan were hesitant to jump on this bandwagon. On June 10
th
,
one day after the Tokyo boycott resolution, the four company heads of the film
association in the Kansai region, namely Shochiku, Nikkatsu, Teikine and Makino,
were supposed to meet in Kyoto, but since Shozo Makino did not attend, and Mr.
Takamura of United Artists attended, the discussion ended without a resolution. On
June 14
th
, a representative from one of the Asakusa theater owners traveled to Kyoto
to make a case for the boycott. But the Kansai distributors decided against the
boycott stating that the Kansai region had not developed as strong an anti-American

183
“Beikoku eiga wo issei ni joei sezu [Organized stop of American movie exhibition],” Jiji
Nippo, June 9, 1924.
184
Morioka Tadao, “Kohkikai [Great Opportunity],” Katsudo Kurabu (July 1924), 40-41.

100
sentiment as the Tokyo metropolitan area. Even the regional representatives of
Nikkatsu and Shochiki indicated that they would part ways with their Tokyo
colleagues and not participate in the boycott. In the case of Shochiku, this
disagreement may have been due to the fact that the founding brothers of Shochiku,
Shirai Matsujiro and Otani Takejiro, split their responsibilities to eastern and western
Japan, and did not see eye to eye on issues including this one.
185

Hollywood Studios
How did the Hollywood film studios respond to this boycott? Hollywood did
not feel much of a blow. Japan merely consisted about three percent of Hollywood’s
foreign revenue.
186
The boycott also had little effect because the major film studios
such as Fox, Universal, Paramount, and United Artists already had distributing
offices in Japan and therefore had secured venues for exhibition. It was the smaller
Hollywood studios such as Metro, Warner Brothers, Goldwyn, and First National,
who relied on Japanese studios as their distributors and exhibitors. Universal was the
first to open its Tokyo office in 1916, United Artists opened theirs in 1922,
Paramount hired Tom de Cochran who had previously managed the Tokyo office for

185
Toshiyuki Matsushima, “Yakyu to eiga no bunka kankei ron [The cultural relationship of
baseball and film] (1),” Basebology no.4 (Spring 2003), 191. “Kobayashi Ichizo, Otani
Takejiro no kokeisha ha dareka [Who will succeed Kobayashi and Otani], Hanashi (February,
1937), 294. In 1936, Shirai was forced to resign after a tax fraud scandal, which left Otani to
control both regions and unified the Shochiku group.
186
J.H. Seidelman (Paramount Foreign Department), memo to Frederick Herron, 28
November 1928, Electrical Research File, reel 4, Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors
Association Archive, quoted in Ruth Vasey, 85. Although the statistics is from 1927, it is
hard to imagine the proportion would have been significantly different in 1924.

101
Universal in 1922. Whenever the American movie studios had a chance, they
acquired movie theaters that would exclusively show their studio films. For instance,
when Japanese film studio Taisho Katsuei merged with Shochiku Kinema and let go
of the Chiyoda-kan Theater in Asakusa, Tokyo and the Asahi-kan Theater in Kobe,
Universal bought both as her direct theaters.
In some instances, Hollywood studios in Japan used both their own
distribution route as well as Japanese distributors. Since Fox Studios used Nikkatsu
as their secondary distributor in addition to their own exhibition resources, (Nikkatsu
had 14 films from Fox in their possession,) they would have naturally been more
opinionated about the boycott than the other Hollywood studios.
187
Responding to an
interview by one of the editors of Kinema Jumpo, Mr. Goodman, the president of
Fox Studios Japan, argued that the boycott would only hurt the Japanese exhibitors.
Goodman pointed out that the income from the Japanese market was marginal, and
that it would merely lead to an unfavorable loss of profit for the Japanese industry.
Hinting an American retaliation, he pointed out that while the U.S. exported 60
million yen worth of film to Japan, Japan exported 260 million yen worth of silk to
the U.S., and therefore the boycott could result in a 200 million yen loss for the
Japanese economy if the United States decided to boycott Japanese silk. On another
level, he reminded the editor that the relationship between Fox and Japan was not

187
Nikkatsu studios had 14 films from Fox studios in their storage, while Fox Japan had 23
films in their storage. Kinema Jumpo 162 (June 11, 1924), 20.

102
just a business relationship, but a friendship and that President William Fox sent a
large sum of money to the relief efforts after the 1923 Kanto Earthquake.
188

The Universal Pictures representative in Japan, Ishikawa Toshihiko, also
responded that it was not realistic to boycott American goods. He argued that even if
Japanese studios fill the hole with European film stock, it will not be sufficient. He
added that the quality of European film was not as good as the American ones. He
analyzed, “The Japanese distributors are just using this opportunity to express their
hatred regarding the premium increase after the earthquake.”
189
Universal Pictures
also bought space in the Japanese newspapers and in Japan Times asking whether it
is just to boycott Universal films and to make a plea to the public:
We can only solve this problem with intelligence, tolerance, justice, and
logic. We have seen through each other through thick and thin. We are deeply
empathetic toward the present predicament. We will ask the public to be the
judge of the boycott movement. We know that we can only rely on the
fairness of the public.
190

Paramount Pictures representative Tom D. Cochran presented a very firm
position on the boycott movement. He argued:
We are empathetic that the Japanese movie distributors are boycotting
American films because of the anti-Japanese Immigration act. We are
saddened by the turn of events but we are prepared to leave Japan, and close
our offices here, although we feel there are ways to compromise.”
191

188
“Kakusha de Beikoku Eiga no Boicotto wo Ketsugi [Several companies agree to boycott
American films],” Kinema Jumpo (June 11, 1924), 20.
189
Ishikawa Toshihiko, “Nariyuki wo miru [Observing the Ramifications],” Katsudo Kurabu,
(July 1924), 39.
190
“Beikoku eiga fujoei mondai [The issue of not exhibiting American films],”
Katsudo Zasshi, (August, 1924), 35.
191
Tom D. Cochran, “Dakyo ni Michi wa aru [There are Ways to Compromise],” Katsudo
Kurabu (July 1924), 39-40.

103

Records show that at least the Germans tried to take advantage of this sudden
opportunity to increase their share in the Japanese film industry. The German
ambassador to Japan made an effort to promote German films.
192
A German film
company tried to capitalize on this opportunity by making a film about Japan to be
distributed in Japan.
193

Film Magazines
Much like their European counterparts, film aficionados were instrumental
in constructing film journalism in Japan.
194
The first film magazine in Japan was
published in 1909, and by the mid-1920s publication of film periodicals reached its
peak. In 1924 alone there were 44 new film magazines founded, 56 founded the
following year.
195
While some of these early magazines were published by film
distributors and studios for promotional purpose,
196
most of the periodicals were

192
“Eiga ni made haibei netsu [Anti-American fever into movies],” Katsudo Kurabu
(August 1924), 101.
193
“Doitsu kara katsudo wo satsuei ni kita[Crew comes to Japan to shoot film],” Tokyo
Asahi Shimbun, July 23, 1924, page 7.
194
For European film clubs and magazines, see David Bordwell, On the History of Film
Styles (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987) 19-27.
195
Makino Mamoru, “Meijiki no bunmei kaika to zasshi ‘Katsudo shashin kai’ [Cultural
Blossom and the magazine The Cinematograph in the Meiji era], Reprint of Katsudo
Shashinkai Vol. 1, (Tokyo: Kokusho Kankokai, 1999), 23. Motochi Haruhiko, Nihon Eiga
Zasshi Tiatoru Souran [Title Directory of Japanese Film Periodicals], (Tokyo: Waizu
Shuppan, 2003). Makino argues the first film magazine was published in 1909, while
Motochi argues the first one was published in 1912.
196
The earliest film magazine, Katsudo Shashinkai was published in 1909 is considered to
have been a promotional vehicle for Yoshizawa Shoten. There are theories that M Pate
published Katsudo Shashin, and Yokota Shokai Katsudo Shashin Times, but since the latter
two periodicals have been not been found, there is no way to verify at this time. Makino
argues that the period Katsudo Shashinkai started publication was a crucial

104
published by film critics who had no ties to the studios. Contrary to the American
male movie fans, which according to Kathryn Fuller were “fading from
prominence,” the Japanese male movie fans continued to be quite prominent in the
fan culture.
197
The movie magazines bifurcated into visually rich, image-heavy fan
magazines primarily for women, and text-based film periodicals primarily written
and read by educated men. It was these periodicals with large male readerships that
dealt vehemently with the boycott issue, while other fan magazines ignored this
issue. In addition, educated people were mostly interested in foreign films which
were much more sophisticated. Domestic films were considered to be in an infantile
stage compared to foreign films, and only appealed to the working class mass until
their quality improved in the late 1920s.
198

It is no surprise that the studio magazines printed voices of support for the
boycott. Fans and people in the film industry alike showed their support for a boycott
movement.
199
One fan wrote, “What a joy to hear about the boycott. I was never
much of a fan of foreign films. I was frustrated with the anti-Japanese act. How we
expected to hear the voice of boycotting American films. I'm sure I share this joy

time for the foundation of a cinematic culture in Japan, and commends the film magazine for
its historical role. Makino, 23, 33.
197
Chapter 7 “Motion Picture Story Magazine and the Gendered Construction of the Movie
Fan,” in Kathryn Fuller, At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of
Movie Fan Culture, (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 133-149.
198
Sato Tadao, 155.
199
For literature on the psychology and politics of consumer boycotts, see: Andrew John and
Jill Klein, “The Boycott Puzzle: Consumer Motivations for Purchase Sacrifice,”
Management Science 49:9 (September 2003): 1196-1209; Sankar Sen, Zehnep Gurhan-Canli,
and Vicki Morwitz, “Withholding Consumption: A Social Dilemma Perspective on
Consumer Boycott,” The Journal of Consumer Research, 28:3 (December 2001):
399-417.

105
with all people of the nation.”
200
The reasons for support raised generally fell into
two categories. One, a politically motivated act of anger and retaliation to the U.S.,
and the other, a hope that it would lead to the advent of a golden age in Japanese film
production.
Wabaka Kaoru, a screenwriter and actor for Nikkatsu, supported the
boycott. He and others expressed a similar anger toward the United States. Wakaba
argued:
The United States is a nation of hypocrisy. It claims to be a nation about
peace and humanitarianism on the surface, yet it is a selfish nation. What they
are interested in pursuing are self-serving peace, self-serving
humanitarianism. Their justice is a justice for the sake of American
happiness. We are running into problems of democracy, communism, birth
control, etc. This all happened because we trusted the U.S. It is tragic that we
have become drunk with the poisonous wine of these dangerous ideas, which
has had deleterious effects on the Japanese spirit.
201

Several other fans made similar arguments about the Janus-faced American policies
of presenting itself as a nation of justice, and yet passing a un-humanitarian
immigration act.
202
In the studio magazine for Shochiku, Iijima Shizuo noted that
Shochiku fans should be happy that the Immigration Act has ignited a production
rush at the studio sets in Kamata, and observed that some of the talented assistant

200
Y .H.sei, “Eiga kai ni Kansha [Thanks to the Movie Industry],” Shinhanagata (August
1924), 34.
201
Wakaba Kaoru, “Beikoku Eiga no Kohkai wo Kinshi seyo [Ban the Exhibition of
American Films],” Nikkatsu Gaho (June 1924), 10.
202
Shoichiro Kitano, “Beikoku Eiga Haiseki ni tsuite[About Boycotting American Films],”
Nikkatsu Gaho (August 1924), 56-57. Kokufukumensei, “Hainichi Mondai to Waga Eigakai
[The Japanese Exclusionary Issue and Our Movie Industry],” Katsudo Zasshi (July 1924),
40-43.

106
directors have started to make their own movies as directors.
203
Yanai Eiji, a fan of
Shochiku movies, agreed. “Shochiku should use this opportunity to overcome the
dominance of American films. The time has come for Shochiku to rise. My fellow
readers, aren't you excited, too?
204
A Nikkatsu fan also echoed, “Our country can
create movies that do not fall short of American films.”
205

On the other hand, the film magazines founded by film enthusiasts were
almost unequivocally opposed to the boycott. The editor mentioned in the postscript
of their August 1924 issue, “There is talk that the film magazines will now focus
more on Japanese cinema. We vow that we will not succumb to that trend.”
206
While
the boycott opposition generally criticized the myopia of the film industry, the
specific reasoning of the opposition can be categorized into four areas: economic
ramifications, criticism against the nature of the industry, romantic views about film
as art, and general hesitation to a hasty emotional reaction against the immigration
act.
The economic incentive that drove the Japanese studios was thinly disguised
and was quickly exposed. Screenwriter Yoshida Takezo argued:
I cannot stand that the entertainment industry is affected by this friction that
has developed out of the self-centered opinions of two nations. Mass
entertainment is irrelevant to this. What I am even more appalled by are the
people who have made unfounded arguments to promote Japanese cinema by

203
Shizuo Iijima, “Chicagoro Kamata no Uwasa no Kikigaki [Recent Rumors from
Kamata],” Shochiku Gaho, (August 1924), 30-31.
204
Eiji Yanai, “Konogoro no koto nado [About recent events and whatnot],” Shinhanagata
(August 1924), 32. Shinhanagata was a film magazine promoting Shochiku Kamata films.
205
S. Kitano, 56-57.
206
Otani Fujimoto, Taro Iwama, “Henshu koki [Post script],” Katsudo Kurabu (August
1924), 136.

107
exploiting this opportunity. If we are to boycott American films, we should
also boycott these idiotic minds in the film industry as well. I have to admire
the advertising capability of those who made this boycott issue such a large
one such as this.
207

One reader complained that the Japanese studio heads were not thinking of
the fans at all. He wrote:
There is no doubt that the anti-Japanese Immigration Act is unlawful. The
Act is a scheme by a small group of American politicians interested in their
own political career, whereas most Americans are indifferent to this issue.
Similarly, this boycott of American films is also a scheme by a few Japanese
studio heads and it does not reflect the opinions of the fans. It's quite hard to
believe that the film industry is acting on pure motives such as nationalism,
(as they claim they are,) when usually they will think nothing of justice or
morality in conducting business. And just when we were beginning to doubt
their motives, we hear rumors about Japanese films swooping in for profit, or
that they are using this opportunity to negotiate premiums with Hollywood. I
believe our intentions are more pure than theirs. It's saddening that our
opinions are ignored for their indecent motivations.
208

Another fan argued that although the German and Italian films are good, they are
still distributed through American companies.
209

Others realistically assessed that the Japanese film industry could not stay
afloat without American film exhibition, and that the increase in Japanese film
production and European film exhibition would fall short and not make up for the
loss. These people argued that not only was it a bad business decision to leave
thousands of feet of reels sleeping in storage rooms, but that Japanese films would
not be able to satisfy the foreign film fans because of the poor quality, and that it
would take a while for American movie fans to develop a taste for European films.

207
Takezo Yoshida, “Okame Hachimoku,” Shochiku Gaho, (August 1924), 26-27.
208
Sakurakawa Shimonzu, “Watashi no Iken [My Opinion],” Kinema Jumpo, (June 21,
1924), 24.
209
“Beieiga haiseki ron,” Katsudo Kurabu (August 1924), 131.

108
These opponents also argued that consumers could not be forced to change their taste
and watch European films.
Citing movie attendance statistics, one fan argued that the movies have
become an important leisure activity for the poverty-stricken people who
experienced the Kanto Earthquake. He argued that movie attendance for a certain
month in 1923 was one million, whereas there were 1.65 million people for the same
month in 1924. He argued that while theaters with exclusive contracts with Japanese
film studios may be able to use stock movies, both domestic and European, it would
be an excruciating situation for independent movie theater owners.
210

Others, such as the editor for Katsudo Kurabu, or “The Movie Club,” Mori
Shinta, pointed out how Japanese film culture was inherently American and that it
was impossible to detach Japanese cinema from it:
Not only does American film represent a majority of foreign films imported,
their technology and artistry has been instrumental in the advancement of our
domestic film production. It is not possible to have a movie culture without the
influence of American film. Any movie made in Japan is going to be
influenced by American film culture. Film culture itself is uniquely
American…. I cannot even begin to imagine what the future would behold if
we lost American films.”
211

Other cinephiles sang a similar tune arguing,
It was impossible to fully execute this boycott in the first place. Even if we had
boycotted Hollywood movies, we still would have had to use Eastman film,
movie cameras made by Simplex and Powers, all manufactured in the US.
212

210
Akanbo, “Bei eiga haiseki ron[Debate of American Film Boycott],” Katsudo Kurabu,
(August 1924), 130.
211
“Taibei Mondai to Beikoku Eiga: Togyosha no taido to kongo no houshin[The American
Issue and American Films: The Attitudes of Those in the Film Industry and Future Plans],”
Katsudo Kurabu (July 1924), 34-36.
212
Reigansei, “Beiga Haiseki ni Saishite[About Boycotting American Films],” Kinema

109

Others argued that film was an art form and it should transcend politics. One
fan wrote, “What is this business about boycotting American films? Don’t they know
that politics and art are separate things?”
213
Another fan wrote, “Rejecting the U.S. is
fine. But changing one’s attitude about art based on temporary frustration is too
much.”
214
Actor Seki Misao, who had worked in both the Japanese and American
film industry, argued, “Let us leave politics to the politicians.” Interestingly, his
essay appeared in Makino, a magazine published by one of the Japanese film
distributors participating in the boycott. But since his concluding thought was his
hope for Japanese cinema to thrive, he avoided any conflict of interest with the film
magazine. In a letter to the editor of Kinema Jumpo, Sugiyama Shizuo agreed, “As
long as movies are an entertainment institution and have an air of pureness about
them, we mustn't think about small problems such as whether they’re Japanese or
American movies.”
215
Kaneko Kiyoshi, editor of Eiga Kenkyu, or Movie Studies,
also argued the universality of film. He wrote in English,
The 'movie' is society's one best amusement; an amusement that is universal.
Kipling's saying, “East is East" fails to apply to the “movie," when recognition
is given to the facts. The "movies" is the one language that is understood by
the entire world. Let's make the "movies" a means for attaining for future
cordial America-Japan friendship.
216

Jumpo (June 21, 1924), 24.
213
Yokohama sei, Letter to the editor, Katsudo Kurabu (August 1924), 134.
214
Yamano KHM, Letter to the editor, Katsudo Kurabu (August 1924), 134.
215
Shizuo Sugiyama, “Beiga Haiseki [Boycott of American Movies],” Kinema Jumpo, (June
21, 1924), 24.
216
Kiyoshi Kaneko, “Editor's View Point” Eiga Kenkyu 1:1 (1924), 53. Cf. Rudyard Kipling,
“The Ballad of East and West,” The Victorian Anthology, 1895.

110
Interestingly enough, among the film magazines, there was no argument that
the Japanese had been negatively represented in American movies, which was a
rhetoric used to justify the boycott. Only in a nationalist magazine was this argument
located.
217
This argument was not necessarily absent in the past. When Cecil B.
Demille's The Cheat was distributed in Japan, both the movie was heavily criticized
for portraying the Asian main character as a brutal rapist, and the star, Sessue
Hayakawa was heavily criticized for starring in it. It is interesting why this argument
was not made as much in 1924.

Aftermath
One government official expressed reservations on the boycott to the studio
executives as well. On June 25
th
, the security director of the Tokyo Metropolitan
Police Department Mr. Sasai called the managers of Nikkatsu and Shochiku
requested that they refrain from boycotting American films. Sasai argued that while
he understood the reasons behind this action, he was not happy that these two major
distributors were soliciting and forcing smaller distributors to join in. While only the
Shochiku representative showed up, both companies issued similar statements
arguing that they cannot back down from the boycott, that they never forced others to

217
Nagai Zenzo, “Beikoku eiga no gaidokuni tsuite: Jinshu henken kyoiku to beika kyoiku
tono osorubeki kekka[About the danger of American films: The terrible aftermath of the
indoctrination of racial discrimination and Americanization],” Nihon oyobi nihonjin[Japan
and the Japanese], (Sept. 1, 1924), 40-49.

111
join the boycott, and illustrated that rural theater owners shared their decision by
sending back American films that had been circulated to them.
218

Perhaps the best evidence of the unpopularity of the movement is that the
boycott ended within two weeks. It is true that most of the magazines which
addressed the boycott issue catered to the upper-class aficionados, and therefore one
can supposedly argue that the opposition against this boycott existed merely in this
particular group of people. Cynics may argue that the opposition to the boycott
voiced by the film magazine publishers was equally motivated by their economic
interests since most of them made money by covering foreign films. But as Tokyo
Asahi Shimbun reported, on July 1
st
, the one movie theater in Asakusa showing
American movies was packed while none of the theaters showing Japanese and
European movies were able to fill their theaters.
219
The statistics on movie
attendance in the subsequent weeks and months clearly show that the masses
continued to go to see American movies.
On July 11
th
, the distributors met at the Shochiku headquarters and decided
to end the boycott. General Manager Tsutsumi stated, “although the boycott will end,
the effort to boost domestic film production will continue. The reason for ending the
boycott is twofold; the boycott is putting economic strains on the theater owners, and
that the fans are too familiar with American movies. The decision was made to

218
“Bei eiga haiseki no ketsugi tekkai wo chukoku[Advisement to abandon American film
boycott decision], Tokyo Asahi Shimbun, (June 25, 1924), 4.
219
“Beikoku Eiga ga hiniku nimo ooiri [Ironically, American film packs theater],” Tokyo
Asahi Shimbun (July 2, 1924), 7.

112
ameliorate these inconveniences.”
220
The next day, the Associated Press reported the
cancellation of the boycott as it became “practically inoperative because of the public
demand for American pictures,” and because the movie “houses refusing to show
American films suffer[ed] heavy loss of patronage.”
221
By September, though, The
Covered Wagon, the silent western epic made by Paramount Studios, was hugely
successful, and became the most popular film of both domestic and foreign films in
1924.
222

There are a few reasons why this boycott failed. The fans quickly saw
through the economic motivations of the distributors and did not care for the boycott.
The distributors could not present a solid front on the issue. One day before the
boycott, the distributors gathered one more time to confirm their solidarity on the
boycott. Even among the main organizers, Nikkatsu tried to wiggle its way out of the
original pact the day before the boycott. At a meeting with all those who agreed with
the boycott decision, Nikkatsu tried to make a case that they had over a hundred
theaters in the Tokyo metropolitan area, and that it would be difficult to follow the
decision precisely, and that they would have to continue renting and showing
American films to some extent. This announcement was not received well as Mr.
Tateishi, an independent theater owner who had already made large financial
sacrifices by stopping the showing of American movies since June 8
th
. He tried to

220
“Ketsugi wo haishi: Beikokumono wo jojo[Abandoning the decision: Showing American
films], Tokyo Asahi Shimbun, (July 12, 1924), 7.
221
“Japan’s Film Boycott Given Up as Failure,” New York Times, (July 13, 1924).
222
Minami Hiroshi, 29. http://www.ryok.co.jp/20th/a23.htm (Access Date: March 28, 2005).
http://www.ucatv.ne.jp/~shuumei/20seiki/1924.htm (Access Date: March 28, 2005)

113
grab Nikkatsu General Manager Negishi, but others calmed him down. The other
attendees were also agitated by Nikkatsu’s attitude, but after further discussion they
all agreed on going ahead with the boycott, but with the addendum that if they had
no choice to show American films after July 1
st
, they would give a week’s notice to
their counterparts.
223
In the end, what seems to have been an invertebrate action on
the part of the distributors demonstrated exactly the kind of dilemma that entails
from being caught in the middle of international politics and international trade.
Also while the distributors may have been able to show their rage about the
increased rental costs, it was done at the sacrifice of the movie theater owners. Ikoma
Raiyu, actor and manager of Chiyoda-kan in Tokyo, confesses in the September
issue of Kinema Sekai, that he actually wanted to get out of the boycott before the
agreement was made public, but was pressured by Nikkatsu and Shochiku
representatives to remain in the pact.
224
The theater owners lost passion for the cause
as they saw independent theaters showing Hollywood movies to large crowds.
225

Universal Pictures was able to continue exhibition through contracts with
independent movie theaters. Shochiku and Nikkatsu substituted European movies in
their foreign film theaters, but stock was limited and had to re-release films that had
already been shown.
226
Another possible explanation for the lack of support from the
clientele is that the studio-owned movie theaters had not established strong enough

223
Tokyo Asahi Shimbun, July 1, 1924, 2.
224
Katsudo Sekai, (Sept., 1924), 47.
225
The manager of Chiyoda-kan in Tokyo confessed that he actually wanted to get out of the
boycott before the agreement was made public, but was pressured by Nikkatsu and Shochiku
representatives to remain in the pact. Katsudo Sekai (September 1924), 47.
226
Katsudo Sekai, (September 1924), 78.

114
ties with the community to go along with their boycott. As the editor of Katsudo
Zasshi argues, studio-owned movie houses had weak relations to theaters owned by
local residents, and the movie houses needed to make effort to have stronger ties
with the community by renting out the facility for community events and needs. In
other words, there was not enough at stake for the movie fans to change their movie-
going experience.
227

Another reason why the boycott ended quickly is because the distributors tried
to completely ban American films, which was not a realistic measure. One cinephile
pointed out, “It was impossible to fully execute this boycott in the first place. Even if
we had boycotted Hollywood movies, we still would have had to use Eastman film,
movie cameras made by Simplex and Powers, all manufactured in the US.”
228
There
have been many instances in the world where nations have complained about the
dominance of Hollywood in their respective film markets, but there has hardly been a
case where they tried to get rid of American films entirely. This is partly due to the
fact that between WWI and WWII, Hollywood overwhelmingly dominated many of
the foreign markets. According to a list compiled by film historian Kristin
Thompson, in 1930, American movies had a seventy-five percent or more share in
thirty-three countries out of the fifty-four nations surveyed, such as Canada, Spain,
China, India, Australia, and most of the South American nations.
229
These countries
often dealt with this domination by trying to put quotas on how many American

227
Katsudo Zasshi (July 1924), 38.
228
Kinema Jumpo (June 21, 1924), 24.
229
Kerry Segrave, American Films Abroad: Hollywood’s Domination of the World’s Movie
Screens (Jefferson, N.C., McFarland & Company, 1997), 284-285.

115
films can be imported, imposing tariffs and other forms of exhibition tax.
230
While
the Japanese film industry would use these tactics in the future to negotiate American
film distribution in Japan, these tactics were not an option amidst the strong anti-
Americanism of 1924. It was either organize a complete shut out of American films,
or do nothing.
231

Conclusion
There are several ways to read this story. First of all, it is a story about the
agency of the consumer against the cultural producers who attempted to control the
distribution of goods. It is a story about the cost the film industry paid for not
heeding to the consumers. It is also a story about the complex relationship between
international politics and popular culture. That is, how political antagonism can
translate into the boycott of some goods, but not others. The boycott of American
watches, sewing machines, and toys were successful, but not of movies. Other
American cultural products such as baseball and automobiles were also not
boycotted. By this time, baseball had been institutionalized as an instructional sport

230
See Vasey and Segrave.
231
As Vasey and others point out, Hollywood films were never exhibited in the same manner
in different places. Censorship by local authorities, both domestically and internationally,
caused certain portions of the film to be deleted and re-edited and altered the experience of
the audiences. As the Birmingham School has persuasively argued, audiences also had the
agency to interpret the film within their own cultural context. Hollywood was keen to these
differences outside of the States since the beginning of the industry, and often
accommodated certain needs and preferences. The Japanese authorities and benshi were
certainly influential in altering Hollywood films to accommodate their needs. But the
significance of this boycott was that the Japanese film industry took the ultimate stand
towards Hollywood by trying to stop Hollywood film exhibition all together.

116
for the youth, and in affect, had already been domesticated into Japanese culture.
Even if there were a professional baseball league, (which was not founded till the
1930s), a baseball boycott would not have affected the U.S. economy in any way.
American automobiles, on the other hand, consisted 73 percent of the 9,600
automobiles in Japan in 1924.
232
It would have been hard for the Japanese
automobile industry to boycott American cars, not only since American cars
dominated the Japanese market, but also the demand for automobile transportation
had suddenly risen after the Kanto earthquake. The comparison with baseball and
automobiles, in turn, sheds light on the interesting combination of elements that led
Japanese studio heads to believe a boycott was possible; political momentum,
economic incentive to protest the rising rental costs, and the preexisting strength of
domestic film production.
On another level, this story is about the domination of Hollywood movies in
foreign countries. It joins other examples of how foreign film industries tried to
protect their market from the powerful invasion of Hollywood. But this story is also
different from most other stories. While it is common during wartime to attempt an
elimination of another culture, this particular case was unique because it occurred

232
Miwa Kimitada, “1924 Iminho no seiritsu to beika boikotto: Kobe shi no baai [The
Passing of the 1924 Immigration Act and American Goods Boycott: A Case Study of Kobe
City],” Hosoya Chihiro, ed. Taiheiyo Ajia ken no kokusai keizai funso shi [The Contentious
History of International Economy in the Asian Pacific Rim], (Tokyo, Tokyo University Press,
1983), 157-159. In 1923, approximately 5.8% of American automobile export was to Japan,
and therefore would not have had a significant impact on the American automobile industry.
Also from Miwa, 158.

117
during peace time and was led by industry leaders rather than the government.
233

Boycotts and protests have often taken place because of misrepresentations of their
national culture, or the threat of American cultural invasion and domination.
234
The
Japanese public has certainly complained about the negative representations of their
people in Hollywood movies; such as was the case when Cecil B. DeMille's The
Cheat was shown in Japan in 1916, which portrayed Sessue Hayakawa as a brutal
rapist. Interestingly, this type of argument was absent from the film boycott
movement of 1924. This boycott movement shows that real rejection has precedence
over misrepresentations on the silver screen. In other words, what is different about
this story, then, is that this boycott was a response to a political rejection by the U.S.
rather than an overpowering threat of American popular culture.
One the other hand, the for the Japanese movie fans who opposed the
boycott, Hollywood movies were not associated with American politics. Sociologists
such as Thomas Cushman and Marc Steinberg have shown how American music was
appropriated as a means of expressing resistance in Russia and in Serbia.
235
The
people involved in this counterculture understood the affinity of rock and pop music

233
As is often the case, governmental policies regulating popular culture do not necessarily
succeed. Even during WWII, it is well-known that people in Japan continued to play
American baseball by changing all the baseball jargon from English to an awkward Japanese
translation. Since complete cultural rejection and banning is not even possible during
wartime, how could a boycott have been successfully led by industrial leaders? In a sense,
the boycott movement was doomed from the beginning.
234
Segrave, 32-58.
235
Thomas Cushman, Notes from Underground: Rock Music Counterculture in Russia,
(Albany, NY , State University of New York Press, 1995); Marc Steinberg, “When Politics
Goes Pop: On the Intersections of Popular and Political Culture and the Case of Serbian
Student Protests,” Social Movement Studies, 3:1 (April 2004): 3-29.

118
to American ideology. What is different about this case is that Japanese movie fans
did not use popular culture as a vehicle of cultural resistance. While the opposition to
the film boycott was an economic resistance against Japanese film distributors, the
politically antagonistic sentiment did not translate to a cultural resistance of
Hollywood films. On the contrary, they embraced American movies, and had
completely detached politics from it.
It warrants consideration that perhaps the audiences who continued to see
American films were different demographics from the active protesters in the anti-
American movement. Surely the anti-American temperament could not have been
monolithic across the nation, and would have depended on multiple variables
including their socio-economic standings, political convictions, and past connections
to the United States. But it is hard to imagine that those who continued to watch
American films were agreeing with the immigration policies of the United States. It
also warrants consideration that the rhetoric used by the contributors of these film
periodicals is not an accurate representation of the sentiment felt by typical movie
fans in Japan. The contributors and readers of these serious film periodicals were
predominately well-educated male, and had bifurcated off from the other glossy fan
magazines that were catered toward the mass female audience. While this is a valid
observation, the fact that the mass continued to see Hollywood films indicates that
the rhetoric and sentiment expressed in these intellectual film magazines were not
too far apart from that of the mass.

119
It also reveals the different geographical imaginations people had about
Hollywood. Those who supported the boycott and those who opposed it shed light on
the different ways in which they viewed Hollywood movies. Supporters of the
boycott considered Hollywood movies to be a national product of the United States
and justified their position as retaliation to the political decision made by the U.S.
government, whereas those who opposed the boycott considered Hollywood movies
as what may be called a “supranational” cultural product. In other words, they
considered Hollywood movies to be a universal art form which happened to be made
in the U.S., and did not let their feelings of nationalistic humiliation influence their
movie-going practices. They were able to separate the cultural allure of Hollywood
films with the political hostility felt from the U.S. government.
European historian on Americanism Rob Kroes ponders on the issue of anti-
Americanism both historically and the shift that occurred after September 11. In this
piece, he argues that Anti-Americanism “always applies selectively, never tending to
a total rejection of both forms of Americanism: the cultural and the political.”
236
The
Hollywood boycott of 1924 appears to demonstrate this at first glance. The failure of
the boycott illustrates that while political rejection of the United States occurred,
cultural rejection did not. But as mentioned at the beginning, the cultural boycott
successfully manifested itself in many avenues. While the Hollywood boycott did
not succeed, other forms of boycotts did, and the failure of the film boycott should be

236
Rob Kroes, “European Anti-Americanism: What’s New?,” The Journal of American
History, 93:2 (September 2006): 426.

120
assessed in that context. In the case of film, Hollywood did not actively use film to
make amends of the anti-Americanism at this time. But American films had already
planted its roots as cultural ambassadors and had organically created a favorable soil
for Japanese movie-goers to consume American movies. I argue that American films
had taken on a life on its own in Japan, and had already been appropriated and
received by Japanese audiences. This illustrates the special characteristics of film,
which can be called a particular “aura” that film possessed. In other words, the
particular nature of this cultural product factored into the rejection of the use of it for
political resistance.
One incident that showed that Japanese people were able to divorce cultural
product and the origins of the culture occurred in the fall of 1934. That year, the
Yomiuri Shimbun, one of the major newspaper corporations and owner of the
professional baseball team the Tokyo Giants, invited American professional baseball
players to play against a Japanese all-star team. The exhibition games were a great
business success. The fact, however, that the games were held at the sanctity of the
Meiji Shrine Ball Park, which represented the glory of university baseball, appeared
to some right-wingers as an act humiliating Japan. When Babe Ruth and his
teammates left Japan, Yomiuri owner Matsutaro Shoriki was stabbed by a right-wing
activist.
237
This incident shows that the right-wingers did not object to the sport of
baseball being played specifically in the Meiji Shrine park, but the fact that the
American players were allowed to play on sacred grounds. It demonstrates that these

237
Note 54, Takemura, 305.

121
protesters had divorced the “American-ness” from the sport, and that baseball had
been domesticated and accepted as a Japanese sport.
The cultural boycott manifested itself in many avenues, and the failure of the
film boycott should be assessed in that context. In Across the Pacific, Iriye analyzed
how the American, Chinese and Japanese people “tried to define their respective
realities.”
238
This boycott illustrates the need to look into the diverse realities among
the producers, distributors, and consumers when analyzing international cultural
relations. It also shows the need to take into consideration the nature of particular
cultural products in assessing what kind of consumer products lend themselves to
expressing political resistance and moreover the kinds of cultural products that
transcend the boundaries of nationhood.

238
Akira Iriye, Across the Pacific: An Inner History of American- East Asian Relations,
(San Diego, CA, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), xvi.
122
CHAPTER 4
GREAT DEPRESSION, LEISURE AND IMPERIALISM IN THE 1930S:
THE INTERSECTIONS IN THE PAN-PACIFIC

“What a nation does with its leisure is oftentimes just as significant as how it either
maintains itself economically or governs itself.”
Forest Rhea Dulles, America Learns to Play (1940)

After the Depression in America: The New Deal and the New Leisure
In discussing the rise of proletarian culture in the 1930s, historian Michael
Denning called the gradual visibility of the cultural production by the laboring
classes the “laboring of American culture.”
239
This section deals with the laboring
involved in the redirection of the worker’s leisure after the Great Depression.
Through this analysis, this chapter showcases the protean yet dialectic relationship
between the perception of labor and leisure influenced by socio-economic forces. As
part of the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), the National Recovery
Act (NRA) brought about the forty-hour workweek for many on an unprecedented
scale, thus multiplying greatly the amount of free time available for the mass. The
sudden increase in “spare time” for the laborers was both a problem as well as a
solution to social and cultural recovery during the great depression. Leisure became
an issue not because it was a newly developing phenomenon of laborers gaining
spare time, but because of the magnitude in which it was occurring. Characterizing

239
Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the
Twentieth Century. (London: Verso, 1997), xvi.

123
the United States as a “leisure-less nation” and as “a dour and rigid nation,”
sociologist Arthur Pack pointed out that there had never been enough leisure for it to
constitute a problem.
240
However, he argued that in recent years there had been a
change in “life’s tempo,” which had been brought about by “mechanical
developments, with spiritual and mental revaluations”:
None, certainly, has been stranger or more replete with potentialities for
change than the rediscovery of leisure. Slowly creeping upon us in a manner
little suspected because so easily absorbed in small quantities, leisure now
rises to confront us as a new problem, and what was once regarded as the
chief reason and goal of man’s age-old struggle for wealth may soon become
the lot of every one of us—whether we like it or not.
241

The fear of leisure was derived from the fact that it seemed undistinguishable from
loafing. Dr. Raymond L. Forman, Reverend at St. Paul’s Methodist Episcopal
Church “scoffed at the trend of the workers today to shout their demands for shorter
hours and higher pay. The appearance of new leisure was attacked by him as a
demoralizing influence which would result in revelry and wasteful idleness.”
242

As writer Harry Overstreet observed, “many of us seem not quite ready to
welcome [the] open time” that has appeared from the liberation of crammed work-
obligations. He astutely observed, moreover, that “we appear to be afraid of what it
may do, not indeed to ourselves, but to others. So we anxiously confer about how we
shall enable these others to fill up hours that may otherwise be mischievously
vacant.”
243
Sayings such as “The devil finds work for idle hands” represent the

240
Arthur N. Pack, The Challenge of Leisure, (New York: Macmillan Co., 1934), 6.
241
Pack, 3-4.
242
New York Times, (September 3, 1934).
243
Harry A. Overstreet, A Guide to Civilized Leisure, (New York: W.W. Norton & Co,

124
protestant work ethic and suspicion against spare time that had proliferated in
America. In fact, one writer pointed out that the United States had created an
“aristocracy of toil,” where labor was virtuous and honorable, and leisure vice and
infamous.
244
The Great Depression, which brought about a significant increase in
spare time for all forced a drastic and desperate reconsideration of the rhetoric of
spare time from focusing on the negative outcomes to discussing additionally the
positive uses of it. Leisure and consumption were now beginning to be seen to have
equal importance with the planned, healthy, balanced and controlled economy.
The dramatic increase of leisure time for the masses was not the only aspect
of the new leisure problem. With the ever-growing population of the city, urban
dwellers were faced with a physical transformation in their leisure culture. For
instance, the impromptu and informal neighborhood life dissipated because of the
high mobility in the city. Neighbors of six months were not able to mingle quite as
freely and willingly as those of eight years. In addition, private recreation spaces
such as front lawns and yards had disappeared with the congestion in living areas
and outdoor activities had to be resorted to schools and clubs and commercial
recreational venues.
245

On the effect of modern urban life on the leisure activities of city dwellers,
educator L. P. Jacks observed:

1934), 11.
244
Pack, 1934, 9.
245
George A. Lundberg, Mirra Komarovsky, and Mary Alice McInerny, Leisure: A Suburban
Study, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), 6.

125
On every side he is surrounded by artful operators who have studied his weak
points, often with the aid of psychology, and beset him with the offer of
ready-made pleasure to be purchased at a price…. Even those of us who are
immune from the attractions of the cinema, the race-course, and the public-
house are not masters of our leisure time, at least to the extent we should like
to be. We are largely at the mercy of our neighbors, who have facilities of
getting at us unknown to the ancient Greeks or even to our grandfathers.
Thanks to the telephone, motor car and such-like inventions, our neighbors
have it in their power to turn our leisure into a series of interruptions, and the
more leisure they have the more active do they become in destroying ours.
Nor are we less active in destroying theirs. We spend a great deal of our
leisure in mutual botheration. In whatever conditions you place a man, the
use he can make of his own leisure will always be limited by the use that
other people are making of theirs.
246

These reasons made the leisure problem a communal one rather than one that is
controllable and fixable by the individual.
In the 1930s alone, Ohio State University remarkably produced twenty-two
master’s theses on leisure. While they were not all from the same discipline, many of
them presented surveys of leisure time activities of high school students, which
imply a systematic and collective effort to understand the leisure culture of youth.
247

These theses of the uses of leisure time among various ethnic groups coincide with
the trend in scholarship spearheaded by the Chicago school sociologists. The issue of
race and leisure intersected in the literature.

246
L. P. Jacks, The Education of the Whole Man, (New York: Harper and Brother, 1931), 56-
57. Emphasis mine.
247
See Appendix A and B for a list of masters and doctoral theses on leisure written in the
1920s and 1930s.

126
a. Moral Argumentation
The argumentation on the morals of leisure was debated from two
perspectives: one condemning the moral hazards of commercial amusement, and the
other, affirming the validity of leisure time. Sociologist Jesse Steiner pointed out the
harm that consuming commercial amusement had. He posited, “the exploitation of
leisure has been a profitable financial venture, catering to human weakness and
promotes habits that tend to degrade rather than to build up.”
248
Many argued that
aimless leisure led to crime and delinquency. Eduard Lindeman, professor of social
philosophy, argued that the youth were not provided with the opportunities for
proper cultural leisure, and that these “youths of the working class are exploited by
commercialized amusements and have become the victims of the vulgar arts.”
249

Writer Eugene T. Lies provided anecdotes from wardens in penitentiaries blaming
aimless leisure as the cause for delinquency. A warden from Sing Sing Penitentiary
gave testimony that out of the convicts that he had known more or less intimately,
“over 95% were at no time associated with well-regulated juvenile groups or
supervised recreation centers. Theirs has been the story of aimless leisure, of
unadjusted personalities, of wrong steers in early life, of drifting along the lines of
least resistance.” Another warden, of Joliet Penitentiary observed, “few had ever
engaged in those athletic sports and games which are so often said to inculcate a

248
Jesse Frederick Steiner, “Challenges of the New Leisure,” New York Times, (Sept. 24,
1933), SM1.
249
E. C. Lindeman, “Youth and Leisure,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science 194 (1937), 66.

127
spirit of team-work, loyalty and good sportsmanship.”
250
Nash argued cynically that
commercial recreation could be spelled more accurately as “wreck-reation.”
251

Conversely, intellectuals also attempted to change the perception of leisure
by listing affirmative reasons for appreciating leisure. One of the arguments
attempted to overturn the dynamics in the workplace. In other words, the discourse
shifted from machines being a curse, which had turned humans into automatons, to
machines should be considered a blessing, which had enabled humans to be
emancipated from labor. Yale professor of chemical engineering C. C. Furnas made
this point in his book entitled America’s tomorrow: An Informal Excursion into the
era of the Two Hour Working Day. Furnas posited that the “most important thing
that our industrialism will give us will be leisure” because machines had increased
the productivity so that all necessary goods could be quickly produced.
252
Another
method used to rid the “traditional American horror of idleness” was by relying on
the authority of others.
253
Overstreet persuaded his readers that Aristotle once said,
“The end of labor is to gain leisure.” Moreover, he reminded his readers, “Even God
is said to have rested from his labors. And it would seem a little sacrilegious to
denounce him as a Devine Loafer.”
254
Lindeman summarized the strategic change in

250
E. T. Lies, “The New Leisure: Drafting a Program,” New York Times (Dec. 3, 1933),
SM3.
251
Jay B. Nash, Spectatoritis. (Unknown: Sears Publishing Company, 1932), 66.
252
C. C. Furnas, America’s Tomorrow: An Informal Excursion Into the Era of the Two-Hour
Working Day (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1932), 5; “Prof. Huxley Predicts 2-
day Working Week,” New York Times, (Nov. 17, 1930), 42.
253
Pack, 1934, 14.
254
Overstreet, 1934, 12.

128
the perception of leisure, that it is to be “viewed henceforth not as idleness or mere
cessation of work, but as a complement for work.”
255

b. Medical Argumentation
As the commonly used phrase “social ills” illustrates, when negative social
behavior in heavily populated areas becomes highly visual, it is often described in
medical terms. During the Great Depression, the increase of spare time and the threat
of undesirable leisure activity were illustrated as symptoms of the failing health of a
city. Lindeman called the industrial society a “civilization that induces nervousness”
and proposed that the best therapy for such a civilization is to be in contact with
nature. He explained that the effect of the machine on the human body is that it
fractionalizes experiences as merely parts of the body, such as the forearm, the leg,
and eyes, which are utilized for a certain repetitious task. Recreation, he argued,
“must be so well organized as to be able to restore organic wholeness to
experience.”
256
His argument reflects the fragmentation and fetishization of the body
in modernity along with the dissatisfaction and anonymity of the human factory
laborer as a merely a dispensable part of the larger industrial machine.
Writer Jay Nash feared that leisure activities were becoming too passive. He
named this ailment “spectatoritis” and defined it as follows:
This machine age has, of course, already supplied an unexampled wealth of
leisure and what happens? The average man who has time on his hands turns

255
Lindeman, 1937, 59.
256
Lindeman, 1937, 60; E. C. Lindeman, Leisure—A National Issue: Planning for the
Leisure of a Democratic People. (New York: Association Press, 1939).

129
out to be a spectator, a watcher of somebody else, merely because that is the
easiest thing. He becomes a victim of spectatoritis—a blanket description to
cover all kinds of passive amusement, an entering into the handiest activity
merely to escape boredom.
257

He continued to describe the scale of the epidemic, “Spectatoritis has become almost
synonymous with Americanism…. Twenty-five million people go to the movies
daily at a time of the worst depression known to man.”
258
He criticized the easy
ready-made amusements that the mass consumed, and proposed that leisure
education was “the great antidote to spectatoritis.”
259
In addition to “spectatoritis,”
Weaver Pangburn, the head of the National Recreation Association, also named an
ailment called “sititis,” which came out of observing that listening or watching others
had short-lived effects and had no long-term benefits.
260
Improper leisure was
viewed as a principal contributor to society’s pathology, while at the same time
people viewed proper leisure as a powerful tool for curing those same ills. Only
leisure seemed to offer a remedy for curing the rest of the deeply entrenched
problems.

c. Ideological Argumentation
This section particularly focuses on the argumentation behind the
involvement of the American federal government in leisure administration. With the
grave economic crisis in which the nation found itself, government intervention was

257
Nash, 4-5.
258
Nash, 10.
259
Nash, 219.
260
Pangburn, 1936, 4.

130
a necessity, in which the quick transition from laissez faire capitalism to a welfare
state was facilitated. While many accepted this intervention as necessary evil, others
felt this was entering treacherous waters anticipating the expansion of control the
government may have. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) in
particular regularized the national government’s role in providing relief. Historian
Lizabeth Cohen argues that the emergence of the welfare state was not a forceful
imposition by the federal government, but that the workers learned to expect more
from the government. Previously, workers would have looked to their family,
friends, neighborhood shopkeepers, former employers and ethnic and religious
welfare agencies for handouts, but the declining power of these institutions and
networks had made workers expect less from these local institutions.
261

Immediately after the Great Depression hit the United States, President Herbert
Hoover commissioned a study to investigate the severity of the impact this economic
crisis had on the everyday lives of its citizens. The President’s Research Committee
on Social Trends was created in December 1929. Funded by the Rockefeller
Foundation, the investigation started in 1930 and ended in 1932. The Committee
heralded the novelty of this government initiative by stating, “The undertaking is
unique in our history. For the first time the head of the Nation has called upon a
group of social scientists to sponsor and direct a broad scientific study of the factors

261
Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 282.

131
of change in modern society.”
262
Americans at Play published in 1933 by Jesse
Steiner was one of the monographs published under the auspices of this Committee,
which surveyed and described the recent trends in recreation and leisure time
activities. Steiner pointed out that advances in technology had increased leisure hours
available to the mass, and yet humans had yet to learn to skillfully use leisure.
Adding scientific information, the report represented the faith social scientists had in
the reliability of social surveys and the ability to solve social problems. In a chapter
of the book, Steiner, then a professor of sociology at the University of Washington,
discussed the call for government intervention, and the response to it.
The government intervening in leisure activities was nothing new when the Great
Depression occurred. The local and state authorities had been involved in monitoring
and censoring leisure activities, such as the Sunday observation laws that kept shops
and amusement facilities closed. Local authorities had dealt with leisure and
recreation differently. Different branches of local authorities had been responsible
for overseeing regulations and controls depending on whether they were commercial
amusement and non-commercial amusement. The following is a list which shows the
wide range of the local government agencies that were responsible for administering
public recreation in cities between 1921 and 1931: Park commissions, boards,
departments, committees; Playground and recreation commissions, boards, and
departments; Boards of education and other school authorities; Mayors, city council,

262
Jesse F. Steiner, Americans at Play: Recent Trends in Recreation and Leisure Time
Activities, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933a/1970), v.

132
city managers, borough authorities; Park and recreation commissions, boards,
departments; Municipal playground committees, associations, and advisory
commissions; Department of public works; Departments of parks and public
property or building; Departments of public welfare; Department of finance and
revenue; Water department; Department of public safety; Swimming pool
commissions; and other departments.
263

With the increase, however, in interstate commerce and mobility, some attempts
were made to have more regulations on the federal level. In the case of film
censorship, for instance, in 1907 the Chicago police became the first local authority
to be responsible for the issuance of motion picture permits in order to regulate the
traffic and circulation of film as well as censor the content. Because of the
inconsistencies between each state, and indeed each local authority, there had been
movements to place federal control on the circulation of movies. Specifically, the
creation of the Federal Motion Picture Commission as a division of the Education
office in the Department of Interior was proposed to preview and license all films,
censor scripts, and supervise studios during production. This attracted attention, but
did not gain enough support to pass the legislature. This indicates that official
censorship had never been popular in the United States compared to other nations,
which had national regulations. According to Steiner, many Americans believed that
official censorship would only be able to have an impact on grave violations of moral
codes, and was only able to bring pressure on the industry as a whole. It therefore

263
Steiner, 1939, 169.

133
relied heavily on voluntary agencies that would act as spokespeople representatives
for individual community standards and orchestrated public opinion which
demanded production of motion pictures with a higher moral value.
In addition, the public had developed such a wide range of ideas about where
the line should be drawn in legislation that it would have been impossible to write a
comprehensive and cohesive guideline, especially concerning Sunday laws and other
moral issues. In rural towns for instance, blue laws were observed even after WWII.
However in Los Angeles, even as early as in 1923, Sabbath had turned into a busy
leisure day for young people, where “people who work in stores and offices [took]
off the clothing of humility and replace[d] it with very little ease. Mostly they wear a
kimono all morning, a bathing suit all afternoon and a dance frock all night.”
264
This
Los Angeles Times article highlighted the generational differences, pointing how the
older population observed conventional customs while the younger population
experimented with new lifestyles.
Not only did the public lack faith in the federal government’s ability to cater
to their individual community needs, the federal intervention in people’s leisure
highlighted the inherent dilemma between democracy and government
administration. Steiner pointed out:
The use of government funds for the active promotion of recreation has been
contrary to past precedent and has had to make its way in the face of much
opposition. The promotion has been made under different auspices, both
public and private, and has made it necessary to give attention to the

264
“Fourth Commandment is cut to one clause: ‘Six Days shalt thou labor,’ ll that is left as
Angelenos forget day of rest,” Los Angeles Times, (November 18, 1923), III 15.

134
problems of coordination. The realization of the “moral hazards” associated
with commercial amusement has led to efforts to regulate them more strictly
in the interest of general welfare. This role of the government as censor has
proved to be difficult. Many measures have been tried out to make its control
more effective.
265

Additionally, Steiner admitted quite pessimistically that it is almost impossible to
control and censor amusement, especially commercial amusement. This is because of
the “close relationship between amusements and morals and the tendency to increase
financial profits by providing demoralizing forms of popular entertainment.”
266
He
observed that the establishments may hide themselves for a while during the
censorship, but it was hard to curb desires to consume such entertainment. Recent
Social Trends argued that self-cultivation was impaired by the commercialization of
leisure, the mechanization of leisure and the consequent new social conventions
emerging from new leisure.
Lies predicted in 1933 that there would be rebellions against attempts by the
NRA or any other government agency to control leisure. He emphasized that the
“American people are not of one accord as they seek a solution for the problem of
leisure,” a problem that is rapidly growing because of the thirty-five to forty hour
work-weeks.
The shade of opinion range from the strongly individualistic conception that a
man’s use of his leisure is strictly his own business to the paternalistic idea
that the people cannot be trusted with leisure and that the country will
probably sink as low as pagan Rome at its worst unless something is done
about the question.

265
Steiner, 1939, 165.
266
Steiner, 1939, 174.

135
He also acknowledged the dilemma of individualism and regulation stating,
liberty loving people will insist that, whatever may be thought about leisure,
it implies freedom. Regimentation will not be tolerated. Yet the facts of
everyday life, to say nothing of the findings of sociologists, demonstrate that
leisure is a matter of intense social concern and a challenge to education and
social planning.
267

Steiner acknowledged the dilemma between respecting individual choice and
administrating communal guidelines as well as the difficulty of imposing a fixed
criterion of what is “suitable” and “appropriate” leisure. Steiner demonstrated this
point by discussing the different degrees to which Sunday observation is kept in
different communities. Smaller and religious communities may have stricter laws
and rules about the use of recreational facilities on Sundays, whereas larger
communities are unable to make their citizens follow Sunday observation laws.
Conversely, Pangburn posited that the very intervention of government makes
recreation democratic. He argued, “Recreation under government auspices is
inclusive. It serves people of all religions, racial and national origins and varying
degrees of means. Recreational activities themselves know no barriers.”
268
While
many suspicious of government intervention in leisure activities advocated leisure
facilities run by voluntary or commercial organizations, Pangburn focused on those
who would not have access to these facilities because of their social-economic status
or ethnicity. The different discourses indicate the mixed emotions Americans had
about the expectations toward federal intervention. Cohen argues, “at the same time

267
E. T. Lies, “The New Leisure: Drafting a Program,” New York Times (Dec. 3, 1933),
SM3.
268
Pangburn, 1936, 82.

136
that workers projected their old paternalistic expectations of ethnic community and
welfare capitalism onto the state, they were developing a new and somewhat
contradictory notion that they were entitled to benefits from the government.”
269

Historian Susan Currell argues that attempts to coordinate leisure led to a
complicated system of leisure management that was officially sanctioned but not
dominated by federal policy. Leisure activities organized by a wide variety of groups
were offered centralized planning and support via the Works Progress
Administration(WPA). This did not mean complete standardization. Rather WPA
workers were sent out to develop local grassroots networks, giving existing
community recreation projects were given support and guidance.
270

Urban recreation faced spatial restrictions due to the sudden expansion of urban
areas, and the lack of foresight to reserve space for public recreation. The interest in
urban planning during the previous decades was focused on the beautification of
civic areas and amelioration of housing and transportation problems and did not
extend to recreation. More comprehensive city planning grew in effectiveness, but
state legislatures were not granted legal authority to realize these plans. The legal
powers had “not gone further than to give general authority over the approval of
plots set aside for recreation by real estate promoters. Cities still depended on the
voluntary cooperation of business interests for new space for public recreation.”
271

269
Cohen, 285. Emphasis mine.
270
Currell, 51.
271
Steiner, 1933, 166.

137
d. “Distinctly American” Leisure
The formation of leisure discourse in 1930s America cannot be explained
without understanding how Americans perceived leisure culture in Europe. Susan
Currell argues that during the 1930s the United States bifurcated from the European
model of utilizing leisure for national mobilization, and established a “truly
American” style of leisure, which was democratic, hetero-social and
individualistic.
272
The primary catalyst that incited this bifurcation was the
totalitarian regimes that had emerged in Germany and Italy. In other words,
anathema against certain foreign political ideologies became an external force, which
helped shape the underlying philosophy Americans had about their leisure. This
argument was illustrated by two professors, who played prominent roles in the
development of the discourse.
Walter B. Pitkin, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, wrote in
1932 that every country should respect the leisure culture that emerged from its own
society. While many Americans fancied the ways in which continental Europeans
enjoyed their vacance, Pitkin argued that there was no use in importing leisure from
France, for instance. For Americans, Pitkin advocated for a “busy leisure.” He
theorized that Americans had a different notion of time, and that Americans tended
to look forward, forgetting the immediate past. “We accept progress as an axiom” as
opposed to the French who “looked down upon it as a childish fancy.” He

272
Susan Currell, The March of Spare Time: The Problem and Promise of Leisure in the
Great Depression, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 38-50.

138
maintained that activity was life for Americans, and that this activity “simply did not
harmonize with most forms of reflection and aesthetic pleasure.” He added, “The
American ideal is busy leisure where the use of free time in which vigorous activity
runs on. Rest appears in it only as a moment of relaxation, which makes possible
fresh activity a moment later.” While he acknowledged that some may find this kind
of American leisure a “fatal flaw of our civilization,” he nonetheless posited that
busy leisure is merely a representation of the values its society has.
273

A uniquely American leisure was something that Lindeman, a fellow
professor from New York, also advocated. While Pitkin had come to his conclusion
through a belief in America’s city-upon-a-hill mentality, Lindeman based his ideas
for a distinctly American leisure culture by referring to the international politics of
the time. He envisioned an American leisure culture depended on contrasting cases
of undesirable leisure culture. He was a professor of social philosophy at the New
York School of Social Work, and from 1934 to 1938 served as the Consulting
Director of the Division of Recreation of the Works Progress Administration. He
contemplated the meaning of leisure in a democracy, explored the implications of a
democratized leisure for social planning, and examined the role of government in
relation to the whole. He had a keen awareness of creating a distinctly American
leisure culture, not a copy of that of Europe, especially not of totalitarian
governments such as Italy and Germany. He argued:

273
W. B. Pitkins, Life Begins at Forty, (New York: Whittlesey House, 1932), 95-97.

139
If recreation can be effectively utilized to build the materials for dictatorship
states, that is, for regimenting purposes, it is reasonable to anticipate that it
may also be used to furnish a secure foundation for the democratic states, that
is for purposes of true freedom…. It appears that our heritage is antipathetic
to that now made manifest in the modern state founded upon force, coercion,
and regimentation.
274

It is somewhat ironic that Lindeman ignored the fact that democracy is equally a
form of political philosophy, and that the implementation of government policies
could be interpreted as a kind of American “regimentation” which excluded the use
of leisure for certain purposes. He did, however, recognize the paradox in the
relationship between leisure and democracy, namely the necessity for organization
and administration. He pointed out, “Once administrators are assigned, or organizers
and leaders of play centers emerge, they may now become ‘dominators.’ They may
become the rulers of leisure.”
275
His argument concluded by emphasizing the
importance of educating the youth of good use of leisure, which supports the point
that he advocated some control and molding of leisure activities.

Leisure Discourse in Japan after the Great Depression
Nationhood had been the central agenda for Japan since the 1868 Meiji
Restoration. Since the 1870s, governmental instructions on leisure activity had been
one of the ways in which the nation attempted to elevate Japan to a “cultured first-
rate country.” Once Japan defeated Russia in 1905 and joined the esteemed group of

274
Lindeman, 1937, 62.
275
Lindeman, 1937, 63.

140
the five major powers, they started to feel they deserved more respect from the other
leading countries. The government and intellectuals paid increasingly more attention
to how Japan was perceived as a culture rather than just their military might or their
industrial yield.
Just as dramatically as the leisure discourse changed in the United States after
black Monday, the leisure discourse in Japan changed just as drastically. The new
leisure discourse after the Great Depression had commonalities in both Japan and the
United States. As with the discussion of the United States above, the Japanese
discourse can be primarily grouped into three categories: moral, medical, and
ideological argumentation. Rather than using these arguments in a competing
manner, many authors used a combination of all three in their arguments. These three
schemes of arguments complemented one another and gained a larger support for a
more positive understanding of leisure and government intervention. Leisure became
an intersection for negotiating widespread ambivalence about technological
advancement, social and economic change, and new social habits, as well as a
domain in which older and fundamental ideas about individuality and democracy
could be negotiated or challenged. The examination suggests that this transition in
leisure argumentation was a significant change which contributed to laying down the
intellectual groundwork for the manipulation of leisure, for mobilizing the state as
tension mounted in the international political arena in the late 1930s. Through this
analysis, this chapter showcased the protean yet dialectic relationship between the
perception of labor and leisure influenced by socio-economic forces. By 1940, as

141
historian Foster Rhea Dulles pointed out, it was widely recognized that “what a
nation does with its leisure is oftentimes just as significant as how it either maintains
itself economically or governs itself.”
276
While many intellectuals showed particular
anathema towards the use of leisure for mobilizing, during the Second World War
leisure culture played an undeniably prominent role in uplifting the spirits and
strengthening loyalty and nationalism.
What was different from the American discourse was that intellectuals did
not discuss the changing attitudes towards leisure in direct relation to the Depression.
In fact, the Depression set off a series of indirect events, which triggered the
changing attitude towards leisure. The Depression made nations such as America and
European countries to tighten their trading to protect domestic industries. The
foundation of regional trading blocs just when the Japanese industry had matured
and was finally able to compete with western countries was indeed a blow to the
Japanese economy. With this, the Japanese government forcefully looked for trading
markets in Asia. The Litton Report that said that the Manchurian Incident was in fact
an unprovoked attack by Japan was the last straw that broke the camel’s back on the
trust that the Japanese government had towards the League of Nations and resulted in
walking away from the League. With such a weak display of leadership, in 1931,
young rightists in the Japanese army assassinated Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi,

276
Foster Rhea Dulles, America Learns to Play: A History of Popular Recreation, 1607-
1940, (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1963) Xi.

142
after which “the government began a precipitous slide toward out-and-out
militarism,” according to political scientist David Leheny.
277

While the Japanese discourse on leisure had come from various directions,
during the 1930s, the intellectuals became increasingly unified in promoting the use
of leisure for mobilization purposes. The term “kosei-undo,” which literally meant
“welfare movement,” was used to describe the use of recreation for political
mobilization. Instead of modeling their leisure on the American style, the
government bureaucrats as well as intellectuals became more interested in learning
from the German and Italian models of mobilization through leisure.
278
Social and
political networks that had been spread into the neighborhoods in the 1910s and
1920s, both in rural and urban areas, became utilized for recreational purposes,
which increased solidarity as a nation.

A World Wide Movement: The International Recreation Congress 1932-1940
The intuition people felt in the 1920s that this increase in leisure time created
certain common problems in many industrializing countries materialized into more
than just a comparison of each country, but an international movement. In the 1930s,
leaders involved in the leisure policies in respective countries gathered three times at

277
Leheny, 65.
278
Eiichi Isomura, Kosei Undo Gaisetsu [Introduction to Welfare Movement], (Tokyo: Joban
Shobo, 1939); Nihon Kosei Kyokai, ed., Dai ikkai nihon kosei taikai hokokusho [Conference
Report on the First Japanese Welfare Conference] (Tokyo: Nihon Kosei Kyokai, 1939);
Kyukichi Ueda, Sonraku gekijo [Peasant Theater] (Tokyo: Gakuji shoin, 1934); Shunzo
Nakata, Kyoikuyori mitaru goraku to kyuyo [Recreation and Rest Seen Through Education],
vol. 1 and 2. (Tokyo: Chubunkan, 1934).

143
an international conference preceding the Olympics. The First International
Recreation Congress was held in July 1932 right before the Los Angeles Olympics.
The Congress was organized by Thomas E. Rivers of the National Recreation
Association, which was the offshoot of the National Playground Association founded
in 1906. More than one hundred delegates gathered in Los Angeles from forty
countries.
279
The purpose of the Congress was to 1) exchange information about the
experiences and data of the recreation movement in each respective country, 2) to
facilitate the recreation movement in each country, and 3) to facilitate international
friendship among the nations.
280

The second conference was held in Hamburg before the Berlin Olympics in
1936, but the United States boycotted this conference out of concern that the
occasion would be used for Nazi propaganda. It was not until 1956 that America
would participate in an international leisure conference.
281
Nonetheless, 130 odd
speakers from sixty-one countries participated in what was titled “World Congress
on Leisure and Recreation,” including several representatives from the Nazi
government as well as the Olympic Committee Chairman. The four items on the
agenda were:

279
Atsushi Hoshina, Kokumin Kosei Undo [National Kosei Movement] (Tokyo: Kurita
Shoten, 1942), 65.
280
Hoshina, 66.
281
“Thomas E. Rivers 1892-1977,” National Recreation and Park Association,
http://www.nrpa.org/admin/content/previewContent.aspx?documentId=7094. Accessed April
4, 2009.

144
1) whether the use of leisure should be a public issue or whether it should be a
private matter, the economic significance of leisure and recreation in a
nation, and the characteristics of leisure use and institutions
2) The fundamental relationship between leisure and work, welfare facilities for
employees, conditions of the workplace and residence, the use of weekends
and leisure, and physical wellbeing of employees
3) Leisure issues of women and children, and the influence on the natural
environment
4) The relationship between labor, art and culture, and a movement for
humanitarianism and world peace.
282

The third Congress titled “the World Congress on Labor and Joy” was held in
Italy in 1938. By this Congress, the meeting had become increasing large, gathering
over a thousand people from fifty countries.
283
The meetings were held in Rome for
the first four days and then the last three days were spent in Florence observing
various forms of performances organized by the government. By this third
conference, the agenda had increased into eleven subcommittees:
1) The development of the recreation movement and various forms
2) Recreation in the everyday lives of citizens in various countries (economic
and social context)
3) Regional adjustment in recreation movement
4) The Recreation Movement in citizens’ well being
5) Sports and physical education
6) Rest, especially considerations on weekends
7) Recreation movement and national culture
8) Recreation in the lives of women
9) Recreation in the lives of children
10) The social functions of the recreation movement for various classes, i.e.
recreation as a means for improving the ethical, mental and material
standards of living for the lower class.
11) The recreation movement as a means of mutual understanding and social
cooperation among various nationalities, i.e. cultural exchange, mutual visits
between citizens

282
Hoshina, 70.
283
Hoshina, 64.

145

These types of international exchange and cross fertilization in recreation policy
traveled beyond the political boundaries of capitalism and fascism. Currell discusses
the different leisure policies of the early 20
th
century in contextualizing the leisure
policies in the United States. Mentioning the Kraft durch Freude (KdF), the Strength
Through Joy leisure program in Germany, she argues that one of the KdF’s most
famous projects, the KdF-Wagen (or the “Strength Through Joy Car”) illustrated the
direct influence of Ford’s corporate welfare strategy. The people’s car, like the
Model T, was to be offered for payment on an installment plan and made in such
quantities that all Germans would be able to own one.
284

Japanese American Leisure in the 1930s
In the 1930s, the Japanese communities in the United States were caught in
the midst of various hardships of the Great Depression, the mounting tension
between United States and Japan, the racial discrimination in many western state
communities and the generational differences between those born in Japan and the
United States.
By the 1930s, the demographics of the Japanese American community had
changed and had impacted the leisure culture of the immigrant community. As Table
5 shows the population of Japanese living in the U.S. had become comparably more
balanced with approximately sixty percent male and forty percent female. The

284
Susan Currell, 41.

146
Table 5: Population of Japanese in America, 1930
285

Male 81771 59%
Female 57063 41%

Issei 70993 51%
Nise 67841 49%

second-generation population had increased to consist half of the Japanese immigrant
population. As the average age of the Issei men reached sixty, the children of the
immigrants grew into their teens in the 1930s, creating a vibrant youth culture in the
larger communities.
286
(See Figure 11)

Figure 11: New-Born Nisei in California, 1912-1935
287

0
1000
2000
3000
4000
5000
6000
1912
1914
1916
1918
1920
1922
1924
1926
1928
1930
1932
1934
Year
Births

285
Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930.
286
Azuma, 111.
287
Matsuzo Nagai, ed. Nichibei bunka koshoshi [History of Japan-U.S. Negotiations] Vol. 5
Iju [Immigration] (Tokyo: Hara Shobo, 1981) 191.

147
As Table 6 shows the number of Japanese families in each state differed significantly
in 1930. The wide range of numbers implies the variety in which leisure culture
would have developed, in terms of the types of activity and frequency based on the
primary demographics in the respective communities.
As historian Yuji Ichioka argued, “the Nisei’s future, however precarious it
appeared in 1924, suddenly loomed all-important to them. The future of the Japanese
in the United States now depended on how their children would grow up and fare in
their own native land.”
288
The attention and high stakes imposed on the up-bringing
of the Nisei population in the post-exclusion period was extraordinary and unique to
the Japanese American community.
289
The various hurdles in the way of the Issei’s
understandings of an “ideal” up-bringing of Nisei became known as the “Nisei
problem,” which “ranged from questions of marriage to employment, and from
education to the racial inferiority complex.”
290

While the Issei generation were keen to make sure that the Nisei succeeded in
becoming ‘proper, respectable, and therefore assimilable citizens, to which goal
many Nisei subscribed to, they were also aware that this goal would not be achieved

288
Ichioka, Issei, 253-54.
289
Yoo, 9.
290
Azuma, 112.

148
Table 6: Number of Japanese Families by State, 1930
291

New England 74 Virginia 21
Maine na West Virginia 3
New Hampshire 1 North Carolina 5
Vermont na South Carolina 3
Massachusetts 46 Georgia 2
Rhode Island 5 Florida 21
Connecticut 21 East South Central 5
Middle Atlantic 847 Kentucky 1
New York 695 Tennessee 3
New Jersey 84 Alabama na
Pennsylvania 68 Mississippi 1
East North Central 221 West South Central 156
Ohio 41 Arkasas na
Indiana 18 Louisiana 8
Illinois 117 Oklahoma 21
Michigan 36 Texas 127
Wisconsin 9 Mountain 1735
West North Central 197 Montana 173
Minnesota 17 Idaho 284
Iowa 5 Wyoming 259
Missouri 23 Colorado 88
North Dakota 20 New Mexico 65
South Dakota 5 Arizona 93
Nebraska 118 Utah 624
Kansas 9 Nevada 140
South Atlantic 81 Pacific 23539
Delaware na Washington 3401
Maryland 9 Oregon 890
District of Columbia 17 California 19248

291
Data extracted from Table 33 “Mexican, Indian, Chinese and Japanese Families by
Divisions and States, 1930.” Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930.

149
by “exclusive judgments.” Historian Eiichiro Azuma argues, that rather
their ideas and practices were situational, elastic, and even inconsistent at
times, but always dualistic at the core. The analysis of Japanese immigrant
eclecticism illuminates the intricate agency of these historical actors, who
selectively took in and fused elements of national arguments, modernist
assumptions, and racist thinking from both imperial Japan and white
America.
292

This point is illustrated by the culture created by college girls at UCLA who
created Chi Alpha Delta, the first Asian American sorority in the nation. On the one
hand, while some of the sorority girls socialized inter-ethnically with Chinese
American male students from the University of Southern California, their attempt to
pledge a Korean American girl failed.
293
Historian Valerie Matsumoto also illustrates
this point that in some cases inter-racial couples were accepted in dance halls, but in
other cases they were not permitted, and therefore, people needed to be aware of
what was acceptable and what was not in each case. Matsumoto argues that this
“messy, exuberant, and variable process of synthesis [was] visible in their socializing
and courtship, ideals of romantic love, and expectations of marriage.”
294

In the 1930s the generational difference in attitude towards Japanese
organizations had become distinct. A secretary of the Fukuoka kenjinkai, who was
himself a Nisei, said:
Mutual Aid is decreasing [among the Japanese immigrant community]. There
is less help given among the second generation because they are becoming

292
Azuma, 6.
293
Shirley Jennifer Lim, A Feeling of Belonging: Asian American Women Public Culture,
1930-60 (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 30, 45.
294
Valerie J. Matsumoto, “Nisei Daughters’ Courtship and Romance in Los Angeles before
World War II,” Asian American Youth: Culture, Identity and Ethnicity, eds. Jennifer Lee and
Min Zhou (New York: Routledge, 2004) 97.

150
more American, and less interested in that sort of thing. They, most of whom
are between twenty-two and twenty-five, like dancing, theatres, and going out
with the other sex. They are not interested in Kenjinkai. The older people
worry about their lack of interest.
295

For the Nisei population who had less allegiance to the prefecture where their parents
came from, the kenjinkai became a somewhat artificial grouping that restricted their
socializing. Various religious groups, sports groups, school groups, and other social
and political groups became a more natural way of organizing themselves. The
Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) became instead the center for Nisei
organization.
The 1932 Olympics is still the lieux de mémoire for Japanese Americans, a
historical point of reference in retelling stories about their past.
296
As historian Eriko
Yamamoto has argued, “the fact that the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics took place in
the largest Japanese American community a mere eight years after the 1924
Immigration Act likely encouraged the surge of collective ethnic sentiments that
transcended divisions of age, group affiliations, or strategies for acceptance.”
297

Seven gold medals, seven silver, and four bronze was a significant increase in the
number of medals Japan received in the two prior summer Olympics in Paris and
Amsterdam. In the gold medal count, Japan came in fifth among the thirty-seven

295
Fukuoka, 75.
296
Pierre Nora, Lawrence D. Kritzman, eds., Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
297
Eriko Yamamoto, “Cheers to Japanese Athletes: The 1932 Los Angeles Olympics and the
Japanese American Community,” Pacific Historical Review 69:3 (August 2000),
399-430.

151
nations participating, only after the United States, Italy, France, and Sweden.
298
The
fact that their track team and swimming team won these medals against western
athletes who were physically larger than them was a great source of pride and
symbolized the arrival of Japan as a first rate nation in athleticism. The Japanese
American community welcomed these athletes into their houses and showed
enthusiastic hospitality for the Japanese Olympic team. Here they negotiated their
Japanese hospitality with their pride as an Angeleno welcoming the Japanese guests
to the hosting city.
By 1939, phonograph technology had advanced and had become affordable
to the ordinary people. Nakamura Recording Company advertised its recording
service saying, “what the Japanese people would love the most is for you to record
songs, stories, and letters into a record so they can hear your voice. We make house
calls.”
299
The technology of phonographs and recording sound created new channels
for Japanese Americans to maintain a reciprocal connection with Japanese culture.

Conclusion
The decade leading up to the Second World War was a period when leisure
and nationalism intersected in many places and in many ways. In all sites,
international politics impacted the leisure culture climate. In America, the threat of

298
“Official website of the Olympic Movement,”
http://www.olympic.org/uk/games/past/index_uk.asp?OLGT=1&OLGY=1932. Accessed
April 4, 2009.
299
Seinanku Jushoroku [South West Directory] 1939, (Los Angeles, Seinan Kyogikai,
1939) 25.

152
Nazism and Fascism was a strong deterrent from openly utilizing leisure for
mobilization, whereas Japanese leaders followed closely their military allies to
organize their mass. The Japanese Americans used leisure time as a site for
negotiating racial, national, and generational tensions always seeking the middle
ground in a contentious context.

153
CONCLUSION

The first half of the twentieth century bears significance as a foundational
period when the discourses on leisure were laid out for industrializing societies. This
discourse-building effort by intellectuals was a global phenomenon, demonstrating
the universality of the issues presented by shorter working hours, urbanization, and
the advent of mass culture.
Needless to say, this history on the transnational intersections of Japan and
the United States in leisure discourse is not a comprehensive one. As historian
George Lipsitz has argued,
[T]he larger history can never be fully comprehended; the complexities and
pluralities of the past always resist definitive evaluation and summary.
Reconstructing the infinitely complex experiences of the past through the
paltry bits of evidence about it available to historians inevitably renders some
aspects of the past as incommunicable.
300

Lipsitz’s confession rings true especially to leisure culture, which is itself a personal
experience; the meaning it has for each individual is intimately their own. Therefore
a history on leisure activities and an analysis of what it must have meant for a whole
society or even a group of people may be considered overly ambitious or indeed
perhaps impossible.
This thesis, in comparison, focused on the individuals who wrote about
leisure and attempted to show similarities and differences, beginnings, directions,
and trajectories. It also put into the spotlight those individuals who carried and

300
George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 21.

154
circulated leisure practices. Through these instances of history, this thesis
demonstrated and actualized the germination of culture and cultural transmission
between communities and beyond national borders.
In the first chapter, the origin of the relationship between leisure and
industrialization was described in the American and Japanese socio-economic
context. It showed the interest in comparing the variety of ways in which
intellectuals in industrialized nations dealt with leisure as a problematic phenomenon.
It also demonstrated the haphazard nature in which certain links between American
and Japanese leisure discourse that were made and that ended as missed
opportunities.
The second chapter sheds light onto the Japanese immigrant communities in
America to demonstrate how leisure crossed borders and became one of the driving
forces for cross-regional movement between immigrant communities. It highlights
the variation of leisure practices by communities to illustrate the geopolitics of
leisure culture.
The third chapter focuses on the intersection of Japanese leisure practice and
nationhood, especially when it created a dilemma for the consumer. The dilemma of
choosing to follow an Anti-American boycott triggered by the 1924 Immigration Act
and the national humiliation it caused or their urge to keep consuming leisure
products from America was a litmus test for how many set their identity; that is,
whether they prioritized their citizenship or consumer identity.

155
The fourth chapter discusses the meaning of leisure as it intersected with
international politics and competing national interests in the 1930s in the Japanese,
American and Japanese American societies. It discusses the cross-fertilization of
leisure discourse as well in an international context. By joining all three sites of
cultural negotiation into one chapter, it aims to be a better represent the
contemporaneous and international characteristics of leisure culture in an
industrialized sphere.
The leisure discourse in the early twentieth century was rehearsed repeatedly
in the later half of the century and has remained an important issue in our modern
lives. Writers and journalists remain fascinated by the European style of leisure;
some arguing its superiority and proposing emulation, others positing the
incompatibility to the American protestant work ethic, which remains to be the
backbone of society.
301
According to 2004 statistics of annual work hours, Japan
ranked fifth with 1828 hours, and America ranked seventh with 1777 hours, which
are both considerably lower than South Korea with 2390 hours, but higher than Great
Britain with 1652 hours.
302
In both America and Japan, scholars and writers write
about the obsession with being busy and the bifurcation of this sense, which
coincides with divergence of class. Other common and discourses are the misuse of
leisure time by youths and the blurring of leisure time and work time thanks to

301
“Europe’s Solution: Take More Time Off,” New York Times March 29, 2009,
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/europes-solution-take-more-time-off/;
Dalton Conley, “Rich Man’s Burden,” New York Times, September 2, 2008.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/02/opinion/02conley.html. Both accessed April 3, 2009.
302
“Annual Work Hours,” OECD in Figures, (Paris: Organization of Economic Co-operation
and Development, 2004).

156
various forms of communication technology such as emails and the World Wide
Web.
303

This thesis demonstrates the protean nature of leisure discourse, the
messiness and haphazardness of cultural transmission, and the importance of agency
in explaining this messiness. Moreover, it demonstrates leisure practice as an arena
where complex decision-making is negotiated beyond the simple dichotomy of us or
them, western or eastern, loyal or unpatriotic, alien or citizen, traditional or modern,
American or Japanese. The leisure discourse of the first half of the twentieth century
shows the intricate dynamics of international politics and their influence on
transnational cultural networks, which serves as a vehicle in some cases for nurturing
and disseminating a supranational cultural product. While the urge for consuming
supranational cultural products proved to be stronger than society’s conviction to
adhere to national interests in some cases, it requires careful historical and cultural
analysis to understand how and when these supranational products are able to sustain
a critical mass amidst complex international politics as well as cultural network
politics.

303
Marci Alboher, “Leisure’s Starring Role in a Complete Life,” New York Times, (May 11,
2008), BU 15; Hal R. Varian, “The Future of Leisure That Never Arrived,” New York Times,
(March 8, 2007). http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/08/business/08scene.html. Accessed
April 3, 2009; Janny Scott, “Working Hard, More or Less; Studies of Leisure Time Point
Both Up and Down,” New York Times, (July 10, 1999).
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/10/arts/working-hard-more-or-less-studies-of-leisure-time-
point-both-up-and-down.html?scp=12&sq=leisure%20time&st=cse. Accessed April 3, 2009.
157
REFERENCES
Government papers

Dofuken oyobi toshi ni okeru kyoiku eiga riyo jokyo [Use of Educational Films in
each prefecture as well as urban areas], 1932. Ministry of Education, Social
Education Division. 1934.

Osaka shi Shakaibu Chosa ka [Osaka City Social Department Survey Division] ed.
Yoka Seikatsu no Kenkyu[A Study of Leisure Life]: Rodo Chosa Hokoku no. 19
[Labor Survey Report, no. 19] (Kohbundo, 1923). Reprinted in Yoka Goraku Kenkyu
Kiso Bunken shu[Basic Sources on Leisure and Entertainment Studies] series vol. 4
Ohzora-sha, 1989.

Shakai seikatsu kihon chosa kekka no gaiyo [Abstract of Results on the Basic Survey
on Social Life]. Statistics Bureau, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications,
2001. http://www.stat.go.jp/data/shakai/2001/jikan/gaiyoj.htm Accessed March 23,
2009.

United States Bureau of Census

Magazines

Eiga Kenkyu

Eiga Shincho

Katsudo Kurabu

Katsudo Sekai

Katsudo Zasshi

Kinema Jumpo

Kokusai Eiga Shimbun

Nikkatsu Gaho

Nihon oyobi Nihonjin

Shinhanagata

Shochiku Gaho

158
Newspapers

Hawaii Hochi (Hawaii)

Jiji Shimpo (New York)

Jiji Nippo

Kashu Mainichi (California)

Los Angeles Times

New York Times

Nichibei Shimbun (San Francisco)

Nichibei Shuho (New York)

Taihoku Nippo (Seattle)

Tairiku Nippo (Vancouver)

Tokyo Asahi Shimbun

Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun

Utah Nippo (Utah)

Oral Sources

Terminal Island Life History Project. Japanese American National Museum, Online
Archive of California.
http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt367n993t&query=&brand=oac

Gerald Horne. “The Black Pacific: African Americans and Japan Confront ‘White
Supremacy.’” Talk, University of Southern California, Feb 28, 2002.

California State University, Fullerton Oral History Program Japanese American
Project Oral History collection, 1966-1976. Online Archive of California
http://oac.cdlib.org/

Senko Matsuoka, Interview.

159

Yoshiko Sakurai, Interview.

160
BIBLIOGRAPHY

“197 Hi-Lites.” Newsletter, tenth anniversary edition of the Boy Scout Troop 179.
May 1938. JANM Hirasaki Collection, 28.SH.A.3.

“33
rd
Anniversary Dinner of Japan American Society of Los Angeles.” Pamphlet,
May 7, 1932. JANM, Hirasaki Collection, 22.B.1.Box6.

“Age of the Machine Defended by Artist.” New York Times, March 17, 1932: 19.

Akashi, Kuni. Zaibei doho hatten shashin cho [Bretherns in America Development
Photo Book]. Tokyo: Kyoritsu Insatsu, 1928.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread
of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1991.

Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Asai, Susan. “Horaku: A Buddhist Tradition of Performing Arts in the Development
of Taiko Drumming in the United States.” Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology,
(1985): 163-166.

Ase, Kazuo. “Yoka to rodo: kachikan no gyakuten [Leisure and labor: The Reversal
of Values].” Yokagaku kenkyu 6 (March 2003): 34-42.

Azuma, Eiichiro. “Racial Struggle, Immigrant Nationalism and Ethnic Identity:
Japanese and Filipinos in the California Delta, 1930-1941.” Pacific Historical
Review 67 (May 1998), 163-199.

-----. Between Two Empires: Race, History and Transnationalism in Japanese
America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Becker, Jules. “The Course of Exclusion, 1882-1924: San Francisco Newspaper
Coverage of the Chinese and Japanese in the United States.” Ph.D. Dissertation,
University of California, Berkeley, 1986.

Betnun, Marvin. “A comparison of the leisure-time activities of delinquent and non-
delinquent boys in Salt Lake and vicinity.” M.S.W. thesis, University of Utah, 1940.

Bevans, George Esdras. “How Workingmen Spend Their Spare Time.” M.A. thesis
in Political Science, Columbia University, 1913.

161
Bonacich, Edna and Lucie Chang, eds. Labor Immigration under Capitalism: Asian
Workers in the United States before World War II. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984.

Bordwell, David. On the History of Film Styles. Boston: Harvard University Press,
1987.

Borsodi, Ralph. This Ugly Civilization. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1929.
Retrieved May 13, 2008, from
http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0303critic/030302borsodi.ugly/030302borsodi.t
oc.html

Briggs, Laura, Gladys McCormick, and J.T. Way. “Transnationalism: A Category of
Analysis.” American Quarterly 60:3 (2008): 625-648.

Bronson, Po. “How We Spend Our Leisure Time.” Time Oct. 23, 2006.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1549394,00.html Accessed March
23, 2009.

Brown, Michael D. Views from Asian California: 1920-1965. San Francisco:
Michael Brown, 1992.

Burke, Agnes M. “The Leisure Hours of Working Girls in a City Parish.” M.A.
Thesis, Columbia University, 1912.

Burkart, H. A. “Motivation in leisure.” M.A. Thesis, Columbia University, 1923.

Butler, Nicholas Murray. “Leisure and Its Use.” Recreation 28:5 (August 1934),
219-220.

Butsch, Richard, ed. For Fun and Profit: The Transformation of Leisure into
Consumption. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.

Byron Dare, George Welton, William Coe. Concepts of Leisure in Western Thought:
A Critical and Historical Analysis. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Publishing
Company, 1987.

Cermak, May C. “How Bohemians of New York City Spend their Leisure Time.”
M.A. Thesis, Columbia University, 1914.

Challman, Grace McMillan. “The Use of Leisure Time by the Italians of New York
City.” M.A. Thesis, Columbia University, 1920.

162
Chan, Sucheng. “The Changing Contours of Asian-American Historiography.”
Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 11:1 (2007), 125-147.

Chase, Stuart. “Leisure in a Machine Age.” The Library Journal. August 1931, 629-
32.

Cheley, F. H. Investing Leisure Time. The University Society. 1936.

“The City Worker’s Spare Time in the United States.” International Labor Review 9
(June 1924), 896-916.

Cohen, Lizabeth. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Combs, Jo Anne. “Japanese-American Music and Dance in Los Angeles, 1930-
1942.” Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology, (1985): 121-149.

Community Service Society of New York. “Comrades in Play, Leisure Time
Activities.” New York: The Society, 1920.

Cook, Daniel Thomas. "The Commercialization of Leisure." Encyclopedia of
Recreation and Leisure in America. Gary Cross, ed. New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 2004: 220-226.

Corbin, Alain. L'Avenement Des Loisirs (1850-1960) [The Birth of Leisure].
Translated by Kyoko Watanabe. Tokyo: Fujiwara Shoten, 2000.

Cunningham, Hugh. Leisure in the Industrial Revolution. New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1980.

Currell, Susan. The March of Spare Time: The Problem and Promise of Leisure in
the Great Depression. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.

Cushman, Thomas. Notes from Underground: Rock Music Counterculture in Russia.
New York: State University of New York Press, 1995.

Cutten, George Barton. The Threat of Leisure. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1926.

Daniels, Roger. Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since
1850. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988.

163
-----. The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the
Struggle for Japanese Exclusion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962.

Dare, B. et. al. Concepts of Leisure in Western Thought: A Critical and Historical
Analysis. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/ Hunt Publishing Co., 1987.

de Grazia, Victoria. The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in
Fascist Italy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the
Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1997.

Dirlik, Arif. “Asians on the Rim: Transnational Capital and Local Community in the
Making of Contemporary Asian America.” Amerasia Journal 22 (Winter 1996), 1-
24.

Dore, Ronald P. Hataraku to iukoto [What it means to work]. Trans. Masahiko
Ishizuka. Tokyo: Chuo koronsha, 2007.

Dower, John. “Ways of Seeing, Ways of Remembering.” A Century of Japanese
Photography. Ed. Japan Photographers Association. 1
st
American ed. New York:
Pantheon Books, 1980, 3-20.

“Dr. Forman Calls Work a Companion.” New York Times, Sept. 3, 1934: p.11.

Dubro, Alec, and Kaplan, David E. “California’s Yakuza: Foothold in Little Tokyo,”
The Californians, July/Aug., (1987): 34-41.

Dumazedier, Joffre. Sociology of Leisure. Translated by Marea A McKenzie. The
Netherlands: Elsevier, 1974.

———. Toward a Society of Leisure. Translated by Stewart E. McClure. New York:
Free Press, 1967.

Dumenil, Lynn. The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s.
New York: Hill and Wang, 1995.

Dulles, Foster Rhea. America Learns to Play: A History of Popular Recreation,
1607-1940. New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1940.

“Educating Us All in Uses of Leisure.” New York Times, Dec.7, 1930: 6I.

164
Erenberg, Lewis A. Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of
American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Espiritu, Augusto. “Transnationalism and Filipono American Historiography.”
Journal of Asian American Studies 11:2 (June 2008), 171-184.

Flewelling, Stan. Shirakawa: Stories from a Pacific Northwest Japanese American
Community. Auburn, WA: White River Valley Museum, 2002.

Floyd, Myron F. "Getting Beyond Marginality and Ethnicity: The Challenge for
Race and Ethnic Studies in Leisure Research." Journal of Leisure Research 30, no. 1
(1998): 3-22.

Fox, Richard W. and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds. The Culture of Consumption: Critical
Essays in American History, 1880-1980. New York: Pantheon, 1983.

Fujiki, Hideaki. “The Advent of the Star System in Japanese Cinema Distribution,”
Studies in Informatics and Sciences (Nagoya University), No. 15 (2002), 11-14.

Fujioka, Shiro. Beikoku Chuo Nihonjin kai shi. 1941. JANM Hirasaki Collection,
29.A.4.

Fukuoka, Fumiko. “Mutual Life and Aid among the Japanese in Southern California
with Special Reference to Los Angeles.” Master’s thesis, University of Southern
California, 1937.

Fuller, Kathryn. At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of
Movie Fan Culture. Virginia: University Press of Virginia, 1996.

Furnas, C. C. America’s Tomorrow: An Informal Excursion Into the Era of the Two-
Hour Working Day. New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1932.

Gabaccia, Donna. “Is Everywhere Nowhere?: Nomads, Nations, and the Immigrant
Paradigm of United States History.” Journal of American History 86:3 (December
1999), 1115-1134.

Garon, Sheldon. Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1998.

Gerber, David A. "The Germans Take Care of Our Celebrations: Middle-class
Americans Appropriate German Ethnic Culture in Buffalo in the 1850s." Hard at
Play: Leisure in America, 1840-1940, Grover, Kathryn, ed. (1992): 39-60.

165
Gerow, Aaron. Nichijogo to shiteno hariuddo to sekai kankyaku no shihai
[Hollywood as a Vernacular and the Domination of World Audiences]. Gendai Shiso
31:8 (June 2003), 124-131.

Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press,
1990.

Godbey, Geoffrey. "The Future of Leisure Studies." Journal of Leisure Research,
32:1 (2000): 37-41.

Goldschmidt, Estelle. “The Use of Leisure Time by Norwegians.” M.A. Thesis,
Columbia University, 1921.

Gonda, Yasunosuke. Mishu goraku no kichou [The Fundamentals of Mass
Entertainment]. Unknown: Dojinsha, 1922.

-----. Shakai kenkyu goraku gyosha no mure [The Group of social studies and
entertainment industry]. Tokyo: Jitsugyo no nihonsha, 1923.

-----. Minshu goraku ron [Theory on Mass Entertainment]. Tokyo: Ganshodo shoten,
1931.

Gordon, Andrew. “Consumption, Leisure and the Middle Class in Transwar Japan.”
Social Science Japan Journal 10:1 (2007), 1-21.

Gunckel, Colin. “The War of the Accents: Spanish Language Hollywood Films in
Mexican Los Angeles.” Film History, 20 (2008): 325-343.

Gratton, Chris and Taylor, Peter. “The Economics of Work and Leisure.” Eds.
Haworth, John T. and Veal, A.J., Work and Leisure. London and New York:
Routledge, 2004.

Griffin, Christine, Dorothy Hobson, Sue MacIntosh, and Trisha McCabe, “Women
and Leisure,” Jennifer Hargreaves, ed. Sport, Culture and Ideology, London:
Routeledge,1982): 88-116.

Hagiwara, Ken, ed. Shudan no koe, shudan no karada: 1920, 1930 nendai no nihon
to doitsu ni okeru ajipuro engeki ten [Exhibition Catalog for “The Voice of Many,
the Body of Many: Agitation Proletarian Theater in Japan and Germany in the
1920s and 1930s]. Tokyo: Waseda University Theater Museum, 2007.

Hall, Stuart, David Held, Don Hubert, Kenneth Thompson, ed. Modernity: An
Introduction to Modern Societies. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996.

166

Hanes, Jeffrey. Taishu Bunka, Kai bunka, Minshu bunka” in Shunya Yoshimi ed.
Toshi no Kukan, Toshi no shintai. Tokyo, Keiso Shobo: 1996.

Harap, H. “Planning the Curriculum for Leisure.” Journal of Educational Sociology,
7 (1934): pp. 308-20.

Hartoonian, Harry. Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in
Interwar Japan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Hartman, Stella Elizabeth. “A Study of Leisure-Time Habits of Young Men and
Women in Los Angeles.” M.A. thesis: University of Southern California, 1942.

Havig, Alan. “The Commercial Amusement Audience in Early 20
th
Century
American Cities.” Journal of American Culture 5 (Spring 1982), 1-19.

Her Togs, Dann, and Nico De Klerk, eds. Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early
Nonfiction Film. Netherlands: Stichting Netherlands Filmmuseum, 1997.

High, Peter B. The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years’
War, 1931-1945. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.

Higson, Andrew. “The Concept of National Cinema.” Screen, 30:4 (1999), 36-47.

Hirahara, Naomi, ed. Greenmakers: Japanese American Gardeners in Southern
California. Los Angeles: Southern California Gardeners’ Federation, 2000.

Hirohata, Joyce, and Paul T. Hirohata, eds. Nisei Voices: Japanese American
Students of the 1930s-Then and Now. Oakland, CA: Hirohata Design, 2004.

Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. New York: Vintage
Books, 1955.

Horowitz, Daniel. The Morality of Spending: Attitudes toward the Consumer Society
in America, 1875-1940. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1992.

Hosokawa, Bill. JACL: Quest of Justice. Los Angeles: Japanese American Citizens
League, 1988.

Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1938.

167
Hsu, Madeline Y. “Transnationalism and Asian American Studies as a Migration-
Centered Project.” Journal of Asian American Studies 11:2 (June 2008), 185-197.

Hunnicutt, Benjamin Kline. "Expansion of Leisure Time." Encyclopedia of
Recreation and Leisure in America, Gary Cross ed. New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons 2004: 311-318.

-----. Work Without End: Abandoning Shorter Hours for the Right to Work. Labor
and Social Change. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988.

Ichihashi, Yamato. Japanese Immigration: Its Status in California. San Francisco,
1915.

Ichioka, Yuji. The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants,
1885-1924. New York: Free Press, 1988.

-----. “Japanese Immigrant Nationalism: The Issei and the Sino-Japanese War, 1937-
1941.” California History 69:3 (Fall 1990): 260-75+.

-----, et al eds. A Buried Past: An Annotated Bibliography of the Japanese American
Research Project Collection. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.

Iminkenkyukai, ed. Nihon no iminkenkyu [Immigration Studies in Japan] Vol. 2.
Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 2008.

-----. Nihon no iminkenkyu [Immigration Studies in Japan] Vol. 1. Tokyo: Akashi
Shoten, 2008.

International Labour Office, ed. “Report on the Development of Facilities for the
Utilization of Leisure.” Geneva: International Labour Office, 1924.

Ishikawa, Hiroyoshi. “Gaisetsu Kenkyusha to kenkyu kikan[Overview of the
Researchers and Research Organizations],” ed. Hiroyoshi Ishikawa, Yoka Goraku
Kenkyu Kiso Bunkenshu: Kaisetsu[Leisure Entertainment Research Primary Source
Series: Bibliographical Notes]. Tokyo: Ozorasha, 1990.

Isomura, Eiichi. Kosei undo gaisetsu [An Introduction to the Welfare Movement].
Tokyo: Joban shobo, 1939.

Itakura, Fumiaki. “Beikoku nikkeijin imin no eiga seisaku: Nihongo toki ‘Chijiku wo
mawasu chikara’ to shinshona nihongo” [Film Production among Japanese
Immigrants in the U.S.: Japanese language talkie “The Axel that rotates the earth”
(1930) and the authenticity of Japanese.” Art Research No. 4 (2004), 101-108.

168

-----. Eiga ni miru senzen no beikoku Nikkei imin [Japanese American Immigrants
Seen through Film]. Ph.D. diss., Kyoto University, 2006.

Ito, Kyoichi. Taisho Showa shoki no Asakusa Geino [Asakusa Entertainment in the
Taisho and Early Showa Period]. Tokyo: Bungeisha, 2002, 69-70.

Izumi, Hirobe, Japanese Pride, American Prejudice. Palo Alto: Stanford University
Press, 2001.

Jackson, Edgar L. "Leisure Research by Canadians and Americans: One Community
or Two Solitudes?" Journal of Leisure Research 35, no. 3 (2003): 292-315.

“Jews Plan Study for New Leisure.” New York Times, Nov. 13, 1933, 10.

John, Andrew, and Jill Klein. “The Boycott Puzzle: Consumer Motivations for
Purchase Sacrifice.” Management Science 49:9 (September 2003): 1196-1209.

Jones, A. M. “Leisure-Time Guidance.” Journal of Educational Sociology, 8:1
(1934) 19-26.

July, A. J. “Can the leisure hours of all the boys of a community be properly directed
by a volunteer organization.” M.A. thesis, University of Notre Dame, 1926.

Kaneko, Atsushi. Hakubutsukan no seijigaku [The Politics of Museums]. Tokyo:
Seikyusha, 2001.

Kasza, Gregory J. The State and Mass Media in Japan 1918-1945. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1988.

Kato, Mikiro. Eigakan to kankyaku no bunkashi[A Cultural History of Movie
Theaters and Audiences]. Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 2006.

Kawasaki, Kan’ichi. “The Japanese Community of East San Pedro, Terminal Island,
California.” M.A. thesis, University of Southern California, 1931.

Kihira, Eisaku, Daizaburo Yui. Gurobarizeshon to teikoku [Globalization and
Empire]. Kyoto: Minerva, 2006.

King, Clarence H. “The Use of Leisure Time by the Japanese of New York City.”
M.A. thesis, Columbia University, 1922.

Kondo, Ken. Hanbei shugi[Anti-Americanism]. Tokyo: Kodansha, 2008.

169

Kroes, Rob. “European Anti-Americanism: What’s New?” The Journal of American
History, 93:2 (2006): 417-431.

Kurashige, Lon. “The Problem of Biculturalism: Japanese American Identity and
Festival before World War II,” Journal of American History (2000): 1632-1654.

Lafargue, Paul. The Right to be Lazy. Trans. Len Bracken. Orig. 1880. Reprinted
Fifth Season Press, 1999.

Larrabee, Eric and Rolf Meyersohn eds. Mass Leisure. Free Press, 1958.

Lee, Shelley Sang-Hee. “Good American Subjects Done through Japanese Eyes:
Race, Nationality, and the Seattle Camera Club, 1924-1929.” Pacific Northwest
Quarterly, (Winter 2004/2005): pp.24-34.

Lears, Jackson. Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America.
Basic Books, 1994.

Leheny, David. The Rules of Play: National Identity and the Shaping of Japanese
Leisure. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003.

Lies, Eugene T. The Leisure of a People: Report of a Recreation Survey of
Indianapolis. Indianapolis: C.E, Crippin & Son, 1929.

-----. The New Leisure: Drafting a Program. New York Times. Dec. 3, 1933: SM3.

Lindeman, E. C. “Youth and Leisure.” Annals of the American Academy of Political
and Social Science, 194 (1937): 59-66.

-----. Leisure—A National Issue: Planning for the Leisure of a Democratic People.
New York: Association Press, 1939.

Lundberg, George A., Mirra Komarovsky, and Mary Alice McInerny. Leisure: A
Suburban Study. New York: Columbia University Press, 1934.

Lyndon, Sandy. The Japanese in the Monterey Bay Region: A Brief History.
Capitola, CA: Capitola Book Co., 1997.

Makela, Lee Arne. “Japanese Attitudes towards the United States Immigration Act of
1924.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Stanford University, 1973.

170
Makino, Mamoru. Nihon Eiga Kenetsu shi [The History of Censorship in Japanese
Cinema]. Tokyo: Pandora, 2003.

-----. “Meijiki no bunmei kaika to zasshi ‘Katsudo shashin kai’ [Cultural Blossom
and the magazine The Cinematograph in the Meiji era], Reprint of Katsudo
Shashinkai Vol. 1. Tokyo: Kokusho Kankokai, 1999.

Mannio, Nilo A. “The Utilization of Leisure in Finland.” International Labour
Review 9 (April 1924), 573-586.

Mason, William M. and John A. McKinstry. “The Japanese of Los Angeles.” Los
Angeles County Museum of Natural History, Contribution 1 (1969).

Matsumoto, Valerie. “Japanese American Women and the Creation of Urban Nisei
Culture in the 1930s.” Valerie Matsumoto and Blake Allmendiger, eds. Over the
Edge: Remapping the American West. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1999: 291-306.

May, Herbert Louis, and Dorothy Petgen. Leisure and Its Use: Some International
Observations. New York: A.S. Barnes and Co., 1928.

May, Lary. Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion
Picture Industry. University of Chicago Press, 1983.

McClain, James L., Merriman, John M., and Ugawa, Kaoru, eds. Edo and Paris:
Urban Life and the State in the Early Modern Era. Ithaca: Cornell University, 1994.

Meyershon, Rolf. "A Comprehensive Bibliography on Leisure, 1900-1958." Mass
Leisure, Eric Larrabee and Rolf Meyershon, eds. Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1958:
391-406.

Minami Hiroshi, Taisho Bunka [Taisho Culture] 1905-1927. Tokyo: Keiso Shobo,
2001, 1
st
ed.1965.

Minamikawa, Fuminori. Nikkei amerikajin no rekishi shakaigaku: Esunishiti, jinshu,
nashonarizumu [A Historical Sociology of Japanese Americans: Ethnicity, Race, and
Nationalism]. Tokyo: Sairyusha, 2007.

Minohara Toshihiro, Hainichi Iminho to Nichibei Kankei [The Anti-Japanese
Immigration Act and Japan-U.S. Relations]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2002.

Miwa, Kimitada. Nichibei Kiki no Kigen to Hainichi Iminho[The Origins of the
Japan-U.S. Crisis and the Anti-Japanese Immigration Act]. Tokyo: Ronsosha, 1997.

171

-----. “1924 Iminho no seiritsu to beika boikotto: Kobe shi no baai [The Passing of
the 1924 Immigration Act and American Goods Boycott: A Case Study of Kobe
City],” Hosoya Chihiro, ed. Taiheiyo Ajia ken no kokusai keizai funso shi[The
Contentious History of International Economy in the Asian Pacific Rim], (Tokyo:
Tokyo University Press, 1983).

Miwa, Yasushi. “Senzen ni okeru shakai minshu shugi no tenkai katei[The
Developmental process of social democracy before the war].” Rekishi Hyoron 380
(Dec. 1981), 35-49.

-----. “1920 nendai ni okeru rodosha no seikatsu bunka [Lifestyles of laborers in the
1920s].” Rekishi Hyoron 477 (January 1990), 88-89.

Mizuuchi, Toshio, Masahiro Kato, and Naoki Oshiro. Modan toshi no keifu :Chizu
kara yomitoku shakai to kukan [Mapping the Modern City: The Genealogy of Socio-
Spatial Urban Configuration]. Kyoto: Nakanishiya Shuppan, 2008.

Modell, John. The Economics and Politics of Racial Accommodation: The Japanese
of Los Angeles, 1900-1942. Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1977.

Morimoto, Toyotomi. “Language and Heritage Maintenance of Immigrants: Japanese
Language Schools in California, 1903-1941.” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of
California, Los Angeles, 1989.

Morris-Suzuki, Tessa, Shunya Yoshimi, eds. Gurobarizeshon no bunka seiji [The
Cultural Politics of Globalization]. Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2004.

Motochi, Haruhiko. Nihon Eiga Zasshi Tiatoru Souran [Title Directory of Japanese
Film Periodicals]. Tokyo: Waizu Shuppan, 2003.

Moving Memories. Prod. Karen Ishizuka. Video. Los Angeles: Japanese American
National Museum, 1993.

Murase, Ichiro Mike. Little Tokyo: One Hundred Years in Pictures. Los Angeles:
Visual Communications, Asian American Studies Central, Inc., 1983.

Nakamura, Robert A., Dir. Toyo Miyatake: Infinite Shades of Gray. Video. Los
Angeles: Japanese American National Museum, 2001.

Nakamura, Seiko. Nomin gekijo nyumon [Introduction to Peasant Theater]. Tokyo:
Shun’yodo, 1927.

172
Nakano, Masaaki, ed. Furukawa roppa to rebyu jidai: Modan toshi no uta, dansu,
warai [Exhibit Catalog for “Furukawa Roppa and the Age of Reviews: The Song,
Dance, and Laughter of Modern Cities]. Tokyo: Waseda University Theater
Museum, 2007.

Nakata, Shunzo. Goraku no kenkyu [A Study on Entertainment]. Tokyo: Shakai
kyoiku kyokai, 1924.

-----. Koikujo yori mitaru goraku to kyuyo [Entertainment and Rest from an
Educational Perspective] Vol. 1 and 2. Tokyo: Chubunkan, 1934.

Nasaw, David. Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements. New York:
Basic Books, 1993.

Nash, Jay B. Spectatoritis. Unknown: Sears Publishing Company. 1932.

National Conference on the Leisure of the People, ed. “The Leisure of the People: A
Handbook, being the report of the National Conference held at Manchester,
November 17-20, 1919.” Manchester: The Conference Committee, 1919.

Neulinger, John. The Psychology of Leisure: Research Approaches to the Study of
Leisure. Illinois: Charles C. Thomas, 1974.

Ngai, Mae. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.

-----. “Asian American History: Reflections on the De-centering of the Field.”
Journal of American Ethnic History 25:4 (Summer 2006): 97-108.

Nihon Eiga Nenkan[Japanese Film Annuals] Taisho 13-14 edition. Tokyo: Asahi
Shimbun, 1925.

Nihon Shimbun Hakubutsukan, ed. Kaigai hojishi to Nikkeijin shakai [Exhibit
Catalog for “Overseas Japanese Language Newspapers and Nikkei Society”].
Yokohama: Japan Newspaper Museum, 2002.

Niiya, Brian, ed. More than a Game: Sport in the Japanese American Community.
Los Angeles: Japanese American National Museum, 2000.

Noda, Kesa. Yamato Colony: 1906-1960. Livingston-Merced JACL Chapter, 1981.

173
Norikoshi, Takao. Alice: Buro-douei wo miryo shita tensai dansa Kawahata Fumiko
Monogatari[Alice: A story on the genious dancer Kawahata Fumiko who fascinated
Broadway]. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1999.

Ogihara, Junko. “The Exhibition of Films for Japanese Americans in Los Angeles
during the Silent Film Era.” Film History, 4 (1990): 81-87.

Ohbayashi, Soshi. Minshu goraku no jissai kenkyu [An Empirical Study on Mass
Entertainment]. Tokyo: Ohara Shakaimondai kenkyujo, 1922.

Okada, Miyo. “A Comparison of the Leisure-Time Activities of Two Hundred Far
Women Living in Two Regions of the United States.” Masters of Science Thesis,
University of Chicago, 1933.

Okamoto, Kaneji. “Goraku kyoikuron no shiso: Gonda Yasunosuke,” Shakai Kyoiku
34: 5 (May 1979), 57-58.

Okihiro, Michael M. AJA Baseball in Hawaii: Ethnic Pride and Tradition. Honolulu,
HI: Hawaii Hochi, Ltd., 1999.

Omi, Michael and Hoawrd Winant. Racial Formation in the United States: From the
1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routeledge, 1994.

Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1999.

Ôoka, Makoto, Hokubei Manyoshu: Nikkeijin tachi no bokyo no uta [A Book of a
Thousand Leaves in North America: Songs of Nostalgia by Japanese Americans].
Tokyo: Shûeisha, 1999.

Osaka shakaibu chosaka, ed. Yoka seikatsu no kenkyu [A Study on Leisure Life].
Tokyo: Kobundo, 1923.

Overstreet, Harry Allen. A Guide to Civilized Leisure. New York: W.W. Norton &
Co., 1934.

Pack, Arthur Newton. The Challenge of Leisure. New York: Macmillan Co., 1934.

Pangburn, Weaver W. “The Worker’s Leisure and His Individuality.” The American
Journal of Sociology, 27:4 (1922): 433-441.

-----. Adventures in Recreation. New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, 1936.

174
Payne, Roger. Why Work? Or the Coming “Age of Leisure and Plenty.” Boston:
Meador, 1939.

Pearson, Warren P. “The Leisure Time Problem.” M.A. thesis, University of Kansas,
1920.

Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-
Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986.

Pieper, Josef. Musse und Kult [Leisure The Basis of Culture]. Translated by Gerald
Malsbary. South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine's Press, 1998.

Pitkins, Walter B. Life Begins at Forty. New York: Whittlesey House, 1932.

“Prof. Huxley Predicts 2-day Working Week.” New York Times, Nov. 17, 1930: 42.

Rafu Nenkan [Los Angeles Annual Directory] 1939-1940 (Los Angeles, Rafu
Shimpo, 1940), JANM Hirasaki Collection, 29.SH.E.4.Box3.

Rafu Nenkan, 1938-1939 [Los Angeles Annual Directory] 1938-1939. Los Angeles,
Rafu Shimpo, 1940. JANM Hirasaki Collection, 29.SH.E.4.Box3.

Rager, F. “The Utilization of Leisure in Austria.” International Labour Review 9
(Feb 1924), 227-241.

Regalado, Samuel O. “Sport and Community in California’s Japanese American
‘Yamato Colony,’ 1930-1945.” Journal of Sport History 19:2 (Summer 1992): 130-
143.

Reed, Dennis. Japanese Photography in America 1920-1940. Los Angeles: Japanese
American Cultural & Community Center, 1985.

Rojek, Chris. Capitalism and Leisure Theory. New York: Tavistock Publications,
1985.

Rogers, R. Roediger and Philip S. Foner. Our Own Time: A History of American
labor and the Working Day. London and New York, 1989.

Rosenzweig, Roy. Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers & Leisure in an
Industrial City, 1870-1920. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

----- and Elizabeth Blackmar. The Park and the People: A History of Central Park.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992.

175

Ross, Steven J. Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in
America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Ruble, Blair A. Second Metropolis: Pragmatic Pluralism in Gilded Age Chicago,
Silver Age Moscow, and Meiji Osaka. Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge
University Press, 2001.

Ruskin, Hillel, ed. International Seminar on Leisure Policies: Leisure, Toward a
Theory and Policy. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1984.

Sakaue, Yasuhiro. Nippon yakyu no keifu gaku [The Genealogy of Japanese
Baseball]. Tokyo: Seikyusha, 2001.

Sasaki, Sasabune. Amerika Seikatsu [American Life]. Los Angeles: Taishusha, 1937.

Sato, Tadao. Nihon Eiga shi[Japanese Film History] Vol. 1. Tokyo: Iwanami
Shoten, 1995.

Sawada, Mitziko. Tokyo Life, New York Dreams: Urban Japanese Visions of
America, 1890-1924. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Schiel, Mark and Tony Fitzmaurice, eds. Cinema and the City: Film and Urban
Societies in a Global Context. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2001.

Segrave, Kerry. American Films Abroad: Hollywood’s Domination of the World’s
Movie Screens. McFarland & Co., 1997.

Seinanku Jushoroku [South West Directory] 1939. Los Angeles, Seinan Kyogikai,
1939. JANM Hirasaki Collection, 29.A.4.

Sen, Sankar, Zeynep Gurhan-Canli and Vicki Morwitz. “Withholding Consumption:
A Social Dilemma Perspective on Cosumer Boycotts.” The Journal of Consumer
Research 28:3 (December 2001): 399-417.

Senuma, Yoshiaki. Seiyo yoka shisoshi[A History of Western Leisure Thought].
Kyoto: Sekaishisosha, 2008.

Shinozaki, Mariko. “Mingei Undo no Hatsuga[The Germination of the Mingei
Movement],” Nihon Fuzokushi Gakkai, ed., Taisho no Tokyo Hyakuwa [One
Hundred Stories of Taisho Tokyo]. Tokyo: Tsukubanesha, 2002.

“Spare Time in the Country.” International Labour Review 9 (June 1924), 917-938.

176

Stark, L. “Five-Day Week Makes its Way in Industry.” New York Times, May 12
(1939): XX4.

Steinberg, Marc. “When Politics Goes Pop: On the Intersections of Popular and
Political Culture and the Case of Serbian Student Protests.” Social Movement
Studies, 3:1 (2004): 3-29.

Steiner, Jesse F. Americans at Play: Recent Trends in Recreation and Leisure Time
Activities. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933a/1970.

Studlar, Gaylyn. "The Perils of Pleasure. Fan Magazine Discourse as Women´s
Commodified Culture in the 1920s." Wide Angle 13:1 (1991): 6-33.

Sumitomo, Akifumi. “Yoka no kiritsuka to toshi shimin mondai: Nihon kindai toshi
kenryoku no rodosha togo rinen [The Regulation of Leisure and Public Issues in the
1920s: The Policies on Laborers Adopted by Japan’s Urban Bureaucrats.” Sogo toshi
kenkyu 46 (September 1992), 125-137.

Svinth, Joseph R. “A Celebration of Tradition and Community: Sumo in the Pacific
Northwest, 1905-1943.” Columbia (1999): 7-14.

Tachibana, Takahiro. Eiga geki to engeki [Movie Plays and Theater Plays].
Unknown: Uchida Rokakudan, 1922.

-----. Eiga kyo no techo [A Note by a Movie Maniac]. Tokyo: Kobunsha, 1924.

-----. Gendai goraku no ura omote [The front and back of modern entertainment].
Tokyo: Daito shuppansha, 1928.

Takahashi, Noboru. “The Use of Leisure Time by Japanese Students in New York
City.” M.A. Thesis, Columbia University, 1928.

Takemura, Tamiro, “Chutogakko yakyu no tanjo,” Shoraku no Keifu: Toshi to yoka
bunka [The History of Laughter and Pleasure: Cities and Leisure Cuture]. Tokyo:
Dobunkan, 1996, 234.

-----. Taisho bunka teikoku no yutopia: sekaishi no tenkanki to taishu shohi shakai no
keisei. Tokyo: Sangensha, 2004.

Takubo Tadanori, “Hainichi Iminho de Nichibei ha shototsu no hohkouhe: Ryokoku
no Kanjoron ga zenmen ni [The Anti-Japanese Immigration Act Led to Japan-U.S.
Conflict: Emotional Arguments Predominate in Both Nations].” Jiyuh (2002): 34-42.

177

Tamai Kiyoshi Kenkyukai, Hainichi Iminho to Nihon no Masu Media[The Anti-
Japanese Immigration Act and the Japanese Mass Media]. Political Science
Department, Faculty of Law, Keio University, 1996.

Tamura, Norio, and Shigehiko Shiramizu, eds. Beikoku Shoki no Nihongo Shimbun
[Early Japanese Newspapers in America]. Tokyo: Koso Shobo, 1986.

Tanaka, Junichiro. Nihon Eiga Hattatsushi [The development history of Japanese
cinema]. Vol. 1, Chuo Koronsha, 1980.

Tanaka, Kiyosuke. “Rodokan Yokakan no henka to shakai taisei[Change and Social
System on the perception of labor and leisure].” Shiso 431 (May, 1960): 611-623.

Tanaka, Stefan. Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1993.

“The New Leisure, its significance and use.” Russell Sage Foundation Library 117
(February 1933), 2-4.

The Okinawa Club of America, ed. History of the Okinawans in North America.
Trans. Ben Kobashigawa. Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Center University
of California, Los Angeles, and The Okinawa Club of America, 1988.

“The Use of Spare Time in Czechoslovakia,” International Labour Review 9 (June
1924), 879-895.

Thompson, E. P. "Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism." Past and
Present 38 (1967): 56-97.

Tomizawa, Katsumi. "1920 nendai Amerika ni okeru yoka, shohi mondai to roshi
kankei no aratana seishin no tanjo: Keiei profesionalizumu to amerika roudo
soudoumei no taiwa [The Birth of a New "Spirit" between Labor Relations and
Leisure/ Consumerism in 1920s America: A "Dialogue" between Administrative
Professionalism and the American Federation of Labor]." Shogaku Ronshu 73, no. 2
(2005): 27-84.

Tsu, Andrew Yu-Yue. “The Use of Leisure Time Among the Chinese Immigrants of
New York City.” M.A. thesis, Columbia University, 1910.

Tsuruya, Kotobuki. Yumeji no mita Amerika [The America Yumeji Saw]. Tokyo:
Shin Jimbutsu Ohrai sha, 1997.

178
Schor, Juliet B. Hatarakisugi no amerika jin: yokisenu yoka no gensho [The
Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure]. Trans. Koji Morioka, et
al. Tokyo: Madosha, 1995.

Senuma, Yoshiaki. Yoka no doko to kanosei [The Status and Potential of Leisure].
Tokyo: Gakubundo: 2005.

Sugiza, Hidechika. “Indasutoriarizumu to yokaron saiko [Rethinking Industrialism
and Leisure].” Yokagaku kenkyu 4 (March 2001): 116-128.

Sumitomo, Akifumi. “Yoka no kiritsuka to toshi shimin mondai: Nihon kindai toshi
kenryoku no rodosha togo rinen[The Regulation of Leisure and Public Issues in
1920s: The Politics of Laborers Adopted by Japan’s Urban Bureaucrats].”
Comprehensive Urban Studies, 46(1992): 125-136.

Ueda, Kyushichi. Sonraku gekijo [Village Theater]. Tokyo: Gakushi shoten, 1934.

-----. Toshi to noson no goraku kyoiku [Entertainment Education in the Urban and
Rural Areas]. Tokyo: Taihaku shobo, 1938.

Unwin, Raymond. “The Influence of Housing Conditions on the Use of Leisure.”
International Labour Review 9 (June 1924), 815-828.

Uono, Koyoshi. “The Factors Affecting the Geographical Aggregation and
Dispersion of the Japanese Residence in the City of Los Angeles.” M.A. thesis,
University of Southern California, 1927.

Usui, Michiko. Nippon no eizo: Utsushie, katsudoshashin, benshi” [Exhibit Catalog
for “Japanese Moving Images: Magic Lanterns, Movie Pictures and Benshi]. Tokyo:
Waseda University Theater Museum, 2007.

Uzawa, Yoshiko. Hashimura Togo: Iero feisu no amerika ijinden[Hashimura Togo:
A Foreign Biography of Yellow Face]. Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 2008.

Vasey, Ruth. The World According to Hollywood, 1918-1939. Wisconsin: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1997.

Veblen, Thornstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. Dover. 1899/1994.

Wagneleitner, Reinhold, and May, Elaine Tyler, eds. "Here, There, and
Everywhere": The Foreign Politics of American Popular Culture. Hanover, NH:
University Press of New England, 2000.

179
Walvin, James. Leisure and Society 1830-1850. London: Longman, 1978.

Waseda, Minako. "Extraordinary Circumstances, Exceptional Practices: Music in
Japanese American Concentration Camps." Journal of Asian American Studies 8: 2
(2005): 171-209.

Williams, Daniel R. "Leisure Identities, Globalization, and the Politics of Place."
Journal of Leisure Research 34: 4 (2002): 351-367.

Wilson, Michael. Pictorialism in California: Photographs 1900-1940. California: J.
Paul Getty Museum and Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1994.

“Workers’ Leisure Committees in Belgium,” International Labour Review 9 (June
1924), 863-878.

_____. “Challenges of the New Leisure.” New York Times, Sept. 24, 1933: SM1.

Wyrnn, Alison M. “Japanese.” Encyclopedia of Ethnicity and Sports in the United
States. Eds. George B. Kirsh, Othello Harris and Claire E. Nolte. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 2000, 251-53.

-----. “Judo.” Encyclopedia of Ethnicity and Sports in the United States. Eds. George
B. Kirsh, Othello Harris and Claire E. Nolte. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000,
264-65.

-----. “Karate.” Encyclopedia of Ethnicity and Sports in the United States. Eds.
George B. Kirsh, Othello Harris and Claire E. Nolte. Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 2000, 267-68.

-----. “Sumo.” Encyclopedia of Ethnicity and Sports in the United States. Eds.
George B. Kirsh, Othello Harris and Claire E. Nolte. Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 2000, 446-47.

Yamada, Takeo. “Daikyokoki no rodo kumiai undo[Labor union movement in the
Great Depression era].” Rekishi Hyoron 380 (Dec. 1981), 49-64.

Yamakura, Akihiro. “’National Humiliation’: Anti-American Reactions in Japan to
the Immigration Act of 1924,” Tenri Daigaku Gakuho 175 (1994), 95-116.

Yamamoto, Eriko. "Cheers for Japanese Athletes: The 1932 Los Angeles Olympics
and the Japanese American Community." Pacific Historical Review 69, no. 3 (2000):
399-430.

180
Yamamoto, Kikuo, Nihon Eiga ni okeru Gaikoku Eiga no Eikyo [Foreign Influences
on Japanese Cinema]. Tokyo: Waseda University Press, 1988.

Yamano, Hidetsugu. “1920 nendai Osaka Kobe Dansho [The Osaka Kobe divide in
the 1920s],” 1920 nendai Nihon ten zuroku [1920s Japan exhibit catalogue]. Tokyo:
Tokyo Metropolitan Museum and Asahi Shimbun, 1988.

Yamashita, Kanshi Stanley. “Terminal Island: Ethnography of an Ethnic
Community: Its Dissolution and Reorganization to a Non-spatial Community.” Ph.D.
Dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 1985.

Yoo, David K. Growing Up Nisei: Race, Generation, and Culture among Japanese
Americans of California, 1924-1949. Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

Yoshida, George. Reminiscing in Swingtime: Japanese American in American
Popular Music, 1925-1960. National Japanese American Historical Society, 1997.

Yoshida Tadao, Kokujoku: Kyojitsu no ‘Hainichi’ Iminho no Kiseki [National
Humiliation: The Trajectory of the Truth and False of the ‘Anti-Japanese’
Immigration Act]. Tokyo: Keizai Ohrai sha, 1983.

Yoshimi, Shunya. Toshi no Doramaturugi: Tokyo sakariba no shakaishi [The
Dramaturgy of the City: A Social History of Amusement Centers in Tokyo]. Tokyo:
Kobundo, 1987.

-----. Hakurankai no seijigaku: Manazashi no kindai [The Politics of Fairs: The
Gaze of Modernity]. Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1992.

-----, Shirahata Yozaburo, et al. Undokai to Nihon kindai[Sports Day and Japanese
Modernity]. Tokyo: Seikyusha, 1999.

-----, ed. 1930 nendai no media to shintai[Media and the Body in the 1930s]. Tokyo:
Seikyusha, 2002.

-----. Shinbei to Hanbei: Sengo nihon no seijiteki muishiki [Pro-American and Anti-
American: Political absentmindedness in postwar Japan]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten,
2007.

Yu, Henry. Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern
America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

181
APPENDIX A
GRADUATE THESES ON LEISURE WRITTEN FROM 1920 TO 1929
304

1920

Challman, Grace McMillan. “The use of leisure time by the Italians of New York
City.” Master’s thesis, Columbia University, 1920.

Pearson, Warren Prescott. “The leisure time problem.” Master’s thesis, University of
Kansas, 1920.

Walsh, Thomas Francis Xavier, Reverend. “A study of the increased wages and of
the increased leisure of the working class, in a Catholic parish in Upper Manhattan.”
Master’s thesis, Columbia University, 1920.

1921

Goldschmidt, Estelle. “The use of leisure time by Norwegians.” Master’s essay,
Columbia University, 1921.

1922

King, Clarence Harper. “The use of leisure time by the Japanese of New York City.”
Master’s thesis, Columbia University, 1922.

1923

Burkart, Helen Alpha. “Motivation in leisure.” Master’s thesis. Columbia University,
1923.

Fitzgerald, A. Ruth. “Training for the worthy use of leisure.” Master’s thesis,
University of Michigan, 1923.

1924

Anderberry, Matilda Christene. “The use of literature in training for leisure.”
Master’s thesis, University of Nebraska, 1924.

304
Search conducted on WorldCat between April and June 2007. It is possible that the entries
have increased since the database is still being updated.

182

1925

Boysworth, Mabel. “Leisure time activities of adolescents in North Carolina.”
Master’s thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1925.

Fulton, Kate. “Adolescent leisure time activities in Mississippi.” Master’s thesis,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1925.

1926

July, Alphonse John. “Can the leisure hours of all the boys of a community be
properly directed by a volunteer organization.” Master’s thesis, University of Notre
Dame, 1926.

Leclerc, Louis R. “The school and leisure-time guidance.” Master’s thesis,
University of Notre Dame, 1926.

Piercy, Mary Elizabeth Stanley. “The playground in its relation to the leisure time of
the junior high school pupil as seen by a survey of agencies for recreation in Fresno,
California.” Master’s thesis, Univ. of Calif., Aug.1926.

Saxman, Ethel Julia. “Students' use in leisure time of activities learned in physical
education in state teachers colleges.” New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers
College, Columbia University, 1926.

1927

Hulbert, Winifred E. “A survey of six of the ‘leisure-time’ organization dealing with
Girls.” Master’s thesis, Columbia University (Education), 1927.

1928

Bantz, Robert King. “Leisure time needs of a boys' group as revealed by a study of
samples.” Master’s thesis, Ohio State University, 1928.

Lusby, Margaret Christine. “Leisure time of the city adolescent.” M.A. thesis,
University of Cincinnati, 1928.

Noll, Ella Marie. “How pupils of the Lincoln junior high school spend leisure
hours.” Master’s thesis, University of Nebraska (Lincoln campus), 1928.

183
Takahashi, Noboru. “The use of leisure by Japanese students in New York City.”
Master’s thesis, Columbia University, 1928.

1929

Ganser, Gerald John. “A survey of the problems of machine-wrought leisure.” B.S.
thesis, Iowa State College, 1929.

Hippaka, Thomas A. “Industrial arts and the worthy use of leisure time.” M.S. thesis,
University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1929.

Rodenwold, Zelta Feike. “The use of leisure by homemakers in a college
community.” M.S. thesis, Iowa State College, 1929.

Thurow, Mildred B. “A study of the leisure of fifty Kansas farm women.” M.S.
thesis, Kansas State Agricultural College, 1929.

Wyatt, Oscar Deen. “An analysis of leisure time activities of adults in Fort Worth,
Texas.” Master’s thesis, Colorado State Teachers College, Dept. of Education, 1929.

184
APPENDIX B
GRADUATE THESES ON LEISURE WRITTEN FROM 1930 TO 1940

1930

Bailey, Floyd Samuel. “Recreation as an integral part of the program of religious
education.” M.A. thesis, Pacific School of Religion, 1930.

Brierton, Alice. “Education for the use of leisure.” M.A. thesis, Marquette
University, 1930.

Dahlberg, Arthur. “Jobs, machines, and capitalism.” Ph. D. diss., University of
Wisconsin, 1931.

Hawkins , Wayne L. “The relation of the extra-curricular activities to leisure time
education.” M.A. thesis, Stanford University, 1930.

Kuschke, Blanche Metheney. “A study of the factors that may affect the leisure time
of rural homemakers in Montana.” M.S. thesis, Montana State University, 1930.

Mayer, Henrietta Claire. “Leisure time occupations of certain Italian immigrants in
New York City.” M.A. thesis, Columbia University, 1930.

Miles, Ward Ray. “Social and leisure activities in rural families distribution of
activity in selected areas of Oklahoma, Kansas, and California.” M.S. thesis,
University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1930.

Springer, Elmer Clanahan. “A study of the use of leisure of one hundred women of
Tuscaloosa, Alabama.” M.S. thesis, University of Alabama, 1930.

Witherspoon, Edna. “A study of leisure time of high school girls.” A.M. thesis,
Indiana University, 1930.

1931

Croker, Roberta L. “The stewardship of leisure.” D. Min. thesis, San Francisco
Theological Seminary, 1931.

Foster, Perley Addison. “(The) use of leisure time by young men.” M.A. thesis,
Boston University, 1931.

185
Humphrey, Alice Wise. “A study of certain leisure time activities and financial
practices in the homes of Minnesota high schools.” M.S. thesis, University of
Minnesota, 1931.

Minton, Eunice Lucile. “A study of juvenile delinquency and the use of leisure time
in Richmond, Virginia.” M.S. thesis, College of William and Mary, 1931.

Nicholson, Paul H. “Adult leisure activities in a Colorado rural school district.” M.A.
thesis, Colorado State Teachers College, Dept. of Education, 1931.

Noble, Emily Harris. “The policies of national governments for the provision of
recreation for the wage worker.” Ph. D. diss., University of California, 1931.

Worrell, Florence M. “How a group of business girls spend their leisure time.” M.A.
thesis, Ohio State University, 1931.

1932

Betterton, Edward. “The machine and leisure: a blessing or a curse to mankind.”
M.A. thesis, Drew University, 1932.

C C Harvey. “Leisure time activities of boys and girls in mining communities of
West Virginia.” M.A. thesis, Miami University, Dept. of Education, 1932.

Constance Arbaugh. “Leisure time activities of San Jose, California, high school
girls.” M.A. thesis, University of Oklahoma, 1932.

Crise, Donald Leach. “The development of the worthy use of leisure time objective
of education in the Pulaski County, Indiana, public schools.” A.M. thesis, Indiana
University, 1932.

Graham, Rosalind. “Industrial leisure.” M.A. thesis, College of the City of Detroit,
1932.

Gray, Wayne Twinem. “Leisure time activities as a measure of the rural standard of
life.” Ph. D. diss., University of Wisconsin,Madison, 1932.

Jacobson, Herman Leslie. “Physical education as training for the proper use of
leisure time.” Ph. M. diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1932.

Redifer, Ada A. “A study of the leisure time of adolescence between 1850-1875 : as
revealed from fifty biographies and memoirs.” Ed. M. thesis, Temple University,
1932.

186

Wyseman, M Ildephonse. “The Catholic high school and education for leisure.”
M.A. Ed. thesis, Catholic University of America, 1932.

1933

Baker, Courtland. “Leisure time activities of high school senior boys in Columbus,
Ohio 1933.” M.A. thesis, Ohio State University, 1933.

Barron, Harry I. “Leisure-time interests, preferences, and activities of children on the
lower east side of New York City: a study of 1632 junior high school students.”
M.A. thesis, Graduate School for Jewish Social Work, 1933.

Bastow, Alice. “A study of the objectives and activities of seven organizations
engaged in directing leisure time activities of adolescent girls.” M.A. thesis,
Northwestern University, 1933.

Bozeman, Wilfred Boswald. “A study of some relationships of social background to
leisure-time behavior of one hundred colored women of Lawrence, Kansas.” M.A.
thesis, University of Kansas, Sociology, 1933.

Hopper, Lillian Eaves. “A laboratory study in teaching the worthy use of leisure.”
M.S. thesis, University of Colorado, 1933.

Horst, Claude William. “A study of the leisure time preferences of boys attending a
part time vocational school.” M.A. thesis, University of Washington, 1933.

Hosler, Myrth Edna. “Leisure time activities of high school senior girls in Columbus,
Ohio 1933.” M.A. thesis, Ohio State University, 1933.

Okada, Miyo. “A comparison of the leisure-time activities of two hundred farm
women living in two regions of the United States.” S.M. thesis, University of
Chicago, Department of Home Economics, 1933.

Weedon, Vivian. “A technique for determining interest in leisure-time activities.”
M.A. thesis, Ohio State University, 1933.

1934

Barlow, Irene Smith. “Leisure-time activities of two hundred high-school girls in
Chicago.” S.M. Thesis, University of Chicago, Department of Home Economics,
1934

187
Beatty, Helen McKee. “A study of the leisure time of nurses.” A.M. thesis, Indiana
University, 1934.

Bourgeois, Vesta Richard. “A survey regarding leisure schools an agency for
developing interests.” Thesis, George Peabody College for Teachers, 1934.

Fuston, Jalasca. “Interests and leisure time activities of boys and girls of
consolidated high schools.” Ed. M. thesis, University of Oklahoma, 1934.

Gates, Nellie. “The worthy use of leisure objective in the teaching of English
literature.” M.A. thesis, Wichita State University, Dept. of Education, 1934.

Geer, Helen Thornton. “Participation of public libraries in leisure time activities for
adults in the field of the fine arts.” Masters essay. Columbia University, Library
School, 1934.

Gibbs, George Edwin. “A survey of the leisure time and recreational life of the negro
boy in Columbus, Ohio.” M.A. thesis, Ohio State University, 1934.

Green, Helen Maurine. “A comparison of in-school and out-of-school leisure time
activities of fifty-five junior high school girls in Dearborn Michigan.” M.S. thesis,
Iowa State College, 1934.

Hayward, Virginia A. “The leisure time activities of the students in Gerstmeyer
technical high school Terre Haute, Indiana.” M.A. thesis, Northwestern University,
1934.

Hupp, Carrie A. “An analysis of the leisure time activities of the graduates of a state
teachers college.” M.A. thesis Colorado State Teachers College, Dept. of Physical
Education, 1934.

Johnson, Marjorie Augusta. “The leisure activities of a group of negro junior high
school girls in Columbus Ohio.” M.A. thesis, Ohio State University, 1934.

Leger, George Harlow. “The use of leisure time and its social implications.” M.A.
thesis, University of Washington, 1934

Martin, Ralph W. “Leisure time reading interests and habits of school pupils in a
small village.” M.A. thesis, University of Rochester, 1934

Miller, Doris Reed. “A psychological study of some unemployed people attending
leisure time school at Y.W.C.A.” M.A. thesis, Ohio State University, 1934.

188
Murray, Eloise. “Contribution of the American Indian to leisure time.” M.A. thesis,
George Peabody College for Teachers, 1934.

O'Neal, Harry Edward. “A study of the leisure time activities of Cincinnati teachers”
Master of Education thesis, University of Cincinnati, 1934.

Opdahl, Alma Amanda. “What the schools are doing to meet the leisure problem as
revealed in current educational literature.” M.S. thesis, North Dakota Agricultural
College, 1934.

Phillips, Elizabeth Estelle. “Increasing the leisure-time value of a high school's
program.” A.M. thesis, Indiana University, 1934.

Pitman, Paul Marsh. “The new education for leisure.” Seminar paper University of
California, School of Education, Berkeley, 1934.

Tandy, W Lou. “Economics of leisure a study in consumption.” PH.D. diss.,
University of Illinois, 1934.

Whorton, Maud Rhea. “A study of leisure time of two hundred twelve women in
small towns of Alabama with college, high school and grammar school training and
other educational opportunities.” M.S. thesis, Auburn University, 1934.

Wilder, Emma Lucy. “The inadequacies of the present program of physical
education activities for girls to provide recreational interests for leisure-time.” Ed. D.
thesis, Harvard Graduate School of Education, 1934.

Wright, Dorothy Grauerholz, “Educational influences on the use of leisure time.”
M.A. thesis, University of Kansas, Sociology, 1934.

1935

Albrecht, Dorothy. “A hobby as a leisure time activity.” M.A. thesis, Marquette
University, 1935.

Barron, Harry I. “Leisure-time interests, preferences, and activities of children on the
lower east side of New York City.” M.A. thesis, Graduate School for Jewish Social
Work, 1935.

Dore, Bernadette Lidwin. “A study of the leisure activities of intermediate grade
pupils.” M.A. thesis, George Washington University, 1935.

189
Fox, John Fenton. “Leisure-time interests and activities of the school children of
Millburn township, New Jersey.” Ph.D. diss., New York University, School of
Education, 1935.

Gessford, Margaret. “Social effectiveness and the leisure time activities of junior
high school girls.” M.A. thesis, George Washington University, 1935.

Hampton, Frances. “New leisure: how is it spent.”
M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1935.

Hubbell, Marion B. “The Allport-Vernon study of values and leisure-time activities.”
Masters essay, Columbia University, 1935

Keller, Vernet S. “A survey of the leisure education programs of the smaller public
high schools in western Massachusetts.” M.S. thesis, Massachusetts State College,
1935.

LaFoy, Jake. “The responsibility of physical education toward leisure time
preparation.” M.S. thesis, University of Wisconsin. Madison,1935.

Larse, Lloyd Q. “Leisure time preferences and practices to senior high school
pupils.” M. Ed. thesis, University of Oklahoma, 1935.

Lewis, Mary Elizabeth. “A study of the leisure time activities of 100 white and 100
Negro men who were classified as "common" or "unskilled" laborers, in 1933.” M.A.
thesis, Ohio State University, 1935.

Li, Hsiu Fen. “Leisure time guidance.” M.A. thesis, Stanford University, 1935.

Mayberry, Ora L. “The leisure time activities of girls with below average mentality.”
M.S. thesis, Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College, 1935.

McMillan, Helda. “Factors that affect the amount and use of leisure by homemakers
in a small Iowa community.” M.S. thesis, Iowa State College, 1935.

Meier, Barbara. “A survey of the leisure time activities and desires of the adult white
population of Azusa.” M.S. thesis, University of Southern California, 1935.

Miller, Bernice Amanda. “A study of the leisure time of one hundred and five
Lincoln women, wives of professional men.” M.A. thesis, University of Nebraska,
1935.

190
Murray, Margaret Elizabeth Miriam. “Effects of enriched leisure time on the social
attitudes and personalities of young girls, with psychological interpretations.”
M.A. thesis, University of Kansas, Psychology 1935.

Reynolds, Lucile Winifred. “Leisure-time activities of a select group of farm
women.” Thesis: University of Chicago, 1935

Settle, Lucy Belle. “Use of leisure time by a group of Florida home demonstration
women.” M.A. thesis, University of Florida, 1935.

Williams, Walter. “A study of the leisure time activities of school teachers.” A.M.
thesis, Washington University, Dept. of Education, 1935.

Wilson, Wildus Gail. “Leisure time activities of the guild-craftsmen of the Young
women's Christian association, Columbus, Ohio – 1935.” M.A. thesis, Ohio State
University, 1935.

1936

Airlane, Anita Lucille. “The leisure-time activities of 244 high school students at
West Chicago.” M.A. thesis, Northwestern University, 1936.

Batchelor, Wilbur Commodore. “Changing conceptions of leisure and leisure
education.” Ed. D. thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 1936.

Bergholz, Mabel Cady. “A study of the leisure time of high school girls.” M.S.
thesis, Oregon State College, 1936.

Collier, Dorothy. “A psychological analysis of the leisure-time activities of some
individuals of normal and some of pre-psychotic personality.” Ph. D. diss., New
York University, 1936.

Doucette, Lawrence. “Organizing a Catholic diocese for leisure-time activities on a
parochial basis.” Masters essay, Columbia University, 1936.

Doyle, Mary Angela. “What is the Catholic pattern of training for leisure?” M.A.Ed.
thesis, Catholic University of America, 1936.

Goode, Marianna. “The leisure time activities of one hundred relief and one hundred
non-relief children in Columbus, Ohio, 1936.” Masters of Advanced Studies in
Architecture thesis, Ohio State University, 1936.

191
Hesmer, Theodore Casper. “The leisure time activities of five hundred and thirty two
business and professional men of the city of Louisville.” M.A. thesis, University of
Kentucky, 1936.

Hurley, Nina Vivian. “A study in junior high school leisure reading.” M.A. thesis,
Colorado State College of Education, Division of Literature and Languages, 1936.

Murdock, Erma. “Coeducational leisure time activities.” M.A. thesis, Stanford
University, 1936.

Noel, Jane Ethel. “The stimulation of leisure time reading of high school pupils
through advertising.” A.M. thesis, Washington University, Dept. of Education, 1936.

Oakley, Helen Elizabeth. “A study of factors influencing leisure activities of
homemakers in selected small towns of Tennessee.” M.S. thesis, University of
Tennessee, 1936.

Reynolds, Stella Gertrude. “A constructive leisure time program for the primary boys
in the American School for the Deaf.” M.A. thesis, Hartford Seminary Foundation,
Hartford School of Religious Education, 1936.

Riley, John W. “Dynamics of non-family group leisure in a New England town,
1857 to 1935.” Ph. D. diss., Harvard University, Dept. of Sociology, 1936.

Robinson, Reginald. “The leisure time activities of public school children from ten to
eighteen years of age attending junior high school and living on the lower west side
of New York city.” Ph.D. diss., New York University, School of Education, 1936.

Shai, George L. “Avocations: a guide to four leisure time pursuits.” M.A. thesis,
Ohio State University, 1936.

Szymanski, Casimir J. “Mental discipline in leisure time.” M.A. thesis, Niagara
University, 1936.

Weeks, Elizabeth Harriet. “The church and the problem of leisure time.” M.R.E.
thesis, Newton Theological Institution, 1936.

Wenz, Leonard Arthur. “A survey of the leisure time interests and activities of junior
high school boys.” M.S. thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1936.

192
1937

Baker, Roy T. “Use of leisure time by Liberal, Kansas, high school students.” M.S.
thesis, Kansas State Teachers College of Emporia, 1937.

Beyer, Fred Charles. “A survey of the leisure activities of adults in the Oakes, North
Dakota, community.” M.A. thesis, Stanford University, 1937.

Gates, Clarence Ray. “A leisure emphasis in education.” Ed. D. diss., Teachers
College, Columbia University, 1937.

Heller, Joseph Henry. “Relation of industrial arts training to both leisure-time and
part-time jobs of "8A" boys in San Antonio junior schools session, 1936-1937.”
M.S. Thesis, A. & M. College of Texas. 1937.

Hogan, William Emanuel. “A study of the leisure time activities of Medill junior and
senior high school pupils.” M.S. thesis, George Williams College, 1937.

Holland, Bertram Holbrook. “Biology as a medium for guidance in the worthy use of
leisure.” M.A. thesis, Boston University, 1937.

Johnston, Julius H. “A survey of the recreational and leisure time activities of a
representative group of male adults of Lawton, Oklahoma, a community of 15,000
population.” M.S. thesis, Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College, 1937.

Landers, Frederick W. “Pewter as a medium in industrial arts education and leisure
time activities.” Ph.D. diss, New York University. 1937

Lawrence, Gladys C. “The history and educational uses of some leisure time
activities.” Ph.D. diss., New York University, School of Education, 1937.

Levy, William. “A study of the adult use of leisure time and its implications for
secondary education.” M.A. thesis, Ohio State University, 1937.

May, Albert Clinton. “A study of the leisure time of the alumni of Newcomerstown
High School.” M.A. thesis, Ohio State University, 1937.

McCullough, Milton W. “The leisure time of 171 Ohio State University students.”
M.A. thesis, Ohio State University, 1937.

Morrill, Allen Conrad. “Restoration leisure: the background of English drama, prose,
and poetry between 1660 and 1688.” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1937.

193
Pinks, James Woodward. “Current trends of leisure and of education for leisure.”
M.A. thesis, University of Colorado, 1937.

Riley, John W. “Dynamics of non-family group leisure in a New England town,
1857 to 1935.” Ph. D. diss., Harvard University, 1937.

Rouzer, Margaret Neely. “A study of modern trends in education in the use of leisure
time and its challenge to the church.” M.R.E. thesis, General Assembly's Training
School for Lay Workers, 1937.

Stacey, Donald A. “A survey of the recreational and leisure-time activities of
Washington Township, Lucas County, Ohio, School District.” M.A. thesis, Bowling
Green State University, 1937.

Ward, Ernest H. “A study of the leisure-time activities of the Civilian conservation
corps camps in Ohio.” M.A. thesis, Ohio State University, 1937.

1938

Armstrong, Gladys Mae. “Leisure time activities of home economics pupils of the
Amarillo, Texas, senior high school.” M.S. thesis, Iowa State College, 1938.

Bennett, Arvle F. “A comparative study of the recreational and leisure time
activities of high school students, CCC camp enrollees, college students, and adults.”
M.S. thesis, Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College, 1938.

Bond, Dorothea Jane. “A study of the college woman's participation in physical
activities as part of her leisure time program.” M.S. thesis, University of Wisconsin--
Madison, 1938.

Coon, Herbert L. “Contributions of physical education in the exempted village high
schools of Ohio toward worthy use of leisure.” M.A. thesis, Ohio State University,
1938.

Cronin, Bernard J. “A study of the leisure-time activities of a selected group of
dependent children in Washington, D.C.” M.S.W. thesis, Catholic University of
America, 1938.

Cruey, G Wayne. “The educational program of the CCC: its provision for leisure
time and vocational guidance. “M.A. thesis, Bowling Green State University, 1938.

194
Goheen, Margaret Rawson. “A program of choral music, intended to prepare
students of the Tacoma high schools for worthy use of leisure time.” M.A. thesis,
State College of Washington, 1938.

Herrala, Sulo John. “A survey of adult recreation and leisure time activites in St.
Louis county, Minnesota.” M.S. thesis, University of Wisconsin,1938.

Hotchkiss, Myra Cantrell. “Physical education as training for the use of leisure
time.” M.A. thesis, University of Arizona, 1938

Kranz, Ruth. “Consideration of the problem of leisure-time activities of the aged
from an analysis of 48 recipients of old age assistance in New York City.” M.A.
thesis, Columbia University, 1938.

McCann, Rita Margaret. “A study of the demands of youth for leisure-time activities
as demonstrated through the National Youth Councils.” M.S.W. thesis, Catholic
University of America, 1938.

McCurdy, Harry Henry. “A leisure time program for junior high school boys.” M.Ed.
thesis, University of Texas, 1938.

Smith, Lucille Estelle. “Leisure reading preferences: a study of Windsor Locks high
school students.” M.A. thesis, University of Maine, 1938.

Tyler, Arthur William. “Leisure time activities and interests of junior high school
boys in Waco, Texas” M.S. thesis, East Texas State Teachers College, 1938.

Wakeman, Marion R. “Educational leisure time activities and juvenile delinquency.”
Ed. M. thesis, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1938.

1939

Casaday, Roma Durant. “Improving leisure time activities of high school youth
through the church.” M.A. thesis, Pacific School of Religion, 1939.

Claybon, John Irvin. “An Investigation of the leisure time activities of 210 students
of the Carver Junior High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma.” M.S. thesis, Kansas State
Teachers College, 1939.

Dennis, Fan. “Social aspects of leisure time activities of teen age girls in Dallas.”
M.A. thesis, Southern Methodist University. 1939

195
Dwork, Frances. “A study of leisure class concepts.” M.A. thesis, Columbia
University, 1939.

Guthrie, William S. “Student use of leisure time and its significance in a total
educational program.” Masters of Advanced Studies in Architecture thesis, Ohio
State University, 1939.

Hahn, William Parsons. “The leisure time activities and interests of the boys of
Spencer High School.” M.S. thesis, West Virginia University, 1939.

Higgins, Fannie George. “Leisure time activities of children in an industrial
community.” M.S. thesis, Alabama Polytechnic Institute, 1939.

Kido, Mitsuyuki. “A study of the leisure time activities of tenth grade students at
Farrington High School.” M.A. thesis, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, 1939.

Newhouse, Samuel Sidney. “Living conditions and leisure-time activities in the
lower west side of Columbus, 1938.” Masters of Advanced Studies in Architecture
thesis, Ohio State University, 1939.

O'Day, Helen Agatha. “A study of children's leisure-time preferences in radio
programs.” M.A. thesis, DePaul University, 1939.

Perkins, Dale H. “A study of the leisure time activities of 100 senior high school
boys in Houston, Texas.” M.A. thesis, Colorado State College of Education,
Department of Education, 1939.

Porter, Harold William. “A training program for adults in the worthy use of leisure
time.” M.S. thesis, Colorado State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, 1939.

Potts, Charlie Kinchin. “The influence of the Bennettsville high school in building
the occupational and leisure patterns of its students.” A.M. thesis, Duke University,
1939.

Richardson, W Eugene. “The adult leisure time opportunities available in a section
of South Columbus, Ohio, 1938-1939.” Masters of Advanced Studies in Architecture
thesis, Ohio State University, 1939.

Sager, Dora Frances. “An investigation of the leisure reading interests of junior high
school pupils.” M.A. thesis, Claremont Colleges, 1939.

196
Smith, Presley Edward. “Examining the curriculum for applications for training in
the worthy use of leisure with special reference to the high schools in Uvalde
county.” M.A. thesis, University of Texas, 1939.

Weintz, Elizabeth Emilie. “The effectiveness of radio broadcasts in stimulating the
leisure reading of high school students.” M.A. thesis, University of Wisconsin--
Madison, 1939.

1940

Adams, Gene. “Explorations in the use of leisure time.” M.A. thesis, Southwest
Texas State Teachers College, 1940.

Allard, Lucile. “A study of the leisure activities of certain elementary school teachers
of Long island.” Ph. D. diss., Columbia University, 1940.

Betnun, Marvin. “A comparison of the leisure-time activities of delinquent and non-
delinquent boys in Salt Lake and vicinity.” M.S.W. thesis, University of Utah, 1940.

Bivins, Bessie Ruth. “Community leisure resources available to negro youth in
Columbus.” Masters of Advanced Studies in Architecture thesis, Ohio State
University, 1940.

Damkov, Peter R. “A survey of two leisure time agencies, St. Martha and Reed street
settlements in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.” Masters of Advanced Studies in
Architecture thesis, Ohio State University, 1940.

de Schauensee, Zita. “A study of leisure-time activities for children and young
people in Prince Georges County, Maryland.” M.S.W. thesis, Catholic University of
America, 1940.

Dulles, Foster Rhea. “America learns to play; a history of popular recreation, 1607-
1940.” Ph. D. diss., Columbia University, 1940.

Ebersole, Dorothy Franche. “An approach to the study of the leisure time activities
of women whose children have reached a self-sufficing age.” M.S. thesis, Iowa State
College, 1940.

Foley, James Henry. “The contribution of the children's museum to the problems of
leisure.” M. Ed. thesis, Boston College, 1940.

197
Grant, Will Brewer. “A comparison of the leisure time activities of a selected group
of juvenile offenders and a selected group of non-offenders residing in Evanston,
Illinois.” M.A. thesis, Northwestern University, 1940.

Harris, James J. “A survey of supervisory practices of leisure time agencies in
Chicago.” M.S. thesis, George Williams College, 1940.

Johnson, Cyrus M. “A study of certain leisure time activities and interests of
Grandview Heights school children, 1940.” Masters of Advanced Studies in
Architecture thesis, Ohio State University, 1940.

Myers, Helen A. “The drives behind the non-school leisure time activities of a group
of fifth grade children.” M.A. thesis, Catholic University of America, 1940.

Poirier, William C. “A study of the major needs of group and class leaders dealing
with youth in leisure time agencies.” M.S. thesis, George Williams College, 1940.

Poppenberg, Henry Joseph. “A survey of the leisure time activities of adults in
Greeley,Colorado.” M.A. thesis, Colorado State College of Education, Division of
the Arts, 1940.

Pratt, W Stanley. “The creative use of leisure time.” B.D. thesis, Andover Newton
Theological School, 1940.

Ramsey, Esta Lee Fitzgerald. “Leisure activities of homemaking students in an
Oklahoma rural community.” M. Home Ec. Ed. thesis, University of Oklahoma,
1940.

Rule, Paul Hopkins. “Industrial arts in education for leisure.” M. Ed. thesis,
University of Washington, 1940.

Sayles, Howard Walling. “Leisure time activities and attitudes of seventy-six
delinquent boys.” M.S. thesis, Boston University, 1940.

Strohoefer, Francis Kilian. “The development of procedures for meeting leisure time
needs for boys. An experiment in the organization and administration of a boys' club
as a phase of a leisure-time program for boys at Bayonne, New Jersey, conducted
with limited financial support.” Ph. D. diss, New York University, School of
Education, 1940.

Taylor, Charles. “Locating and satisfying the leisure-time interests of the pupils of
Willis High School, Delaware, Ohio.” M.A. thesis, Ohio State University, 1940.

198
Von Trebra, J T. “Major problems and generalizations in the field of leisure as
revealed by an analysis of critical books.” M.A. thesis, Colorado State College of
Education, Division of Education, 1940.

-----. “A study of community leisure time activities.” Ph. D. diss., Colorado State
College of Education, Division of Education, 1940.

Willis, Edna. “A study to determine whether certain selected factors influence the
leisure time activities and interests of school of education students at New York
university.” Ph.D. diss., New York University, School of Education, 1940.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Pachucas, pachucos, and their culture: Mexican American youth culture of the Southwest, 1910-1955

PDF

Trans-Pacific localism: emigration, adaptation, and nationalism among Japanese immigrants in California, 1890-1940

PDF

Connected: information and state power between the United States and South Africa

PDF

Concrete utopia: the development of roads and freeways in Los Angeles, 1910-1950

PDF

The people of the fall: refugee nationalism in Little Saigon, 1975-2005

PDF

Sakaliou: reciprocity, mimesis, and the cultural economy of tradition in Siberut, Mentawai Islands, Indonesia

PDF

Lapses in memory: slavery memorials and historical amnesia in the United States

PDF

State restructuring and pathways to local democracy: idea and politics of decentralization in Japan and Korea

PDF

Regarding Vietnam: affects in Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic literature and film

PDF

Elevated: Ballet and culture in the United States, World War II to the National Endowment for the Arts

PDF

Japanese-American basketball: constructing gender, ethnicity, and community

PDF

Egalitarianism begins at home and in cohorts: egalitarianism in United States public opinion, 1952-2000

PDF

China's investment in the United States and the public relations implications: A case study of the Lenovo-IBM acquisition

PDF

Representational conquest: tourism, display, and public memory in “America’s finest city”

PDF

The resiliency of Arab authoritarianism and the Arab-Israeli conflict: the United States' role in the cases of Egypt and Jordan

PDF

The role of race in configuring park use: a political ecology perspective

PDF

Forced march to modernity: State-imposed cultural change and regime stability in 20th-century east Asia

PDF

A megaproject matrix: ideology, discourse and regulation in the Delhi Metro Rail

PDF

Going beyond the victory garden: War, gender, and women of national concern

PDF

The origin and development of continuous narrative in Roman art, 300 B.C. - A.D. 200

Asset Metadata

Creator Itatsu, Yuko (author)

Core Title Beyond nationalism: a history of leisure discourse in and between the United States and Japan, 1910-1940

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program History

Publication Date 07/30/2011

Defense Date 05/04/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Japan,Leisure,OAI-PMH Harvest,transnational history,US

Place Name Japan (countries), USA (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Ethington, Philip J. (committee chair), Iwamura, Jane Naomi (committee member), Kurashige, Lon (committee member)

Creator Email itatsu2002@yahoo.co.jp,yitatsu@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2431

Unique identifier UC1494032

Identifier etd-ITATSU-2934 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-567537 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2431 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-ITATSU-2934.pdf

Dmrecord 567537

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Itatsu, Yuko

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu