Radical crossings: from peasant rebellions to internationalist multiracial labor organizing among Japanese immigrant communities in Hawaii and California, 1885–1935

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Content RADICAL CROSSINGS:
FROM PEASANT REBELLIONS TO INTERNATIONALIST
MULTIRACIAL LABOR ORGANIZING AMONG JAPANESE
IMMIGRANT COMMUNITIES IN HAWAII AND CALIFORNIA,
1885–1935

by

Yushi Yamazaki

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirement for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)

December 2015

Copyright 2015 Yushi Yamazaki

ii
Dedication

To my father, Shigeki Yamazaki,
and my mother, Fumiko Yamazaki

iii
Acknowledgments
I am thankful of all the academic and spiritual support from my mentors, friends, and
families. Robin D. G. Kelley, my co-chair of the dissertation committee, gave me much
inspiration to delve into the global history of capitalist transformation and class struggle.
George Sanchez, the other co-chair, showed me a great example of how to be a historical
sociologist and a social historian at the same time. These two historians set the standard to
which I will always aspire. Sunyoung Park introduced me to the field of Proletarian cultural
production in East Asia and overall Japanese studies. By doing so, she greatly stimulated
my project of linking and tracing the activist subjects of Japanese and Okinawan diaspora
over the Pacific. Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Kara Keeling helped me through the qualifying
exams. Ruthie helped me learn to give a rigid Marxist analysis of political economy to my
subject, while Kara helped me to widen my academic horizon by stimulating my thoughts
on bodily practice and embodiment, especially that of Karate brought by Okinawna
immigrants.
I owe a huge debt of gratitude those cohorts and colleagues at the University of
Southern California, who read and commented on parts of my dissertation project. They
include Adam Bush, Deborah Al-Najjar, Genevieve Carpio, Tasneem Siddiqui, Christina
Heatherton, David Stein, Ryan Fukumori, Syria Shrestha, Robert Eap, Priscilla Leiva,
Haven Perez, Jessi Quizar, and Jih-Fei Cheng. Also, Anthony Rodriguez, Analena
Hassberg, Claudia Vera-Rosas, and Gretel Vera-Rosas gave me spiritual support. There are
two persons who deserve special mention. Alvaro Marquez has inspired me with his
knowledge of visual representation and practice of producing visual arts. His artworks were
iv
with me while I wrote my dissertation. They were literally with me in my room and I
looked up at them on the wall once in a while. His linoleum-cut prints of lettuce and
farmworkers of Salinas always refreshed me with new motivation to write. He introduced
me to Dorothea Lange’s photography and overall gave me huge support to write about
California’s farmworkers. My brother-in-law, Jeffrey Govan, has inspired me with his
notion of storytelling as energy transfer. As we talked about the characters in my
dissertation, he helped me to see the convergence and divergence of people’s life stories
clearer, and helped me realize the profound aspect of self-reflection in the writing. His
musicianship also inspired me so much that playing an instrument became part of my
self-care practice. He read the whole dissertation and gave me feedback.
I greatly appreciate the support for archival research from librarians, and the
conversations with other fellow scholars. They include Michele Welsing and Raquel
Chavez of the Southern California Library; Kayoko Taniai of the Osaka Labor Archive;
Kosuzu Abe of the Ryukyu University; Tsutomo Tomotsune of the Tokyo University of
Foreign Studies; Manuel Yang of the Waseda University; Kosue Uehara, Ryota Mochiki,
Katsura Saito, Yuko Konno, and Go Oyagi. I thank my long-time Japanese friends,
Shin’ichiro Tsuboi, Chihiro Takiyama, and Kosaku Ono for their warm friendship, which
backed me up so many times.
Last but not least, I am grateful of the everyday support and encouragement from my
life partner, Christiahn Govan, my mother-in-law, Cecille Thomas, and my son, Kainami
Govan Yamazaki. I would like to thank my parents, Shigeki and Fumiko Yamazaki, for this
life and the most fundamental inspiration of my life.
v
Content
Dedication ................................................................................................................................ ii
Acknowledgments .................................................................................................................. iii
List of Tables .......................................................................................................................... ix
List of Maps .............................................................................................................................. x
List of Figures ......................................................................................................................... xi
List of Abbreviations ............................................................................................................ xii
Abstract ................................................................................................................................. xiv

Introduction .................................................................................................................... 1

Part 1: Peasant Rebellion and the Formation of a Pacific Working Class
Chapter 1: Hyakusho-Ikki (Peasant Rebellion) and Economic Restructuring
From the Late Edo to Early Meiji Periods .......................................................................... 27
History of Hyakusho-Ikki and Lives of Farmers ................................................................. 27
Tentacles of Western Colonialism ....................................................................................... 38
Yonaoshi Rebellion and Sen Katayama’s Family ............................................................... 45
“Gannenmono (First-Year Folks)” and the Maria Luz Incident .......................................... 56
Changing Class System and Remaining Power Relations ................................................... 65
1871 Hiroshima Buichi Rebellion ....................................................................................... 69
Liberation of Outcastes ........................................................................................................ 73
1873 Mimasaka Anti-Conscription Rebellion ..................................................................... 76
1873 Fukuoka Chikuzen Takeyari Ikki ............................................................................... 84
Privatization of Land and Struggle for the Commons ......................................................... 88
Chisokaisei Hantai Ikki (Anti-Land Tax Rebellions) and Jiyu Minken Undo .................... 94
Chapter conclusion .............................................................................................................. 98

Chapter 2: Ideology of Labor Recruitment and Vestiges of Peasant Rebellion
in Hawaii ............................................................................................................................... 100
vi
Burgeoning Japanese Colonialism ..................................................................................... 101
Matsukata Deflation and Farming Village ........................................................................ 105
The World Tour of King Kalakaua and Hawaii between the United States and Japan ..... 108
Kaoru Inoue, Takashi Masuda, and Robert W. Irwin ........................................................ 112
Recruitment and Ideology of Labor Selection ................................................................... 118
The Masters and Servants Act ........................................................................................... 128
Vestige of Hyakusho-Ikki in Early Labor Disputes by Japanese Plantation Workers ...... 130
Chapter Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 150

Chapter 3: Okinawan Immigration, Japanese Nationalism, and Racialized Labor
in Hawaii ............................................................................................................................. 153
Context of Colonization and Subjugation of Okinawa ...................................................... 153
Noboru Jahana, Protection of Somayama, and Resistance against Privatization of Land 158
Relationships between Prefectural Groups in Hawaii ....................................................... 183
Japanese Nationalism ........................................................................................................ 187
Early Okinawan Immigrants .............................................................................................. 197
Kakushin Doshikai (Japanese Reform Association) and Plantation Workers ................... 204
1909 Oahu Sugar Strike ..................................................................................................... 210
Okinawan Involvement ...................................................................................................... 216
Chapter Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 218

Part 2: Class Struggles in the Pacific—Labor Movements in Japan and California
Chapter 4: Trans-Pacific Movement of Japanese Socialists and Anarchists ................. 223
Fusataro Takano and Shokko Giyukai ............................................................................... 228
American Federation of Labor and Anti-Asian Movement in the West Coast ................. 237
Tekko Kumiai (Iron Workers’ Union) and Sen Katayama’s Trajectory ............................ 241
1900 Public Peace Preservation Act and Social Democratic Party ................................... 252
Shusui Kotoku and His Anti-Imperialism ......................................................................... 255
Criticism of Russo-Japanese War and Foundation of Heiminsha (Commoners’ Organization)
........................................................................................................................................... 261
vii
Sen Katayama’s Speech Tour on the West Coast in 1904 ................................................ 264
The Relationship between the AFL and the Socialist Party of America ........................... 273
The Japanese Immigrant Socialist Circle and Their Understanding of Racism ................ 275
Chapter Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 278

Chapter 5: Shusui Kotoku, IWW, and the Fresno Labor League .................................. 279
Shusui Kotoku’s Sojourn in Bay Area in 1905–06 ........................................................... 279
Who Are the True Allies? .................................................................................................. 293
Direct Action or Parliamentarism? .................................................................................... 296
Social Revolutionary Party’s Organ, Kakumei .................................................................. 300
Fresno Labor League ......................................................................................................... 309
Taigyaku Jiken / High Treason Affair ............................................................................... 318
Sen Katayama’s Reaction to High Treason Incident ......................................................... 323
Return with American Experience .................................................................................... 324
Katayama’s Fourth-time Stay in the United States ........................................................... 325
Chapter Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 334

Chapter 6: Japanese Communists in California ............................................................... 337
Sen Katayama’s Encounter with Otto Huiswoud and his Work in Mexico ...................... 337
Formation of Communist Party in California .................................................................... 345
Japanese Immigrants in California .................................................................................... 347
Okinawan Youth Group: Reimeikai (New Dawn Society) ................................................ 348
Karl G. Yoneda: A Kibei’s Trajectory .............................................................................. 358
Foundation of JWA Los Angeles Branch .......................................................................... 368
First Organizing Drive of Agricultural Workers ............................................................... 380
Shandong Intervention, 3.15. Mass Crackdown, and an ILD Branch in Japan ................. 384
TUUL-AWIU Farmworker Organizing ............................................................................. 387
Unemployed Council and the Campaigns ......................................................................... 392
Communists’ Positionality in Japanese Immigrant Community ....................................... 395
Long Beach Incident, Police Brutality, and Deportation Cases ........................................ 402
viii
Cannery and Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union (CAWIU) ...................................... 410
San Francisco General Strike ............................................................................................ 419
Chapter Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 422
Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 426
Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 434

ix
List of Tables
Table 1: Emigrant Prefectures of Government-Contract (Kan-Yaku) Immigration to Hawaii
and the Distribution of Immigrants 121
Table 2: Distribution of Land Approval in Okinawa 168
Table 3: Amount of 30-Year Loan for Each Magiri to Regain Somayama 176

x
List of Maps
Map 1: Counties of Hiroshima Prefecture in 1900 122
Map 2: Counties of Fukuoka Prefecture in 1871 126
Map 3: Counties of Kumamoto Prefecture in 1871 127
Map 4: Okinawa Prefecture and Ryukyu Islands 160
Map 5: Island of Okinawa 161

xi
List of Figures
Figure 1: Members of the Reimeikai (1921) 357
Figure 2: Arrested Organizers of the 1931 Imperial Valley Strike 390
Figure 3: The Deported Japanese Communists 406
Figure 4: A mural of a Black prisoner tied, Hollywood John Reed Club, 2/11/1933 409
Figure 5: "Nine Scottsboro Youths" mural. Hollywood John Reed Club, 2/11/1933 410

xii
List of Abbreviations
AAAIL All-American Anti-Imperialist League
AFL American Federation of Labor
AWIU (Southern California) Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union
CAWIU Cannery and Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union
CIO Committee for Industrial Organization (1935–1938)
Congress of Industrial Organization (1938–)

CP Communist Party
HSPA Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association
HWA High Wage Association
ILD International Labor Defense
ILWU International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union
IWW Industrial Workers of the World
JAWOC Japanese Agricultural Workers’ Organizing Committee (of Southern
California)

JFMAD Japanese Foreign Ministry Archival Documents
JPAL Japanese Proletarian Artists’ League
JWA Japanese Workers’ Association
KGYP Karl G. Yoneda papers
SBZSME Zaibei shakaishugisha museifushugisha enkaku
SBSMJKS Shakaishugisha, museifushugisha: Jinbutsu kenkyu shiryo
TUEL Trade Union Educational League
TUUL Trade Union Unity League
xiii
UCAPAWA United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America
YCL Young Communist League

xiv
Abstract
This dissertation excavated the buried strands and the longstanding patterns of
transnational activism, resistance, and thoughts in the history of Japanese immigrants in
Hawaii and California. It revealed the tradition of peasant rebellions that Japanese
immigrants brought to Hawaii’s sugar plantations, the pre-migration struggle of colonized
Okinawans for their common land that seeped into their immigrant life, and the presence of
early Japanese socialists in the San Francisco Bay Area and their trans-Pacific network that
critiqued Japanese exclusion by white-supremacist labor unions and the immigration
policies of the government. By examining these struggles of the first generation Japanese
immigrants, for economic and racial justice in Hawaii and California between 1885 and
1935, through the lenses of transnationalism and internationalism, this dissertation helped
us to better understand the emergence of Communist-led labor organizing, where many of
the abovementioned trajectories of Issei and Kibei-Nisei conflated.
This convergence, feeding off of the accumulation of historical experience of racial
exclusion and exploitation and also the anti-imperial struggles between the empires of
Japan and the United States, nurtured the triangular vibrancy of resistance and labor
movements between Japan, Hawaii, and California. This historical experience of Issei and
Kibei leftists was not simply peripheral, but integral to the narratives of Asian American
Studies and the U.S. Left. By retroactively extending the genealogical investigation of
resistance and labor movements and critically analyzing the continuity and rupture in it, this
dissertation offered a larger, panoramic view of the width and depth of early Japanese
immigrants’ world of struggle, which has been invisible in previous scholarship.
1
Introduction

In early 1891, an incident broke out at a sugar plantation on Hawaii Island.
Japanese immigrant laborers gathered in front of the owner’s house to protest his alleged
sexual relationship with his married Japanese maid. They saw this as rape, a reasonable
assumption given the oppressive racial and gender relations of the time. They were also
protesting his brutal treatment of them. Then the owner accused them of trespassing and
fired shots from his pistol. Japanese medical doctor and immigrant supervisor, Iga Mori,
stated in his report:
Four or five hundred Japanese workers thronged around the plantation owner’s
house with torches and sticks in their hands. The touch-and-go situation seems as
if it were an Ikki [peasant rebellion in Japan] back in the day. Many workers kept
clattering and moving back and forth around the camp. The occasional shouts
showed their sadness.
1

Eventually, Mori persuaded the planter to withdraw his trespassing charges, and the
workers to end their six-day strike.
This incident poses a fundamental question about the nature of early labor strikes
and disputes by Japanese immigrant workers in Hawaii, and suggests their genesis may
be found in Hyakusho-Ikki or peasant rebellions in 1870s and 1880s in Japan. Indeed, a
generation of the early immigration, which was initiated by the Japanese government in
1885, had experienced getting involved or witnessing peasant rebellions. Sen Katayama
(1859–1933), who first immigrated to the United States in 1884 and later became
involved in labor movements across the Pacific in the first quarter of the twentieth

1
James Hiroshi Okahata and Hawaii Nihonjin Iminshi Kanko Iinkai, eds., Hawaii Nihonjin iminshi [A
History of Japanese Immigrants in Hawaii] (Honolulu: Hawaii Nikkeijin Rengo Kyokai, 1964), 127.
2
century, points to the formative role of these peasant uprisings in his autobiography. On
an early morning of May 1873, in a farming village of Hadeki, Mimasaka (Northern part
of what is now the Okayama prefecture), fourteen-year-old Sen (born Sugataro Yabuki)
found a group of village farmers gathering across from his house. With axes, spades, and
bamboo spears in their hands, their voices stirred the air.
“Where are [the] others?” they shouted.
“They all have left for Yuge town,” responded Sen’s great grandfather,
Kichizaemon (1794–1876).
They immediately started running in that direction, holding their arms up and
yelling to the sky. All of the healthy males ran from his village, including his older
brother, 17-year old Mokutaro and his young uncle, 13-year old Mansaburo. Only elders,
women, and children remained. Later, those who remained behind saw the sky above the
southern mountain turn red and heard roars and rumbles from afar. Through the
grapevine, they heard that the rebellious farmers had torched the house of the well-to-do
farmer, Kagami, who also ran a brewery and exploited the farmers and peasants in the
area by loaning them money at high interest rates.
2

The arson was a part of the larger farmers’ and peasants’ rebellion, which involved
six counties of Northern Okayama. The protesters demanded exemptions from taxes for a
period of five years, abolition of the new conscription, a Western calendar, and closure of
the new modern schools that not onlytook their much-needed young farmhands away
from the agricultural fields, but imposed new fees on rural families. To suppress the

2
Sen Katayama, Aruitekita michi [The Path I Have Walked] (Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Center, 2000
[originally published as a part of volume one of Sen Katayama Collection, 1959]), 57–58.
3
rebellion, the central government sent policemen from the surrounding four prefectures
and even dispatched two regiments of the Japanese Army from Osaka. More than four
hundred rebels were arrested, of which fifteen were decapitated. Several more remained
in jail after the initial arrest. The uncle of Sen Katayama was released on bail of five yen,
while his brother spent a year in jail. Furthermore, it was not just the Okayama region
that was experiencing large-scale rebellions. Protests with similar demands were erupting
all over Japan throughout the 1860s and 70s.
3

This experience of young Katayama suggests a relatively unexplored strand of
inquiry in the historical study of Japanese immigrants to Hawaii and the United States
and their emigrant communities. Japanese scholars Masaaki Kodama, Tomonori Ishikawa,
and Alan Moriyama have conducted the most comprehensive study of emigrant
communities. Thanks to their empirical studies of migration records from the archive of
the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, local newspapers, and records of emigration
commission companies (called imingaisha), we now know about the immediate
environment of these communities. Yet their studies left unexplored the long history of
rural resistance to capitalist transformation, the rise of the modern nation-state, and the
shifting power relations in these complex, intersecting contexts. Once we situate the
history of emigration in these larger histories, we gain a deeper insight into the
experiences of Japanese emigrations to America, which are fundamentally intertwined
with the highly contested, often violent process of the global expansion of capitalism and
Japan’s transformation in it. Indeed, one of the characteristics of capitalist transformation

3
Ibid., 58, 172.

4
was the continued subjugation of agricultural sector.
4

The excavation of the story of rural rebellion in Japan at the crux of economic
restructuring leads us to more reexamination of Japanese immigrant and Japanese
American history. In what ways did the political, economic, and social conditions of
Japan and the struggles against capitalist transformation and Japanese imperialism
continue to affect the way Japanese immigrants in the United States organized for social
justice in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first four decades of the
twentieth century? And how did trans-Pacific leftist circuits and organized labor
throughout the Japanese diaspora in the United States affect movements in Japan?
Previous scholarship of Japanese American history, and more broadly, Asian American
history, had emphasized the narrative of “becoming Japanese/Asian American.” The
premigration struggle of colonized Okinawans usually tends to be treated as a mere early
footnote of the distinctive immigration history of this group. The presence of the early
Japanese socialists in the Bay Area and their trans-Pacific network has also been prone to
be reduced to a fruitless sojourn of leftist intellectuals. This research uses a renewed
transnational framework that functions to help us better understand the emergence of
Communist-led labor organizing, where many trajectories of Issei (Japanese born) and

4
Masaaki Kodama, Nihon iminshi kenkyu josetsu [Introduction to the Study of Japanese Emigration]
(Hiroshima: Keisuisha, 1992); Tomonori Ishikawa, Nihon imin no chirigakuteki kenkyu [Geographical
Study of Japanese Emigrants] (Ginowan, Okinawa: Yoju Shorin, 1997); Alan Takeo Moriyama,
Imingaisha: Japanese Emigration Companies and Hawaii, 1894–1908 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 1985); Yasuo Wakatsuki, “Japanese Emigration to the United States, 1866–1924: A Monograph,”
Perspectives in American History 12 (1979): 389–576; Alan Takeo Moriyama, “The Causes of Emigration:
The Background of Japanese Emigration to Hawaii, 1885–1894,” in Labor Immigration Under Capitalism:
Asian Workers in the United States Before World War II, ed. Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984), 248–276; Yuji Ichioka’s The Issei: The First World of the First
Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885–1924 (New York: Free Press, 1988).
5
Kibei-Nisei (U.S.-born but raised in Japan) conflated. By employing a lens of
“un-becoming Japanese American” and extensively revisiting and exploring the historical
experiences of Issei with Japanese-language materials, and material originating from
Japan, this dissertation attempts to renew our understanding of the triangular dynamics of
working-class resistance between Japan, Hawaii, and California.
5

To merge the pre-World War II Japanese immigrant/American historiography with
the conceptual framework of “un-becoming Japanese American” is a critical task. On one
hand, scholars assessed the racially differentiated vulnerability of Japanese immigrants
and their American-born descendants by investigating the socio-legal institutionalization
of racism agaist them, including bans on Japanese immigration, denial of naturalization
rights, denial of property rights through alien land laws, limited work opportunity, and
segregation of schools and residency underpinned by degratory Orientalist representation
and outright mob violence. On the other hand, the analytical framework that measures
social vulnerability by the distance to the “full” American citizenship hampers a critical
excavation and examination of the anti-racist resistance in the history of Japanese
immigrants. Indeed, citizenship and civil rights no doubt render one’s life more secure
than not. However, what gets forgotten are those Japanese immigrants, whose visions
neither conformed to American civil nationalism nor subscribed to the self-serving boasts
of relative economic ascendancy or the preservation of middlemen ethnic economy. They

5
Historian Erica Lee commented in a panel titled “New Directions in Asian American History” at the
2015 annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) in St. Louis that the presented
works on the critique of periodization centered on shifts of immigration laws, the Asian American
delinquent criminalization in the present carceral state, and the U.S.-born Chinese Americans who went
back to China and never came back all point to the revision of the dominant narrative of “becoming Asian
American.”
6
dared to criticize the racialized labor hierarchy of America.
The consideration of capitalism and class struggle therein is also largely absent
from studies on Japanese emigration produced within the field of Asian American studies.
Not to mention, there was the old liberal stance observed in Bill Hosokawa’s Nisei: even
Asian American historians, who longed to record a history of people of color with a
critique of white-centrism in the previous histriography, happened to produce
liberalism-infused framework. For example, Ronald Takaki’s Pau Hana and Strangers
from a Different Shore both land on what Vijay Prashad would call bureaucratic
multiculturalism. Eileen Tamura’s earlier work, Americanization, Acculturation, and
Ethnic Identity, though there is strength in her analysis of education as reproducer and
negotiator of power relationship, takes up the themes of acculturation, assimilation, and
Americanization. Jere Takahashi’s Nisei/Sansei importantly included the Nisei
Communists and Sansei’s involvement in the Asian American movement within the
political spectrum of the Japanese American community, but seems to reduce the
hierarchical nature of community social stratification to the juxtaposition of “different
political styles.” Valerie J. Matsumoto’s Farming the Home Place traced the dynamics of
the Japanese family farm with oral history, but her class analysis seems undeveloped.
Also, liberal concern for constitutional rights continues to inform the framework of
scholarship on the Japanese internment.
6

6
Gary Okihiro’s historiographical guide was helpful in situating my work within Japanese American
history. See Gary Y. Okihiro, The Columbia Guide to Asian American History (New York: Columbia
Yniversity Press, 2001), especially 203–241; Bill Hosokawa, Nisei: The Quiet Americans (New York:
William Morrow, 1969); Ronald Takaki, Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835–1920
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983); Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History
of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1998[Second Edition]); Eileen H. Tamura,
7
We should expand on the critique of the mainstream Japanese immigrant
community foregrounded by historian Yuji Ichioka. Ichioka acutely argued that “the 1924
Immigration Act signified the complete failure of the Japanese immigrants’ struggle
against exclusion…[A]ll of their efforts to adapt themselves to American society and to
demonstrate their assimilability had been in vain.” It was mostly because, he points out,
Japanese nationalism or “dual nationalism,” which tried to connect Japanese nationalism
to American nationalism, prevented the mainstream Japanese immigrant community from
realizing the common source of oppressions against people of color and from nurturing a
more critical notion of social justice that encompasses all oppressed humanity. Ichioka
deftly illuminated that the Japanese community leaders tried to disassociate themselves
from Chinese and Koreans even when they were all stigmatized and excluded in an
identical manner as an equally inferior and undesirable race. In addition, Ichioka drew
attention to the intraethnic discrimination against burakumin, or ex-outcastes, ingrained
in the minds of community leaders. My goal is to rescue those Japanese immigrant
precursors, whose eyes were looking at racial and economic justice for all—that is,
beyond liberal capitalist property rights. These radical visionaries, mostly Issei, did not
aim at achieving “full” American citizenship because their naturalization rights were
denied. They, rather, questioned the whole system of racial capitalism of America and
attempted to stop feeding an insidious construction of the model minority myth, which

Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity: the Nisei Generation in Hawaii (Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 1994); Jere Takahashi, Nisei/Sansei: Shifting Japanese American Identities and
Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997); Valerie J. Matsumoto, Farming the Home Place: A
Japanese American Community in California, 1919–1982 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
8
had caught the minds of mainstream Japanese community leaders.
7

This thesis is relevant not just for Issei but also Nisei, Sansei, and on, because it
possibly intervenes the narrative of victimization that culminates in Japanese internment.
First, though the Japanese internment was a prime example of the violation of Nisei and
Sansei civil liberties, a critique of it would not be thorough without including the
sovereign state powers of control of labor influx and outflux, mobility control, expulsion,
detention, and deportation—all of which were inflicted upon Issei as well. It is especially
because the state found the “right” to deport migrant workers indespensable for
de-radicalizing the masses of workers and adjusting the amount of labor reserve for the
interest of (agribusiness) capitalists. The Japanese internment was also a labor issue,
roughly coinciding the initiation of Bracero program and the Executive Order 8802. It
was not simply to confine them, but the fact that some internees were taken back to the
fields and worked aside Mexican braceros in the war-time labor-shortage shows that the
state power simultaneously played a role of excluding them but also incorporating
detainable aliens and citizens within “the mutually constituted regimes of global
capitalism and territorially defined and delimited (“national”) state sovereignty.”
8

7
Ichioka, Issei, 253, 248–250. For a racially exclusive nature of civic nationalism, see Gary Gerstle,
American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2001); The criticism of Asian Americans’ complicity in a power structure that bolster anti-black racism and
white supremacy has emerged as a significant theme. The relationship between the upper- and middle-class
Japanese immigrant community and whites in the pre-war period seems a precursor to model minority myth,
whose origin scholars usually argue was in the Cold War period. See Robert G. Lee, “The Cold War
Origins of the Model Minority Myth,” in Asian American Studies Now: A Critical Reader, ed. Jean Yu-wen
Shen Wu and Thomas G. Chen (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 256–271; see also Ellen
D. Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton: Prineton
University Press, 2013).

8
Nicholas De Genova’s theoretical overview is useful for critically chronicling the emergence of
deportation regime. See Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz, eds., The Deportation Regime:
9
In a way, some Issei had experienced the danger of statelessness before the United
States government presented them with question 28 of the loyalty review during the
internment. The existence of those Issei communists–who were deported from the United
States but chose to live in the Soviet Union rather than Japan because it harshly
oppressed and prosecuted communists–points to the significance of class-based struggle
against global capitalism and both Japanese and American imperialism. Away from the
liberal narrative of “becoming Japanese American,” (the key is “becoming,”) but this
time, “becoming internationalist subjects,” who subjectively formed what Peter
Linebaugh would call planetary consciousness of the proletariat. What was essential for
them was whether Japanese immigrants andAmericans were able to generate a critique
applicable to, or common ground of, oppressions of other groups and other forms.
Second, this is not to argue that those Issei, the first generation Japanese
immigrants, were separatist or became bold enough to be aloof of American values
because of the protection by the Japanese government, while Nisei did not have it. Quite
the opposite, the Issei socialists, anarchists, and communists were oppressed and
surveilled by Japanese government and its consulates. Third, it is a mistake to think we
can easily demarcate the actually overlapping and coworking generations. Nisei, too,
were prone to deprivation of citizenship through the Cable Act and, though it never
materialized, James Phelan’s reccurent scheme to retroactively deprive the children of
foreign-born parents of citizenship. So was Nisei of American citizenship the only future

Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 9; As to the
complexities and inconsistencies of immigration law of the United States regarding deportation of
noncitizens, see also Daniel Kanstroom, Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History (Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007).
10
of Japanese immigrants/Americans as the immigrant community leaders advocated? The
human rights of old Issei laborers were worth fighting for, too. Fourth, the
way-to-full-citizenship (and also victimization) narrative tends to ignore Nisei socialists
and communists, who fought against imperialism and for rights of workers all over the
world.
Only recently, scholarship of pre-World War II Japanese American history
developed intersecting global and local class analyses, community social stratification,
and transnationalism. Scott Kurashige’ The Shifting Grounds of Race offered a
comparative and relational account of racial and labor politics of Japanese Americans and
African Americans in Los Angeles, featuring some Japanese and African American
communists. Rumi Yasutake’s Transnational Women’s Activism examined Japanese
women’s involvement in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, which overarched
Japan and California. Eiichiro Azuma brought renewed attention to Issei with the
transnational framework of “between two empires.” Andrea Geiger’s Subverting
Exclusion is the first monograph that focused on the ex-outcaste Japanese immigrants in
North America. Finally, Josephine Fowler investigated internationalism of Japanese
immigrant communists, who worked in tandem with their Chinese comrades. My
dissertation aims to write a trans-Pacific history of the Japanese immigrants’ labor
movement with an internationalist class analysis.
9

9
Scott Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of
Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Rumi Yasutake, Transnational
Women’s Activism: The United States, Japan, and Japanese Immigrant Communities in California, 1859–
1920 (New York: New York University Press, 2004); Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race,
History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Andrea
Geiger, Subversive Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885–1928 (New
11
For that purpose, my project draws much inspiration for this historical quest of
Japanese immigrant visionaries from the scholarship of transnational social history,
global labor migration, and the making of global radicalism. Following the manner in
which E. P. Thompson sought to “rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the
‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan” to demonstrate the active process of
the English working class formation, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s The
Many-Headed Hydra recuperated the hidden history of the Atlantic proletariat, including
sailors, slaves, pirates, religious radicals, urban laborers, soldiers, and dispossessed
commoners, who were mobile, multitudinous, multiethnic, and self-active, though
expropriated from commons and exploited by capitalist institutions. With those
fundamental inspirations, my dissertation contributes to the writing of “Pacific history
from below”–in other words, the formation of the Pacific working class and how they
fought back against the empires of racial capitalism in the region.
10

Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2011); Josephine Fowler, Japanese and Chinese Immigrant
Activists: Organizing in American and International Communist Movements, 1919–1933 (Newbrunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2007).

10
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Vintage Books, 1966); Peter
Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden
History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000). My focus on the making of
working-class in Pacific does not intend to ignore the proliferation of anthropological, literary, and
historical examination of the oceanic people. As Matt K. Matsuda summarized well, scholars have explored
the vast historical sphere and scope of the Pacific with critical approach, that is, “not to concentrate on the
continental and economic ‘Rim’ powers of East and Southeast Asia and the Americas to define the Pacific,
but to propose an oceanic history much more located in thinking outward from Islanders and local cultures.”
For more details on the plethora of foci and approaches in the Pacific historical studies, see Matt K.
Matsuda, “AHR Forum: The Pacific,” American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (June 2006): 758–780.
Oceanic histories emphasize movements and interconnections, which not only suggest a seaborne or
maritime focus but also conceptualize Pacific worlds through linkages of intermediate environments from
beaches and coastlines to villages, ports, and harbors, where the strictly territorial or national-specific
approaches decline in favor of thematic chronicles. See also Gary Okihiro, Island World: A History of
Hawai‘i and the United States (Berkeley: University of California, 2008); Gary Okihiro, Pineapple
Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones (Berkeley: University of California, 2009); Arif
12
Labor migration and the making of global radicalism are the two pillars of my
Pacific frameworks. First, it places labor migration within the context of imperialism,
describing how British, American, and Japanese imperial designs shaped the political and
economic condition of the Pacific islands and rim regions. I argue that local incidents in
farmers’ lives in Japan, racial formation in the Pacific Rim, and the global expansion of
capitalism are mutually constitutive. As Labor Immigration Under Capitalism, edited by
Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich, laid out the fundamental analysis thirty years ago,
capitalist transformation, through imperialist interventions, caused upheavals and
dispossessions in both urban and rural lives, and the production of racialized laborers
succeeded. Therefore, in order to write Japanese immigrant “history from below” in the
Pacific, one needs to situate the labor migration from Japan to Hawaii and North America
in the larger movement of people in the Pacific–including, for example, ‘blackbirding’ of
Polynesians and Melanesians to plantations on Australia and Fiji, and the ‘coolie’ trade of
the Chinese and later immigration of Koreans and Filipinos.
11

Like the Atlantic, the Pacific has been an historical site of capital flows, (often
coerced) labor migration, and imperial conquest. However, what is distinctive in the
Pacific was the emergence of a Japanese empire. A latecomer to modern imperialism,
Japan had been a target of U.S. white supremacy even as it achieved military ascendancy
during the Meiji era. As Gerald Horne stated in his work White Pacific, “the movement
of U.S. nationals westward did not end with the ‘closing’ of the frontier on the North

Dirlik, ed., What Is in a Rim? Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea (New York: Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers, 1998 [Second Edition]).

11
Cheng and Bonacich, Labor Immigration under Capitalism.
13
American mainland.” Horne’s analysis of ‘blackbirding’ and the Lisa Yun and Moon-Ho
Jung’s examination of racialization of Chinese as ‘coolie’ show that “[L]ong before
Asian migrants landed in the United States Europeans and Americans had begun
accumulating capital by seizing distant lands, displacing indigenous peoples, and opening
up commercial and labor markets—in Louisiana, California, Hawai‘i, China, Cuba,
Africa, and beyond.” While the earlier Japanese immigrants were still in the realm of
semi-bound contract labor, similar to coolie labor, the looming of Japanese empire
affected the racial formation of Japanese in Hawaii and California. Any historical
examination of twentieth century Asian immigration, especially from Japan, Korea, and
China, needs to analyze the process of U.S. and Japanese imperial expansion and the
relationality among whites and those Asian immigrants. As Eiichiro Azuma foregrounded
the perspective of “between two empires,” this dissertation tries to situate Japanese
immigrants’ struggles for economic and racial justice in the interstices of two empires,
which operated more often in a state of coexistence and cooperation rather than conflict.
12

12
For example of racialized labor in mid-nineteenth century, ex-Confederates played a pivotal role in
transporting bonded labor, which amounted to 62,000 Pacific Islanders (based on a low estimate—some
estimates over 100,000), to Fiji and Queensland, Australia and in the formation of a new kind of slavery.
Indeed, seven years after Captain Cass imported the first 98 Chinese coolies to Hawaii in 1852, twenty
Polynesians had already been brought there. Captain English transported 84 Polynesians from Manihiki of
Cook Islands in 1869, followed by the forty-two Captain R.W. Wood brought from Pukapuka. About two
thousand Pacific islanders were forcibly taken from Kiribati and Melanesian islands to Hawaii between
1878 and 1883. Gerald Horne, The White Pacific: U.S. Imperialism and Black Slavery in the South Seas
after the Civil War (Honululu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), 5; Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane:
Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 9;
Lisa Yun, The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2008), xxii–xxiii. On the role of the ex-confederates in blackbriding and
establishment of plantations in Fiji, see Chapter 2–4. On blackbirding, see also Laurence Brown, “‘A Most
Irregular Traffic’: The Oceanic Passages of the Melanesian Labor Trade,” in Many Middle Passage:
Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, ed. Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and
Marcus Rediker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 184–203. On Chinese coolie trade, see
Evelyn Hu-DeHart, “La Trata Amarilla: The ‘Yellow Trade’ and the Middle Passage, 1847–1884,” in
Many Middle Passage, 166–183; Okahata et al., eds., Hawaii Nihonjin iminshi, 262. As Lisa Yun explains
14
This study situates a history of the Japanese emigration to the United States within
the broader context of the transoceanic history of global labor migration. Oceans overlap
in a complex way and all the crisscrossing shipping routes facilitated the labor migration.
Study of the Indian Ocean immediately gets connected to the history of the Pacific. My
examination of peasant rebellions as the major context of Japanese Pacific migration
resonates not only with Him Mark Lai’s scrutiny of the Taiping Rebellion as background
of the Chinese labor migration, but also Hugh Tinker’s examination of the Indian Mutiny
as one of the factors of dispossession that incited Indians to migrate as ‘indentured
servants’ through British colonial designs—for example, to Mauritius, British Guiana,
and later Fiji. What is clear is that early Japanese immigrants shared with Chinese and
Indian coolies the grueling labor condition of plantations, which derived from the legacy
of slavery. In addition to Hawaii, which my dissertation investigates, Japanese laborers
began to arrive in Peru around the turn of the twentieth century, and Brazil after 1908.
Both were part of the global labor relocation regime. Peru abolished slavary in 1854 and
imported Chinese coolies, while Brazil abolished slavery in 1888 and came to have a
similar void in labor supply. Coercion through contracts and loans and the domesticating
of those who used to be subsistence-producers into bona fide laborers was a key element
in labor recruitment. Labor migrants then had to endure the layered, gray continuum of
being debt peons and free wage laborers, given that racialized Asians bonded labor

the terminology ‘coolie,’ I recognize the pejorative connotation and class implication as “lowly laborer.”
That being said, I will use the term without parentheses with the understanding of the socio-historical
specificity as racialized Asian bonded labor and weigh the way the term evokes the critical analysis of
Western assumptions of self-ownership, individual freedom, and consensual legal relation that usually
frame migration studies. See Yun, The Coolie Speaks, xix-xxi. As to the framework of situating Japanese
immigrants between two empires of Japan and the United States, see Azuma, Between Two Empires.
15
questions with the Western concepts of self-ownership, individual freedom, and
consensual legal relation that usually frame migration studies. Thus, imagining the
transnational space around oceans, islands, and rims became the prime catalyst of
planetary class struggle and offered fertile spawning ground of global radicalism.
13

My exploration of Japanese immigrant socialists and anarchists in the San
Francisco Bay Area and their transnational network follows and expands the emergent
scholarship of global radicalism. Ilham Khuri-Makdisi illuminates the Mediterranean
radical trajectory that overarched Beirut, Cairo, and Alexandria between 1860 and 1914.
She argues that socialist and anarchist ideas were regularly discussed, disseminated, and
reworked among intellectuals, workers, dramatists, Egyptians, Ottoman Syrians, ethnic
Italians, Greeks, and many others in these cities. Maia Ramnath elaborates on the
transoceanic trajectories and global network that the Ghadar Party formed. The members
of the Indian anti-colonial movement fought against the British Empire while it
established its headquaters in Berkeley, California. Characters of different regional,
linguistic, class, religious, and political backgrounds—such as students, soldiers, pilgrims,
traders, and laborers—came to find common ground in their struggles, and combined
revolutionary nationalism, Marxism, and Pan-Islamism.

13
Thomas W. Chinn, ed., A History of the Chinese in California: A Syllabus (San Francisco: Chinese
Historical Society of America, 1969); Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour
Overseas 1830–1920 (London: Hansib Publishing, 1993 [Second Edition]); Brij V. Lal, Girmitiyas: The
Origins of the Fiji Indians (Canberra: Journal of Pacific History, 1983); Thomas R. Metcalf, Imperial
Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920 (Berkeley: University of California, 2007); For
peasant rebellions in India, see Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India
(Durhan: Duke University Press, 1999); For Japanese in Peru, see C. Harvey Gardiner, The Japanese and
Peru, 1873–1973 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1975); Peter Blanchard, Slavery and
Abolition in Early Republican Peru (Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resouces, 1992); H. E. Maude,
Slaver in Paradise: The Peruvian Slave Trade in Polynesia, 1862–1864 (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1981); Watt Stewart, Chinese Bondage in Peru: A History of the Chinese Coolie in Peru, 1849–1874
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1951).
16
Oh In-Cheol, Yong-ho Ch’oe and other scholars have scrutinized the anti-colonial,
revolutionary nationalists of Korean diaspora in Hawaii and North America. Him Mark
Lai’s pioneering work probed the Chinese immigrant leftists in America. Building
parallel and in relation to those works as well as Yuji Ichioka’s research on Japanese
immigrant socialists and anarchists, my dissertation extensively traces the trans-Pacific
making of labor movements in Japan and California, in which Sen Katayama, Shusui
Kotoku, and Fresno Labor League played a crucial role in the first decade of the
twentieth century, a similar role that Japanese immigrant communists would later play in
the late 1920s and 1930s.
14

The historical analysis of the role that Japanese immigrants played in global
radicalism entails the examination of their discursive, personal, and substantial
connections to the radicalism in East Asia. While Andrew Gordon and Sheldon Garon
investigated Japanese labor history with a keen eye on the relationship between organized

14
Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the making of global radicalism, 1860–1914
(Berkeley: University of Los Angeles, 2010); Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement
Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2011); G. Balachandran, Globalizing Labour? Indian Seafarers and World Shipping, c.
1870–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) is another example that re-examines oceans as sites of
struggle—in other words, the social and labor history of Indian maritime workers. For revolutionary
nationalism of Korean immigrants and the repercussion of the March First Movement of 1919 in Hawaii,
see Yong-ho Ch’oe, ed., From the Land of Hibiscus: Koreans in Hawai‘i, 1903–1950 (Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007). Oh, In-Cheol, A Study on Korean Immigration and Independence
Movements in Hawaii: Relating to Korean Churches and Picture Bride, 1903–2003 (Namdong Kwangju:
Sung Moon Dang, 2005); Peter Hyun, Man Sei! The Making of a Korean American (Honolulu: University
of Hawaii Press, 1986); Kingsley Lyu, “Korean Nationalist Activities in Hawaii and the Continental United
States, 1900–1945,” Part I (1910–1919), Amerasia Journal 4, no. 1 (1977): 23–90; Kingsley Lyu, “Korean
Nationalist Activities in Hawaii and the Continental United States, 1900–1945,” Part II (1920–1945),
Amerasia Journal 4, no. 2 (1977): 53–100; Him Mark Lai, “A Historical Survey of Organization of the Left
Among the Chinese in America,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 4, no. 3 (Fall 1972): 10–21; Him
Mark Lai, “The Chinese Marxist Left in America to the 1960’s,” Chinese America: History and
Perspectives (1992): 3–82; Robert G. Lee’s article on Asian immigrant radicalism gives a concise overview.
See Robert G. Lee, “The Hidden World of Asian Immigrant Radicalism,” in The Immigrant Left in the
Untied States, ed. Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996),
256–288.
17
labor and the concrete political process of “Taisho Democracy,” thereby showing their
focus on the nation-state, other scholars who worked on East Asian histories of
proletarian cultural production under the influence of postcolonial studies sought to
overcome the nation-state as the conventional modality of investigating history. Heather
Bowen-Struyk, for example, drew attention to Shanghai as a nexus of flows of imperialist
capital and radical ideas, Chinese left-wing literature movement led by students returning
from Japan, and Japanese writers in Shanghai and Manchuria. Samuel Perry has
significantly argued that colonial subjects, mainly Chinese and Koreans, in the Japanese
proletarian organization experienced impediments from their Japanese comrades despite
the fact that anti-imperialist internationalism was essential to the organization. This
points to the parallel to white leftists’ relationship to comrades of color in the United
States. Importantly, Japanese workers and labor activists in the U.S. were reading
Japanese proletarian literature, such as works by Takiji Kobayashi, for the Japanese
communist newspapers brought those stories to the audience and stimulated their own
creative writings. While my study shows the trans-Pacific reach of the East Asian
proletarian cultural production, it weighs the examination of movement building itself.
15

My research delves into movement building with a renewed transnational
framework and by paying attention to the different heterogeneous voices in the “Japanese”
movement. It looks, for example, at the Okinawan premigration movement against the

15
Andrew Gordon, Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1991); Sheldon Garon, The State and Labor in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1987); Heather Bowen-Struyk well summarizes this new direction of scholarship on proletarian
internationalism in East Asia. See Heather Bowen-Struyk, “Introduction: Proletarian Arts in East Asia,”
positions 14, no. 2 (Fall 2006): 251–278; Samuel Perry, “Korean as Proletarian: Ethnicity and Identity in
Chang Hyok-chu’s ‘Hell of the Starving,’” positions 14, no. 2 (Fall 2006): 279-309.
18
colonial and capitalist transformation of land relation and also at Okinawan immigrant
communists, who occupied much of the membership of the Japanese Workers
Association in Los Angeles. My approach here evidently echoes Ken Kawashima’s The
Proletarian Gamble, which delves into Korean workers in Japan, who made up more
than one half of Zenkyo, the underground Japanese communist labor union, and struggled
against discriminatory wages, unfair hiring and firing practices, and racist housing
practices. Certainly, it also draws attention to the different extents of the Japanization
experience and institutionalized racism between Koreans in Japan and Okinawans in the
United States. However, my goal is to look beyond the national boundary, with
sensitivity regarding dissident voices, and widen the regional focus of East Asian labor
movements by connecting it to Hawaii and California since there was a significant flow
of ideas, people, resources, goods, and capital throughout East Asia and the world across
the Pacific. Indeed, the international proletariat competed with the nation-state for the
privilege of becoming the most significant community imagined by proletarian writiers
and artists. The multi-ethnic organizational practice and print culture brought by Japanese
and Okinawan immigrant communists to the United States similarly envisioned the
solidarity of workers across the Pacific, without forgetting the implications of Japanese
imperialism in East Asia.
16

My project pays keen attention to the differences between transnationalism and
internationalism. Transnationalism refers to a mode of analysis or description of

16
Ken C. Kawashima, The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan (Durham: Duke
Univeristy Press, 2009).

19
movements that cross national boundaries—largely because the undesirable conditions
extend beyond a single nation-state. Movements built by immigrants and subjects of
diasporas tended to overarch home and exile because their lives dealt with problems in
the two or more societies they resided.
17
Internationalism, in turn, is shaped by a
fundamental critique of the nation-state, which is the most fundamental unit through
which racial capitalism operates, with anti-radical laws, anti-foreign-born deportation
policies, labor protection laws or lack thereof, and other state-sanctioned differentiation
of social vulnerability. Especially when the movement of capital to overseas dramatically
increased in the form of imperialist projects of colonization, monopoly, and bloc
economy, internationalism views subjugatedstruggling groups in cross- or supranational
solidarity. Movements can be transnational without exhibiting internationalism. Japanese
imperialist patriotic organizations on the West Coast are an example. Likewise,
movements can be internationalist without being transnational. Although many scholars
have used the term “transnationalism” with the implication of “internationalist” politics,
my dissertation uses the term “transnational,” rather, as a neutral descriptive adjective.
This study also sees internationalism as a product that grew out of the practices of
movement organizing. For example, the last chapter of my dissertation illuminates the

17
For Laura Briggs, Gladys McCormick, and J. T. Way, transnationalism is a category of analysis, which
denaturalizes the ideological deployments of nationalism and enables us to center certain historical events
that are not contained within national boundaries, such as colonialism, international division of labor, and
the production of migrants, to name a few. It desires to recover voices without homogenizing or
oversimplifying the experiences of those living in the margins or assuming that their longings were
coterminous with the nation. A considerable amount of work in anti-imperialist and decolonial traditions, in
feminist, antiracist, and ethnic studies scholarship, and in economic and labor history, has prefigured and
provided a foundation for the project of transnationalism. Transnationalism is a strategy for identifying the
ideological work of the nation by offering a series of provocations derived from our own work about what
might be seen as the self-evidently “national.” See Laura Briggs, Gladys McCormick, and J. T. Way,
“Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis,” American Quarterly 60, no. 3 (September 2008): 625–648.
20
way the proletarian internationalism developed campaigns against Japanese imperialism,
such as “Hands Off China.” Thereby, it also attempts to reveal how the participants of the
movement transform themselves into internationalist subjects. Thus, using a transnational
optic, my research looks at both struggles in Japan and struggles in Hawaii and California
in parallel. It asks how struggles in Japan “traveled” through migration, and how did the
experience of organizing workers under U.S. racial capitalism affect the labor movement
in Japan? How did these trans-Pacific movements of ideas, practices, and
immigrants—including peasants and leftists—help create a continuum of resistance and
bolster interethnic coalitions?
18

My dissertation research reveals a little-known history of multi-racial and
multi-ethnic labor organizing by examining the forging of “internationalist” social
movements in Hawaii and California in the first four decades of the twentieth century.
One of the reasons those Japanese sought a cross-ethnic alliance was their sense of
separation from the state. They often had to fight not only against American racism but
also Japanese consulates, which surveilled immigrant radicals and cooperated with the
United States in their counter-insurgency effort, rather than protect its nationals. It also
investigates the process in which Japanese immigrants encountered other workers of

18
For recent discussion of “transnationalism” and “internationalism,” see Andreas Wimmer and Nina
Glick Schiller, “Methodological Nationalism, the Social Sciences, and the Study of Migration: An Essay in
Historical Epistemology,” International Migration Review 37, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 576–610; George Lipsitz,
“Abolition Democracy and Global Justice,” Comparative American Studies 2, no. 3 (2004): 271–286; Erika
Lee and Naoko Shibusawa, “What is Transnational Asian American History? Recent Trends and
Challenges,” Journal of Asian American Studies 8, no. 3 (October 2005): vii–xvii; Erika Lee, “Orientalisms
in the Americas: A Hemispheric Approach to Asian American History,” Journal of Asian American Studies
8, no. 3 (October 2005): 235–256; C. A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy
Kozol, and Patricia Seed, “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” American Historical Review
111, no. 5 (December 2006), 1441–1464; Augusto Espiritu, “Transnationalism and Filipino American
Historiography,” Journal of Asian American Studies 11, no. 2 (June 2008): 171–184.
21
color and ideas of labor activism and labor solidarity, and nurtured a critique on the
capitalism that articulates and rearticulates a hierarchy of racialized and gendered labor.
Their practice of multi-ethnic and multi-racial organizing came into being through their
own struggles and organizing efforts, as workers and journalist intellectuals (independent
of white leftists), and ultimately came to fruition through the Communist movement–
especially during the Great Depression. In pursuit of social justice alongside Mexican,
Chinese, Filipino, and black laborers, Okinawan and Japanese activists were able to forge
a collective political identity that sought racial and economic justice.
The first chapter will look at the long history of resistance and rebellion of farmers
and peasants in Japan to highlight at least three peaks of rebellions that took place,
respectively, in 1866, 1873 and 1883–1884 before the inception of the
government-contracted (Kanyaku) immigration to Hawaii in 1885. While Carol Gluck
astutely observed that some historians who worked on Japanese peasant rebellions might
have contributed to essentialist ideas about national culture because of their valorization
of indigenous, or non-Western, forms of popular protest, Takashi Fujitani has called for
more critical and non-nationalistic approaches to resistance. My goal is not to construct
an essentialist historical portrait of “Japanese radical tradition,” but rather to reveal
changes in the manner and scale in which farmers and peasants resisted both feudal and
modern taxations and the privatization of land (or commons in general), and envisioned
egalitarian land distribution.
While Chapter 1 aims to illuminate the transformation of peasant consciousness
from the late Edo to the early Meiji eras by focusing on the major emigrant communities
22
of Okayama, Hiroshima, Fukuoka, Kumamoto, and Yamaguchi prefectures, Chapter Two
examines how opposition to rural political and economic change set the stage for émigré
resistance in Hawaii.
19
A chief cause of massive rural dispossession in the 1880s was the
Matsukata administration’s decision to finance its military build-up through draconian
deflationary policies. Japanese colonial expansionism and militarization went hand in
hand. Japan’s colonization of Okinawa and imperial intentions toward Korea provide the
context for future Okinawan and Korean immigration to mainland Japan and the United
States (including Hawaii because both Okinawan and Korean immigration started after
the annexation). This chapter reveals how international diplomacy and the 1850 Masters
and Servants Act shaped racial formation in Hawaii in the context of Pacific labor
migration, establishing the legal basis for exploitative contract labor. It also sheds light
on how mercantile capitalism set up the profit-making scheme of state-sponsored
immigration to support its troubling financial condition. Finally, Chapter 2 illuminates
the role of Kaoru Inoue and his business partners, Takashi Masuda and Robert Irwin, in
how they generated Hawaii-bound immigration and their failed efforts to select docile
farmers who would not disturb the incremental movement of capital. However, Japanese
immigrants carried over the protest culture of withholding their labor and submitting
grievances from the tradition of peasant rebellions.
Chapter 3 examines the premigration struggles of Okinawans against the
privatization of Okinawan common forest, called Somayama, imposed by Japanese

19
Carol Gluck, “The People in History: Recent Trends in Japanese Historiography,” Journal of Asian
Studies 38, no. 1 (November 1978): 25–50; Takashi Fujitani, “Minshushi As Critical of Orientalist
Knowledges,” positions 6, no. 2 (Fall 1998): 303–322.
23
colonial dominance. The leaders of this oppositional movement, Noboru Jahana, Kyuzo
Toyama, Kosuke Uema, and Shinsuke Taira, came to advocate for Okinawan emigration
during the movement, which led to the first Okinawan immigration to Hawaii in 1900.
The second half of the chapter looks at the labor strikes in Hawaii between 1900, when
Okinawans started arriving, and 1909, a year that marked one of the largest strikes with
nationalist solidarity as its driving force. This raises an important historiographical
question: How did Okinawan immigrants join the labor disputes led by Japanese
immigrants, and, how did they negotiate their subject positions in this period of looming
Japanese nationalism?
After the Sino-Japanese War, the discourse of “Abandoning Asia” became
dominant, which affected Japanese immigrant communities and reinforced a self-serving
comparison with Chinese immigrants in Hawaii and the United States. Indeed, the
racialization of Japanese immigrants related to that of Chinese immigrants in Hawaii and
the United States within the context of shifting legal constraints as well as racial ideology.
The differentiation of Japanese from Chinese and the association of Japanese to
Hawaiians as a “cognate race” delineated some specificities of this process played out
between two empires. Japan’s struggle to recover its sovereignty had the potential of
challenging global white supremacy, but Japan, as a modern state, instead made choices,
in the course of its own ascendance, to achieve status as an ‘honorary white’ nation.
Part 2, Chapter 4 opens with Fusataro Takano, who first introduced the idea and
practice of labor unionism to Japan around the turn of the twentieth century. Takano was
so deeply embedded in the discourse of Japanese nationalism, he neglected to look at
24
fellow Chinese workers as potential allies. Despite this limitation, the labor organizations
he founded in Japan became the vehicles through which journalists and social activists
like Shusui Kotoku and Sen Katayama became socialists. In turn, the trans-Pacific travels,
sojourning, and migration of these two prominent Japanese socialists and their comrades
stimulated the anti-war and anti-imperialist discourse among the Japanese
student-laborers in the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Area.
Chapter 5 delves into Kotoku’s anti-racist critique of the American Federation of
Labor’s (AFL) refusal to organize Asian immigrant workers, compared to the Industrial
Workers of the World’s (IWW) inclusionary policies under “One Big Union.” Japanese
socialist circles in the United States furiously protested AFL and the Socialist Party of
America (SPA) for backing anti-Asian immigration policy under the racist slogan that
they constituted a “Yellow Peril.” Realizing they needed to act on their own, Tetsugoro
Takeuchi and others under Kotoku’s anarchist influence founded the Fresno Labor
League to advocate for Japanese workers’ rights. Their pointed criticisms of Tennosei
(Japanese emperor system) militarism provoked the spying program by Japan’s
Department of Interior as well as Japanese consulates, resulting in the infamous High
Treason Affair in which Shusui Kotoku and some other anarchists were hanged. This had
a chilling effect on Japanese immigrant communities, particularly among immigrant
leftists.
Despite these setbacks, the seeds of labor activism among Japanese immigrants
continued to be sown by Sen Katayama, the subject of Chapter 6. Katayama’s
collaboration with Asian and African diasporic intellectual activists such as M. N. Roy
25
and Otto Huiswoud stimulated the idea of multiracial and multiethnic labor organizing in
the early period of Communist International, which was soon to be practiced especially in
California. Okinawan leftists in Los Angeles and many Kibei-Nisei such as Karl G.
Yoneda formed an unlikely alliance with Katayama in the Communist labor movement in
the 1920s and 1930s. Japanese and Okinawan immigrants, who worked as farm hands
alongside Mexican and Filipino workers in California, resorted to class solidarity as one
of their effective strategies in their fight against racial capitalism. The Agricultural
Workers Industrial Union, which led the1930 Imperial Valley strike, as well as some 35
strikes from 1931 to 1933—which involved more than 35,000 Mexican, Filipino,
Japanese, Blacks, Whites and East Indians—was the main force challenging the
unbearable working conditions, low pay, long hours, discriminatory firing, and poor
housing on California farms. This very system, their efforts demonstrate, exploited the
labor of immigrants and their descendants, who were extremely vulnerable to state
violence in the form of anti-radical persecution and anti-immigrant legislation before and
during the Great Depression.
By looking at the long historical trajectories from peasant rebellions to the
internationalist multiracial labor organizing with an analysis of the continuity and rupture
between Japan and Japanese immigrant communities, this dissertation argues that
numerous Japanese laborers and intellectuals learned to analyze the political economy of
the racial capitalism that they were embedded in and invented an effective way to resist
the violent, exploitative system. Their historical predecessors of struggle often offered
them inspirations and ways to grapple with harsh conditions of labor and life.
26
Part 1:
Peasant Rebellion and the Formation of a Pacific Working Class

27
Chapter 1: Hyakusho-Ikki (Peasant Rebellion) and Economic Restructuring
From the Late Edo to Early Meiji Periods

This chapter aims to clarify that the inception of Hawaii-bound migration
originated in the upheavals caused by Japanese capitalist transformation. It weighs the
perspective of ordinary farmers and peasants, who were downtrodden but self-reliant, and
attempts to reveal how they perceived the drastic changes in the political economy caused
by the open door policy, the dissolution of the feudal class system, and land privatization.
While it illuminates the specific ways in which peasants responded to the massive
tranforation through rebellion, this chapter also shed a light on the Maria Luz Incident,
and the very first group of Japanese brought to Hawaii in 1868, in order to contextualize
the position of Japan within the broader global labor relocation, particularly the coolie
trade from Asia.

History of Hyakusho-Ikki and Lives of Farmers
Japan has a long history of peasant resistance. Paying attention to the particularities
of this historical development will enable us to reconsider, for example, how Ronald
Takaki categorized patterns of resistance in Hawaii’s sugar plantations: violence
(physical confrontations and acts of arson), recalcitrance (work slowdowns), nepenthe
(use of alcohol and opium to ease the emptiness and alienation of commodity production,
which replaced subsistence production), desertion/absconding/exodus, and labor strikes.
Takaki’s categories, adopted from African American history, do not adequately explain
28
the resistance of Japanese immigrants in Hawaii. Understanding earlier traditions of rural
rebellions will also enable us to read culturally specific trajectories in the modes of
resistance and analyze the difference between the feudal socio-economic setting and the
monoculture of plantation economy. We need to start by examining the manner and scale
of peasant rebellion in Japan and how the shifting contexts shaped ideology and
resistance among emigrants.
20

Peasant resistance under the reign of the Tokugawa administration differed from
that of the Chusei (Middle Age). The peasants in those uprisings had armed themselves
with such weapons as swords, bows, and sometimes firearms, up until 1591, when
Toyotomi Hideyoshi issued a ban on peasants possessing any weapons. The Tokugawa
reign maintained a strict division of farmers and soldiers (Heino Bunri). Therefore,
Hyakusho-Ikki, or the peasant resistance during the Tokugawa period, is distinguished
from Ikki or the violent uprisings up to the Sengoku and Azuchi-Momoyama periods.
21

Hyakusho-Ikki had mainly three types of resistance, all of which were of a
nonviolent nature: Osso (legal petition), Chosan (absconding), and Goso (thronging to
appeal). Osso is a case where farmers and peasants submit their request or demand not to
the local functionary (Daikan or Bugyo) of the Tokugawa administration but above them,

20
Despite Ronald Takaki’s rather clumsy attempt to frame Hawaiian plantation workers’ resistance
through categories imported from American slavery studies, African American history nonetheless proved
useful to how I understand the way migrants, whether coerced or voluntarily, brought their own cultural
and political traditions. See Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of
African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1998). Also, other studies of diasporic resistance stimulated my inquiry. For example, Jennifer Guglielmo
examines how women’s culture of resistance travelled with immigrants from Southern Italy. See Jennifer
Guglielmo, Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880–
1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Takaki, Pau Hana.

21
Satoru Hosaka, Hyakusho-ikki to sono saho [Peasant Resistance and its Manners] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa
Kobunkan, 2002), 2–11.
29
to the higher functionary, since the lower, local functionaries were implicated in, or the
source of, the matters farmers wish to resolve.
Chosan is analogous to a strike. It is the collective act of farmers and peasants
removing themselves from the production site, namely their agricultural field and village.
By doing so, they force their feudal landlord to meet their demand. They abscond to a
neighboring fief or to the mountains, which were thought of as commons protected from
the interference of feudal lords. In addition, there was a common law that treatment (or
exploitation) of farmers in a feudal domain should be at the same level in adjacent
domains. Only men of working age usually participated in Chosan, leaving behind other
villagers, including children, elders, and women. The laws of the Tokugawa Shogunate
administration, in its earlier years, did not consider this strategy a criminal act, but it did
punish villagers who provided refuge to absconders. Later, in 1742, the new laws, called
Kujikata Osadamegaki, outlawed the practice and imposed a death sentence on Chosan
leaders.
Goso is a case where farmers and peasants gather at a castle or a mansion of their
feudal lord to make their demands heard and met. While Osso and Chosan were dominant
resistance strategies during the seventeenth century, Goso emerged in the eighteenth
century because that was when a Daimyo (domanial feudal lord), who ruled a han (feudal
domain) took away control of villages from Tokugawa local functionaries and intensified
taxation and exploitation. Therefore, Goso usually expanded to more agricultural
communities than Osso and Chosan in order for farmers and peasants to target the
common landlord. Goso was also made illegal in the mid-eighteenth century. In 1770, the
30
Tokugawa administration set up a bulletin board in each village, through which they
attempted to inform numerous villagers of the illegality of Chosan and Goso.
22

Farmers and peasants developed certain rituals and practices to prepare for a revolt
that reappeared across different regions and eras. First, they made a secret covenant—a
Kishomon—under joint signature and became a Totou (a banded group). During
large-scale rebellions covering aan entire han, each village signed the covenant. The
Kishomon was usually written on Goouhoin, a talismanic paper issued by a Shinto shrine
or a Buddhist temple. After members signed with a seal of blood, they burned it, put the
ash in water, and drank it before an altar. This act was called Jinsui. Those who were
bonded through this process were supposed to share strong loyalty and discipline.
Espionage of and recession from the plot were prohibited; members were not even
allowed to mention it. They pledged to refrain from drinking alcohol theft, arson, and
wearing luxurious clothes. Kishomon documents also explain why they resorted to
Hyakusho-Ikki and listed their demands. In cases where their representatives had to travel
to Edo (Tokyo) to appeal, the documents specified expenses and who would bear the
costs, which most likely corresponded to each participant’s rice yields for the year. Those
who fell sick, were injured, or punished during a rebellion were supposed to receive
compensation. In other words, they expected sacrifice, especially of Todori (leaders),
given that the leaders were likely to be executed for starting a rebellion, and both the
leaders and the members, with a strong sense of solidarity derived from the village

22
Ibid., 30–31, 57–79, 108–114, 134–135.
31
communities, made sure to honor the sacrifice and support surviving families.
23

Rebelling farmers and peasants of the Edo period used their appearances to
symbolize their pride in the ‘farmer-hood.’ The Minokasa or a straw raincoat, was a
uniform of peasant rebellion participants. In Japanese feudal society, they were
prohibited from wearing luxurious cloths. A straw raincoat symbolized their frugality and
status. In a peasant rebellion in the Miyazu domain in 1822, farmers wanted to make
those who oppressed them wear straw raincoats and farm the fields for a full work day
with a sickle and a spade all day long so that they would understand the farmer’s life.
Farmers used many tools, but they used the sickle to symbolize their struggle by drawing
it on their flag. Although some leaders used the Wakizashi (a short sword) as a symbol of
authority and the harquebus as a signal to start a rebellion, they most likely did not resort
to violence due to their self-discipline. They tended to limit any damage to properties and
houses. The use of bamboo spears only appeared in the nineteenth century at the end of
the Edo era, when discipline began to loosen, as we will discuss later.
24

Peasants usually organized their rebellions along feudal administrative lines, based
on a social network designed from the bottom up–from mura (a village) to kumi (a group
of villages) to gun (a county) to han (a whole feudal domain/province). Straw flags
represented different groups of participants and were used to control the direction of the
participants once they were in motion. The leaders usually sent out word via circulars
from village to village beforehand to announce their aims and the date of the protest The

23
Ibid., 138–162.

24
Ibid., 175–184. The peasant rebels carried the sickle, spade, hoe, mallet, hatchet, hammer, and
Tobiguchi (a stick with a hook on top of it).
32
circulars were intended to counter objections from Shoya (village headman) whom a han
government would blame for the disorder, and to mobilize as many villages as possible
by hinting that those who did not join would suffer consequences. Toward the end of the
Edo era, the use of bulletin board notices instead of circulars increased, mainly because
the polarization of the farming class lead to divergent interests and made it difficult to
mobilize an entire village. Focusing on individuals rather than a village became a more
effective organizing strategy. In either case, the point of rebellion was to exhibit the
overwhelming presence of numerous farmers and peasants. To launch the uprising, the
rebels used sound and fire. They blew on conch shells, hit the fire bells or gongs that
were in the temples, lit torches and built bonfires, and generally raised a cry.
25

As I juxtaposed ‘farmers’ and ‘peasants’ as the subject of resistance, I found there
was a distinction within farming class of the Edo period. Toyotomi Hideyoshi started
Kenchi (agricultural land evaluation), which the Tokugawa feudal system inherited.
Kenchi is a prediction based on periodic cadastral surveys and projected agricultural
yields (usually rice) measured by the unit called koku, which is about 180 liters. Those
farmers whose names were recorded in the survey book are called Hon-Byakusho. Each
of them typically represents one or two chos of land (about two or four acres. One cho is
9917 square meters. One acre is 4046.8 square meters.), where their families and a few
seasonal helpers solely farmed and submitted fifty percent or more of the yields as tax.
Village headmen, who were called Nanushi in Kanto, Kimoiri in Tohoku or Shoya in
Kansai, were Hon-Byakushos who had several chos or more of land, farmed with peasant

25
Ibid., 167–172.
33
laborers and were responsible for temporarily storing the harvested rice in a warehouse
before the local functionary carried it away from the village.
Those poor farmers whose names were not even on the record of the survey,
because they did not have sufficient yield, were called Mizunomi-Byakusho or Komae.
Their right to use common land and forest and water resources was limited in some
villages. They were not exempt from taxes; the tax-in-kind was levied on the entire
village as a unit. A village could autonomously decide which village member was to
submit how much proportion of the tax. While Shoya stratum often accumulated extra
wealth through managing Sake breweries, cotton and rapeseed farms, or silkworm farms,
many Mizunomis were declining for many reasons, including the rising tax burden,
disease infamilies, poor crops caused by drought and cold summers, and debt from
merchants or a Shoya, resulting from the aforementioned changes, especially after the
second half of the eighteenth century. Some Mizunomis became landless peasants who
worked for Shoyas. Some Shoyas hired rural labor directly, whereas others leased land to
tenants. As a consequence, land and wealth were concentrated in the hands of the Shoya
stratum.
26

Class polarization, paralleled by the spread of commodity crop production and its
market, was the context for the farmers and peasants’ rebellions. According to Nijiji Aoki,
3,711 cases of peasant resistance occurred between 1573 and 1878. These rebellions
became larger and more frequent toward the mid-nineteenth century, as the predominant

26
Kiyoshi Inoue and Susumu Fukaya eds., Monogatari: Nihon no nomin undo [Narrative History: Farmers’
Movement in Japan] (Tokyo: Rironsha, 1954), 12–13.

34
strategy to that of Goso.
27

While historian Toshio Yokoyama emphasizes an anti-authoritarian streak in his
study of the history of the Japanese struggle against oppression, laying the foundations
for a revolutionary class consciousness, some historians, including Yoshio Yasumaru,
argue that Hyakusho Ikki did not intend to dismantle the whole feudal system, because
the farmers and peasants ultimately based their demands for reducing taxes and other
service on the belief that the rulers (Shogun or Daimyo lord of their domain) represented
the only legitimate authority capable of doing justice to the demands of the ruled. This
belief derived from a Confucian ideology of Jinsei, which expected a ruler to be merciful
and understanding toward its subjects. Characteristic of paternalism, it masked
exploitation by turning the producer into a dependent of the ruling class, whose social
reproduction as a class depended on the labor of the ruled. The point here is to situate the
peasant rebellions of 1850s to 1880s in the areas that would become emigrant
communities in the shifting worldview of those peasants, whose embrace of Jinsei
ideology ultimately began to erode as the polarization of the farming class intensified and
foreign powers shook the Tokugawa authority.
28

Rather than retroactively applying the framework of class struggle to precapitalist
Japan, I started where the subjectivity of peasants derives. Farmers and peasants had a
consciousness and practice of autonomy, evident especially in how they worked the land

27
Nijiji Aoki, Hyakusho-ikki sogo nenpyo [Comprehensive Chronological Table of Peasant
Resistance](Tokyo: San’ichi Shobo, 1971), 2–20.

28
Ibid., 184–188; Toshio Yokoyama, Hyakusho-ikki to gimin densho [Peasant Rebellion and Folklore of
Peasant Martyrs] (Tokyo: Kyoikusha, 1977); Toshio Yokoyama, Gimin densho no kenkyu [Study of
Peasant Martyr Folklore] (Tokyo: San’ichi Shobo, 1985); Yoshio Yasumaru, Nihon no kindaika to minshu
shiso [Japanese Modernization and Popular Thought] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1999), 234–237.
35
and made sustainable use of natural resources from mountains and rivers. They engaged
in subsistence agriculture that differed markedly from the modern version that is oriented
toward profitability, productivity, and mechanization. When Sen Katayama’s
great-grandfather hosted a local functionary, their sense of self-reliability and autonomy
was clear. If the samurai functionary were as familiar as peasants with farming and how
to assess crop condition, he would have been able to correspond crop condition and
amount of rice to be taxed. But because he was not as familiar, the farmers took
advantage of it. The functionary had to swallow the assessment by farmers and the
farmers made that process less embarrassing for him by carrying him through in a
palanquin around the village and hosting a conventional banquet with food and rice wine.
As we will discuss later, the intensive peasant rebellions against the privatization of land,
which curtailed peasants’ custom of autonomous collective management of village life
centered on agriculture and natural environment, attest to their understanding of the
importance of the commons.
29

Having spent his formative years in a farming village, Katayama was able to grasp
the psychology of farmers who were downtrodden but self-reliant, as his descriptions of
farming life in his autobiography demonstrate. Farmers strenuously worked from early
morning until dusk in the fields, and carried out seasonal tasks. During the slack season,
after they finished harvesting rice in autumn, strong workers collected firewood in the
mountains, while the weaker ones pounded steamed rice into rice cakes. With the arrival
of snow, farmers took to the mountains to hunt rabbits and to the rivers to catch loaches

29
Katayama, Aruitekita michi, 14.
36
and gobies. People in a household gathered every night with a torch made out of pine root
and chips, and most of the men wove mushiro and mino (straw mat and straw raincoat),
made waraji and nawa (straw sandals, straw ropes, straw bags), while the women spun
cotton into threads, dyed them, wove them into cloth, and made kimonos for the new year
celebration. They made miso, soy sauce, and tobacco for themselves and bought salt,
medicine, paper, combs, needles, sugar, and dried fish, including squid and salmon, from
peddlers. Surplus rice, not cash, was used to make these transactions, and accounts were
settled only twice a year—on the new year and obon (a week-long summer ritual of
drawing ancestral spirits back).
In March, the young picked yomogi (mugwort) and made yomogi-mochi. In April,
they picked warabi (bracken) in their mountain meetings. They started cultivating rice
paddies in mid-April by with oxen, and they began by putting young grass in paddies as a
fertilizer and then stomping on them to make good seedbed. They prepared unhulled rice
in water and sowed them on drained paddies. After forty to fifty days, when the rice
reached about five inches long, water was restored to the paddies in preparation for
replanting in June, during the rainy season. The entire village had to
cooperate—uprooting every seedling, washing the roots carefully, and replanting them in
perfect rows—all while singing work songs against an orchestral background of croaking
frogs and other creatures. After they made rice paddies, they harvested potatoes and peas
and caught eels at dusk. They attended to their reservoir—a lifeline during dry
years—and watched the climate carefully during pollination time, which occurred around
the 210th day of rice growth.
37
Their seasonal labors were colored and enriched by accompanying rituals such as
the new year celebration, Ujigami festival (Ujigami is a guardian god of a particular place
or area in the Shinto religion of Japan), and Obon festival (Japanese Buddhist custom to
honor the spirits of one's ancestors) in summer. Understandably, when planning a
rebellion, peasants almost always had to negotiate with this seasonal working schedule.
Katayama wrote in his autobiography that all this experience in a farming village had
been very useful even when he became a part of revolutionary movement because the
perseverance he had developed got him through many hardships and helped him
understand the psychology of farmers.
30

Village life proceeds in a serene pastoral pace and rhythm, punctuated by
occasional visitors. In a time without newspapers, telegraph, or other forms of media,
Kawara-ban (one-paper woodblock print) was one of a few reliable information sources
through which villagers came to know what was going on outside of their living sphere.
One day a Kawara-ban about the unwelcomed arrival of foreigners reached Hadeki
village. As a child, Sen Katayama sensitively perceived the news and rumors about the
“Black Ships” and vividly remembered how the fear of battleships from an unknown
country had shaken the whole village. In contrast, the ruling intellectuals of Tokugawa
bakufu knew how part of China had become colonized after the Opium War, but still had
not reached a consensus with other domanial lords on how to deal with those foreign

30
Ibid., 33, 34, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 54. Obon celebration is held around July 15 in the old Japanese lunar
calendar (equivalent of mid-August in the present Gregorian calendar.) When people held Ujigami festival
depended on areas. Here I based my description on Sen Katayama’s Hadeki village, where they had
Ujigami matsuri in April.
38
visitors: expel them or open the gate for trade.
31

Tentacles of Western Colonialism
The tentacles of British, French, and American colonialism reached Japan and
began influencing its political and economic condition from the 1860s on. Britain had
forcibly opened five ports and established a colony at Hong Kong as its price for ending
the Opium Wars of 1839–42, and the United States wanted to sneak in on the action to
access the Chinese market. Under the 1844 Wanghia Treaty, the Chinese allowed
Americans to use five ports, too, with full extraterritorial rights. Mirroring the gunboat
diplomacy of British imperial colonialism, American “big stick” diplomacy was looming
in Asia. Nine years later, the American Asiatic Squadron came to Okinawa
32
and onto
Tokyo Bay via Hong Kong and Shanghai. Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry saw his
mission as a version of Manifest Destiny, i.e., bringing Japan “within the influence of
European civilization” and taking “the gospel of God to the heathen.” Supported by the
desire of the Navy and New England whalers and traders to build coaling stations,
Perry’s four “black ships” anchored at the entrance of Tokyo Bay in order to deliver

31
Ibid., 22–23.

32
According to a historian, George Kerr, one of Perry’s crew members raped a 50-year-old Okinawan
woman in 1854, thereby marking a beginning of a history of U.S. military and sexual violence against
Okinawan women. Commodore Perry demanded a trial not for the rapist but for the local Okinawan men
who chased the crew member and caused him to fall to his death. Those men were tried. One was sentenced
to permanent exile from the island and the others for eight years. As quoted in Yoko Fukumura and Martha
Matsuoka, “Redefining Security: Okinawa Women’s Resistance to U.S. Militarism,” in Women’s Activism
and Globalization: Linking Local Struggles and Transnational Politics ed. Nancy A. Naples and Manisha
Desai (New York: Routledge, 2002), 243–244. See also George Kerr, Okinawa: The History of an Island
People (Boston: Tuttle Pub., 2000).
39
President Fillmore’s letter to the Tokugawa bakufu.
33

The idea and practice of the global color line was brought to Japan from the very
beginning of the encounter. The meaning of race was being produced. After weeks of
fruitless negotiations, Perry left for Hong Kong and returned in February 1854 with eight
warships of the Squadron. His crewmen did not only dazzle the Tokugawa officials with
such technological advances as the telegraph, the daguerreotype, the steam engine, the
Colt revolver, and farming machines to make the Japanese think that a seclusion policy
would keep Japan behind the civilization, but also exhibited racially charged ideology by
performing a couple of minstrel shows—one accompanied by a lecture on phrenology,
the pseudoscience of racial hierarchy based on skull size. On March 27, 1854, Perry
invited Tokugawa functionaries to a banquet on one of the ships, Powhatan, and his
crewmen performed an “Ethiopian concert.” According to the program flyer, they
performed “Picayune Butler,” “Ladies Won’t You Marry?,” “Sally Weaver,” “Uncle
Ned,” “Sally Is De Gal For Me,” “Oh! Mr. Coon” “As Colored ‘Gemmen’ of the North”,
“Old Tar River,” “Massa’s In De Cold! Cold Ground,” “Old Grey Goose,” “Old Aunt
Sally,” “Canal Boys,” “Virginia Rose Bud,” and “As Niggas of the South.” They
performed again at Hakodate on May 29, at Shimoda on June 16, and at Naha, Ryukyu
on July14. The self-righteous entertainment of white America came with bluster.
According to Hiroshi Mitani, Perry threatened the Tokugawa administration, with a hint
of war, to open doors. Based on “mistaken reports,” Perry accused Japan of

33
Commodore M. C. Perry, Narrative of the Expedition to the China Seas and Japan, 1852–1854, ed.
Francis L. Hawks (Washington, D.C.: Congress of the United States, 1856), 5, 75, 235. As quoted in Bruce
Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2009), 83–85; As to Manifest Destiny, see also Rudolph F. Acuna, Occupied America: A
History of Chicanos (New York: Pearson, 2014 [Eighth edition]).
40
“imprison[ing] shipwrecked [American] sailors” and refusing to accept Japanese
castaways, and denounced it as “exceedingly inhumane.” The United States was prepared
to “exhaust all our resources if necessary in order to wage war” against such adversary
nation. Perry added that the United States had recently conquered Mexico and
“circumstances may lead your country into a similar plight.” With the knowledge of
Britain’s control over Chinese trade following the Opium War, Tokugawa bakufu signed
the Kanagawa Treaty with the United States on March 31, 1854, granting coaling rights
for U.S. ships and allowing for a U.S. consul in Shimoda. Thus ended Japan’s 254-year
policy of seclusion.
34

The arrival of the Black Ships severely weakened the Tokugawa bakufu’s authority
and led some to question its legitimacy, as well as its capacity to deal with soaring prices
and other domestic upheavals engulfing the country. The crisis found voice in Chobokure,
songs sung by homeless monks and performed with a crosier or a bell in order to beg for
coins. In one such ditty, the singer editorialized, “Not to mention the question of what is
going on in foreign countries, what would happen to our country and our fleeting life in a
case of emergency? . . . you are pressing by power to pretend a peaceful society, but
without morals it will be far from harmony of people. Without harmony people would not
serve your military . . . people on soil seem to be about to rise up like Amakusa
[Referring to a rebellion, in which about 40,000 peasants engaged in 1637 to 1638 in
Shimabara and Amakusa of Kyushu] . . . when people grow grudges against the rule,

34
Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea, 83–85; Kiyoshi Kasahara, Kurofune raiko to ongaku [Arrival of
Black Ships and Music] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 2001), 85, 102–170; Hiroshi Mitani, Escape from
Impasse: The Decision to Open Japan, trans. David Noble (Tokyo: International House of Japan, 2006),
187–89; Peter B. Wiley, Yankees in the Land of the Gods: Commodore Perry and the Opening of Japan
(New York: Viking, 1990), 403.
41
god’s anger and various misfortunes will fall on you no doubt . . . while you are idling,
what would you do if a revolution happens?”
35

Pressing for an “open door” policy, Townsend Harris, the first U.S. consul general
in Japan, was more aggressive in pursuing trading rights, which led to the conclusion of
the Harris Treaty in 1858. The treaty’s provisions included exchanging diplomatic agents,
opening of the ports of Kanagawa (Yokohama), Hyogo (Kobe), Nagasaki, Niigata, Edo,
and Osaka to foreign trade, permitting U.S. citizens to live (lease lands, purchase
buildings, or build warehouses) in those ports—except Edo and Osaka—while falling
entirely under the domain of the U.S. legal system (in other words, they were granted
immunity from Japanese law). The treaty also fixed low import-export duties and the free
export of Japanese gold and silver
36
, granted missionaries the right to teach and
proselytize, banned opium imports and rice and wheat exports except for feeding sailors,
enabled the Japanese government to hire any American artisans, lawyers, scholars, or
sailors to purchase or order weapons, warships, steamships, merchantmans, whalers, and
fishing vessels, and prohibited the United States from selling military goods to any
parties except the Tokugawa bakufu. The treaty’s signing was hastened by the fact that
the British and the French defeated China again in the Arrow War in 1858. Harris
suggested that Japan sign the treaty before the allied Anglo-French fleet arrived and
forced the regime to accept less-favorable terms.
Nevertheless, the agreement was as imbalanced as the Tientsin Treaty between

35
Akira Sakuragi, Sokumenkan bakumatsu-shi [History of the End of Edo Period Viewed Sideways]
(Tokyo: Keiseisha, 1905), 87–94.

36
The relative values of gold and silver were 1 to 4.65 in Japan and 1 to 15.3 outside of Japan.
42
Great Britain and China. Indeed, the Harris Treaty was just the first of five so-called
“amity and commerce” agreements signed in 1858 between Japan and Russia, France,
Great Britain, and the Netherlands—also known as the Ansei Treaties.
37

Anti-Tokugawa samurai leaders interpreted the Tokugawa bakufu’s powerlessness
against foreign powers and failed seclusion policy as evidence that they need to ramp up
the sonnō joi (revere the emperor, expel the “barbarians” (Westerners’)) philosophy that
had been disseminated among samurai class. They now called for replacing the bakufu
with a government more able to show its loyalty to the emperor and continued efforts to
expel foreign powers. Satsuma
38
and Choshu
39
, the two main provinces adversarial to

37
Conrad Totman, “From Sakoku to Kaikoku, The Transformation of Foreign-Policy Attitudes, 1853–
1868,” Monunmenta Nipponica 35, no. 1 (1980): 1–19; Conrad Totman, The Collapse of the Tokugawa
Bakufu, 1862–1868 (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1980); Shinya Murase, "The
Most-Favored-Nation Treatment in Japan's Treaty Practice During the Period 1854–1905," American
Journal of International Law 70, no. 2 (April, 1976): 273–297.

38
Folker Reichert, “Mord in Namamugi” [Murder in Namamugi], Damals 45, no. 3 (German: Konradin
Medien, 2013): 66–69; Totman, The Collapse of the Tokugawa Bakufu, 68–72. When a retired British
merchant, Charles Lennox Richardson, stopped over at the treaty port of Yokohama in September 1862, his
party encountered the retinue of Satsuma regent Daimyo Shimazu Hisamitsu traveling on the Tōkaidō road
through the village of Namamugi. When Richardson approached Shimazu's palanquin too closely (despite
being warned not to do so), the daimyo’s bodyguard attacked and killed the Englishman. British lieutenant
colonel Neale demanded that Tokugawa bakufu give an apology and a huge indemnity of £100,000,
representing roughly one third of the total revenues of the bakufu for one year. Neale kept threatening a
naval bombardment of Edo if the payment was not made. The bakufu, eager to avoid trouble with European
powers, apologized and paid the indemnity to the British authorities. Britain also demanded of the Satsuma
domain the arrest and trial of the perpetrators of the incident, and £25,000 compensation for the surviving
victims and the relatives of Charles Lennox Richardson. Satsuma Province, however, refused to apologize,
to pay the compensation, or to convict and execute the two Satsuman samurai responsible for the murder.
Deciding to put pressure on Satsuma, the Royal Navy commander seized three foreign-built steam
merchant ships belonging to Satsuma. Satsuma lord, Shimazu, took it as declaration of war and ordered the
bombardment of British navy ships. British warships countered by shelling the city of Kagoshima.
Eventually Satsuma paid the indemnity by borrowing money from the bakufu, settling her dispute with
Britain.

39
Albert M. Craig, Choshu in the Meiji Restoration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 200–
201, 231–236. In a similar path, Choshu attempted to expel foreign ships that appeared on the seaboard of
the western tip of the Japanese mainland. It attacked an American merchant ship en route to Shanghai from
Yokohama on June 25, 1863, shelled a French ship passing through the Shimonoseki straits the next day,
and fired on a Dutch warship the next month. In July, a U.S. frigate sailed in the straits and sank two
43
Tokugawa, took the lead in the joi (expulsion of foreigners) effort. However, Satsuma
and Choshu suffered a defeat by the Western militaries in the early 1860s and soon
changed their stance from expelling foreign powers to prioritizing the import of Western
technological advance and military reinforcement. Thus, Satsuma and Choshu became
allies in a civil war against the Tokugawa administration, which in turn started the
punitive expedition against Choshu. Satsuma and Choshu opened their regions more
rapidly than the rest of Japan. A Scottish merchant, Thomas Blake Glover, who worked
for the Shanghai-based trading company Jardine Matheson, played the crucial role of
selling rifles and warships to Satsuma and Choshu through Nagasaki, despite the fact that
it was in violation of a treaty between Great Britain and Tokugawa. Glover helped send
17 Satsuma students and several Choshu students to London –including Kaoru Inoue
(1836–1915), who would later become foreign minister. With strong ties to the Mitsui
mercantile and shipping company, Inoue would go on to negotiate regarding the
inception of Japanese migration to Hawaii with Robert W. Irwin, the then-Hawaiian
consul general.
40

Both the new open door policy and the civil war between Choshu and the

vessels that belonged to Choshu Lord, Mori Takachika. Four days later, two French warships with marines
also retaliated against Choshu by landing and destroying its forts. They burned the ammunition, confiscated
most of the weapons, and set fire to the dwellings nearby. After France, the Netherlands, and the United
States attempted to reopen the strait through diplomatic negotiations that dragged for a year, the British
Minister to Japan suggested a joint military strike against Choshu by British, American, Dutch, and French
ships. In early September 1864, nine British, four Dutch, and three French warships, accompanied by an
American steamer—a total of 2,000 soldiers and marines—destroyed the forts around Shimonoseki and
defeated the Choshu troops. When peace negotiations started after Choshu’s surrender, U.S. Minister
Robert Pruyn demanded an indemnity of $3,000,000, which the bakufu was unable to pay. Instead, they
had to allow further lowering of custom tariffs.

40
Gordon Daniels and Chushichi Tsuzuki, eds., The History of Anglo-Japanese Relations 1600-2000, vol.
5, Social and Cultural Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 19–20.
44
Tokugawa bakufu immensely affected farmers’ lives, which partly explains why
numerous Japanese farmers revolted. One of the reasons was the difference in the
exchange ratio of gold and silver inside and outside of Japan. This caused many feudal
han domains to randomly issue their own paper money, called Hansatsu. The rice market
experienced confusion, too. The Tokugawa bakufu attempted to stockpile rice for
samurai soldiers for its military expedition to Choshu. Rice merchants responded by
buying and hording most of the rice in the market. Especially in Musashi (now the
Saitama and Western part of Tokyo), many people, who earned a meager living logging,
now had to buy rice at double the price, and buy wheat at triple the price. The bakufu also
started to increase control over silk, a major export commodity, by giving particular
wealthy merchants privileges over silk-producing farmers, who had been selling for
themselves.
Although they did this under the guise of improving quality standards, it was soon
revealed that the bakufu was sucking up the commission fee imposed on farmers. The
farmers in turn demanded an end to domestic regulations on silk dealing. The bakufu also
made farmers man the highway stations using their own horses, and provide labor for the
Tokugawa military. These policies made a bad situation unbearable. From June 14–19,
1866, a rebellion of more than 100,000 peasants, tenant farmers, day workers, and
artisans covered the Musashi region and spread to surrounding areas. They destroyed silk
authorization stations and set out for Yokohama port—the entrepot for new Western trade,
widely considered as the cause for the rise in prices and the source of insecurity by the
rebels. They demanded decreases in grain prices, return of what had been pawned, and
45
cancellation of additional military service.
41

Yonaoshi Rebellion and Sen Katayama’s Family
The year 1866 was one of the peaks of farmers’ and peasants’ rebellions. The
country was besieged by 185 separate uprisings, usually under the popular banner of
“Yonaoshi (Mend/Rectify the world)” or “Yonarashi (Flatten the world)”—which often
aimed at “Bammin Kyusai, or rescue of every poor person.” Peasant consciousness began
to transcend the individual feudal domain. Rapid social and economic changes were
beginning to affect Katayama’s village too. The life of farmers in the Tsuyama
domain—adjacent to Katayama’s area—was in crisis because of the rising rice prices, a
series of of poor crop yields (in 1866 alone they had too much rain right after planting
rice seedlings, cold wind in July, and typhoons in August), corruption of local
functionaries, and the recently-added tax and service, which the Tokugawa administration
imposed to cover the expense of their two military expeditions into the treasonable
Choshu. On November 24, 1866, after their petitions for tax reductions had been
repeatedly rejected, the Kamoya villagers rose up and appealed directly to the top
samurai feudal lord of the Tsuyama domain. The leader, Naokichi Niki (a farmer of
middle stratum), made use of a local, somewhat ironic, convention: they disguised
themselves as “Hi’nin (outcastes)” as a symbolic critique of the landlord for reducing the
peasants’ conditions to that of outcasts, which then enabled the rebellious peasants to

41
Jun Saito, Zusetsu: Nihon no hyakusho-ikki [Illustration: Hyakusho-Ikki in Japan] (Tokyo: Minshusha,
1999), 91–97.
46
behave as “outsiders” of the landlord’s legal sanction.
42

The uprising spread in many directions, like a chain reaction, from village to village,
and even into neighboring domains. It encompassed at least seventy villages in the
Tsuyama domain, sixty in the Numata domain, and twenty villages in the Tokugawa’s
exclave area in Tsuyama—of which Sen Katayama’s Hadeki village was one. Sen was
just six years old when his own village revolted. Their actions included not only Goso,
but also Uchikowashi, a strategy of destroying houses and warehouses of powerful
merchants and huge “land-collecting” farmers. Remarkably, peasants almost always
disciplined themselves not to steal, or kill anyone.
43

Because wealthy farmers could not “privately” own their land in a capitalist sense,
they held “pawned” farmlands for peasants unable to pay their taxes. Those wealthy
families of the Shoya/headmen stratum still had to submit taxes in kind and perform other
services. However, they tended to be middlemen who, on the pretense of representing
farmers’ interests, established cozy relationships with local functionaries and skimmed
off of the tax revenue extracted from the peasants. When peasants carried out
Uchikowashi, they stopped by the houses of the wealthy village headmen, demanded to
be well-fed, and proceeded to destroy the homes in which they ate. At the house of
Sojuro Morimoto, a local headman of Kurashiki village, Uchikowashi participants even

42
Katayama, Aruitekita michi, 25–26. Sen Katayama was so intrigued by the rare sight of Tokugawa
military parading through the village westward to Choshu—the samurais with their helmets, armor on red
jinbaori, their spears and flags sitting fearlessly upon their horses—that his grandmother had to restrain him
from joining the procession. He even experienced the problem of inflation and monetary confusion caused
by the issuance of local paper currencies when he was sent to buy rice wine from a nearby marketplace.
(Ibid.)

43
Naohiro Asao, Seiichi Ando, Ryukai Kawade, and Yoichi Goto, eds., Okayama kenshi, vol. 9, Kinsei IV
[Prefectural History of Okayama](Okayama: Sanyo Shimbunsha, 1989), 552–569.
47
said, “How on earth would we be grateful of your feeding us, you fiend?” and rejected
food so they could start Uchikowashi.
44

In the Kitayama village in Shonan County, three Buddhist bonzes mediated the
demands for each group of villages, called Kumi. Although grievances varied across each
domain, the main demands were tax relief (calling for a 50 percent reduction the first year,
followed by 20 percent the next), free redistribution of rice and money to aid poor
farmers and peasants, the replacement of village representatives, the return of pawned
farmland, a 50 percent reduction in rent paid by tenant farmers, no deception and precise
measurement in packaging harvested rice, an end to the unfair dealings by rice merchants,
and the abolition of military service and tax imposed by Tokugawa expeditions.
45

Samurai soldiers of each feudal domain encountered waves of peasant uprisings.
They usually tried to retain political legitimacy by sparing the lives of rebellious farmers
who labored for the whole system, choosing instead to arrest only the leaders of
conspiracies and harshly punish them as warnings. The leaders were sentenced to life in
prison, though they were released, under amnesty, by the Meiji emperor in 1868. In the
aftermath, the feudal Daimyo landlord of the Tsuyama domain did not reduce tax in kind,
i.e. the rice harvest. But they provided 23,150 hyos (1,530 tons) of rice to the villagers in
the domain for aid. The Numata domain landlord eventually provided 100 tons of rice for
aid. The villages, including Katayama’s Hadeki, were able to change the amount of extra

44
Ibid., 552–569.

45
Ibid., 563–570.
48
tax and service imposed by Tokugawa functionaries.
46

Yonaoshi Hyakusho-Ikki, which continued to erupt through the 1870s, was clearly
a new phase of resistance, because they held radical views on the collapse of feudalism
and liberation from bondage. First, peasants’ demand of tax reduction became more
emboldened. Stasuma and Choshu, which declared the formation of new Meiji
government against Tokugawa, took advantage of the demand for a 50 percent tax
reduction foregrounded by the farmers in Tokugawa territory. By supporting the demand,
the new government tried to gain the support of farmers in enemy territory in the ongoing
civil war and undermine the material basis of bakufu, not to mention the legitimacy of it.
However, rebel leaders outside of Tokugawa territory replicated the demand and even
called for the temporary suspension of taxes. This happened in the Kanbara County
rebellion (Niigata Prefecture), the Oki rebellion in 1868 (Shimane), the Okawatsu
rebellion in 1872 (Niigata), the Kaho rebellion, also known as Chikuzen Takeyari Ikki, in
1873 (Fukuoka), and the Ise rebellion in 1876 (Mie). The peasants in Minami Aizu
County actually won the half reduction for a year.
Second, the farmers dared to sever the control of the money-lending merchants by
demanding the restoration of pawned land, materials, and interest-free loans for the next
several years. Many of those who carried out Uchikowashi intended to destroy the legal
documents of debt. This was seen in the Musashi rebellion, as we examined, the
Shintatsu rebellion in 1866 (Fukushima), the Minami Aizu rebellion in 1868 (Fukushima),
the Esashi rebellion in 1868 (Iwate), the Higashikanbara rebellion (Niigata), the Hyuga

46
Ibid., 568, 574–575.
49
rebellion in 1869 (Miyazaki), the Shinoyama han rebellion in 1869 (Hyogo), and the
Gujo County rebellion in 1869 (Gifu).
Third, they demanded the dismissal of Shoyas, and public elections of village
representatives. These bold demands point to a more self-conscious reconsideration of the
old order and an incipient vision of a new order in which hardship and poverty are not a
matter of course. Most importantly, the consciousness of many farmers and peasants
connected ongoing changes in socio-economic conditions to the question of land. In 1869,
peasants in the Ugo region (now the Akita and Yamagata prefectures) spread rumors
about an egalitarian redistribution of land that would allow hyakusho to have at least six
koku of rice harvest a year. In the same year, similar rumors were so widespread in the
domain of Hiroshima that the feudal provincial government had to deny it by an
ordinance.
47

In 1868, Sen Katayama’s village experienced another peasant uprising. This time,
the two axis of antagonism were clearer; one was between the feudal domain lord and
farmers/peasants and the other was between Shoya stratum of farmers and peasant
stratum. On one hand, about 80 percent of farmers were producing less than 5 koku (900
liters) of rice per year in the area. This meant that most farmers were so poor they were
vulnerable to losing their land and had to borrow money to pay taxes. On the other hand,
wealthy farmers had expanded the amount of land under their management. The Yabuki

47
Yasumaru, Nihon no kindaika to minshu shiso, 416–421, 424–425; Nijiji Aoki, Meiji nomin sojo no
nenjiteki kenkyu [Chronological Study of Peasant Rebellion in Meiji Period] (Tokyo: Shinseisha, 1967),
38–55.

50
family
48
, for example, accumulated land that sporadically existed in seventeen villages
yielding 140 koku of rice, and leased much of the land to tenant peasants. The situation
worsened when the Tokugawa administration announced it would grant its exclave
domain in Tsuyama to the Daimyo of Hamada of the Iwami province. Expelled from
their land in the Second Choshu War, this feudal clan of 4,000 subjects once depended on
61,000 koku of rice, produced by the farmers of Iwami province. In Tokugawa’s exclave,
however, farmers produced only 20,000 koku. Anticipating new tax increases under the
Hamada clan’s rule, farmers and peasants of seventy-four villages started drafting an
appeal to block the transfer of land. From Katayama’s village, a man named Hatsujiro
was sent as a representative. In February of 1868, the Tatsuno clan, who used to govern
the exclave on behalf of Tokugawa, announced that the Hamada clan would not take
control, and the tax rate would stay the same.
49

As soon as things seemed to calm down, a rumor that taxes would be cut in half
gripped the region, encouraged, no doubt, by a wing of the Satsuma, Choshu, and Tosa
coalition, who sought to return political power to the imperial court and overthrow the
ruling Tokugawa Shogunate. They understood how rural disaffection could impact the
civil war and sought to make use of peasants’ antagonism against heavy taxation. (One of
the leading figures of Choshu, Shinsaku Takasugi, had first-hand knowledge of the
Taiping Rebellion, where a peasants’ army, backed by mercenaries and organized by an
American, Frederick Townsend Ward, proved effective. Takasugi advocated for an

48
This Yabuki ( 矢吹) family is different from Katayama’s original family Yabuki (藪木).

49
Asao et al., Okayama kenshi, 9:575–582.
51
organized peasant militia, or Kiheitai, to help challenge Tokugawa rule). With this rumor,
farmers and peasants of eighteen villages, including Katayama’s Hadeki, went to the
local functionary of the neighboring Okayama domain and resorted to Goso to demand
the 50 percent tax reduction. Some Shoyas of several villages not only tried to persuade
rebellious farmers to withdraw the petition, but also informed the Tatsuno feudal
authority of this uprising and helped them arrest three leaders. A few days later, about
eighty farmers gathered in front of the house of the Shoya of Otokami village, where one
of the arrested leaders was from. They secured his release and convinced the village
headman to recalculate ten years of back tax payments.
50

This incident redirected the energy of farmers and peasants to more equal
participation in village management. Specifically, they demanded that Shoyas disclose
Chomen (tax record) and compensate them if any “miscalculations”— unfair gains or
illicit funds—were found that had stayed in Shoyas’ hands. The Tatsuno clan’s local
functionaries kept suppressing dissident farmers by force. On April 23, about one
hundred farmers and peasants from the villages of Hadeki, Otokami, and Shionouchi
resorted to Chosan and escaped to Takiyama Village in the neighboring Okayama domain
in order to use the neighboring authority as leverage in negotiating. Yoshizo Hayakawa, a
local functionary from the Okayama domain, met Yahachiro Matsukata, a counterpart of
the Tatsuno feudal authority. Faced with Hayakawa’s harsh criticism, Matsukata
promised to release the farmers and negotiate after they returned to their villages.
Matsukata visited each of the eight villages but his negotiations failed, leaving him no

50
Ibid., 584–587.
52
option but to secretly take the tax records away. In the following intercalary April, six of
those villages petitioned for the Shoyas to retire. More progressive Shoyas from other
villages temporarily took over management. One of the villages was Hadeki, where Sen
Katayama’s great-grandfather Kichizaemon, grandfather Yoshisaburo, and his uncle
Mansaburo were discharged from the roles of village headmen.
51

Sen Katayama’s autobiography reveals no wrong-doing on his great-grandfather’s
part, but he recalls the episode involving the reexamination of tax records to demonstrate
his great-grandfather’s sincerity and integrity. He writes:
There started takeovers of village headmen’s control and practice in farming
villages. Rumors were that a certain Shoya lost all his properties because it had
been revealed he embezzled public money of the village in the past and he had to
return the entire amount. This rumor caused unrest among farmers. It shook my
village too. My family inherited the headman role for generations. At that time my
great grandfather was the headman. He had been playing the role for sixty
years . . . The rumor that reexamination [of records of taxation, village public
money, and money-lending] had been going on everywhere caused tension
between my family and other villagers. They believed that my great grandfather
had also misappropriated village money with the sacrifice of others and thronged
to my house, yelling “Disclose all the records and return all you stole in all these
decades!” and “You are going to be empty this time. You will have to throw up all
you have swallowed!”
The reexamination began. A proxy of county farmers supervised the process
in which the representatives of villagers spent days to thoroughly look up the
records. Although there were not many who can read and write in my village, the
whole village cheered up the representatives. It lasted two or three months. The
result was what no one in the village had expected. Neither the county proxy nor
the village representatives could find any misappropriation. Furthermore, it turned
out that my great grandfather had paid from his own pocket to meet village
expenses and that he had not received compensation for that. When the account
was finally settled, he received the amount . . . What I learned from my great
grandfather is justice, unselfishness, and sincerity.
52

51
Tokuwa Nagamitsu, ed., Bizen bicchu mimasaka hyakush-ikki shiryo [Historical document of Peasant
Rebellion in Bizen, Bicchu, and Mimasaka], 3:1481–2, 1618. As quoted in Asao et al. Okayama kenshi,
9:587–589.

52
Katayama, Aruitekita michi, 31–33.
53

The anecdote reveals the complexity of power relationships within a farming
village. It seems that his family was discharged from the Shoya/headman role only
temporarily, for his brother would be discharged from his headman position by the new
government in the later 1873 rebellion. But it at least shows the sometimes-ambiguous
middleman position that Shoyas occupied. As a matter of fact, houses of some local
headmen evaded Uchikowashi because they were loyal to villagers and supported their
cause. Although the revolts became more complicated as they spread to more villages,
the most dynamic actors continued to be (1) the Shoya stratum, who wanted to avoid any
loss or destruction of their property and preserve its interest by asking Tatsuno feudal
authority to enforce the law that banned farmers’ direct action and to arrest the leaders of
farmers; (2) the poor farmers and peasants, who attempted to expose the injustice in the
tax management by Shoyas and to use the neighboring Okayama feudal authority as
leverage in negotiation, and; (3) the Tatsuno feudal authority, who wanted to avoid any
criticism from neighboring domains and higher Tokugawa authorities, and to retain its
legitimacy of governing the area. While a couple of farmers’ representatives went to
Kyoto to appeal to the imperial court that the new Satsuma, Choshu and Tosa coalition
government be restored, the new government had already announced the transfer of the
ex-Tokugawa’s exclave to the forgiven Hamada clan.
The fact that twenty-seven villages petitioned for the direct rule by the emperor
indicates peasants’ deepening distrust in the Tokugawa reign and the changing
consciousness and shifting worldview. The Hamada authority that ruled over the
54
transferred domain—renamed the Tsuruta domain—was initially willing to tolerate the
farmers’ demands, but its tolerance paradoxically catalyzed the uprising and broadened
its geographical reach. New representatives of the farmers of four counties submitted the
eleven demands. The first demand addressed the dishonest tax management by Shoyas at
the time of domain authority transfer. The Tatsuno authority had admitted that as a
remedy for poor crop of 1866, farmers could submit 25 percent of tax in money, 40
percent in kind/rice, and 35 percent a year later because of poor crops. When the land was
transferred in May 1868, Tatsuno no longer claimed for the tax levy postponed from a
year before. However, Shoyas had already collected 800 kan of silver (768,000 silver
coins) without informing the peasants whether Shoyas were submitting to old Tatsuno or
new Tsuruta authority and submitted to the old authority in September 1867. Now
farmers demanded that their money be returned. Second, Shoyas were supposed to submit
tax payment in silver, but they collected gold coins from farmers based on the calculation
that one gold coin equaled one hundred silver coins in the Osakan exchange market. As it
turned out, the exchange rate was closer to 1 = 180, which prompted farmers to demand
that Shoyas refund the difference. Widespread Shoyas’ corruption also led to demands
for more equitable management of village matters.
53

That the lord of the new Tsuruta domain accepted these demands triggered another
wave of direct action. The new village leaders, consisting mainly of farmers and peasants,
usually invited a few local functionaries, Shoyas, and a county proxy of farmers, to
publicly carry out the recalculation of tax records and other services. The domain lord

53
Asao et al., Okayama kenshi, 9:590–595.
55
ordered lenient confinement of five Shoyas, and the local functionaries broke convention
by not staying at the Shoya’s house during their visit to a village. The lower stratum of
farmers and peasants was able to dispatch the new government in the neighboring
Okayama domain and force the resignations of local functionaries allied with wealthy
farmers. They stopped the hereditary succession of Shoya rule. In at least twelve villages,
new headmen were elected by vote. The old feudal order was surely collapsing; farmers
and peasants realized they possessed power and the capacity to attain a greater level of
self-determination and justice.
54

However, these were pyrrhic victories. The last wave of rebellions occurred in
November of 1869, capping off a year of poor crop yields due to the lack of sunlight in
May and frigid winds in July. Although the Tsuruta domain lord decided to reduce the
taxation on rice and other crops by 20 percent, some 2000 Hinin (outcastes) and farmers
who, disguised as Hinins, thronged at houses of wealthy farmers and ate their stored rice.
Hatsujiro and Iwazo from Hadeki village were involved. They demanded a 50 percent tax
reduction, not 20 percent. The lord mobilized a couple hundred samurai subjects and
arrested 780 rebels. Some farmers escaped to Kyoto and appealed to the new government,
but the new government extradited them back to the Tsuruta domain. Three leaders were
sentenced to exile on far-off islands and many received multi-year prison sentences. Thus
the two-year-long regional upheaval came to an inauspicious end. The peasants and poor
farmers had to realize that the new Meiji government was as absolutist and oppressive
toward them as the Tokugawa administration, as it immediately abandoned its pledge to

54
Ibid., 597–613.
56
cut taxes in half.
55

“Gannenmono (First-Year Folks)” and the Maria Luz Incident
While the local contexts of dispossession of peasants had been brewing inside the
country, the external context of the Pacific labor relocation by Western powers found a
way into Japan, even before the inception of government-sponsored migration in 1885.
About 300 years after Toyotomi Hideyoshi, infuriated over Portuguese slave trade of
people of the Kyushu region, carried out some of the first policies of closing the door, the
Meiji government opened it again. In 1868, the first year of the Meiji period, an incident
happened that shows Japan was still in the trans-Pacific sphere of the coolie trade. Hawaii
was one of the major destinations of the global coolie trade, competing with Cuba and the
British West Indies. The planters, originally hailing from British or American Christian
missionary families, were for years most vigorous in their demand for Chinese labor, as
the Chinese were the cheapest and most available.
56

A German physician, William Hillebrand—then the physician for the Hawaiian

55
Ibid., 614–616.

56
According to Midori Wakakuwa, Portuguese traders engaged in slave trade. In 1555, a Portuguese
missionary at Macao wrote in his letter that those Portuguese who had come to Asia forgot “truth” by
engaging in greedy deals, especially through purchase of female slaves. In 1571, the Portuguese King, Don
Sebastian, banned the Japanese slave trade after Portuguese missionaries complained that it would hamper
their proselytizing efforts. However, the ban was not effective. Portuguese merchants bought young women
and used them as sex slaves, and forcibly took children to sail away with them. The Portuguese used young
Japanese men as their soldiers at Goa, Malacca, and Macao and sometimes sold them to Muslim countries.
Importantly, Wakakuwa argues that Asian human trafficking preceded that of the Portuguese. Ethnically
motley crews of Wako (pirates in East Asian seas) had performed human trafficking around the sea since
the fourteenth century. For example, people from Koryo (now a part of Korea) were enslaved and made to
labor in the Kyushu region of Japan. When Toyotosmi Hideyoshi himself exacted participation in his
Korean expedition from other feudal lords, the Wako sold Korean villagers they had caught and financed
the expedition. Midori Wakakuwa, Quatro Ragazzi: Tensho Shonen Shisetsu to sekaiteikoku [Quatro
Ragazzi: Tensho Embassy and World Empire] (Tokyo: Shueisha, 2003), 413–417.
57
royal family and a member of the King's Privy Council, the Board of Health, and the
Bureau of Immigration—was dispatched to Asia to “secure for the Islands a useful and
tractable class of laborers” in April of 1865. He obtained 500 coolies from China, and
reported his preference for Chinese over Indians, though he recommended introducing “a
few hundred Indian coolies” too.
In the debate over the coolie trade, the penal sanction of the 1850 Masters and
Servants Act of Hawaii came under fire by an anti-coolie American press from 1868 to
1872. The penal code says that a contract servant might, for willful absence from work,
be apprehended and sentenced by any district or police justice to serve his employer up to
double his time of absence after completion of the contract, though not to exceed one
year. Persistent refusal to work could land a contract laborer in prison for a longer period
of time. Also, the district or police justice could terminate a contract if a charge of cruelty
or if violation of contract was sustained against an employer. The Hawaiian Gazette tried
to counter-publicize the condition of the Hawaiian plantation: “We have no Coolie
system here in its present odious acceptation, we never have had . . . The law requires a
man to do what he has contracted to do.” A reader’s comment was attached: “It never
occurred to me that the right to break a voluntarily made contract with impunity . . .
constituted any part of the system of free labor.”
57

This propaganda, indeed, did not prevent the first Japanese labor migration from
happening in a manner of the coolie trade. Robert Crichton Wyllie, a planter on the island
of Kauai who was also the Hawaiian foreign minister, voiced his plea for laborers as

57
Hilary Conroy, The Japanese Frontier in Hawaii, 1868–1898 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1953), 12–13, 15–16.
58
epidemic diseases decimated the native population of Hawaii, and the plantation
economy shifted from coffee to sugar cane. Wyllie wrote to Eugene M. Van Reed, an
American businessman in Japan who had asked to be appointed Hawaiian consul general
there, that “[W]e are much in want of them [laborers]. I myself could take 500 for my
own estates. Could any good agricultural laborers be obtained from Japan or its
dependencies? . . . If so send me all the information you can and state at what cost per
head they could be landed here.” Van Reed proceeded to hire three Japanese recruiters,
Hanbei Kimura, Yonezo, and Kumehachi. In his letter to the U. S. minister to Japan,
General Robert B. Van Valkenburgh, Van Reed wrote that his “men [are] mere laborers
who had been picked out of the streets of Yokohama, sick, exhausted, and filthy, and
without clothing to cover decency.” Their occupations were listed as “cooks, barbers,
blacksmiths, potters, sake makers, leather workers, printers, wood workers, tailors,”
implying that actually very few of them were farmers. Although Van Reed had obtained
190 passports from Shogunate, the new government took over the Yokohama port shortly
after. Without waiting for the establishment of diplomatic relations between Hawaiian
Kingdom and Meiji’s new government or for passports to be issued, the British ship
Scioto, chartered by Van Reed, left Yokohama for Hawaii with a motley group of 149
Japanese under a three-year contract on May 17, 1868, arriving at Honolulu on June 19
with one of them, Kodzu Waki, dead.
58

Chugai Shimbun, one of the Yokohama press, condemned the whole transaction in

58
Ibid., 8; Van Reed to Van Valkenburgh, April 20, 1869, A.H., F.O. and Ex., Consul General, Kanagawa,
as quoted in Conroy, The Japanese Frontier in Hawaii, 21; Ibid., 24, 25, 27.
59
an article titled “The Same as Selling Negroes:”
59

Riding on the tumult within Japan a certain foreigner resident at this port has
reached an agreement with pleasure seeking people for work at sugar cultivation
in the Sandwich Islands . . . [thus] innocent Japanese are deceived by cunning
foreigners, will have all profits stolen from them. The poor Japanese cannot
endure the painfully hot climate and the painful burdensome work They will not
only meet with sickness but will have no way . . . for them to be returned to their
native place . . . There is no peace in the entire country of Japan today, and even
the government does not have time to deal with things of this sort. However, with
the gradual pacifying of the disturbances the government will examine this event
and mete out suitable punishment to those connected with it.

Van Valkenburgh meanwhile issued a decree that “[T]he Act of Congress to
prohibit the coolie trade, etc., approved February 19,1862, and which was framed with
regard to China, is hereby made applicable to Japan,” though U.S. Secretary of State
Seward wrote that the regulation would have to be rescinded, as it was without
foundation in law.

Van Reed also got away with sending forty-two Japanese laborers to
Guam in the same year, none of whom were ever paid for their work before being
rescued by a ship chartered by the Meiji government three years later.
60

The reports on those labor migrants of the first Meiji year to Hawaii show the
predicament that they faced. The 148 Japanese were quickly distributed to plantations.
Seventy-one labor migrants were sent to Maui, twenty-two to Kauai, and four to Lanai.
Fifty-one remained on Oahu. The Meiji government pronounced Van Reed’s activities a

59
Chugai Shimbun, Yokohama, Keio 4
th
mo., 3
rd
day (April 22, 1868), quoted in Yukosha, ed., Meiji,
Taisho, Showa rekishi shiryo zenshu: Gaiko-hen jokan [Colletion of Histrocal Materials of Meiji, Taisho,
Showa Periods] (Tokyo: Yukosha, 1934), 50-51. This book has been digitized by Japanese National Diet
Library and can be read at their website. http://kindai.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/1920416 (accessed November
13, 2013).

60
Enclosure in American Minister to Office for Foreign Affairs, Kanagawa Saibasho, etc., May 26, 1868,
Gaimusho, I: 1, 652, as quoted in Conroy, The Japanese Frontier in Hawaii, 25; Kodama, Nihon iminshi
kenkyu josetsu, 22.
60
crime and negotiated the terms for the laborers’ return. Japanese officials, including
Kagenori Ueno, were predictably nervous about getting into diplomatic entanglements as
they sought to establish and protect Japan’s sovereignty, but they finally reached an
agreement stipulating that “all whippings by the field bosses should be reported to the
Hawaiian government, which had agreed to pay a fine of from five to thirty silver
dollars . . . In the event of illness, your employers will kindly provide medical treatment
and you will receive regular wages.” They also secured the return of about thirty-eight
men, who consisted of “[m]echanics . . . and all the sick, deformed and disabled” at the
expense of the Japanese government, and permitted the remaining laborers who wished to
stay to return at the conclusion of their contract at the expense of the Hawaiian
government.
Arriving at Yokohama, one of the returnees sent an official letter complaining that,
“although we worked diligently we never got a day of rest, we got no medical treatment,
we were beaten, our wages were held up for months.” Another returnee wrote “laborers
had never received the $10 advance promised, that in Hawaii every man of them had
been imprisoned at least two or three times, that they were each time charged 8 or 10
dollars upon release.” Tomisaburo, who was appointed as special agent to look after the
rest of those who remained, also reported concerns, including quarrels between laborers
and overseers, protests against assessment of fines, mix-ups regarding wages, taxes, and
so on. Three of the returnees actually committed suicide. When the contracts were about
to expire in May, 1871, nineteen wished to return to Japan, thirty-seven wished to keep
61
sojourning in Hawaii, and thirty-six wished to go to the United States.
61

There were about 140 Japanese around 1870, including Gannenmono. They kept
suffering from the luna’s (overseer’s) brutality. On May 24, 1874, Katsusaburo Yoshida
fought in self-defense against a luna named Henry Treadway. Treadway had been
brutally whipping Hawaiians, Chinese, and Japanese workers on Captain James Makee’s
plantation in Maui. For the most part, Makee’s twenty-five Japanese workers felt he was
generous for granting advance payments and for allowing workers to move on to other
plantations if they wanted. When Treadway beat Yoshida and tried to ride his horse,
another worker, Kinji Ono, beat Treadway with a sugar cane. Twenty other Japanese
joined the fight. The next day, they were tried before a plantation (kangaroo) court,
whose judge was the plantation owner. The prosecutor was the luna, but the defendants
complained and took the case to a Honolulu district court. They hired a proxy, Ace
Hardwell, for a hundred dollars.
Katsugoro Yoshida, Kinji Ono, and Tora [last name unknown] were found guilty,
sentenced to three hundred days in jail, and fined one hundred dollars each. The other
laborers involved in the fight were fined thirty-five dollars each. It is noteworthy that
those Japanese laborers promised each other that they would evenly share the burden of
fines. This is reminiscent of how peasants shared monetary burdens while involved in

61
An example of rules imposed at those plantations is as follows: At the Nuuanu plantation, “they
provided for 10 hours time per day, with the laborer to be docked 1/4-days wages if 10 (or 15) minutes late;
lights out, conversation cease at 9 p.m.; extra pay for overtime work payday each month; rooms to be
cleaned by laborers once a week; laborer to pay (by wage deduction) for carelessly broken, lost, or stolen
tools; 25 cents fine per stick for appropriating cane; no liquor or opium; laborer not allowed to leave
plantation on working days without permission; absence from work without permission to be charged at
rate of 2 days for each one absent—this also applying to absence for sickness due to laborer’s own
imprudence”; smoking, noise, visitors, lights in quarters after 9 p.m. punishable by 25 cents fine per
offence. Conroy, The Japanese Frontier in Hawaii, 29–30, 40–43.
62
rebellions in Japan. Soon after, a planter in Lihue, Kauai, took over the contract of these
twenty-five Japanese workers by paying their fines and putting them to work on his
planation.
62

Some others found occupations other than plantation work and largely intermarried
with Hawaiian or Portuguese women. Most importantly, this whole incident of
Gannenmono (First-Year Folks) let the Japanese government make sense of the cruel
nature of labor relocation schemes, which had been happening across the Pacific. It
seems important for the officials to differentiate Japanese from Chinese. Ueno, “with a
great deal of pleasure,” reported “the efforts of the new government in striving to protect
the interests of our people, thus establishing its good name and reputation, which is said
to be different from that of China.” Meanwhile, reluctance set the tone of migration
negotiation between Japan and Hawaii and other governments for a decade to come.
63

Another incident revealed the nature of “shipments” across the Pacific that Japan
was getting exposed to through its new open door policy. On July 9, 1872, the María Luz,
a Peruvian cargo ship en route from Macao to Callao, Peru, stopped at Yokohama to fix
damage caused by a severe storm. Inside was a cargo of Chinese coolies destined for
Peruvian plantations. While anchored at Yokohama, a coolie escaped by jumping
overboard and swam to the nearby British warship HMS Iron Duke. When he was turned
over to Japanese authorities at Yokohama port, he reported cruel mistreatment and
requested that the 231 other Chinese aboard be rescued. The captain of the María Luz,

62
Sakae Morita, Hawaii gojunenshi (Tokyo: Toppan Insatsu, 1919), 717–719.

63
James Hiroshi Okahata and the Publication Committee of the United Japanese Society of Hawaii, eds., A
History of Japanese in Hawaii (Honolulu: United Japanese Society of Hawaii, 1971), 60–61.
63
Ricardo Herrera, was summoned and admonished to treat the escapee with leniency and
to take better care of the other Chinese.
64

Soon after, another Chinese indentured laborer escaped. His complaint reached
acting British consul Robert Grant Watson that the first escapee had been treated brutally
by the Peruvian captain when he got back to the ship. Watson inspected the vessel and
found that the claim was true and that conditions were similar to that of a slave ship.
Watson formally approached Japanese Foreign Minister Soejima Taneomi to take action.
Soejima reviewed the ship's records, interviewed the officers, and found that its cargo of
illiterate indentured laborers had been deceived into signing contracts that they could not
read or understand in Macao, and that they were being confined against their will under
inhumane conditions. Many had been kidnapped, and most had no idea of the location of
their final destination. The court, presided by Ōe Taku, held that the company owning the
María Luz was guilty of wrong-doing. Indeed, foreign countries, including the United
States (with the exception of the United Kingdom) counter-argued that Japan had ignored
the Yokohama extraterritorial zone. Furthermore, Captain Herrera appealed against the
decision, with English barrister F.V. Dickens. Dickens charged that involuntary servitude
was practiced in Japan in the form of the sale of prostitutes and in the contractual debts of
apprenticeship, and was thus not illegal. He added that, since the Chinese laborers had
been hired in Macao, the case fell within the jurisdiction of Portugal due to
extraterritoriality agreements between Japan and Portugal. However, Ōe eventually ruled

64
Bert Edström, ed., Turning Points in Japanese History (New York: Routledge, 2002), 75–78; Donald
Keane, Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852–1912 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002),
216–218.
64
that the Peruvian captain and contractor were in violation of international law, and not
Japanese law. The Qing dynasty (the Chinese government) officially thanked the
Japanese government for its strong stance and assistance rendered to Chinese subjects. In
June 1873, the matter was submitted to the arbitration of Czar Alexander II of Russia,
who, two years later, supported the Japanese court’s decision.
65

Charles E. DeLong, the then-American minister in Japan, felt the censure of his
superiors and of the American press for his conduct in the case of the Maria Luz. When
the Hawaiian government asked him to be a third party to negotiate the labor immigration
treaty with Japan, DeLong wrote back to Ferdinand Hutchison, president of the Hawaiian
Board of Immigration, in reference to the coolie trade, stating that he could not act “for
the Hawaiian Kingdom, which seeks to carry out what the United States would prevent.”
DeLong had another objective: to prevent Japan from turning against the United States
and allying with China. Therefore, when the Sino-Japanese Friendship and Trade Treaty
of 1871 concluded with a sentence confirming that both countries had unequal treaties
with Western powers, DeLong feared an Oriental alliance against Western states that
would be “calamitous.” On the other hand, DeLong tried to attract Japanese attention
eastward to Hawaii by showing support for the idea that influential Japanese elites take
up leases there, or form a sort of Japanese colony, which would bring Japanese
laborers—though not in the same manner as a coolie trade. Meanwhile, diplomatic
negotiations over labor immigration took a backseat to revising unequal treaties with
European and American powers. As a result, the Hawaiian sugar plantation establishment

65
Edström, Turning Points, 75–78; Keane, Emperor of Japan, 216–218.
65
continued to bring shiploads of Chinese laborers during the 1870s. The Bureau of
Immigration had imported approximately 13,500 Chinese coolies between 1852 and 1882,
but by 1882, only 5,000 remained on the plantations. When they branched out after the
expiration of their contracts, into such trades as shop-keeping and rice cultivation, white
men regarded them as competitors and thus unsuited for Hawaii’s sugar economy.
66

Changing Class System and Remaining Power Relations
A law passed in late 1872 emancipated the Burakumin outcastes, prostitutes, and
other forms of bonded labor in Japan—a repercussion of the Maria Luz Incident. The
British lawyer Dickens’ accusation that Japan practiced involuntary servitude in the form
of the sale of prostitutes and forcible apprenticeship put pressure on the Japanese state to
restructure the old class system. But there were other reasons to liberate the Burakumin
outcastes, which had to do with Japan’s shifting land systems, as I shall argue later. For
now, a brief contextualization is required.
67

Nominal abolition of the class system and nominal liberation of the outcastes added
a fundamental dimension to the political economy of the Meiji government. During the
Tokugawa era, people were not allowed to change occupations easily, especially from

66
Payson J. Treat, Diplomatic Relations Between the United States and Japan, 1853–1895 (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1932), Vol. I, 462–463; DeLong to Hutchison, Jan. 18, 1873, Archives of
Hawaii, Foreign Office and Executive file, Envoy to Japan, as quoted in Conroy, The Japanese Frontier in
Hawaii, 47; Hilary Conroy, “Meiji Imperialism: ‘Mostly Ad Hoc’,” in Japan Examined: Perspectives on
Modern Japanese History, ed. Harry Wray and Hilary Conroy (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Party,
1983), 138; Conroy, The Japanese Frontier in Hawaii, 48; Okahata et al, eds., A History of Japanese in
Hawaii, 71–72.

67
This could be one of the contexts that explain the presence of prostitutes in Japanese immigrant
communities in the U.S. See Yuji Ichioka, Issei, 28–39.
66
non-samurai to samurai status. A child of a Bushi (a warrior) would become a Bushi; a
child of a farmer would become a farmer. Farmers were not allowed to wear any silk
clothes and or long ornamental, silver hairpins, although many openly defied convention.
Men who were not heirs could not inherit any land, according to the practice of
partitioning land to the eldest son, called Bunke. Agrarian non-heirs had few choices;
they could stay with their oldest brothers and their families, become Buddhist monk or
tenant farmers, or move to an urban area.
Likewise, a child of a carpenter became a carpenter. Artisans had hereditary
succession, although they allowed non-heir sons of farming families to become their
apprentices. Merchants also accepted non-heirs as apprentices. This illuminates the fact
that the non-samurai population, including farmers, artisans, and merchants, had more
social connection than those between the samurai class and the non-samurai class.
68

In 1869, the feudal categories of status were reorganized into a new “class system”
under the slogan Shimin Byodo, which literally means “equality among the old four
statuses.” Specifically, Daimyo samurai lords and aristocrats (Kuge) were recategorized
as Kazoku. Other Bushi or samurai warriors, who were the bureaucrats and functionaries,
were recategorized as Shizoku. Under the new system they were prohibited from carrying
swords, but they received stipends (called Chitsuroku) from the new government.
Hyakusho, who lived in farming villages and supplemented their income with handicrafts
and logging, and Chonin, who lived in towns close to lords’ castles and were mostly

68
Katayama, Aruitekita michi, 24–26, 48; Only blind persons were allowed to become a masseur or a
masseuse, an acupuncture practitioner, and a Shamisen (three-string instrument) teacher. Katayama’s
family was Shoya, who was, as headmen of a village, responsible for hosting travellers. Most of them were
on the way back from Kyoto, where they had obtained certificate of Kendo (way of sword), Sado (way of
tea), Kado (way of flower).
67
artisans and merchants, were both recategorized as Heimin, which literally means
commoners. They were now allowed to marry people from other categories and change
their occupation and place of residence freely.
The attempt to maintain the privilege of the ex-samurai class, i.e., Shizoku, created
a huge financial burden to the new government. To solve this problem, the state also
strengthened Japan’s colonial project. Although some Shizokus with education were able
to become bureaucrats, teachers, functionaries, or police officers, many remained jobless.
The government initially provided the Shizoku population with stipends, whether they
were employed or not. The sum of the stipend reached approximately 30 percent of the
national budget. The new conscription and the Tondenhei plan (Hokkaido frontier
colonization by Shizoku) were intended to absorb this population a short time later. An
ex-Satsuma elite samurai, Kuroda Kiyotaka, also a vice-chairman of the Hokkaidō
Development Commission (Kaitakushi), visited U.S. President Grant and asked him to
send an agricultural advisor to Hokkaido. The commissioner of the U.S. Department of
Agriculture, Horace Capron, who had had an appointment from the president to assist in
the removal and resettlement of Native Americans from Texas following the
Mexican-American War, came to Hokkaido and gave a blueprint for Japanese
colonization of Hokkaido, the land of Ainu.
69

When the government’s annual revenue declined to 700,000 yen, partly because
farmers and peasants won tax reductions, it issued a national bond of 30 million yen, and
paper money of 48 million yen. But the coexistence of the government-issued currency

69
Fumiko Fujita, American Pioneers and the Japanese Frontier: American Experts in Nineteenth-Century
Japan (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), especially Chapter 2.
68
and 1,600 kinds of regional paper money caused confusion and depreciation,
exacerbating rural poverty and instability. The excessive issue of currency, rising prices
after the open door policy, and other new policies had not only worsened poverty levels
but also caused psychological insecurities in farmers. While farmers and peasants were
familiar with the reign of the Tokugawa feudal system through the Jinsei ideology and
therefore believed in the effectiveness and leverage that their resistance methods had, the
new government did not hesitate to deploy violence against the very population on whose
productivity it depended.
70

When the new government, led by the Satsuma and Choshu alliance, replaced the
han system with more centralized prefectural system and ordered the ex-lords to move to
Tokyo, farmers and peasants in Hiroshima, Mori, Takamatsu, Fukuyama, Okayama,
Kochi prefectures attempted to prevent their old feudal masters from moving to Tokyo in
1871.
71
Not that they wanted to return to the old system; rather, as in the case of Buichi,
who had drafted the demands during the Hiroshima rebellion, they were still trying to
work with old samurai functionaries and lords to improve land and other agricultural
policies. Those farmers and peasants did not support the changes of personnel and
policies for their recuperation that their lords had already agreed upon.
72

70
Aoki, Meiji nomin sojo no nenjiteki kenkyu, 41; Katayama, Aruitekita michi, 56.

71
This demarcation of 300 prefectures were similar to the territorial boundaries of old han system and of
course different from the arrangement of the current forty-seven prefectures.

72
Seiji Imahori, Masao Arimoto, and Hideo Kai eds., Hiroshima kenshi: Kindai 1 [Hiroshima Prefectural
History: Modern Era 1] (Tokyo: Toppan Insastu, 1980), 72–74.
69
1871 Hiroshima Buichi Rebellion
Hiroshima, the largest emigrant community, had a history of significant peasant
uprisings. Buichi was from a peasant family in the Arita village of Yamagata County and
a person who diligently worked on the betterment of village life and local society. Given
that Buichi and many others witnessed the polarization of farming population and the
sharp decline of peasants, and petitioned the han regional government to help the needy
peasants, the news that their ex-lord was moving to Tokyo made them think that their
petitions would be ignored. From 1870 to 1871, Buichi submitted a memorial to the
Hiroshima han administration regarding what kind of help the authority should give to
peasants.
Seven items suggested in it were: (1) to build a row house in front of each county
office so that peasants who traveled there to ask for judgment regarding disputes in
villages could stay, (2) to order rich farmers and merchants to redistribute six sho (one
sho is 1.8 liters) of rice from each storehouse they owned to peasants, given that there
were 25,000 storehouses in 670 farming villages, in addition to 25,000 others in towns,
which would be able to provide 3,000 koku of rice for the rescue of peasants; (3) to
appoint an overseer for cattle deals, since many peasants had suffered from fraud and
brokerage overcharge. Buichi suggested the han government fix the handling fee, and a
sho of rice should be levied from every cow transaction in order to redistribute it to
peasants, (4) to request the han government to loan dried sardine and lime, for fertilizing,
to every village, given the shortage of mountain weeds due to the year’s bad weather and
the refusal of fertilizer merchants to sell on credit. This eventually contributed to an
70
increase of the amount of rice levied; (5) to reduce the number of responsible positions in
villages, since allowances for position-holders imposed an undue financial burdens; (6) to
redistribute rice and silver directly to peasants rather than Shoya middlemen in order to
avoid distrust in villages; (7) to embrace morals of the teachings of Sekimon Shingaku.
When farmers and peasants like Buichi, who had been waiting for responses to those
petitions, heard the news of abolition of feudal administrative power, they worried that
their efforts might not bear fruit.
73

When the family of Asano Nagakoto, the ex-lord of the Hiroshima feudal domain,
was about to leave the castle in palanquins for Tokyo via Ujina port on August 4, 1871,
numerous farmers thronged the castle gate and would not let the family leave. While the
prefectural office started sending its twenty-four officials to surrounding counties to
persuade people to stay at their own villages, the number of people who gathered in the
castle town of Hiroshima still increased on the 8th of August. A few thousand farmers
and peasants entered the castle and submitted their entreaty under the name of “farmers
and peasants of sixteen counties of ex-Hiroshima feudal domain” on August 11. They
demanded three things: that the ex-lord, Asano Nagakoto, should remain, that they object
to the new government and its policies, and that no new taxes be imposed by new
government. During the fifteen years between 1853, when Perry came to Japan, and 1868,
when the new Meiji central government began, the Hiroshima feudal domain had
collected extra taxes nine times to balance its financial deficit. The feudal functionaries
tried to accommodate villagers by giving them new postsand allowances. Farmers and

73
Ibid., 87–90.
71
peasants in the han expected Namida-kin (money) to be mercifully given back to them as
a token of functioning paternalism and loyalty. But with news of the move of their
ex-lord and replacement of the han system with the prefectural system, they became
concerned that their poverty would deepen without the expected return. They also
strongly objected to new measurements of rice and area of field, which could lead to tax
increases.
74

Some farmers and peasants started directing energy to carry out Uchikowashi on
the same day. Those in the Otsuka and Takano villages of Yamagata County destroyed
the houses of local headmen. The Shoya of the Kamitsutsuga village was captured and its
leaderswere interrogated by peasants. On August 5, 1871 (the next day), the properties of
Shoyas of Arima and Arita villages became the target of Uchikowashi. The rebellion
quickly spread to adjacent Sera and Kamo counties, further onto Miyoshi, Eso, Mikami,
and Hiba counties to the north, and Mitsugi and Kounu counties to the east, not to
mention the castle town of Hiroshima. In the castle town, thirty-three houses of wealthy
merchants, plus three other houses of new city officials, were destroyed by a mixed
crowd of peasants and poor urban residents. In the Kouyama town of Sera County, an
official sent to convince the peasants to refrain from joining the rebellion was assaulted
and forced to commit suicide with a sword. This suggests the discipline of no killing that
existed in past Uchikowashi-style rebellions might have fallen apart. In the Hiro Village
of Kamo County, rebels took the tax record from the local headman’s house and

74
Ibid., 91–93.

72
destroyed it.
75

Once the rebellion started, a series of superstitious rumors caught people’s
imagination, accelerated the rebellion, and sometimes incited aggression toward new
officials. One rumor painted the new government as, literally, a vampiric entity. Another
was that women, aged fifteen to twenty, and cows would be sold to foreigners. A third
said that Christian icons had been secretly given to Shoyas, in a box made of paulownia
wood. Mostly importantly, one of the rumors talked about a moratorium on all debt and
egalitarian distribution of land. This tells us that the gaze of peasants looked to
establishing a more equal and just land system. The prefectural office strived to deny all
of them. That farmers and peasants were so influenced by a rumor shows that they
perceived the new government’s policies as being influenced by foreign powers.
76

The authority soon responded by sending five platoons to the corners of castle
town. Their gunfire killed twenty-two peasants and injured four. When the rebels
dispersed and escaped from the city center, they joined uprising peasants in the villages
on their way back. In the town of Onomichi, more than 40,000 people gathered and rioted,
including those who were going back to the counties of Mitsugi and Kounu. The uprising
peasants destroyed twenty houses of Shoyas in Miyoshi County, twenty-nine in Eso
counties, and twelve in Nuka County. In Mitsugi County, rioting peasants stabbed a
prefectural official with bamboo spears and threw him into the sea, while others grabbed
the tax records, took down the bulletin board set up by the new government, and built a

75
Ibid., 76–78.

76
Ibid., 91.
73
new one that exhibited the old country name. The prefectural authority even had to send
two battalions and five companies and ask nine neighboring prefectures to catch any
run-away peasants they found. With a final count of two Uchikowashi rebellions in
Toyota and Saeki counties in September, the rebellion ended. A total of 573 people were
arrested, of which four were decapitated, and the head of the alleged leader, Buichi, hung
in public. The punishment included five others, executed by hanging, eighteen others
exiled, thirty-two put to forced labor, 321 beaten by cane, and 193 whipped. As I
examine later in this chapter, the recruitment of emigrants in Hiroshima seems to have
avoided the most upheaved counties and have concentrated in the western part of the
Hiroshima prefecture.
77

Liberation of Outcastes
The liberation of outcastes would shed light on the more complicated power
relations in rebellions of the other would-be emigrant communities of Okayama, where
Katayama’s Hadeki village and Fukuoka prefectures were located. The framework of
feudal hierarchy continued to dissolve. In 1871, Eta, Hinin, and other outcastes in the
Edo period, who had been positioned “outside” of the feudal hierarchy, were emancipated.
Eta were those who specialized in handling animals and dead human bodies. Under the
influence of Buddhism, Japanese food ways depended on plant rather than animal foods
and abhorred the ritual impurity of blood and death. Cattle were raised for plowing and
other agricultural work, rather than for their meat and milk. The Buddhist stricture

77
Ibid., 78–81, 84.
74
against taking life helped to produce an outcaste segment in the society composed of
those communities specializing in such occupations as slaughtering and processing
animal products. Also, indigenous beliefs associated notions of pollution (kegare),
avoidance (imi), and offerings for propitiation (harai) with blood and death, thereby
rendering childbirth, menstruation, diseases, wounds, and dead bodies abominations.
Those professions associated with blood and death such as the hagi (skinner), the kawata
(leather worker), onbo (cremator, funeral worker), banta (watchman for the bodies of
criminals after execution), and shuku (tomb watcher), were considered to be of the lowest
social status, according to indigenous and Buddhist beliefs. Although the Eta were
prohibited from participating in the worship of the gods, they were indispensable as
disposers of defiled objects in the precincts of the Shinto shrines and local economy.
Many feudal lords in the Tokugawa period actually encouraged Eta to settle in their
manors to produce leather goods, including armors, saddles, bowstrings, and other parts
of musical instruments such as drum skins. The Tokugawa law system maintained that
whereas the Eta were permanent outcastes by inheritance, the Hinin were outcastes only
by occupation and social status. The Hinin were in the transient trades of begging,
prostitution, shooting gallery and peep show running, monkey mastering, dog trainering,
snake charming, juggling, acrobatics, and fox taming.
78

Even the defiled, outcaste, or untouchable occupations were functionally
significant in the local economy. Thus, various mechanisms such as granting of
monopoly, tax-free use of land, and sanctions for the outcaste leadership were created by

78
George De Vos and Hiroshi Wagatsuma, Japan’s Invisible Race: Caste in Culture and Personality
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 6–32.
75
feudal political power to insure the persistence of groups to carry out the defiled
occupations. Beyond the fully monopolistic occupations related to animals, the Eta and
the Hinin developed several local monopolies. Those included village watchmen, public
executioners, mortuary services, and the night-soil fertilizer trade. They also expanded
their monopoly to textile dying and the manufacturing of bamboo articles, such as tea
whisks. Importantly, many of them kept their agriculture on a piece of arable land. Thus,
people of diverse, low-status occupations were forced to live in the same villages. The
Eta were required to marry Eta. They were not allowed to wear silk, hair accessories, or
geta (footwear heightened with bars). Instead, they wore cotton clothes with a patch of
sewn leather, tied their hair together with straw, and often walked barefoot. When
approaching the home of a farmer, the Eta were required to take off their headgear and
footwear before entering the courtyard and were not allowed to cross the threshold. They
were not allowed to sit, eat, or smoke in the company of accepted commoners.
79

The Eta night watchman for Sen Katayama’s Hadeki village was Yaezo, who lived
at a nearby Shimoniko village. In this region, they called the police Banta. Yaezo came to
Hadeki twice a year, in spring and autumn, with his underlings. In front of each house,
they gave a polite bow, with their hands to the ground. The head of the family was
supposed to give Yaezo one sho bottle of wheat in spring and one of rice in fall. They
also came to the village to greet everyone for the New Year and Obon celebrations.
During these, they were given rice and mochi. The job of a Banta was to expel drifters
and beggars and to watch for thieves at night. At festivals or fairs, they watched out for

79
Ibid., 6–32.

76
pickpockets. For weapons, all they had was a short metal truncheon and some ropes, to
hold down suspects. When a village had a funeral, they cleaned the grave and received a
tip.
80

1873 Mimasaka Anti-Conscription Rebellion
While the 1868 rebellion that happened in the rural communities surrounding
Katayama’s Hadeki village saw a sort of cooperation between peasants and outcastes like
Hinin and Eta in questioning accumulation of wealth and land, five years later, in 1872,
new government policies put them in a much different situation. The new government
carried out a series of new policies, which facilitated transferring property rights from the
feudal domain to taxable individual households and opened access to education and
commerce to the general populace. In February, the government lifted the ban of the sales
and purchase of land, and in April it ordered issuance of new land titles. In August, the
Meiji government promulgated the establishment of a centralized school system. Three
months later, it also announced the inception of a new conscription system. The
government kept the structure of privilege by excluding heads of households, heirs,
bureaucrats, students of designated “prestigious” schools, and those who could pay 270
yen instead of being enlisted. Farming families were enraged over this, mainly because it
took non-heir sons, who were indispensable as field laborers. The conscription law also
had a phrase directly translated from French, “impôt du sang”, which commonpeople
interpreted literally as “tax of blood” resulting in the rumor that their legacies would

80
Katayama, Aruitekita michi, 16.
77
betaken away. The political, economic, and social turbulence made commoners nervously
wonder what would become of them. In this region too, farmers speculated that the
government would give a woman and a cow to Westerners from every unit of area that
produced 1,000 koku of rice.
Farmers and peasants, who had demanded more power and egalitarian distribution
of land during the rebellions of 1866 and 1868 and did not welcome the new changes that
were unfolding, had difficulty articulating their larger vision of a new free and equal
society. The 1873 Hojo Anti-Conscription Rebellion in Okayama shows the complexity
and limitation of peasant resistance. Dissatisfaction with the new government and the fear
of a newly imposed system resulted in some violence toward the emancipated outcastes.
There was fear and antagonism toward the new government, which was rapidly
Westernizing itself and increasing the burden on farmers. A man named Utaro, of the
Teieiji village in the Nishisaijo county of Okayama, utilized the “tax of blood” rumor as
leverage to incite a rebellion with the help of fifteen other representatives from
surrounding villages. He added to the rumor that men in white clothes would come and
suck the blood out of anyone of the ages between ten and forty years old, and that they
should kill any strangers dressed in white. Although Utaro and other leaders did not have
specific visions or plans for their version of a future society—and ended up with insisting
on returning to old world values—the concerted peasant effort and collective energy that
sought solutions to the poverty and scarcity caused by privatization of land, increased tax,
and conscription is still significant.
81

81
Masao Arimoto, Kazuo Akiyama, and Ken’ichi Futoda, eds., Okayama-kenshi vol. 10, Kindai I
78
On the morning of May 26, 1873, some villagers indeed saw a man wearing white
clothes, parading around the village. This was actually Utaro in disguise, dressed to spark
the village into action. People hit the temple bell, spread the news, raised cries, and
gathered around with bamboo spears and bamboo flutes. The crowd soon reached 1,000
ready participants. They searched the houses of Kocho (under the new prefectural
administrative system, ex-Shoya and new local headmen were now called Kocho), beat
up some of the village leaders, and assaulted neighboring villages. Gunfire rang from the
ex-samurais’ rifles of the Tsuyama domain; they were hired for suppression, and
countered the marching farmers and peasants headed to the prefectural office. When a
prefectural officer tried to persuade those who had retreated the the Takano shrine of
Ninomiya Village to disband, Kamenoshin Ono, a rebellion participant, ex-samurai and
master of Shinai-ryu Kobudo (a traditional martial art), shouted, “If you follow me [to
continue the uprising], I will put an incantation against hardships!”
This bolstered the crowd’s resolve, and, rather than disperse, they regained their
coherency and continued to spread the rebellion to surrounding counties: Kumehokujo,
Kumenanjo, Aida, Shohoku, Shonan, Yoshino, Mashima, Higashinanjo, and Oba—until
they were suppressed by a platoon sent from the Osaka Tenth battalion.
82

The distinctive aspect and clear limitation of this rebellion was that antagonism
toward the new governmental policies and a desire to go back to old conventions led to
an assault on the villages of ex-outcastes. A day before the inception of rebellion, Utaro

[Okayama Prefectural History Volume Ten: Modern Era I] (Okayama: Sanyo Shimbunsha, 1985), 59–65.

82
Ibid., 63–69.
79
and a couple of others had a meeting at the Hachiman shrine in Doi Village and talked
about a plan to “blame ex-Eta for their rudeness [that their new peer-to-peer behaviors
had] and tell them to keep the nomenclature and observe the old convention of showing
respect to farmers and peasants by deeply bowing in their presence.” They even discussed
use of force, but did not reach any consensus. When the rebels came to Myobara Village,
one of the village leaders, an ex-sumo wrestler, Kumezo Kobayashi, overheard the rebels’
plot to “force the ex-outcastes observe the old conventions, remain in the old status, and
be at the van of the Goso thronging” because people at the front line tended to be seen as
the leaders and were highly likely to be punished. They decided that they would resort to
force if the ex-outcastes rejected their demands. Kumezo went ahead to the Kamoya-suji,
where the ex-outcastes lived, and tried to persuade them not to resist the rebels’ decision.
He asked headmen of Eta’s village, Mitsugoro and Moritaro, to follow the old
conventions, which includes not using geta or kasa (umbrella) outside of their village,
wearing zori (straw sandals) when they traveled outside of their village, and bowing to
the ground when they come across others. Kumezo demanded that Mitsugoro and
Moritaro announce to the prefectural office that they were going to lead the Goso
thronging. The two said that they had no intention to join the Goso and rebellions.
Shortly after, the rebels, led by an ex-Samurai, Hanhei Endo, assaulted the village. The
ex-outcastes reacted by painting buckets black (so that they look like canons) and
equipping themselves with swords and spears. Eventually violence broke out. Although
Kumezo joined the sinister acts of massacre and arson, he, out of feelings of guilt,
stopped the killing by making Mitsugoro submit a document of ”apology” to vice-Kocho.
80
According to the list of damages recorded in the aftermath of the rebellion, the rebels
took the lives of eleven men and seven women of ex-Eta status and injured eleven others.
Moreover, fifty-one of fifty-four cases of Uchikowashi were of houses of ex-outcastes in
addition to 263 more houses burned down by the rebels.
83

Limitations were such that the resistance against strengthening the state’s
ideological apparatuses of conscription, formal education, and privatization were carried
out with the desire to go back to the farmers’ own land-based communities and
conservatism by keeping the caste distinction of ex-Eta. Their ten demands, which
represented thirty two villages, included: (1) no taxation for coming five years, (2)
cessation of the new policy of cutting traditionally long hair, (3) a ban on planting the
cash crops of tea and mulberry, whose leaves were for silk worms, (4) the allowance for
peasants to submit rice when they did not have enough money to pay the tax that they
were required to for owning a land title, (5) a requirement for pictures and visual
explanations for land surveys; (6) the abolishment of conscription, (7) no change of
miscellaneous tax [on transportation], (8) a ban on killing of cows and beef eating, (9) a
cancellation of emancipation of outcasts, and, (10) a return to the reign of feudal
domainal lords. Their demands clearly show that capitalist transformation never
proceeded without encountering resistance, but it was not necessarily because peasants
and farmers had a far-reaching vision of liberation for everyone. What is important to
note is that the ex-samurais, who were getting fewer and fewer provisions and stipends
from the Meiji government, thereby becoming poorer, attempted to lead some of the

83
Ibid., 69–74.
81
throngs. Whether they took over the leadership from the hands of farmers and peasants
and agitated them into acts of violence is a question to investigate further.
84

Historians have discussed limitations of this rebellion. Hajime Imanishi argues that
rebels of farming communities shifted from their original desire to restore the economy
and dignity of the farming population to a conservative and even discriminatory
aggression of ex-outcastes. According to him, it was because farmers feared that
foreigners’ reign in the new government would degrade their treatment to the point where
they were as oppressed as ex-outcastes used to be. Thus, some farmers perceived the new
status of ex-outcastes as Shin-Heimin (new commoners) not only as freedom of
occupation, mobility, and marriage, but also as a source of insecurity. Imanishi also
argues that farmers thought ex-outcastes would catch and eat the cows that the farmers
used for cultivating fields, and feared that if land were redistributed to everybody,
including ex-outcastes and Shizoku, their land would be reduced and curtailed.
85

Other scholars, including Ichiro Tomiyama and David Howell, argue that the old
custom-based ‘Othering’ of Eta cannot explain the outbreak of violence. Rather, the
collapse of the moral framework of the Confucius Jinsei ideology and the decline of the
legal authority they used to deal with meant the end of ritualistic uses of force in older
Hyakusho-Ikki and especially Uchikowashi rebellions. What was subsequently
burgeoning was a “modern” outright violence imposed by farmers and peasants who had
been “enclosed” by the state, well-to-do farmers, and merchants. Losing their land

84
Ibid., 74–78.

85
Hajime Imanishi, Kindai Nihon no sabetsu to seibunka: Bunmei kaika to minshu sekai [Discrimination
and Culture of Sexuality in Modern Japan: Civilization and People’s Lives] (Tokyo: Yuzankaku, 2004),
190–193.
82
because of debt and floating in a relative power vacuum, farmers and peasants were
unable to fully envision a more equal and just society and, as a result, clung to the past
order.
86

The dissolution of the feudal system caused instability, suspicion, and the further
stigmatization of ex-outcastes through the new koseki (populace registration) system, as
well as discrimination in marriage and occupations. While the ex-outcastes welcomed
their new commoner status and freedom from strict behavioral codes, their path was not
easy. As historian Andrea A. E. Geiger investigates, the Japanese immigrant communities
in Hawaii and North America retained the discriminatory biases and practices against
people of ex-outcaste background. It is important to understandthat the emergence of
nationalism would become one of the essential factors in the formation of not only
Japanese society but also Japanese immigrant communities, because the practice of
“Othering” in relation to ex-outcastes, Okinawans, Ainu, Koreans, and Chinese shaped
the notion of normative modern/civilized citizenry in Japan.
87

What is also clear from observing the aftermath of the 1873 Mimasaka
Anti-Conscription Rebellion is that the new government had established new legal
ground for suppressing rebellions, arresting the participants, and imposing severe

86
David Howell, “Boryoku no kindaika” [Modernization of Violence], in Nashonaru hisutorī o manabi
suteru [Unlearning National History], ed. Naoki Sakai (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 2006), 135-159.
Tomiyama further argues that this new mentality and practice of modern “Othering” is the discursive and
material space where the Meiji state would disseminate to the population an exclusive nationalistic identity
later on. While he argues that peasants’ fear had been being reconstituted and reorganized in the context of
looming nationalism and new policies that consolidated the socioeconomic and political structure of
modernizing government, I would maintain that Japanese nationalism took hold of the mentality of
populace around the Sino-Japanese War in 1894.

87
Geiger, Subversive Exclusion.
83
punishment upon them. Utaro and fourteen other leaders were beheaded, sixty-four were
imprisoned, 617 were beaten by cane, seven were whipped, and 25,947 were fined 2 yen
35 sen per person (the then-price of one koku of rice). One hundred thirty-three
ex-samurai participants were sentenced to removal from Shizoku status. But a year later,
with the payment of fines, they regained their privileged Shizoku status. The local court
record shows that their crime was “following other rebels” and their leading role in the
breakout of violence was neglected. The monetary compensation that the government
paid for the destruction of property included twelve yen for each burned house and seven
of the commoner houses that were destroyed. This included not only the properties of
Shoya stratum, but also 314 ex-outcaste households. It was probably the only right thing
done by the government.
The size of the rebellion was representationally tantamount to the widespread
grievances regarding poverty and even heavier taxations under the new government. Of
all the male farmer population of 109,624 in the Hojo prefecture (now the northern part
of Okayama), 25 percent of 26,906 were punished. As I described at the beginning of the
chapter, Sen Katayama’s Hadeki village was involved, and his older brother, Mokutaro
and his young uncle, Mansaburo joined the rebellion. The uncle of Sen Katayama was
released on bail from jail while his brother spent a year in jail. It is not clear what
happened to Yaezo, the ex-Eta’s Shimoniko village adjacent to Hadeki village. More
importantly, this incident of assaulting ex-Eta villages in the Okayama prefecture was not
a sole exception in the early Meiji peasant rebellions. Rather it was also seen a month
84
later in Fukuoka, which would be another locale of labor recruitment a decade later.
88

1873 Fukuoka Chikuzen Takeyari Ikki
Like the Okayama prefecture, large anti-conscription rebellions erupted in the
prefectures of Watarai, Oita, Tottori, Shimane, Hiroshima, Myoto, Nagasaki, Ehime,
Shirakawa, and Kyoto, in 1873. In June this year, farmers in Fukuoka prefecture were
suffering from draught and could not plant rice seedlings. When those peasants in the
Takakura village of Kama County gathered at the Hiyoshi Shinto shrine, a provocative
topic came up.
Rice merchants, who as a principle buy low and sell high and have a keen eye on
the price differences between counties and regions, turned out to have utilized a secret
means of communication to manipulate rice prices and make more profit. They had
Metori or a “signaler” who stood on top of a mountain and signaled whether the rice
market price was going up or down in a particular area. The signaler used red and white
flags during the day and beacons at night. They transmitted these signals from Mt.
Hinoyama in Shimonoseki and Mt. Hobashira in Kurosaki, to Mt. Kanaguni at the
boundary of Kama and Tagawa counties, Mt. Kosho in Akizuki, and Mt. Mino in
Chikugo.
89

Then, the farmers and peasants, who wanted to prevent merchants from engaging

88
Arimoto et al., Okayama-kenshi, 10:78-85; Katayama, Aruitekita michi, 57–58. Fourteen-year old
Katayama might have taken a lesson from the incident, whether consciously or not. The lesson is that the
new state is mercilessly violent and that he should try his best not to be arrested and thrown into jail. In
later days, Katayama would act very carefully not to get caught by police for his activism until he actually
gets imprisoned in 1911.

89
Saito, Zusetsu, 284–285.
85
in price manipulation, visited a leader of those signalers, a Sumo wrestler named Hikkai
who was living in Inohiza Village in Tagawa. Hikkai refused to negotiate, maintaining
that he had been authorized to continue to conduct signaling by the new local government,
and even captured the ten representatives from the farming village. As soon as Takusho
Fuchiue, a doctor living in the Tsutsuno Village of Kama County heard the news, he sent
out a circular to twenty-seven villages of the county and asked to join the attempt to
rescue them. On June 16, numerous farmers and peasants thronged to Hikkai’s place and
resorted to Uchikowashi. The next day, farmers and peasants carried out Uchikowashi in
Okuma town and destroyed the houses of the rice merchant, the rice wine merchant, and
wealthy farmers.
90

This event triggered an even larger peasant rebellion, which ranged the counties of
Kama, Honami, Munakata, Kasuya, Joza, Geza, Yasu, Mikasa, Ito, and Shima and
involved at least 100,000 farmers and peasants and possibly as many as 300,000.
According to the seven letters of demands that remained, they asked for (1) a reduction in
prices, (2) no taxation for three years, (3) an abolishment of the new conscription and
modern school systems, (4) a cessation on the issuing of land titles, (5) the restoration of
old han paper money and the old calendar, and, (6) the conservation of class distinction
of untouchables. Peasants all over the Fukuoka prefecture had already been resorting to
taxation sabotage since 1871. But the question is whether they really were trying to
liberate themselves from an exploitative class system. With their antagonism toward the
new government and its institutionalization of Western civilization, (newly introduced

90
Ibid., 285.
86
from the top down), thousands of farmers and peasants from the east, the west, and the
south all aimed to throng at the new Fukuoka prefectural office. On the way, they
destroyed not only properties of the rich, as Uchikowashi does, but also the symbols of
Western influence, such as new, modern schools, telegraph facilities, new ward offices,
and new bulletin boards. On the twenty-first of June, they destroyed the prefectural office
and burned the documents that they found there.
91

When some peasant groups that had come from the counties of Kama, Honami, and
Kasuya merged at Hakozaki on June 20, they burnt down the buraku (ex-Eta) villages of
Tsuji, Horiguchi, and Shogenji along the Sekido River. Horiguchi Village clearly refused
to join the rebellion because it had petitioned for the disposal of a portion of the
government-owned land adjacent to their village due to the congestion of houses. Since
the declaration of Kaihorei (emancipation) in 1871, they had been working on this
expansion of the residential part of village, permission of cultivation, and an
establishment of a modern school nearby.
92
A historian, Toyoo Shindo, saw the
involvement of Shizoku as a major factor in the arson and violence against ex-caste
commoners and argued that it was Shizoku who demanded the preservation of the
distinction between commoners and ex-outcastes, given their interest in perpetuating and
remaining on top of a hierarchical structure of society. He argues that the peasants burned
three villages of Eta based on the impartially applied principle of rebellion participation,

91
Ibid., 286–288.

92
The aspiration for right of education on the side of the ex-outcastes makes a contrast to other peasants’
protest against new schools and fee. It is probably because while some (not many) of the children from
farming communities could attend Terakoya, free lessons of (Chinese) classic reading at Buddhist temples,
children of outcastes did not have access to Terakoya. As to the way ex-outcaste communities welcomed
the establishment of new school system, see Imanishi, Kindai Nihon no sabetsu to seibunka, 49–51.
87
not out of hatred. However, Toyomi Ishitaki critically and comprehensively reexamined
the historical evidences that historians, including Toyoo Shindo and Kazushige Shimura,
who overemphasized the anti-feudalist nature of peasant rebellions, and argues that it was
farmers and peasants who demanded the preservation of the distinction between
commoners and ex-outcastes. While ex-caste commoners protested discriminatory
treatment as they attempted to get previously unavailable jobs of day-workers, other
commoners—mainly farmers and peasants—reacted by forcing public bath owners and
barbers to reject ex-outcaste customers, even before the rebellion. Furthermore, the
scrutiny of records shows that more than 1,500 of about 4,000 houses of ex-caste
commoners were burnt down as the rebellion spread over adjacent counties. The farmers
and peasants could not totally remove the bigotry of discriminatory mind, thereby posing
a serious question about the potential of peasant rebellion as drastically changing a
hierarchical structure of local society.
93

Fukuoka prefectural authority dispatched twenty platoons consisting of
ex-samurais and asked the Kumamoto division of Japanese military to help suppress the
rebellion. The rebels started to disperse when they encountered bombardment. In the
aftermath, thousands of people were punished. One was hanged, three were decapitated,
ninety-four were imprisoned, 11,829 were flogged, and 52,013 were fined. Masamichi
Tanaka, a high functionary of adjacent Mitsuma prefecture—where the rebellion
reached—wrote that commoners, who were supposed to be subjects of the Japanese
emperor, had greatly exhibited disrespect toward Ue (high authority, culminating at the

93
Saito, Zusetsu, 288; Toyomi Ishitaki, Chikuzen Takeyari Ikki kenkyu noto [Study Notes on Chikuzen
Takeyari Rebellion] (Fukuoka: Godogaisha Karansha, 2012), 12–60.
88
emperor) and wrongly interpreted the idea of equality and the concept of a republic. It
was not acceptable, he added, to let commoners have such ideas of independence and
freedom when they were supposed to support Japanese imperial lineage and rule. He
concluded that about 1,700,000 of Shizoku should embody the best military and civilian
subjects and be distinguished from commoners. However, some of the declining Shizoku
were vocalizing their frustration and demanded the return of their old master as the
governor. They also demanded the hiring Shizoku for prefectural functionaries, and that
functionaries from other prefectures not be hired. As we will see later, Shizoku would
play an ambivalent role in the Freedom and People’s Right Movement between 1877 and
1882.
94

Privatization of Land and Struggle for the Commons
As the demands of the rebellions in 1873 show, farmers and peasants protested the
inception of land tax reformation, or, in other words, land privatization. To reveal what
was at stake as far as power around this particular policy-making gives an understanding
as to what kind of ideology later immigration policy makers had, especially Inoue Kaoru.
A historian, Kunio Niwa, deftly reveals that the policies of nominal emancipation of
outcastes and the new land tax reforms were contrived by the same group of bureaucrats.
In other words, Eta’s village was an obstacle to the government’s attempt to implement
an equally applied land tax, for Eta’s land had been tax-free. Shortly after the
emancipation on October 12, 1871, other lands that had been exempt from taxation,

94
Ibid., 286–288; Toyama Shigeki chosakushu [Comprehensive Works of Shigeki Toyama] (Tokyo:
Iwanami Shoten, 1991), 3:4.
89
including the residences of samurai, castle towns, and forests for common use by
peasants and drifters, were declared as objects of taxation. Two month after the
government lifted the ban on sale and purchase of land, the legal system of
commodification of land came into force with the order of issuance of land titles on
August 7, 1872. Indeed, the implementation took almost twenty years to reach every
corner of the country, and the old tax in kind continued to exist for a few years. But the
new land system became the very basis of Japanese capitalist transformation. The new
law stipulates that (1) uniformly set land tax, whose rate is at three percent of land price,
should be paid by cash regardless of how much crop farmers yield; (2) the landowner,
confirmed by the issuance of land bonds, is liable for the taxes instead of the farming
village as a unit of taxation.
95

As economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi clarifies, a market economy and its
global expansion must comprise all the elements of industry, including labor, land, and
money. When empirically defined, commodities are objects produced for sale on the
market. However, “labor, land, and money are obviously not commodities; the postulate
that anything that is bought and sold must have been produced for sale is emphatically
untrue in regard of them . . . Labor is only another name for a human activity which goes

95
Kunio Niwa, Chisokaiseihou no kigen: Kaimei kanryo no keisei [The Origin of Land Tax Reformation:
Formation of Modern Bureaucrats] (Kyoto: Minerva Shobo, 1995), 285–288. While the new land taxation
system economicly subsumed the land, the new Family Registration Law and other legislations attempted
to subsume and supervise social spaces. Hinin, beggers, and drifters came to be seen as potential criminals
and associated with bad sanitation practice. As Hajime Imanishi argues, the government internalized the
Western gaze and prohibited nudity in public, mixed bathing, religious practice of possession, abortion,
infanticide, and male homosexuality. Wakamonogumi, in farming villages, where youth autonomously
decide on management of festivals and pursue a mate, also experienced dissolution. The modern practice of
Miai (arranged marriage) and Picture Bride emerges subsequently. See Imanishi, Kindai Nihon no sabetsu
to seibunka, 101–180.
90
with life itself, which in its turn is not produced for sale but for entirely different reasons,
nor can that activity be detached from the rest of life, be stored or mobilized; land is only
another name for nature, which is not produced by man; actual money, finally, is merely
a token of purchasing power which, as a rule, is not produced at all, but comes into being
through the mechanism of banking or state finance.” The contradiction that Japanese
farmers and peasants faced should also be contextualized in this global privatization of
land, and their struggle should be seen as a part of macrocosm of struggle for commons.
96

The privatization of land in Japan had devastating effects on peasants and other
commoners. It basically severed the organic ties that peasants, fishermen, and even
nomads had formed in relation to land and land use. First of all, it tried to eradicate
Iriaichi, or commons of mountains. Iriaichi is the forest that once constituted vague
boundaries between villages, where people go in and collect firewood, weeds for
fertilizing, wood for crafting, and many other resources for hunting and fishing. These
commons were also where nomadic people lived. Soma, or woodcutters, who had formed
groups to work with based on the combination of sophisticated skills, and had to keep
moving in spring and summer to find the best wood— sometimes over a few hundred
miles—practiced slash-and-burn farming when needed. Kijishi, craftsmen who
specialized in making wooden bowls, also wandered and build huts to work in. Meiji
government charged them for the wood they took and for the lease of the land used for
their huts, based on the new land-owning relationship. Drifters, who practiced
slash-and-burn farming in the mountains of Hiroshima and Yamaguchi, were called Hoito,

96
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston:
Beacon Press, 2001), 75.
91
and those in the Kochi prefecture were called Mo-to. Those people, who tended to evade
the new family registration law, were often seen as primitive and prone to stealing by the
authorites. The exclusive land-owning right largely took the livelihood of drifters away.
97

Second, the numerous farming villages in Japan used to commonly or collectively
manage land resources (ridges between fields, roads, bridges, farmlands rotated among
villagers, fertilizing weeds, and wood) and water resources (rivers, irrigation channels,
and reservoirs), were closely interrelated with dependence on agriculture. It was a part of
their livese and they collectively took responsibility in managing it and thereby formed
autonomous living and environmental spheres according to natural resources. Some of
the villages had small slash-and-burn farmland for growing extra subsistence crops
because the feudal lords imposed little or no tax on it.
98
The self-proclaimed enlightened
bureaucrats of the Meiji government saw these kinds of “village-owned” or collectively
managed lands as incompatible with the principle of the “modern land ownership” that
was mutually exclusive and belonged to individuals. The new system slowly but surely
dismembered the once organically interconnected body of farming villages. Kunio Niwa
estimates that the land privatization policy deprived all kinds of commoners of 218,260
cho (216,448 hectares) of slash-and-burn farmland all over Japan.
99

It was Kaoru Inoue who took initiative to implement the privatization of land after

97
Kunio Niwa, Tochimondai no kigen: Mura to shizen to Meiji Ishin [The Origin of Land Problem:
Village, Nature, and Meiji Restoration](Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1989), 106–123, 150–168.

98
25 percent of all farmland in Nishisaijo county of Okayama prefecture, 26 percent in Nuka county of
Hiroshima prefecture, 65 percent in Joza County, and 30 percent in Kozuma County of Fukuoka were
slash-and-burn farmland.

99
Niwa, Tochimondai no kigen, 124–149. For the effect on people who managed forestry and fishery, see
Ibid., 169–193.
92
other governmental leaders such as Tomomi Iwakura and Toshimichi Okubo agreed upon
the policy and left for the United States and Europe to accelerate the importation of the
administrative, industrial, and technological advances and the military systems of
Western countries and renegotiate the terms of unequal treaties.
100
Kaoru Inoue, the then
vice-minister of the Treasury, ordered unlimited disposal of mountainous land that the
Meiji government had requisitioned through civil war and Haihan Chiken (abolition of
domainal system) using bidding, which totally ignored farmers’ right to Iriaichi. This
attests to Inoue’s ignorance regarding villagers’ lives in rural Japan and also reveals what
kind of politician he was. When he lined his own pocket by selling the Osarizawa mine in
the ex-Nambu domain—which the government had requisitioned—to a merchant from
his home region in Choshu, Heizo Okada, he was harshly denounced. The issuance of
land titles for collectively managed lands and mountains met huge resistance from
farmers and peasants. Kaoru Inoue had to resign in May of 1873, and the unlimited

100
December of 1871 saw the departure of the Iwakura Embassy, whose purpose was to learn and
accelerate the importation of the industrial and technological advance and the military systems of Western
countries, not to mention the governing methods. The records of their visits to the United States, Britain,
France, Prussia, Russia, and Italy between 1871 and 1873 show the ideological stance that this oligarchic
Meiji government came to take in terms of class struggles. When they reached Paris in mid-November of
1872, they came to learn about the Paris Commune. Their record, Kairan Jikki, referred to the
Communards as “mobs,” “rioters,” and “rebels,” and wrote “even in a civilized country, people lower than
middle are inevitably morally unenlightened, obstinate in terms of attitude, and violently rough. It is wrong
to say that every Western country is of beautiful manners and customs throughout upper and lower classes.”
They also commented on the idea of labor rights, saying that “you know but little of the world when you
say a government is responsible for unemployed population. . . . It is as though a rich and noble gentleman
states on human nature only from an intellectual perspective, stuck to beauty of benevolence and benefit,
and taught ‘small people’ how to be lazy.” Obviously, the Japanese oligarchs lacked an understanding of
the lives of ‘small people’ and dismissed the idea of democracy, not to mention socialism, and sided with
the government that had killed 35,000 Parisians by praising President Adolphe Thiers. As quoted in Akira
Tanaka, Iwakura Shisetsudan: Beiou Kairan Jikki [Iwakura Embassy: Record of Touring America and
Europe] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2002), 122–131.

93
disposal of land stopped two month later.
101

However, that did not mean the privatization of land stopped at all. In short, the
government enforced the calculation formula for determination of land price, which was
aimed to not decrease revenue, and enabled itself to carry out land surveys in cases of
farmers’ complaints about land prices, and put land up for auction or bought it outright,
in cases of repeated complaints. The sixth article of the Land Tax Reformation law said
that when revenue from taxes on tea, tobacco, and logs surpassed two million yen, the
government would lower the land tax rate accordingly. Seven years later, it nullified this
promise. Although the Meiji administration prohibited land sale to foreigners out of fear
of Western colonization, the privatization of land made numerous komae and
mizunomi-hyakusho become tenant farmers and brought about greater scales of absentee
landlordism. The right of a landowner to the land was not limited to its sale, transfer,
pawn, but also included change-of-land use. This meant that a landlord could terminate
the land lease with tenant farmers whenever they wanted. Because the new Land Finance
Law and the newly set up judicial system protected creditors, commercial and financial
activities dealing with land as commodities and mortgages greatly increased. Kaoru Inoue
and other bureaucrats expected that large absentee landlordism by the wealthy and
money-lending/banking capitalists would lead a way to the introduction of large-scale
Western agriculture. Contrary to what he thought, the small-unit tenant farming under
absentee landlordism (called the Jinushi system) would persist until World War II.
102

101
Niwa, Tochimondai no Kigen, 206–214.

102
Ibid., 214–222. The government determined the formula for calculating the land price as follows. If x is
94
Chisokaisei Hantai Ikki (Anti-Land Tax Rebellions) and Jiyu Minken Undo
Large rebellions against land tax reformation happened in the Shonai region of the
Yamagata prefecture in 1874, and in the Ibaragi, Mie, Aichi, Gifu, and Sakai prefectures
in 1876 and 1877. Direct action to occupy and regain Iriaichi in the Gumma prefecture
involved more than 30,000 farmers and peasants in 1881. Among the prefectures that sent
surpluses of emigrants, only Kumamoto experienced a large rebellion against the
conscription and land tax reformation in the Sakitsu village of Amakusa County in 1873.
It involved about four hundred villagers. Another rebellion happened in 1874 at the
Gocho village of Akita County, where people questioned the budgeting expenses
allocated for implementation of tax reformation—more specifically, the land surveying
needed for determining land price. On one hand, those who engaged in the Freedom and
People’s Right Movement gave birth to the first publicly elected prefectural assembly in
1875. On the other hand, a group of dissatisfied and declining Shizoku rioted and killed
the regional military leader and prefectural governor. In 1876, rebellions against land
reformation erupted because the government was going to end the land survey, despite

land price and y is the monetary value of annual income (sold rice harvest), the equation x = (y - 0.15y -
0.03x - 0.01x) ÷ (1 + 0.06), will give you the price. In other words, one is supposed to extract from annual
income the cost of fertilizer, the predicted tax, and village tax. Then, as usual capitalization assessment
goes, divide it with the interest rate, which is “compatible with local convention.” (Under the Western
influence, land is seen as a real estate asset, which “yields” profit/interest.) However, the government did
not allow people to calculate on their own. It did not allow them to set fertilizer cost more than 15 percent
of land price, nor should “the interest rate based on local convention” be more than 6 or 7 percent (5
percent for leased farmland). The village fee was set at 1 percent of land price. The above-mentioned
formula states that land price is eight and a half times annual income (x = 8.5y) and land tax, that is three
percent of it, is 25.5 percent of annual income (0.03x = 0.255y). Although 25 percent seems a lighter
taxation than nearly 50 percent in the Edo period, the whole land survey process and calculation was
manipulated so that the government would gain at least 72,000 more yen as revenue than that of the year
before. For more details on the manipulation, see also Mitsuo Oka, Ryuzo Yamazaki, and Kunio Niwa, eds.,
Nihon keizaishi: Kinsei kara kindai e [Japanese Economic History: From Late Edo To Modern Era](Kyoto:
Minerva Shobo, 1991), esp. see chap. 5; For another concrete example of process of land price calculation,
see Takashi Saeki, “Tokuyama Toda chiku no Chiso Kaisei ni tsuite [On the Land Tax Reformation in the
Toda area of Tokuyama]”, Tokuyama Chiho Kyodoshi Kenkyu 22 (March 2001): 25–34.
95
the fact that many farmers and peasants complained about the deceptive method of land
evaluation and petitioned for reassessment of land prices. This wave reached Kumamoto
City in late 1876.
The local leaders of the Freedom and People’s Right Movement in the Jo-hoku
region helped farmers and peasants in the Nankan, Ueki, and Yamaga towns of Tamana
County, who had complained about the way Kocho collected and inappropriately used
money for carrying out land price assessments, to demand a public election of village
headmen. The governor of Kumamoto issued a ban on assembly in public space to
suppress this resistance. Peasants deftly evaded punishment by saying they were
gathering for rabbit hunting, or they were just bystanders and observers, not instigators.
In January of 1877, about ten thousand farmers and peasants gathered at Kosen temple in
the Yamaga Village of Yamaga County and succeeded in making twelve Kocho and
vice-Kocho resign. Shortly after, the Seinan War (Satsuma Rebellion), the largest civil
war started in the neighboring prefecture of Kagoshima by declining Shizoku, depleted
the farmers’ energy to rebel.
Also in January of 1877, Aso County of Kumamoto saw a peasant rebellion unfold.
Farmers and peasants there were barely earning a living selling cash crops such as
tobacco, indigo plants, and rapeseed on the relatively barren soil of volcanic ash from Mt.
Aso. Absentee landlordism was becoming rampant. In the Shimojo and Yumita villages
of the Oguni area, farmers asked Kochos to explain what they used the minpi (village fee
collected as a part of new tax) for. More and more farmers and peasants in surrounding
villages began to have similar village/town meetings. The village headmen, police
96
officers, and even Shinto priests explained the use of the fee, hinted at tax reduction, and
urged them not to assemble. About 9,000 farmers and peasants—66 percent of the county
population—resorted to Uchikowashi rebellions to demand (1) a reduction of tenant
farming rent by half, (2) a lower interest rate for their debt, (3) the shredding of bonds,
and (4) the postponement of return of borrowed rice to landlords. They went so far as to
destroy the houses of money-lending merchants and some landlords. The rebellion spread
to the towns of Oguni and Uchinomaki and, as a result, sixty-four houses of landlords
were destroyed. When the civil war in western Kumamoto subsided in April, authorities
began to investigate and arrest the rebellion participants. Twenty-nine leaders were
sentenced from one hundred days to life imprisonment, and 8,571 others were punished.
In response to the intensity of years of peasant resistance against the new land tax system,
the Meiji government decided on the reduction of land tax rates from 3 percent to 2.5
percent in 1877.
103

The Freedom and People’s Right Movement, initially started by intelligentsia of
Shizoku status aiming for the establishment of a constitution and parliamentary system in
1874, marked the beginning of journalism in Japan and merged with peasants’ resistance
against land reformation. Multiple class interests were intersecting. The Shizoku leaders,
despite the fact that they disseminated the idea of natural rights, maintained that only
Shizoku and the rich could have voting rights for national assembly. The Gono, or
well-to-do farmers, tried to affect regional politics through establishment of local or
prefectural assemblies and took advantage of the support of farmers, who had resisted

103
Saito, Zusetsu, 303–304; Seiichi Morita, Kumamoto ken no rekishi [The History of Kumamoto
prefecture] (Tokyo: Yamakawa, 1972), 270–273.
97
against unjust land surveys and determination of land prices. This meant that independent
farmers obtained a new channel of legal struggle in order to demand just determination of
land prices and reduction of village taxes.
However, the government strengthened regulations against activism and journalism.
In 1875, Zanboritsu, or the Criticism Act, rendered any pieces of journalism that
“dishonored” politicians and bureaucrats illegal. In the same year, Shimbun Jorei, or the
Newspaper Act, mandated governmental permissions for publication of newspapers and
magazines and clarification of addresses of writers and contributors. It also prohibited
pen names and agitating articles that defended political criminals and supported changes
of government. In 1880, Shukai Jorei, or the Rally Act, mandated permission of the
police for holding a political rally, the reporting the place and date no later than three
days prior, and the names and addresses of the speakers at those rallies. It also gave
police the authorization to break up political meetings, when necessary, to keep “public
safety.” Even under this suppression, in 1878, Aikokusha, one of the political associations
in the movement, succeeded in collecting petitions, signed by more than 200,000 people
all over Japan, demanding the opening of a national assembly and democracy, though it
was rejected by the emperor. When the Japanese government changed its economic
policies in order to intensify its militarization in 1881, the deflation it caused radicalized
farmers and peasants beyond legal struggles.

98
Chapter conclusion
The historical examination of peasant rebellions in Japan in the 1860s and 1870s
revealed that people of the future emigrant communities of Okayama, Hiroshima,
Fukuoka, and Kumamoto had the experience to organize themselves based on the
principles and strategies of traditional peasant rebellions. Employing the strategies of
Osso, Chosan, Goso, and Uchikowashi, farmers and peasants demanded tax reduction
and egalitarian land distribution. This history shows how vigorously they reacted to the
capitalist transformation of Japan, especially the privatization of land and the
impoverishment caused by it. By situating the farmers and peasants’ resistance in rural
Japan in the contexts of global capitalist transformation, the stretch of British and
American imperialism, and Japanese entry into the trans-Pacific coolie trade, Chapter 1
offers a preparatory analysis of future emigrants as intersection of local, national, and
global power relations.
This investigation drew as much attention as possible to the shifts in the political
economy from the late Edo period to the early Meiji period and observed the multiple
implications of peasant rebellions. Importantly, Kaoru Inoue, who played a central role in
carrying out land privatization, would become a crucial figure in the planning of the
government-sponsored immigration to Hawaii. Inoue and other Meiji government elites
oppressed rebellious farmers and peasants so harshly and brutally as to transform Japan
into a modern capitalist state. Production of taxable privatized land and deprivation of
common land caused massive dispossession among those who lived as producers of
subsistence for everybody. Migration of Japanese farmers and peasants happened
99
between two locales, Japan and Hawaii, both of which went through this capitalist
transformation. Yet, while peasant rebellions did not express a revolutionary desire to
build a new society, its natural anti-capitalist insistence on preserving an autonomous
way of living constituted a genuine threat to state power and profoundly shaped the rise
of modern Japan. Moreover, as we shall examine in the next chapter, the politics and
ideology of rural rebellion would shape—and be transformed—in Hawaii’s plantation
economy, the cauldron of British and American racialized capitalism.

100
Chapter 2: Ideology of Labor Recruitment and Vestiges of Peasant Rebellion in
Hawaii

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Japan and the United States
loomed as empires in the Pacific. Importantly, the Matsukata administration secured the
budget for the drastic militarization-through-deflation policy, which accelerated the
dispossession of farmers in the early 1880s. The very inception of Japanese colonial
expansionism coincided with this militarization. The colonization of Okinawa and the
semi-colonization of Korea ultimately gives the basic context to the future Okinawan and
Korean immigration to mainland Japan and the United States (including Hawaii because
both Okinawan and Korean immigration started after the annexation). This chapter
examines how international diplomacy played a role in racial formation in Hawaii
through labor relocation and migration in the Pacific, while the 1850 Masters and
Servants Act had laid out the legal institution of contract labor in Hawaii. It also sheds
light on how mercantile capitalism set up the profit-making scheme of state-sponsored
immigration to support Japan’s troubling financial condition. It attempts to reveal how
crucial the involvement of Kaoru Inoue and his business partners, Takashi Masuda and
Robert Irwin, was in the inception of the Hawaii-bound immigration. They sought “bona
fide” farmers who would not disturb the incremental movement of capital in this
enterprise. However, Japanese immigrants carried over the political culture of
withholding their labor and submitting grievances, which derived from the tradition of
peasant rebellions.
101
Burgeoning Japanese Colonialism
In the mid-1870s, the Meiji government, which had been consolidating domestic
political, economic, and military powers through the acts of suppressing peasant
rebellions, slowly started implementing the ideology of colonialism, somewhat replicated
from U.S. and European powers. In December 1871, Miyako islanders were sailing back
from Shuri (the capital of the Ryukyu Kingdom), where they had submitted taxes. This
Ryukyuan vessel was shipwrecked by a typhoon and, afterwards, drifted to the southern
tip of Taiwan. Due to miscommunication, fifty-four out of sixty-six Ryukyuans were
beheaded by the Paiwan aborigines. The remaining twelve crewmen were rescued by Han
Chinese and were transferred to the Fujian province in mainland China and then back
home to Ryukyu. The Meiji government of Japan demanded that the Chinese government
punish the Taiwanese aboriginal leaders responsible for the murders of the Ryukyuan
crew. Japanese Foreign Minister Soejima Taneomi went to Beijing, and was received by
an audience appointed by the Qing Emperor Tongzhi; however, his request for
compensation was initially rejected. China considered the matter an internal affair, since
Taiwan was part of the Fujian Province of China and the Ryukyu Kingdom had a
tributary relationship with it. More importantly, China rejected compensating Japan
because the “wild” Paiwan aboriginals were outside of Taiwanese jurisdiction. The
process was permeated with Western influence and also epitomized the early Meiji
government’s nervous sensitivity to Western advice. The U.S. minister at Tokyo, Charles
E. DeLong, encouraged Soejima to try a program of expansionism against China. He
secured the employment at the Japanese foreign office of the recently recalled American
102
consul at Amoy, General Charles LeGendre. Although the scheme did not materialize
immediately because of the split in the Japanese government, the foreign policy
leadership listened when LeGendre arranged American assistance in the form of two
military officers, an American ship, the New York, and LeGendre himself as advisor to
the expedition. When DeLong was replaced by Judge John A Bingham, the U.S. State
Department—which was informed of the plan of the military campaign by
Bingham—ordered cancellation of American participation. But LeGendre’s involvement
did not end here.
104

The Japanese government sent an expedition of 3,600 soldiers, led by Saigo
Tsugumichi, in May 1874. Thirty Taiwan tribesmen were killed at the Battle of Stone
Gate on May 22, and a considerably greater number were wounded. In November 1874,
Japanese forces withdrew from Taiwan after the Qing government agreed to an indemnity
of 500,000 Kuping taels. This military expedition served a number of purposes for
Japan's new Meiji government. One was to distract the declining Shizoku from their
growing dissatisfaction, given that there erupted the Saga Rebellion by dissatisfied
Shizoku. The Japanese soldiers included many Tondenhei (frontier settler/soldier)
deployed from Hokkaido, which was originally aimed at transformation of Shizoku into
new national subjects. The other purpose was to colonize Ryukyu. Japan had begun
claiming suzerainty, and later sovereignty, over the Ryukyu Kingdom through the
century-long economic control by Satsuma, though its traditional suzerain had been
China. Emboldened to more forcefully assert its claim as the voice of the Ryukyuan

104
Conroy, “Meiji Imperialism: ‘Mostly Ad Hoc’,” 138–9.
103
islanders, Japan succeeded in forcing China to recognize that the Japanese expedition was
to protect “civilians” in the settlement, mediated by Britain and LeGendre, who turned up
in Beijing. In the late 1870s, Japan used this as justification for taking de facto control
over Ryukyu, moving the king of Ryukyu to Japan, and forcibly incorporating Ryukyu as
a prefecture renamed Okinawa in 1879. The Japanese government and Qing China left
Ryukyu’s nationality in a gray area, where China held the Yaeyama islands and Japan
held the rest of the Okinawan islands. It was suggested by John A Bingham that Okinawa
could follow the example of San Domingo.
105

In 1875, Japan tried to replicate Western gunboat diplomacy against Korea. In
1866, a man of war, with a mixed crew of Americans, British, and Chinese, sailed up the
Taedong River toward the Korean capital, Pyongyang, despite a warning message. The
sailors, frightened by a hostile crowd on the shore, volleyed, and the Koreans responded
by killing all the crew and burning the ship. In 1871, the United States and France
returned to impose punishment in a joint military expedition, embarking from Nagasaki.
The American minister to China, Frederick F. Low, who was in charge, mimicked
Commodore Perry’s method of steaming right into strategic islands near the capital as if
he owned them. After refusing to meet with lower-level officials and proceeding to
(eventually) breach the gateway to the capital, Koreans opened fire. Marines targeted
Ganghwa Island and sought to seize the forts. After the Americans caused 650 Korean
deaths and desultorily negotiated, they withdrew and did not return. Four years later, in

105
Ibid., 139; Shigeki Toyama, “Seitai no Eki”, in Nihon rekishi daijiten [Encyclopedia of Japanese
History], ed. Nihon Rekishi Daijiten Henshu Iinkai (Tokyo: Kawade Shobo, 1969), 6:113; Manabu
Yokoyama, ed., Ryukyu shozoku mondai kankei shiryo, vol. 7, Ryukyu Shobun: Ge (Tokyo: Honpo Shoseki,
1980), 137–138.
104
1875, a small Japanese warship, which was surveying coastal water without Korea’s
permission, overreacted to a Korean warning shot with bombardment and temporal
occupation of Ganghwa Island. Japan, which had deployed its army at Hiroshima and
Kumamoto in case of failure of negotiation (as advised by the foreign advisor, Gustave
Emile Boissonade de Fontarabie), leveraged this military confrontation to conclude the
Treaty of Ganghwa Island in 1876. The Japanese ambassador plenipotentiary, Kiyotaka
Kuroda, and a vice envoy, Kaoru Inoue, forced Korea to sign this unequal treaty, similar
to what Japan signed with Western countries years before, which included
extraterritoriality, opening of two ports other than Pusan, and an abandonment of tariff
autonomy.

Overall, it is plausible that the United States and Japan would grow as empires
together, feeding off of each other.
106

Importantly, there were some Japanese governmental leaders who had been
hesitant to take military action toward Taiwan and Korea and insisted instead on
recuperating the power of the people, or Minryoku Kyuyo. Toshimichi Okubo, who led
the administration between 1873 and 1878, recognized the fact that the basis of the Meiji
new government had still been unstable. First, the annual revenue was lower than its
expenditure and foreign debt had reached five million yen. Second, imports exceeded
exports by one million yen and gold had outflowed tremendously. Third, although Japan
had tried establishing the manufacturing industry in order to reduce imports, this effort
would come to nothing if Japan waged a large-scale war and had to import firearms and
battleships from Western countries. However, the assassination of Okubo in 1878 and the

106
Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea, 88.
105
expulsion of Shigenobu Okuma in 1881, who was sympathetic to the Freedom and
People’s Right Movement, from the government, caused a shift of power to Tomomi
Iwakura and Hirobumi Ito, who took the suggestion by Aritomo Yamagata and
Masayoshi Matsukata to increase liquor and tobacco taxes in order to drastically increase
the military budget so as to establish Japan as an imperialist power. Thus, Matsukata
began new economic policies in 1883.

Matsukata Deflation and Farming Village
Matsukata, as minister of finance, faced the problem of inflation because the
government had printed 27 million yen and borrowed 15 million yen to pay the cost of
suppressing the Seinan Civil War in 1877, thereby increasing the number of government
and bank notes by 55 percent from 1877 to 1878. In order to reduce government
expenditures and the amount of money circulation, especially nonconvertible paper
money, he terminated most governmental aid to nonmilitary industries (though continued
production of ships and rifles) and used the surplus of 40 million yen obtained from
selling off of those governmental firms to reduce the amount of paper money (by 23
percent between 1881 and 1885), and cutting money supplies. He raised the tax on liquor
by 250 percent and tobacco by 750 percent. The deflation increased revenues from land
tax.
Matsukata’s deflation policies were devastating to farmers and peasants.
Household industries, especially the silk industry, collapsed. The fall in prices of
agricultural crops reduced farmer and peasant income, which led to their inability to pay
106
land taxes. The farmer and peasant participants of the Freedom and People’s Right
Movement, especially Kanto regions that had had high concentrations of industrial silk
production, diverged to form the Komminto (Poor People’s Party) and the Shakkinto
(Debt Party) to radicalize their demand and resort to direct action beyond legal channels.
In Gumma, Kabasan (now a part of Fukushima), and Chichibu (now the western part of
Saitama) in 1884, the plot of overthrowing government and of rebellions demanding
reduction of tax and cancellation of debt were revealed and harshly suppressed by law
enforcement. These so-called Gekika Jiken, (“intensified icidents”), were indicative of
tremendous dispossession of peasants, who turned out to become drifters and the urban
poor.
The major emigrant communities of Hiroshima, Yamaguchi, Fukuoka, and
Kumamoto did not see this kind of intensified rebellion in the 1880s, but this by no
means meant that farmers and peasants there were not suffering from deflation. In
Hiroshima, the economic report states the plight of farmers. In 1883 and 1884, farmers
had declined greatly due to the decreasing price of rice, which led to the subsequent
shrinking of other commercial transactions—especially those dependent on demand from
farmers. Despite the fact that profit from crops—including rice, cotton, hemp, and
indigo—all went down, they had to submit the same amount of tax. Many people thought
that the value of paper money was increasing again because of deflation, and were
reluctant to spend, which led to less circulation of money in the regional economy. Some
farmers “fortunately” sold their cloth, furniture, and land. Many others could not sell
those commodities and ended up putting them up for public auction. The textile industry,
107
which had given women jobs and a source of income during slack seasons, declined.
Between 1884 and 1886, 18.9 percent of all registered land in Hiroshima was sold,
bought, or changed ownership. The proportion of tenant farming land increased 4 percent
from 32.3 to 36.3 percent.
107

The plight of farmers was much the same in Yamaguchi. Between 1880 and 1884,
the price of rice for one koku went down from 9.27 to 4.65 yen, salt from 1.67 to 0.91,
and sake from 17.13 to 14.21. The local newspaper, Bocho Shimbun, states “Farmers and
fishermen in Kuga, Kumage, and Oshima counties live a most difficult life. They mostly
eat rice bran, buckwheat (soba) chaff, and mixture of leaves of persimmon tree and okara,
the residue of the tofu-making process. Many of them have not seen rice or wheat on
their dining table for several days.” In Oshima County, “carpenters and stone masons as
day workers found no jobs and went back to their home villages . . . carpenters and wood
cutters work for 0.09 to 0.14 yen a day . . . Many are on the verge of starvation.” The
typhoon in the summer of 1884 only worsened the condition. The proportion of tenant
farming land increased from 36.5 to 37 between 1883 and 1890 in Yamaguchi.
108

In Kumamoto too, the rice price underwent a severe change. The rice price index
declined from 100 in 1881 to 55.6 in 1882, 39.6 in 1883, 33.2 in 1884, 40.8 in 1885, and
37.8 in 1886. On January 9, 1884, Kumamoto Shimbun stated that “[I]f you wander on
streets and observe how the stores are, all you can see is storefronts with piled-up goods,

107
Kogyo Iken [Industry Report] vol. 23, reprinted in Meiji zenki zaisei keizai shiryo shusei
[Comprehensive Historical Records of Early to Mid Meiji Finance and Economy], as quoted in Kodama,
Nihon iminshi kenkyu josetsu, 14–15.

108
Bocho Shimbun (Yamaguchi), June 5, 1885 and September 5, 1884, as quoted in Kodama, Nihon
iminshi kenkyu josetsu, 12.
108
no customers, and a shop-owner with an abacus sitting very concerned. If you go into a
farming village,. . . you will see a village bulletin board filled with signs of public
auctions due to bankruptcy.” “In Koshi County, some people broke apart roof tiles and
sold them. Others sold the farmland where they just planted wheat. Others borrowed
money with sprouting bamboo shoots as mortgage. Many survive by eating okara. The
poor in Kamimashiki County dig the roots of higanbana, or a cluster amaryllis, and eat
it.”
109

The polarization of the farming class and the accumulation of land in the hands of
absentee landlords, who were tied with money-lending entities, became nationwide
phenomena. Without any domestic labor market that could absorb those that were
dislocated, about three hundred or more people from Hiroshima, Fukuoka, and
Yamaguchi migrated to Hokkaido. This is the impending local context of the inception of
Japanese migration to Hawaii in 1885.
110

The World Tour of King Kalakaua and Hawaii between the United States and Japan
The negotiation process that leads to the beginning of government-supported
migration of the Japanese to Hawaii shows intersecting interests between the three
political bodies of Japan, Hawaii, and the United States, and also between trading
company merchants and planters, thereby articulating political economy of the Pacific.
During the winter of 1881, King Kalakaua of Hawaii visited Japan in the early stage of

109
Kumamoto Shimbun, January 9, 1884 and April 23, 1885, reprinted in Meiji no Kumamoto [Kumamoto
in Meiji Era] ed. Kumamoto Joshi Daigaku Kyodo Bunka Kenkyujo [Local History Studies Center at
Kumamoto Women’s University],(Tokyo: Kokusho Kankokai, 1985), 249, 251.

110
Kodama, Nihon iminshi kenkyu josetsu, 15.
109
his around-the-world tour. He had three propositions. The first one, made with the full
approval of the King’s American advisors, was to relinquish all extraterritorial rights in
Japan, which Hawaii had gained by virtue of the most-favored-nation clause in the treaty
of 1871. They tried to induce labor migration by withdrawing from the unequal treaty
system that bound Japanese sovereignty and showing their understanding of Japanese
officials’ agonies. Japanese Foreign Minister Kaoru Inoue was forward-looking; however,
he put it off until other treaties were revised. The second proposition might have been
devised along the somewhat European conventions of intermarriage between royal
families. When Kalakaua paid a visit to the Japanese Emperor, he proposed a
matrimonial alliance between a fifteen-year-old Japanese prince and his own niece, the
princess Kaiulani, then six years old and studying in Scotland, her father’s home country.
111

Although Kalakaua’s election in 1874 over Queen Emma was indicative of a
victory for American interests over English interests in the Hawaiian Islands—and the
1876 Reciprocity Treaty with the United States removed tariffs on fifteen items,
including the strong Hawaiian sugar industry to the American market—King Kalakaua
intended to prevent any more American inroads. When a special envoy from the Japanese
royal family, Michinori Nagasaki, came to Hawaii in 1882 and brought a reply to the
second proposition, the letter reveals yet another proposition which King Kalakaua must
have secretively made.
While your Majesty was in my capital, you have in the course of conversations
alluded to a Union and Federation of the Asiatic nations and Sovereigns . . . The

111
Conroy, The Japanese Frontier in Hawaii, 50–53.
110
Oriental nations, including my country, have long been in a state of decline and
decay; and we cannot hope to be strong and powerful unless by gathering inches
and treasuring foots gradually restore to us all attributes of a nation. To do this
our Eastern nations ought to fortify themselves within the walls of such Union
and Federation, and by uniting their powers to endeavor to maintain their footing
against those powerful nations of Europe and America, and to establish their
independence and integrity in future . . . But this is a mighty work and not easily
to be accomplished and I am unable to foretell the date when we shall have seen
it realized . . . However, I ardently hope that such Union may be realized at some
future day . . . it cannot only be the fortune of Japan and Hawaii, but also of
whole Asia.
112

Japan politely rejected all three propositions. It might be useful to consider the
reason: Japan did not want to offend the United States and arouse hostilities before Japan
achieved revisions to the unequal treaties. However, it is more important to examine this
as a response to the yet strengthening ideology of a global color line. J. M. Kapena, “a
native born subject” of Kalakaua, who was dispatched as envoy later in the same year,
pushed along the same approach and conceptualization. He was instructed to urge the
Japanese imperial government to recognize the Hawaiian King “as one of the family of
Asiatic Princes” and he vocalized the idea that “to strengthen his hand is to elevate the
sovereign of a cognate and friendly race. This can be most effectively done by a
migration of Japanese people to the Hawaiian Islands.” “[They] may blend with ours and
produce a new and vigorous nation making our land the garden spot of the eastern Pacific,
as your beautiful and glorious country is the western.”
113

It is cogent that this discourse of Japanese and Hawaiians as a cognate race was

112
Mutsuhito to Kalakaua, Jan. 22, 1882, Archive of Hawaii, Safe.

113
Gibson to Kapena, Sept. 22, 1882, Archive of Hawaii, Foreign Office and Executive file, Envoy to
Japan; His Ex., J. M. Kapena, Report, Mission to Japan, etc., Nov. 14, 1882, enclosure D, Archive of
Hawaii, Foreign Office and Executive file, Envoy to Japan. As quoted in Conroy, The Japanese Frontier in
Hawaii, 57; Ibid., 55.
111
strategically produced to react to European and American colonialism. Its recognition of
white supremacy in the face of imposed colonialism led the Hawaiian royal family to
seek allies. In that sense, it was more than just a negotiatory maneuver or some rhetoric in
diplomacy. However, the Hawaiian kingdom sought the possibility of shifting the
population ratio within the colonialist plantation economy and selective importation of
workers. This strategy did not drastically challenge the colonial economy and never
worked positively for Kanaka’s empowerment and self-determination. Indeed, Hawaii,
with pressures from white advisers, had reached out for labor to Portugal, Austria,
Norway, Germany, and the United States, and even to less prospective places like Siberia,
Mongolia, Azores islands, Italy, Malaysia, Poland, Australia, and other Pacific islands.
The expense to transport the Portuguese was much more than Asian counterparts. Also,
the efforts to import “South Sea Islanders met not only with expense difficulties but with
active opposition to such recruitment from Hawaiian Board of Missions, which had
missionaries placed throughout Micronesia.”
114

From the viewpoint of Japanese Foreign Minister Kaoru Inoue, the Meiji
government had received requests for labor immigration from other countries, too. In
1876, Australia requested labor immigrants for their Northern Territory. In 1883, the
Netherlands government informed Japan of its desire to have Japanese laborers in the
Dutch West Indies. Spain had sent a similar request. In 1884, the Canadian Pacific
Railroad asked for 500 laborers for constructing train tracks in Victoria Island. Inoue
allowed none of them to be carried out, including that proposed by Hawaii, saying that

114
Alan Moriyama, Immingaisha, 7.
112
Japan would not send its people abroad until all the unequal treaties are revised.
115

Kaoru Inoue, Takashi Masuda, and Robert W. Irwin
Although a series of negotiations between King Kalakaua and his envoy Kapena
did not bear fruit, one thing that Kalakaua obtained in Japan was his acquaintance with
Robert Walker Irwin, and through him, a much better negotiation channel to the inside of
the Japanese government. The relationship between Kaoru Inoue, one of the central
figures in the oligarchic Meiji government, and two merchants, Takashi Masuda and
Robert Irwin, can articulate how government-sponsored immigration to Hawaii came into
being. The examination of the interconnection of their interests also clarifies the
mercantilist phase of capitalist transformation in Japan and the ideology of labor as
commodity.
Takashi Masuda’s father was a Tokugawa official who governed Sado Island,
where the largest gold mine in Japan existed. After his father was assigned as a
functionary mediating foreigners who came to Yokohama, Masuda started training and
working as an interpreter in Tokyo and Yokohama, often times aside with Chinese
compradors. In 1870, Masuda started working for Walsh, Hall and Company, a trading
company in Yokohama dealing in exports of rice, silk, and green tea. The company was
relatively small, compared with four major foreign businesses in Yokohama—Oriental

115
Chief Secretary of South Australia to the Japanese Foreign Ministry, Sept. 19, 1876, Japanese Foreign
Ministry Archival Documents (hereafter cited as JFMAD), 3.8.2.2, vol. 1; Japanese Foreign Office to
Wilton Hack (the individual seeking Japanese workers), February 27, 1877, JFMAD 3.8.2.2, vol. 1;
Telegraph message from Chikayoshi Sakurada, Charge d’Affaires of Japan in Netherlands to Foreign
Minister Inoue, Sept. 10, 1883, JFMAD, 3.8.2.2, vol. 1; Inoue to Sakurada, Sept. 11, 1883, JFMAD, 3.8.2.2,
vol.1; Report from the Governor of Kanagawa prefecture to the Foreign Ministry and the Home Ministry,
July 5 1884, JFMAD, 3.8.2.6.
113
Bank, Hong Kong Shanghai Bank, Jardine Matheson, and the Netherlands Trading
Company, which had been selling weaponry, warships, and railroads. In 1872, Kaoru
Inoue, the then-Vice Minister of Finance, recruited Masuda for the Mint, newly
established a year before, under supervision of Englishman Thomas William Kinder.
Inoue’s decision was based on the fact that Masuda and another merchant, Heizo Okada,
had collected gold and silver coins from the Tokugawa period. Masuda and Okada had
their coins examined by experts, and sold them to the Meiji government, which needed to
homogenize the currency system and prepare for the land tax system.
116

Robert Irwin was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1844, into an elite family. His
father was William Wallace Irwin, former mayor of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and a
Whig member of the United States House of Representatives, who, on the expiration of
his term, was appointed charge d’affaires at Copenhagen. His mother, Sophia Arabella
Bache of Philadelphia, was a fourth-generation direct descendant of Benjamin Franklin.
After the Civil War, his elder brother Richard, who was a colonel in the Union Army,
started working for the Pacific Mail Steamship Company in San Francisco. Provided an
opportunity by his brother, Robert was sent to Japan in November 1866 as the Pacific
Mail Steamship Company agent in Yokohama, to prepare for receiving and handling the
regular trans-Pacific steamer service, which would be inaugurated in 1867.
117

By 1872, Irwin was active in the Yokohama firm of Walsh, Hall and Company,

116
Minoru Nagai, ed., Jijoden Masuda Takashi okinaden [Biography of Takashi Masuda] (Tokyo: Chuko
Bunko, 1988), 21-37, 70, 76, 84–87, 100–106.

117
Yukiko Irwin and Hilary Conroy, “R. W. Irwin and Systematic Immigration to Hawaii,” in East across
the Pacific: Historical and Sociological Studies of Japanese Immigration and Assimilation, eds., Hilary
Conroy and T. Scott Miyakawa (Santa Barbara: American Bibliographical Center Clio Press, 1972), 41–42.
114
called Ameichi in Japanese. There he became acquainted with Takashi Masuda, who had
been working for the firm as an interpreter and would soon leave the company to become
an official of the Ministry of Finance. Through Masuda, Irwin came to know Kaoru Inoue.
They came closer through the issue of foreign loan. Finance Minister Inoue was dealing
with the debt that the new centralized Meiji government took over from all the hans
(feudal domains) since many of those domains had purchased military goods through
foreign trading companies during the civil war (some of the ammunition and warships
had been seized from the defeated Confederacy after the U.S. Civil War). Walsh, Hall
and Company also had claims against Tosa and other hans. Irwin helped Inoue negotiate
with Walsh to reduce the debt. Irwin further advised to use this precedent of discount for
negotiating with other companies. This is how Irwin became Inoue’s highly placed friend
in the Meiji government in the following years.
118

In 1873, Kaoru Inoue resigned his post in the government after an exposé exposed
his selling the Osarizawa mine in the ex-Nambu domain—which the government had
requisitioned—to a merchant from his home region Choshu, Heizo Okada. Meanwhile,
Inoue, Masuda, and Okada, with Irwin’s advice and assistance, decided to create their
own trading company, called Senshu Kaisha. It dealt in rice, silk, and green tea for export,
and weaponry, wool cloth and fertilizer for import. When Irwin left Walsh, Hall and
Company to enter a partnership with Edward Fisher in 1874, Senshu Kaisha’s owners
asked Irwin to mediate all of their deals with foreign entities. As purchasing agent for the

118
Ibid., 42; Nagai, Jijoden Masuda Takashi, 116. See also Toshio Suzuki, Japanese Government Loan
Issues on the London Capital Market, 1870–1913 (London: The Athlone Press, 1994) and Roy S.
Hanashiro, Thomas William Kinder and the Japanese Imperial Mint, 1868–1875 (Boston: Brill, 1999).
115
Japanese army, it secured 100,000 Snyder guns, which government forces used to quell
the Satsuma ex-samurai’s rebellion of 1877.
119

In 1876, the leader of a Mitsui business group, Rizaemon Minomura, asked Inoue
to establish a trading company in his Mitsui group and rehire the employees of Senshu
Kaisha. The origin of the Mitsui business group (called Echigoya) is a merchant family,
who sold kimono produced in Kyoto to customers in Tokugawa’s Edo (Tokyo). Because
they had to deal with exchange between gold coins used in Eastern Japan and silver coins
used in Western Japan, they became a moneychanger, authorized by Tokugawa
Shogunate. They survived the civil war by lending money to both Tokugawa and the
Satsuma-Choshu alliance. The Mitsui family played a part as accountants for Meiji
government and started the Mitsui Bank in 1876. Thus, the Senshu Kaisha trading
company was reorganized as Mitsui Bussan Kaisha (Mitsui Trading Company), with 500
thousand yen as founding capital, loaned from the Mitsui Bank. Masuda became its
president on Inoue’s recommendation. Irwin remained the key figure in its overseas
trading activities, with rice, silk, and tea as the principal exports of the company and
ammunition, wool, fertilizer, and used copper as the principal imports.
120

Irwin accompanied Inoue when he traveled to America and Europe to study
financial markets, tax, and currency systems in 1876. Robert Irwin arrived in London in

119
Irwin and Conroy, “R. W. Irwin and Systematic Immigration to Hawaii,” 43; Nagai, Jijoden Masuda
Takashi okinaden, 112–116.

120
Irwin and Conroy, “R. W. Irwin and Systematic Immigration to Hawaii,” 43; Junzo Yoshida, “Mitsui
zaibatsu no kigyo keitai tenkaishironteki kosatsu [Observation on the History of Mitsui’s Development as a
Financial Group]”, in Ryutsu Keizai Daigaku Ronju 23, no. 1 (1988): 18–33; On the role of Mitsui Group in
Japanese Imperialist expansion to China, see Masako Sakamoto, Zaibatsu to Teikokushugi: Mitsui Bussan
to China [Financial Group and Imperialism: Mitsui Trading Company and China] (Tokyo: Minerva Shobo,
2003).
116
June, 1877 to open a London branch of Mitsui Bussan Kaisha in order to manage the
export of rice and other commodities, on account of the Japanese government, from
Japan to Europe. On his return to Japan in 1879, Irwin was appointed as counselor of the
Mitsui Bussan. Inoue played a role in matchmaking Irwin and Iki Takechi. Takeuchi was
related to the Mitsui family. Their marriage thereby solidified the nepotistic, elite circle
of politicians and merchants around the Meiji government.
121

It was during the trip King Kalakaua and high officials took from Honolulu to
Japan that Irwin’s credibility as an insider of Japanese diplomatic and trading policy
stood out in Kalakaua’s eyes. Around the time Inoue returned to government as minister
of public works in 1878, and lord of foreign affairs in 1879 (later renamed as minister of
foreign affairs), Irwin became acting consul general for Hawaii in Japan in 1880.
Permanent appointment of Irwin as consul general in 1881 ultimately changed Inoue’s
stance toward labor emigration. Inoue wrote to a new envoy, Colonel Curtis P. Iaukea,
that “I have the honor to state . . . that the nomination of a gentleman of such ability and
so well acquainted with the affairs of Japan as Mr. Irwin cannot but be satisfactory to His
Imperial Majesty’s Government.” Shortly after, Inoue set out to establish a profit-making
scheme of state-sponsored immigration with his close business partner, Irwin.
Obviously, the most crucial factor of the inception of emigration is the alignment
of Kaoru Inoue, Takashi Masuda, and Robert Irwin, who came across each other when
the infantile phase of Japan’s capitalist transformation brought about trading supported
and transacted by the central state, while it tyrannically carried out the land reformation

121
Irwin and Conroy, “R. W. Irwin and Systematic Immigration to Hawaii,” 43–44.
117
and deflation policy, at the huge sacrifice of numerous farmers and peasants. Now those
dispossessed farmers and peasants would be used for attaining foreign currency through
an immigration scheme.
The analysis of “push” factors, such as the poverty and upheaval caused by peasant
rebellions, cannot solely explain the inception of emigration. Indeed, the poverty of
peasants and farmers deepened by the Matsukata deflation policy was so far-reaching that
not only Hiroshima and Yamaguchi, but other prefectures, had rising poverty populations.
If these prefectures were not the only poverty-stricken regions, what does the selection of
Hiroshima, Yamaguchi, Fukuoka, and Kumamoto prefectures as recruitment sites imply?
In short, the capitalist ideology of labor relocation preferred obedient labor to rebellious
labor. As evidenced in Inoue’s later decision to recruit immigrants not from eastern Japan,
including Fukushima, Ibaragi, Gumma, Saitama, Tokyo, and Shizuoka, where the
radicalized groups of the Poor People’s Party and the Debt Party were active in early the
1880s, the immigration scheme was designed not to simply recuperate the lives of the
poor but to make profit out of the labor migration—which would improve the state’s
finances, and help sugar plantations’ incremental movement of capital.
122

Irwin helped the Hawaiian envoy, Colonel Curtis P. Iaukea, to preliminarily
negotiate with Foreign Minister Inoue, who in turn clarified that the Meiji government
was not willing to commit to a formal immigration agreement, but “not inclined to
impose any obstacle” to a properly arranged labor emigration. Irwin went back to Hawaii
with Iaukea and succeeded in getting the Hawaiian legislature to vote to allot $50,000 for

122
Ibid., 45; Conroy, The Japanese Frontier in Hawaii, 59.
118
Japanese immigration, and the project moved on. Irwin came back to Japan with
additional appointments as commissioner of immigration and special agent of the
Hawaiian Board of Immigration to organize the first shipment of immigrants.
123

Recruitment and Ideology of Labor Selection
Scholars have extensively examined the economic, social factors, and conditions
that contributed to the recruitment of farmers and peasants from particular areas. They
pointed out the convention of being migratory workers in both Yamaguchi and Hiroshima
prefectures, though mostly carpenters, artisans, and fishermen. Masaaki Kodama also
revealed that the Oshima and Kuga counties of the Yamaguchi prefecture, where most of
the Yamaguchian emigrants were from, had the highest proportion of people who had
other (miscellaneous) occupations than farmers, merchants, and artisans. Masao Arita
maintains that there were many believers of Jōdo Shinshū (one of the major Buddhist
denominations in Japan) in Hiroshima, Yamaguchi, Fukuoka, and Kumamoto and that
there is a correlation between the large number of emigrants, its teachings of diligence,
and population pressure caused by its prohibition of abortion. Some took into
consideration natural disasters. There was a major drought in 1883 in the Saeki county of
Hiroshima, and typhoons that hit Hiroshima City, the Saeki and Aki counties of
Hiroshima, and the Oshima and Kuga counties of Yamaguchi. Importantly, Kodama
showed, through examination of economic statistics, that Hiroshiman emigrants were,
more often than not, from areas that had more population pressure and less farmland than

123
Ibid., 45–46.
119
prefectural averages reported. Decline of cotton farming also further impoverished some
of the emigrant communities. Though a crucial factor, the polarization of farmers and
increase of peasants were not exclusively applicable to these emigrant communities.
Overall, these do not exhaust all the possible explanations.
124

In this section, the focus will be on the ideology of the labor selection. In other
words, the search for “benign, nonrebellious farmhands” led to those areas. The Mitsui
Bussan Company was deeply involved with the recruitment of immigrants. They
dispatched their employees to Yamaguchi, Hiroshima, Fukuoka, and Kumamoto
prefectures, handled the recruitment and transportation, and provided Irwin with a
publicity medium for Hawaiian immigration, Chugai Bukka Shimpo. The call for
application was disseminated from the central government to prefectural and county
administrations. Inoue showed his preference of his home region, Yamaguchi, as a
candidate of recruitment. The region called Suo or Boshu (the eastern half of Yamaguchi
prefecture), where many immigrants were from, had a very small number of peasant
rebellions in the past decades. In addition, Inoue believed that those benign farmers
would be channels of importing the “superior large-scale agriculture practiced in the
Western world.” He told one of the embassy clerks at Honolulu, Toshiro Fujita, that the
government-sponsored labor migration “is to make [Japanese] farmers learn Western
ways of agriculture and orderly and systematic ways of laboring.. . . We will first recruit
emigrants from my home country, [ex-]Choshu and [ex-]Boshu [Both now Yamaguchi

124
Kodama, Nihon iminshi kenkyu josetsu, 52–74.
120
prefecture] and Hiroshima and Kumamoto in addition to them.”
125

The concentration of immigrant recruitment in western Japan can be interpreted as
Inoue and Masuda’s avoidance of radicalized peasants and farmers of the Poor People’s
Party and the Debt Party, who resorted to a direct plot action of toppling the
Meiji government in the Kanto region in the early 1880s. Avoidance in this way allowed
the elite to pursue the profitability and efficiency of the capitalist enterprise, thereby
attempting to exclude any potential disturbance to incremental movement of capital. The
exchange between Irwin and Masuda further attests to the ideology of the labor selection,
which tried to avoid rebellious farmers and peasants, and choose obedient ones. Masuda
advised Irwin to recruit immigrants from the Hiroshima and Yamaguchi prefectures.
When, years later, Keisuke Mochizuki, a politician from Hiroshima, asked Masuda why
he chose for these locations, he responded that,
You can judge the character of people of various prefectures by analyzing the
philosophy of the outstanding Confucian scholars of that prefecture. The
outstanding scholar of Hiroshima prefecture was a sensible man and his
philosophy was sound and pacifistic, with nothing radical or revolutionary in it.
Therefore I think that people of the Hiroshima prefecture must be sound and law
abiding.
126

This strategic “risk management” was more localized too. Given that Hiroshima had
experienced the Buichi Rebellion fourteen years prior, the recruitment seems to have
avoided the upheaved counties of Kamo, Yamagata, Sera, Miyoshi, Eso, Mikami, Hiba,
Mitsugi, and Kounu, and recruited for the first two shipments fifty-nine from Hiroshima

125
Kodama, Nihon iminshi kenkyu josetsu, 41–42; Toshiro Fujita, Kaigai zaikin shihanseiki no kaiko
[Memoirs of Working Abroad for a Quarter of a Century] (Tokyo: Kyobunkan, 1931), 1–2.

126
Nagai, Jijoden Masuda Takashi, 272.
121

Table 1: Emigrant Prefectures of Government-Contract (Kan-Yaku) Immigration to Hawaii
and the Distribution of Immigrants (Parentheses for percentage)
127

City, 136 from Aki, 356 from Saeki, thirty-three from Numata, and twenty-seven from
Takamiya county, thereby showing concentration in western part of the Hiroshima
prefecture, bordering emigrant counties in the Yamaguchi prefecture.
128

As for the Fukuoka and Kumamoto prefectures, the labor selection for the first two
shipments to Hawaii in 1885 was not as efficient as in Hiroshima. The record shows that
emigrants were recruited from those counties where peasants had rebelled in the
mid-1870s. The extent of recruitment concentration to particular counties was very low.

127
This table is produced from Kodama, Nihon iminshi kenkyu josetsu, 26. Table 1. 6.

128
Kodama, Nihon iminshi kenkyu josetsu, 25–32.
Shipment Hiroshima Yamaguchi Kumamoto Fukuoka Others Total
1885 1–2 612 (31.6) 420 (21.7) 276 (14.3) 149 (7.7) 477 (24.7) 1,934 (100)
1886 3 351 (40.0) 490 (55.9) 36 (4.1) - - 877 (100)
1887 4 762 (52.7) 637 (44.1) 16 (1.1) 1 (0.1) 30 (2.0) 1,446 (100)
1888 5–7 1,647 (50.1) 1,611 (49.0) - - 28 (0.9) 1,446 (100)
1889 8–11 1,919 (47.1) 1,919 (47.1) 118 (2.9) 116 (2.9) - 4,072 (100)
1890 12–14 694 (25.4) 651 (23.8) 776 (28.4) 615 (22.5) - 2,736 (100)
1891 15–20 1,941 (27.9) 2,228 (32.1) 2,476 (36.8) - 78 (3.2) 6,723 (100)
1892 21–22 1,021 (43.7) 703 (30.0) 494 (21.1) 2 (0.1) 120 (5.1) 2,340 (100)
1893 23–25 1,578 (38.1) 1,271 (30.7) - 1,297 (31.3) - 4,146 (100)
1894 26 597 (39.2) 494 (32.4) 55 (3.6) - 378 (24.8) 1,524 (100)
Total
11,122
(38.2)
10,424
(35.8)
4,247
(14.6)
2,180
(7.5)
1,111
(3.9)
29,084
(100)
122

Map 1: Counties of Hiroshima Prefecture in 1900

From the Fukuoka prefecture, emigrants were recruited from twenty-seven out of
thirty-one counties, covering both northern and southern parts of Fukuoka. Two
emigrants were recruited from Kama County, where the 1873 Fukuoka Chikuzen
Takeyari Rebellion had started. From the surrounding counties that went through the
upheaval, eleven were recruited from Kasuya, nine from Munakata, five from Honami,
two from Joza and Geza, respectively, four from Mikasa, one from Ito, and seven from
Shima. As to Kumamoto prefecture, thirty-one emigrants were recruited from Tamana
123
County, where a peasant rebellion against the unfair assessment of land prices and
corruption of local headmen happened in 1876. Twenty-nine were from Amakusa, where
a rebellion against the conscription and land tax reformation happened in Sakitsu village
in 1873, involving about 400 villagers. Thirty-eight emigrants were from Akita, where
farmers and peasants of Gocho village rebelled in 1874. Thirty-two others were recruited
from Yamaga County, where, in 1877, about 10,000 farmers and peasants succeeded in
changing twelve village leaders. No one was recruited from Aso County, where about
9,000 farmers and peasants resorted to Uchikowashi-type rebellions to demand half in
reduction of tenant farming rent, lower interest rates for their debts, the shredding of
bonds, and the postponement of return of borrowed rice to landlords. They destroyed the
houses of money-lending merchants and some landlords in 1877.
129

Without effectively localized strategies of selecting and recruiting bona fide
farmers in Fukuoka and Kumamoto, the militancy derived from past experiences of
peasant rebellion seeped through into Hawaii as they migrated. Masuda warned one of
Irwin’s recruiter, Naozo Onaka, who recruited some immigrants from Kumamoto
(ex-Higo), “people from Kumamoto are physically strong and capable of hard work, but
once you mistreat them their stubborn nature may cause you trouble.” Masuda’s memoir
goes on to verify this idea by telling that “My prediction proved correct later. Those
immigrants from Kumamoto had conflicts with their employer and dared set a fire to a
sugar plantation and burned it down.” While the reputation of Hiroshimans and
Yamaguchians as good laborers led to continuation and concentration of further

129
Ibid., 39.
124
recruitment of those people, the recruitment of Fukuokans and Kumamotoans drastically
decreased from the third shipment until it restarted in 1889. This was probably because
they actually resisted the first year, as evidenced in the cases of arson.
130

For Kaoru Inoue and Takashi Masuda, Fukuoka and Kumamoto were very
strategically important prefectures for their economic enterprise. They were even familiar
with certain domestic labor migration patterns in this region. In 1876, Mitsui Bussan
Kaisha started undertaking all the transportation and sale of coal mined from state-owned
Miike Coal Mine, located at the mountain overarching Miike County of the Fukuoka
prefecture and Tamana County of the Kumamoto prefecture. Coal mining was a crucial
part of early Japanese capitalist transformation and the state-supported primitive
accumulation process. Since the beginning of state management in 1873, it used convict
labor from prisons of Fukuoka, Kumamoto, Nagasaki, and Saga prefectures, which could
have included peasant leaders who were punished and sentenced to jail or prison terms
after rebellions. They were put under supervision with sabers and punished with no food
provisions for a day if they left more than six kilograms of low-quality coal in a
420-kilogram hand truck. This practice of exploiting convict labor continued even after
the government sold Miike mines to the Mitsui Financial Group (Zaibatsu) in 1888.
Every year from 1883 to1885, prisoners brought from Kumamoto rioted and even
destroyed a water pump and buried a pit under water. As a result, a year later , the 40
“most villainious” Kumamotoan convicts were sent to Hokkaido, which was another
major destination where convict labor was sent and exploited. The use of convict labor

130
Nagai, Jijoden Masuda Takashi, 272.
125
remained central, especially for Miike mines compared with other coal mining enterprises
like Takashima and Chikuho in the same region, until dynamite was introduced. The
concern of prison riots involving explosives halted the use of convict labor around the
1894 Sino-Japanese War and the alternative contract labor system, called Naya or Hamba
system (living in quarters called Hamba and forced to work with long shifts under strict
control), was established.
During those years, Inoue and Masuda were aware of the increasing number of
nonconvict miners coming from surrounding farming villages, counties, and prefectures,
and had knowledge of how much labor reserves were available in the region. For
example, Okimatsu Iwata, who was born in Hiroshima and had worked as a miner in
Kyushu since 1877, then went to Osaka, where he worked for a lumber dealer, arrived in
Hawaii on the third shipment of workers in 1886. Taikichi Remuta, who had worked as a
coal miner, clerk, and construction worker in Japan and a military laborer in Taiwan,
arrived in Hawaii in 1889. A writer of a Japanese language newspaper in Hawaii,
Yasutaro Soga recalls that “[T]he [immigrants] from Kumamoto and Fukuoka are . . .
noted for their daring and bold spirit which made them skilled tunnel workers,” which
might suggest their aptitude in mining. Inoue, Masuda, and dispatched recruiters might
have weighed their sturdiness over the fact that the regions had gone through peasant
rebellions about a decade ago.
131

131
Hidenobu Ueno, ed., Kindai Minshu no Kiroku 2: Kofu [Record of Masses in Modern Era 2: Miners]
(Tokyo: Shin Jimbutsu Oraisha, 1971), 529–530, 600–611; Yoshihiro Ogino has shown that laborers were
coming to yet another largest coal mine in modern Japan, Chikuho mine in Fukuoka, from as far as
Northern Kyushu (Saga, Oita, Kumamoto prefectures) and Seto Inland Sea region (Hiroshima, Ehime
prefectures) in 1898. See Yoshihiro Ogino, Chikuho Tanko Roshi Kankeishi [History of
Labor-Management Relations in Chikuho Coal Mine] (Fukuoka: Kyushu University Press, 1993), 100–112;
126

Map 2: Counties of Fukuoka Prefecture in 1871

A History of Japanese in Hawaii, 115–116,118. Mitsui Group bought Shimmachi Silk-Spinning factory and
Tomioka Spinning factory, both located in Gumma pref., from the government in 1887 and 1893
respectively. They knew geographical distribution of light and mining industry and corresponding labor
recruitment and migrant workers. Alan Moriyama also pays attention to the widespread practice of labor
recruitment based on the knowledge of where capitalists can find labor reserve in a particular region. He
wrote “Japanese textile mills were sending agents to Nagano, Yamanashi, Gifu, Niigata, and Toyama
prefectures in central Japan. As a result, women from central Japan made up the large majority of workers
in the Meiji-period textile mills.” Moriyama, Imingaisha, 15.
127

Map 3: Counties of Kumamoto Prefecture in 1871

Ultimately, government-sponsored labor migration was a profitable scheme that
Inoue, Masuda, and Irwin were able to benefit from. Irwin’s personal return was $5
United States gold coin per head, and there was also an item of $15 per head “Brokerage
fee” to take care of the cost of recruitment and arrangements in Japan, some of which
may have found its way into his pocket. Inoue had hoped to acquire foreign currency
through emigration. He calculated that an estimated 12 million yen (6 million in currency
plus purchase of Japanese commodities) sent home annually by 100,000 emigrants in the
128
Pacific would be equivalent to 5 percent interest on a 250 million yen loan. This would
certainly be a boon to Japan’s hard-pressed economy. He had therefore arranged for
compulsory savings by the emigrants. Masuda’s Mitsui group greatly benefited from
mediating the recruitment and transportation processes.
132

The Masters and Servants Act
The Masters and Servants Act of Hawaii, enacted in June 1850, and the
amendments subsequently added, shaped the fundamental condition of Japanese
immigrant labor on the sugar plantations in Hawaii. Although the law denied contract
holders the “right” to inflict any punishment—corporal or otherwise—physical violence
and whippings by overseers were widespread and persistent. In 1869, Chief Justice
William L. Lee had to instruct a jury that the notion that a master “may legally whip his
servant and the planter his coolie” had no foundation. In the same year, Dr. William
Hillebrand, the first head of the Bureau of Immigration, advised planters to “bear well in
mind that a Chinaman is not a Negro or a Polynesian in character” and he is “strong in
tenacity of rights, quick of ebullition of temper and readiness for fight.” Section 1419 of
the Act, its amendments, and court rulings held that a worker could not evade the
requirement of service by deserting the contract beyond the expiration date, that a penalty
of double the time of absence could be added to the term of the contract, and that a
three-month prison sentence was added for a second offense of desertion (though this was
removed in 1876). Even though the time added could not extend beyond one year after

132
Conroy, The Japanese Frontier in Hawaii, 65–6; Okahata, A History of Japanese in Hawaii, 103.
129
the expiration of the term and wages were to be paid at the contract rate during any penal
service, the punitive and carceral nature of the indentured plantation labor was visibly
rampant.
133

Indeed, a couple of amendments seemed to improve the condition and status of
immigrant contract workers. In 1869, the legislature provided that the presence of an
appointed contract officer was necessary to validate the contract acknowledged by both
parties and to pay any and all advances, since paying a portion of worker’s wage to a
third party (middleman agency) had been problematic. In 1872, Section 1423 was
amended to deem a laborer to be a competent witness on behalf of his complaint. The
indentured bondage was not supposed to transferable to another person, including the heir
of a dead contract holder. However, it was also established that “a company of
individuals” could write a contract, and a change of partners in such enterprise would not
free the laborer from the contract.
134

As the number of sugar plantations and imported contract laborers drastically
escalated after the 1876 Reciprocity Treaty with the United States, the original frame of
the labor importation scheme, which the bureau had stated would entitle immigrants to all
the rights and privileges of Hawaiian subjects under the laws of the Kingdom, started to
degenerate. In 1877, the court maintained that issues around the labor contracts under the
Act were civil matters, not criminal. To enforce his private contract, however, the
employer accomplished it through penal sanctions—imprisonment through hard labor,

133
Kingdom of Hawaii Supreme Court, John Wood v. Hookina, 3; Hawaiian Reports 104 (1869), as
quoted in Edward D. Beechert, Working in Hawaii: A Labor History (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1985), 49.

134
Ibid., 51–2.
130
fines, or both. Workers were deprived of the protections offered by the criminal justice
system, including appeals to higher courts based on grounds of improper procedure.
There generated a prospect of an indefinite or life-term prison sentence for an issue
judged to be a civil dispute.
135

With the removal of the chief justice’s power to appoint the police court and
district magistrates and the transfer of it to the governors of the four islands in 1882, it
was made more difficult for the district judges in areas remote from the capital to
maintain proper administration of the law. Plantation police were often given the same
capacity as regular police and arrested contract laborers without the formality of warrants
being issued by the magistrates. In 1885, the Bureau of Immigration adopted a policy that
authorized the assignment of power of attorney to “planters and managers to prosecute,
sue, or defend all cases under labor contracts, under the auspices of the Board of
Immigration,” thereby rendering the legislative protections of workers minimal. Thus,
kangaroo courts became dominant. Moreover, “[N]o systematic provisions were made for
translating court proceedings in Hawaiian language into English or any other language
until the 1885 treaty with Japan.”
136

Vestige of Hyakusho-Ikki in Early Labor Disputes by Japanese Plantation Workers
Transition into the contract labor with tight supervision on the plantations in
Hawaii made stark contrast to the work in the semi-autonomous agrarian villages in

135
Ibid., 56.

136
Ibid., 46, 48, 55.
131
Japan, thus triggering much resistance. J. H. Okahata commented on how the aspect of
labor discipline in Hawaii contrasted with the labor back in Japan. “Without any
regulation of work time forcibly imposed by external forces, even landlords, Japanese
farmers used to be able to take a break, smoke a cigarette, or chat whenever they wanted
to while working on the field [back in Japan].” Historian Franklin Odo also argued that,
“Conforming to the strict discipline of this industrial agriculture was physically,
culturally, and socially devastating to the Japanese workers.” The workers toiled within
an endlessly predictable schedule—from 6 A.M. to 4:30 P.M. (with half-an-hour for
lunch.); 6 days per week; 10 hours in the field or 12 hours in the mill. The spontaneity
and joy of farming blurred away when whistles, bells, and sirens determined waking and
resting, and luna dictated the pace of work with black snake whips. The fact that
Bango—or a laborer’s plantation identification tag—indicated ethnic background by both
its shape and number, made workers wonder whether they were seen as human beings or
a herd of laborers to be driven.
137

Cane labor was grueling. The workers plowed the fields with oxen, irrigated the
sugar plantations (hanawai), and fertilized, cut and plant the seed cane (pula pula). It
takes one-and-a-half to two years for cane to grow ripe and ready for harvest. Hoeing
weeds (kalai) goes on for a few hours straight and stops only when they sharpen the
blades. Even though they stripped dry, withered, spiny leaves from the stalks (hole hole),
cutting cane with machetes (kachiken) made them feel like they were fighting twelve-foot

137
Okahata, Hawaii Nihonjin iminshi, 265. Franklin Odo and Kazuko Sinoto, eds., A Pictorial History of
the Japanese in Hawaiʻi, 1885-1924 (Honolulu: Hawaiʻi Immigrant Heritage Preservation Center, Dept. of
Anthropology, Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, 1985), 53–4.
132
tall, bristling giants in the hot sun and the dusty, humid, stagnant air. This was why
laborers wore protective clothing in the fields—to shield themselves from the sun, rain,
wind, heat, centipedes, scorpions, and yellow jackets, dust, and, most of all, from
abrasions caused by the sharp needles of the cane leaves. Loading the harvested cane into
wagons, railroad cars, or flumes (happaiko) was also heavy labor. Except for the
introduction of the steam plow and the small cranes for loading canes, all remained
backbreaking manual labor. The managers and the luna were responsible for extracting
the utmost work at the least cost, by recording the time worked and supervising the tasks
assigned for the day.
138

It is important to recognize how quickly Japanese immigrants reacted to the harsh
conditions of plantation labor, especially the brutal overseers called lunas, who drove
immigrant laborers incessantly. Two kinds of analyses are necessary here. One is where
those immigrants were from. Although it is difficult to comprehensibly narrate the
background of each participant of labor strikes in Hawaii’s plantations, it is still crucial to
recognize that they are not without history and that their historical experience or memory
of peasant rebellion played a role in the resistance in a new environment.
On the other hand, it matters too where they were now, i.e. Hawaii. What kind of
conditions they labored and lived in acted as the very trigger of labor strikes. As the
previous section examined, the Masters and Servants Act outlined the oppressive
conditions in addition to the content of labor itself. While the memory and experience of
peasant rebellions might have not been automatically carried on or passed on, it was

138
Takaki, Pau Hana, chapter 3; Odo and Sinoto, A Pictorial History of the Japanese in Hawaiʻi, 53, 61.
133
reactivated by the oppressive working and living conditions at the sugar plantations in
Hawaii. When those two perspectives are combined, the argument is not as simple as the
Kumamotoans and Fukuokans were more rebellious than Hiroshimans and
Yamaguchians, and therefore they led labor strikes. Rather, my argument is that scholars
should investigate how the particular manners of resistance derived from Japanese
peasant rebellions helped them to address and intervene the socio-economic conditions of
specific plantation they were on when describing the details of Japanese labor strikes in
Hawaii.
Consul Irwin tried to soften the treatment of the Japanese immigrants by having the
Hawaiian government distribute a flyer to planters, which actually carried a mixed
message. It said “These people could be led by the ‘silken thread of kindness,’ and the
planters who were kind to them would find that in times of emergency they will work
beyond the contract hours, if they should be asked, and without compensation. They
could also be found willing to repair their homes and do a great many things that are not
required by their contracts.” This ambiguous message probably did not do much to
change the minds of planters and lunas. The Masters and Servants Act of 1850
entrenched the operation of sugar plantations so firmly that the strangely garbed Orientals
must have been perceived by the field overseers as nothing but newly arrived coolies just
like the Chinese, who had been laboring on the cane plantations.
139

On the other hand, the briefing of those Japanese immigrants at the time of
recruitment, which had told them what to expect in Hawaii, did not make them as docile

139
Okahata, A History of Japanese in Hawaii, 97, 99.
134
and servile as the employers would have wanted, either. The Japanese government, in
tandem with local municipalities, attempted to align with the ideology of labor selection
and discipline those recruits to be tamed as diligent laborers. The Hiroshima governor,
Sadaaki Senda, made an announcement to the emigrants who were going to be on the
second shipment in 1885, which said “On this occasion of your travel to Hawaii as
temporary workers, I want to encourage you to observe the law of the country [Hawaii],
maintain your health, be eagerly engaged in farm work, behave properly, not to bring
disgrace on your country, remain frugal, save money, and return to your hometown in
glory. ” Saeki county of Hiroshima prefecture and villages in Oshima county of
Yamaguchi made emigrants jointly sign on a written oath with a guarantor that “in a case
of trouble caused by your immoral conduct, argument, or fight, you will have to
compensate for damages you cause by selling your private property and, if not enough,
relatives and guarantors have to compensate.”
140

Hardly a month had passed since the arrival when a small-scale work stoppage
occurred on the Paia plantation on Maui, where a Japanese laborer was brutally beaten by
a luna. When the manager did not punish the luna, the Japanese laborers went on strike.
“The strikers were judged guilty of disturbing the peace,” and “were fined $5 each plus
$1 court charges.” Furthermore, camp policemen routed out those too ill to work and
threw them into jail, to be fined $6 for initial “offense” and $8 for repeat “offense.”
141

Sixteen Japanese workers, including Konosuke Otsuki, walked out of the Papaiko

140
“Nihonjinmin Hawai koku e dekasegi ikken, zonobu,” JFMAD; “Hawai dekaseginin ni kansuru shorui
tsuzuri,” Hatsukaichi-shi Archive. As quoted in Kodama, Nihon iminshi kenkyu josetsu, 44.

141
Yukiko Kimura, Issei: Japanese Immigrants in Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988),
6; Okahata, Hawaii Nihonjin iminshi, 98, 101.
135
plantation on the island of Hawaii the same month. They complained that many had to
labor longer than ten hours a day for indoor labor and twelve hours a day for outdoor
labor as stipulated in their contracts and that even the sick were forced to work.
142
Other
walkouts took place that same year. Workers on the Paia and Haiku plantations
complained about a lack of medical attention and rough handling by foremen.
143

Receiving numerous complaints, the Japanese government dispatched Special
Commissioner Katsunosuke Inoue, adopted son of Foreign Minister Inoue, accompanied
by Irwin, on the second immigrant vessel, the Yamashiro Maru.They arrived in Honolulu
on June 17, 1885 to look into the matter, and signed a protocol. Firstly, an inspector, Joji
Nakayama (whose salary was $100 a month, which would be increased to $250 later),
would make all necessary investigations and dispose of the Japanese immigrants as he
might deem best. Secondly, planters or direct employers of labor would not be authorized
to arrest or seize Japanese laborers because they were not agents of the government.
Third, the Japanese should have the service of an interpreter from the Board of
Immigration staff present in case of arrest or court trial. Fourth, the government would
remove all the Japanese from Paia, Hamakuapoko, and Lidgate’s plantations upon the
receipt of their petition for removal. Fifth, the Hawaiian government would give notice to
planters that no luna would be allowed to lay hands on any Japanese. While Irwin
introduced the ten additional Japanese inspectors and interpreters and seven Japanese
doctors (with one doctor to be added for each 350 new immigrants), he appeased

142
Toraji Irie, Hojin kaigai hattenshi [History of Development of Japanese Immigrants] (Tokyo: Hara
Shobo, 1981), 1:61.

143
Bureau of Immigration to the Consulate, May 30, 1885, JFMAD 3.8.2.7.
136
infuriated planters by shifting the increasing cost of this labor immigration to the
immigrants themselves. In the first four shipments, per-capita costs to the Hawaiian
government and planters were $17.79 and $52.11, respectively. From the fifth to twelfth
shipments, they were reduced to $5.32 for government and $1.77 for planters. Not only
did immigrants come to pay their own “importation” costs, but most of the expenses of
Nakayama’s Inspection Bureau, as well as various unusual expenses. This meant that the
laborers would repay a $70 advance for passage and other importation expenses at $6 per
month, and both those already in Hawaii and those to come would pay 35 cents per
month into an interpreters’ and doctors’ fund.
144

In 1887, the president of the Bureau of Immigration asked that the recruits be
chosen as follows: “The laborers shall be young, able bodied, healthy, agricultural
laborers only, [and] they shall be men who have heretofore habitually engaged in
agricultural pursuits, and shall under no circumstances be taken from the inhabitants of
towns or cities, or be from among persons engaged or trained in pursuits other than
agricultural.” Irwin assured that from the fifth up to eleventh shipments Irwin instructed
to take almost all the immigrants from Hiroshima and Yamaguchi. Irwin made these
changes in order to persuade Hawaiian officials and planters to continue the
convention-contract system and to increase the efficiency of labor exploitation and
profitability for parties involved, thus sustaining this whole scheme, which was, of course,

144
Okahata, A History of Japanese in Hawaii, 100–101; Conroy, The Japanese Frontier in Hawaii, 75–
77, 83.

137
profitable for him.
145

Irwin also made use of the discourse that Japanese laborers were superior to
Chinese laborers, which reinforced the racial hierarchy of labor. He tried to dissociate the
Japanese from the Chinese by carrying out stricter quarantine because, in his opinion, one
of the most undesirable features of Chinese immigration was smallpox, which the coolies
often brought with them in transit. Following the abovementioned revision, he repeatedly
asked, in a circular to fifty firms and overseers of plantations, for softer treatment with
consideration of “the sensitive nature of the Japanese race . . . which renders any rough
handling of the laborer, abortive, if intended to secure obedience.”
146

Joji Nakayama’s inspector team also proved to be very diplomatic in getting along
with the planters. In the second half of 1886, at a German-owned plantation on the island
of Kauai, where some ninety-two Japanese workers—all from Kanagawa and Yamaguchi
prefectures—were working, about fifty of them had been jailed for refusing to work.
Even sick laborers were ordered to work in the sugarcane fields. Nakayama’s
investigation report says “[E]ven among diligent people there were many whose income
was not sufficient to pay their fines . . . Gibson wanted a quiet settlement, and [we agree
that if we withdraw the workers] such withdrawal might induce other workers deceitfully
to demand changes for trivial reasons.” While they explained to the employer and the
local judge that the inspectors and doctors had proper governmental commission and both
needed to cooperate with them, they reprimanded those who had been jailed for not

145
Lorrin A Thurston, Minister of the Interior and President of the Bureau of Immigration, to Irwin, Sept.
8, 1887. JFMAD 3.8.2.360.

146
Conroy, The Japanese Frontier in Hawaii, 72–74.
138
having obeyed the order of the employer and persuaded them to return to work with the
new arrangement.
147

This self-serving paternalism of Irwin and Japanese officials was meant to maintain
the dominance of Japanese importation over that of the Chinese, which was by then 600
workers per year. Irwin wrote to Godfrey Brown, who succeeded Gibson as Hawaiian
minister of foreign affairs in 1887, “Japanese emigration really settles all your labor
problems and gives you a fairly good agricultural laborer at a much cheaper wage than
any previous laborer, Chinese, Portuguese, or other nationality, and has unquestionably
greatly reduced the price of all labor on the plantations.”
148

In spite of all such official remedial measures on the part of the Hawaiian
government, the customary practices on the plantations, which were deeply rooted in the
racialized labor hierarchy and the brutal control of it, did not change. On October 29,
1889, on the Hamakua plantation of Hawaii Island, Jun Goto was found dead, hung from
a utility pole with all four of his limbs tied. Goto spoke English fluently and often played
the role of fair translator at the trials of his countrymen. Keigoro Katsura, of the
Inspection Bureau, hired a private detective. Finally, the public prosecutor at Hilo,
Hitchcock, indicted five whites, including John Miller, a shop clerk, and Tom Stale, a
luna. John Miller was sentenced life in prison and Tom Stale was sentenced to ten years.
This brutal incident of white lynching shocked Japanese immigrants in Hawaii, who by
this time had reached a population of about ten-thousand. On May 6, 1890, four hundred

147
Report of the President of the Bureau of Immigration (1888), 236, as quoted in Okahata, A History of
Japanese in Hawaii, 101.

148
Ando to Inoue, Jan. 13, 1887, JFMAD XX, 350-352; Irwin to Godfrey Brown, Sept. 28, 1887.
139
Japanese of the Hakalau plantation on Hawaii Island struck, demanding stoppage of
forced overtime and that work hours equal those of other plantations. Keigoro Katsura
and Seiji Kimura from the Inspection Bureau, together with his vice-consul, Shimai,
mediated the case, and planters eventually accepted the laborers’ demands.
149

Another strike at the Heeia plantation on Oahu carried the vestiges of earlier
peasant rebellions in Japan. In April, 1890, some 170 laborers filed a protest with
management through their translator and time-keeper, Goro Sato, because they were
kicked and beaten by overseers and were unhappy over the punishments of the deduction
of half-day’s wages or even no pay for a day’s work, for allegedly ignoring the luna’s
orders. After their demands were rejected, irate Japanese workers organized meetings,
selected three representatives, consulted with Sachikichi Takei (who had moved from the
American mainland), formed an action strategy, and drew up petitions. The
representatives walked to Honolulu over the Pali to present their petition to the Japanese
consulate and the Japanese Immigration Bureau. The secretary of the consulate, Taizo
Masaki, expressed his willingness to investigate the case and also advised them to go to
the Immigration Bureau on the grounds that mediation of labor disputes was under the
Bureau’s direct jurisdiction. In contrast, the top official of the Bureau, Joji Nakayama,
displayed no sympathy and remained haughty. He “threw their petition onto the veranda
without even reading it and berated them for having the temerity to make complaints and
told them that they should realize that they were nothing but mere contract laborers.” The

149
Okahata, Hawaii Nihonjin Iminshi, 122–3, 126; Pacific Commercial Advertiser, May 14, 1890. John
Reinecke’s annotated bibliography is useful to track down these articles on labor strikes. See John E.
Reinecke, Labor Disturbances in Hawaii, 1890-1925 : A Summary (Honolulu, 1966).
140
trio was so furious they brought the matter to the attention of the Foreign Ministry in
Japan. Pressured, Nakayama reluctantly joined Masaki to carry out the investigation. The
laborers did not respond to a sugar agent’s attempt at appeasement. Eventually, they
succeeded in making the plantation accede to all demands of improving work conditions
and also discharging a few overseers. Drawing up a petition, appointing representatives,
and marching were very reminiscent of the manner of peasant rebellions in Japan; taking
grievance to a higher authority especially points to the manner of Osso.
150

This is where the January 1891 incident comes in. As mentioned at the beginning
of this dissertation, it broke out at a sugar plantation on Hawaii Island and reflected
Goso-styled thronging. The owner’s alleged sexual relationship with his married
Japanese maid caused Japanese immigrant laborers to protest. Not only did they see the
“relationship” as rape, (which was plausible, given the oppressive racial and gender
relations of the time), they had accumulated many complaints regarding the brutal
treatment they received from the plantation owner. When they thronged around his house
and attempted to interrogate him, he responded by firing shots from his pistol.
Eventually, the Japanese medical doctor and immigrant inspection officer, Iga Mori
reconciled the case by making the owner take back accusation of trespassing by Japanese
workers and by asking them to stop the labor strike that had been going on for six days.
151

Collective walkouts and marches to submit grievances were all cultural practices of
peasant rebellions in Japan. On April 13, one hundred fifty Japanese left their work at

150
Pacific Commercial Advertiser, April 26 1890; Ryukichi Kihara, Hawaii Nihonjin shi (Tokyo:
Bunseisha, 1935), 451–452; Okahata, Hawaii Nihonjin iminshi, 126–7.

151
Morita, Hawaii Gojunenshi, 847; Okahata, Hawaii Nihonjin iminshi, 127.
141
Hana plantations on Maui in order to complain about nonpayment of wages. They were
arrested for desertion, tried, and acquitted. On June 24, two hundred Japanese from an
Ewa plantation marched into Honolulu and complained to Japanese officials and agency
officers of various grievances, but eventually returned to work after the agency persuaded
them to. They celebrated the Japanese Emperor’s birthday in November by refusing to
work. They marched into Honolulu, prepared to be arrested. Instead, they were fined $3
each and ordered to return to work. In October, Japanese inspectors had to mediate a
dispute at the Hana plantation. The same month, 275 Japanese on the Makaweli
plantation on Kauai struck. The outcome is unknown. But they were fined $1 each and
returned to work.
152

Extra-legal violence was a part of coercive nature of plantation labor. On the
Olowalu plantation on Maui, a Japanese worker was burnt to death when an overseer
pushed him into a blazing brush fire over a slight argument. In January 1892, on the
Kukuihaele plantation on the island of Hawaii, a white field boss shot Ihei Higashi in the
leg with his pistol for no cause at all. The angered coworkers took the case to circuit court
where the offender was fined and sentenced to six months in jail. The defendant went on
to appeal the case and bribed the judge and witnesses so they would acquit him of all
charges. Soon, Higashi’s countrymen, including Kunizo Suzuki, Shin Yamamoto,
Yusuke Sato, Memon’ichiro Ono, and Ken’ichiro Hoshina, raged at this injustice and
began a fund drive to further appeal the case to the Supreme Court of Hawaii. They held
a public forum and collected donations from fellow immigrants. The white luna hurriedly

152
Pacific Commercial Advertiser, April 21, 1891; June 25, 1891; Friend, December 1891; Pacific
Commercial Advertiser, October 26, 1891; October 30, 1891.
142
asked the Japanese section of the Immigration Bureau as well as the Japanese Consulate
for a mediation. As a result, Higashi was given $350 in compensation, but sent back to
Japan.
153

Walkouts and marches continued to be a meaningful way to protest. In addition,
protesters showed strong support for each other by collectively submitting petitions or
attending their fellow protesters’ trials. On May 20, 1892, 107 Japanese rioted over the
arrest of a plantation laborer at Kipahulu on Maui, who had allegedly deserted his wife.
Although it is not clear what caused this separation or whether it derived from
male-dominated gender relation, it is clear that those plantation workers’ private lives
were under surveillance. When twelve Japanese were arrested as ringleaders, the rest of
them marched via Ulupalakua to the Wailuku jail to demand his release. On November
25 of the same year, over 200 Japanese laborers of the Ewa plantation marched from 2:00
a.m. till 10:30 a.m. to the offices of Japanese Government officials in Spreckels Block in
Honolulu after the plantation owner, W. J. Lowrey, declined to accede to their demand to
fire a luna. This luna had broken a Japanese laborer’s nose when five Japanese got into a
fray with another luna who had “docked a lazy laborer a half day for not working.”
Japanese officials warned them if they do not return to work they would be arrested, and
made them board a 1:45 p.m. train to Ewa.
154

The pattern of these disputes shows that the description of Japanese laborers as
“lazy” and of their individual and collective self-defense against injustice, mistreatment,

153
Pacific Commercial Advertiser, October 30 1891; Okahata, A History of Japanese in Hawaii, 125;
Okahata, Hawaii Nihonjin iminshi, 127.

154
Pacific Commercial Advertiser, May 30, 1892; November 26, 1892.
143
and abuse as “savage acts,” “gangs,” and “mobs” were intended to justify both the luna’s
violence and brutality and the execution of forces under the name of labor control and
profitability. These forces were kept well-intact in Hawaii. On June 25, 1893, one of the
lunas, named Boardfeldt, of the Pacific Sugar Mill at Kukuihaele, placed “a lazy
Japanese,” with whom he “had some trouble” a day before, to one side to work by
himself. When the laborer attempted to throw the luna down, and drew a clasp-knife in
the tussle, the luna, who also saw “a gang of sixty Japanese coming for him,” drew a
revolver and shot a Japanese in the back and then ran away. The luna was arrested and
taken to Honokaa for trial. Then, on the day of the trial, about 250 Japanese marched into
Honokaa to attend it.
155

The fines charged on the Japanese immigrant laborers were an integral part of
racist practice of criminal justice procedures and plantation management, thereby
curtailing their ability of remitting and a sense of economic security and foundation. On
July 31, 1893, one-hundred forty Japanese laborers, on the Hamakuapoko plantation in
Maui, refused to work that morning because the Japanese Immigration inspectors had
informed them that “Restoration Day” was one of the holidays when they would get a
day off. But the manager and his deputies argued, “Though formerly the 31st was a
holiday, this year the government had refused to officially proclaim it, therefore they
could not legally cease from labor.” The manager and his deputies asked a Japanese
doctor in Wailuku to persuade the laborers to return to work, and the workers actually
worked for the latter half of the day. In spite of that fact, the manager and his deputies

155
Pacific Commercial Advertiser, June 27, 1893; June 29, 1893.
144
arrested seven of the Japanese leaders and brought them to Makawao court. These seven
men were fined $3.50 each. On December 27, 1893, sixty-three Japanese contract
workers on Paauhau struck, alleging scarcity of water allowance, but they were fined
$3.25 each. Convict labor through this criminal justice system helped build Hawaii’s
infrastructure. Over 100 Japanese, who had struck at H. P. Faye’s plantation at Mana,
Kauai, on Feburary 27, 1894, were brought to Honolulu to work out the sentences on Pali
road and at the quarries.
156

Just like in the peasant rebellions in Japan, coherence was an organizing principle
Hawaiian village communities and families used to stay unified when carrying out
walkouts or thronging in labor disputes.The abovementioned 1890 Heeia plantation strike
had this element. When a Japanese laborer would not join a strike, six other Japanese
“serenaded him with tin-can music, threw stones, and broke windows in his room.” At
the Ewa plantation, most Japanese “entered into a solemn agreement that no one should
do any more work than anyone else.” It was obviously intended to not allow
uncompensated overwork and “was punctiliously observed by all the clan.” This was a
counter act to the distinctions that emerged on some plantations. The planters paid
younger and stronger workers slightly more (usually 10 cents per day) to set faster paces
for their fellow workers. They were called “hippari men” (from the Japanese hipparu, “to
pull along”). When a Japanese hippari man at the Ewa plantation broke the agreement on
December 28, 1893, four fellow Japanese went to his house and, “after binding the strong
man,” proceeded to “beat him about the head with the peculiar Japanese shoes they wore,”

156
Pacific Commercial Advertiser, August 7, 1893; January 3, 1894; March 19, 1894; March 20, 1894;
April 4, 1894.
145
which were probably waraji, made of straw, or geta, made of wood. “The victim”
“managed to escape” to “the overseer’s house.” When the overseer, Ferguson, and a
police officer, found the four alleged offenders, the police officer, who surprisingly
seemed to be able to understand the Japanese language, “overheard the [Japanese remark]
and interpreted it” as they were going to “kill” them. Ferguson “promptly pulled his
revolver” and “cowed the men into submission.” Later, a crowd of Japanese gathered at
the overseer’s house and shouted, “We all did it.” The four were arrested and brought to
trial. The expression of “we all did it” clearly shows that the workers saw themselves as
unified in their struggle.
157

Japanese laborers used armed self-defense as a common tactic in their labor
disputes. On January 12, 1894, trouble arose at Koloa of Kauai. A luna, Schimmelpfennig,
beat a Japanese laborer. Approximately 150 Japanese plantation hands were “on war-path,
parading the streets with clubs and jack-knives.” They were “indignant,” “rose up in a
body,” and “went for the luna, who barely escaped with his life.” They “then organized
themselves,” “refused to go to work until the matter could be laid before their Consul in
Honolulu,” and “defied arrest” by forming “into small groups” armed with clubs. “Mr. K.
Okkotsu, the Japanese inspector,” was sent to inquire into the matter. The outcome is not
reported in the Pacific Commercial Advertiser article. The overpowering of Japanese by
white lunas or plantation policemen with firearms characterized the immediate power
struggle on the site, in addition to mediations by Japanese government officials, who

157
Pacific Commercial Advertiser, April 26, 1890; December 30, 1893; Odo and Sinoto, A Pictorial
History of the Japanese in Hawaiʻi, 55.
146
were on the side of the sugar industry.
158

White lunas, plantation policemen, and the managers possessed weaponry that
often overwhelmed the clubs plantation workers held in their hands. On August 21, 1894,
five Japanese men were taken out of the field and put to work in the mill, where the work
day ended an hour later than in the field. When the plantation policeman, Lennox, tried to
force them to remain working at the site, one of the Japanese was “obdurate.” Lennox
snatched all of his effects, including a tea bottle, and forced him return to work. Once the
man got back to work, Lennox gave him his belongings back. Things turned again when
the worker hit Lennox in the head with the tea bottle. A scuffle ensued. The Japanese
“was considerably used up by Lennox’s blows.” “During the evening several hundred
laborers called on Manager Lowrie and demanded the discharge of Lennox.” Lowrie
would not accede this and suggested mediation by Japanese inspectors. Lennox “got a
double-barreled shotgun, loaded with buckshot, laid it across his knees, and sat on his
doorstep all night. The laborers came up in little and in big crowds, gazed at the stalwart
policeman, gazed at the gun and went home.” The laborers refused to work next day. Joji
Nakayama and K. Okkotsu, from the Japanese Immigration Inspector Bureau, persuaded
the Japanese laborers to return to work.
159

The extent of coordination for united actions among Japanese laborers is
noteworthy. Although they were characterized by some historians as “sporadic and
spontaneous” compared with the 1909 Oahu Sugar Strike, in which Japanese immigrant

158
Pacific Commercial Advertiser, January 19, 1894.

159
Pacific Commercial Advertiser, August 23, 1894.
147
newspapers, small business owners in urban areas, and plantation hands worked out a
strike plan together, they still entailed more communication and coordination for united
action than absconding in relatively small numbers. According to Ronald Takaki,
ha’alele hana, or desertion from service, was commonplace in plantations during the era
of contract labor. The police arrested 3,454 laborers (mostly Chinese) for desertion
between 1880 and 1882 and 5,706 between 1890 and 1892 (both Chinese and Japanese).
However, the extent of organization and collectivity of the Japanese resistance in the
form of marching, thronging, selecting representatives, and submitting petitions are
indicative of the tradition of Japanese peasant rebellion, thereby making us consider the
culturally specific origins of their strikes.
160

On the dark, stormy night of November 21, 1894, some 150 Japanese contract
laborers on the Kahuku plantation performed Chosan (a collective walkout) and Osso
(submission of grievances to a higher authority). Angry at general mistreatment and
particularly at a brutal luna, the committee of the Japanese plantation hands called upon
Manager Arnemann and demanded the instant dismissal of the luna—a demand he
rejected. The laborers knew “the plantation’s head men were armed and did not care to go
against six shooters and rifles.” Then the workers walked thirty-eight miles over
disordered roads via Pali and Koolau, arriving in Honolulu at 3:00 a.m. the next morning.
They were exhausted and starved. Some had no overcoats or blankets. Most of them were
barefoot. In Honolulu, they finally managed to lay their grievances before the chief

160
Takaki, Pau Hana, 135–7, 148. Takaki reveals that at least 20 Japanese separately ran away between
December of 1891 and January of 1892 from the Koloa Plantation, two from Kukaiau Plantation in the fall
of 1889, two from Laupahoehoe Plantation in 1889, and one from Hutchinson Sugar Plantation in 1890.
148
inspector, Okkotsu, and the charge d’ affaires to the Hawaiian Republic, Goro Narita,
who had actually first declined to talk. The petition declared that “they had been abused
outrageously, miserably housed, put on short fuel allowance and deprived of water” and
that “they were compelled to work day and night at times and forced to walk from the
fields when trains were running.” Of course, it also demanded the discharge of the
habitually brutal luna. After hearing the Kahuku agents, the inspector decided that the
strikers were in the wrong. Eventually, the seven ringleaders were fined $5 each and
everyone had to walk thirty-eight miles back to the plantation. They were not prosecuted
this time, but the luna kept his job.
161

Brutality was so deeply entrenched in laborers’ lives on Hawaiian sugar plantations
that records repeatedly show similar incidents by overseers. The same men of the Kahuku
plantation struck again in January of the next year for the same reason—the brutality of
the same luna. They were taken before a judge at Hauula. They stated “[W]e don’t want
your law, we want our own,” and refused to plead. They were fined $5 each for contempt
for court, and then started another march to Honolulu. Captain Parker and a squad of
police met ninety-four of them and took them to the Oahu jail. On June 13, 1896, the
Japanese laborers on the Olowalu plantation assembled peacefully to protest
unreasonable rules. A luna fired his revolver into air. Shortly after, they armed
themselves with sticks and stones, while the luna retired to his house. He and other lunas
discharged their rifles into the air, so the protesters sought refuge in the sugar mill. The
luna was fined and discharged, while about fifty Japanese were arrested. However, the

161
Pacific Commercial Advertiser, November 22, 23, 1894.
149
Japanese were acquitted. On March 11, 1897, a Japanese interpreter, Kenzaburo Wada,
was beaten to death in Maui. His role of legal defender probably made him look like a
nuisance to the plantation overseers and managers. In 1898, Japanese laborers got into a
fight with a Japanese luna named Hoshi on the Makaweli plantation of Kauai. Four of
them were punished. On November 2, 1899, Sokichi Yamashita was beaten at Waiakea
on the island of Hawaii.
162

Even after years of effort of importing “bona fide” farmers from Japan, the
authorities kept agonizing over the issue of labor selection and control. The Planters’
Labor and Supply Company reported that Japanese laborers were “well treated and fairly
dealt by,” but “[T]he demagogic element among the laborers kindles and keeps alive an
antagonistic sentiment against employers.” It regretted that “the facilities in the shape of
free legal defense do much to promote appeals to the law courts on frivolous pretexts,”
and also stated that, without the help of counsel of the Japanese government to deny
laborers in open court or any other ways, “the possibility of controlling the badly
disposed among the laborers becomes a work of extreme difficulty.” It concluded that for
such “lawlessness” and “tendency to strike the only remedy possible is the introduction
of some other class of labor to supplement the Japanese.”
163

Those Japanese immigrant workers tapped into the tradition of peasant resistance.
Whether they succeeded in winning what they demanded or not, they indeed succeeded in
conducting organized protests. This does not mean that the Japanese immigrants in

162
Pacific Commercial Advertiser, January 5, 1895; June 20, 1896; June 30, 1896; Okahata, Hawaii
Nihonjin iminshi, 127.

163
Pacific Commercial Advertiser, November 22, 1894.
150
Hawaii protested solely based on the strategy they had from historical experience and
knowledge of peasant rebellions in Japan. A new experience of interethnic solidarity in
their fight against racial labor hierarchy had sprouted, too. Indeed, Japanese immigrants
might have learned something from the emergence of interethnic cooperation seen in a
strike by Chinese and Japanese laborers on the Puehuehu Plantation in 1900, and yet
another strike by forty-three Japanese and Portuguese women field hands on the Kilauea
Plantation the same year. However, the following decade (between 1900 and 1910)
shows the predominance of nationalist sentiment and practice that involves a wider range
of Japanese immigrant communities in labor organizing. The demarcating contexts were
two-fold. One was the growth of nationalism after the Sino-Japanese War in mainland
Japan and its rippling effect in the Japanese immigrant media of Hawaii. Second was the
Organic Act of 1900, which established Hawaii as a territory of the United States on June
14. Japanese contract laborers had not been allowed to legally strike and were susceptible
to arrest and punishment for violating the contract in case they do; but this new act
abolished the labor contract system.
164

Chapter Conclusion
Japanese immigration to Hawaii started at the conjunction of global history where
Western colonist powers stamped on many parts of Asia, and the coolie trade was a still
dominant form of labor migration. Japan and the United States were two burgeoning
empires, thereby creating a trans-Pacific sphere of racial formation, which was

164
Okahata, Hawaii Nihonjin iminshi, 147, 149.
151
distinctively characterized by the discourse that differentiates Japanese laborers and
Chinese coolies, despite the similar intensity of exploitation under the overall white
supremacist hierarchy. Japan itself loomed large as an imperialist absolutist state, which
was very oppressive toward its peasants who fought for the egalitarian distribution of
land. The government-sponsored immigration scheme was designed in ways that the
elites of the Meiji regime, Kaoru Inoue, Takashi Masuda, and Robert Irwin could benefit
for themselves and could contribute as a partial solution to the financial crisis of
modernizing Japan. The history of the inception of the Japanese immigration to Hawaii
has numerous traces that evidently point to the intensified exploitation of the agricultural
sector in capitalist transformation. It entailed not only the primitive accumulation process
in which the people were ripped off of the land, but also production of new national
subjects who were to be disciplined as “bona fide” laborers and soldiers of the Imperial
Army
165
. Even under that condition, the Japanese immigrants to Hawaii were able to
bring memory and experience of peasant rebellions. The vestiges of the manner of
peasant rebellion in Japan were observed in the early labor strikes in the numerous sugar
plantations in Hawaii.
Resistance by the peasants in the Japanese emigrant communities and by the
Japanese immigrant workers in Hawaii was implicated in the context of capitalist
transformation of Japan, the Pacific, and the globe. By adopting different geographical
scales (from local to trans-Pacific) as units of analysis, this chapter deepened our
understanding of the way those peasant subjects encountered racist practices on the sugar

165
Japanese conscription for the Imperial Army started in 1873.
152
plantation with what they brought from their homeland. They tapped into or reactivated
their tradition of peasant protest and had to learn what really constitutes the racial
capitalism that the United States and Britain had established on the islands of Hawaii.
The chapter attempted to reveal the shifts and similarities in the manner and scale in
which farmers and peasants resisted against both modern taxations and the privatization
of land (or commons in general) and the plantation economy. They envisioned the
egalitarian distribution of land in Japan, but in Hawaii the land was obviously neither
theirs nor under their practical control or management. On a foreign and hostile land, they
had to come to realize that a monoculture plantation economy had drastically narrowed
the path to autonomy and self-subsistence, and they had to struggle through the new
conditions of living as racialized wage-laborers. In short, the ideology that drove their
resistance shifted from pre-modern land egalitarianism to struggles against racist violence
and labor exploitation, but the manner of resistance remained that of Chosan, or
collective walkout, Osso, petitioning to higher authority, and Goso, thronging to demand.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the ideology that guides immigrants’ resistance
would gradually change to a sense of nationalism and would be able to overarch and
involve both plantation workers and urban workers in Honolulu, as we examine the 1909
Oahu sugar strike in the next chapter.

153
Chapter 3: Okinawan Immigration, Japanese Nationalism, and Racialized Labor in
Hawaii

This chapter examines the process of immigration to Hawaii and the United States
that Okinawans underwent fifteen years after mainland Japanese farmers, peasants,
laborers, and elites—and who, either by force or by choice, found themselves in a place
yet to be defined. Focus will be placed on the way that Japanese colonialism affected the
Okinawan farmer’s relationships to his land and the way the Okinawan people reacted to
the colonial political economy. The second half of the chapter will look into the labor
strikes in Hawaii between 1900, when Okinawans started arriving, and 1909, a year that
marked one of the largest strikes,with nationalist solidarity as its driving force. This, of
course, raises an important question in the historiography of the Japanese immigrant
labor movement: How did Okinawan immigrants join the labor disputes that were led by
Japanese immigrants, and, how did they negotiate their subject positions in this period of
looming Japanese nationalism?

Context of Colonization and Subjugation of Okinawa
As Japan transformed its society with modern institutions, including the land tax
system, it basically attempted to apply the same taxation system to its colony, Ryukyu,
which had been subsumed under the control of the Japanese prefectural system and come
to be called Okinawa. Okinawan immigration to Hawaii, initiated in 1899 by Kyuzo
Toyama, was deeply embedded in the transformation of land relation during the process
154
of Japanese colonization and the people’s protest against it. In short, the political and
economic control of Okinawa by ex-Satsuma clan politicians and merchants was
devouring the common forest, (Somayama). Noboru Jahana took the lead of the
opposition to this land grab. While Koei Osato, who wrote Jahana’s biography in 1935
(in the context of oppression by the Japanese fascist empire), created a heroic narrative of
Jahana, and a succeeding generation of scholars, including Masahide Ota, followed the
basic account of Jahana as a hero, Akira Arakawa reexamined the primary sources that
Osato used, and attempted to describe Jahana as bureaucratic and opportunist. Both
Osato’s heroism and Arakawa’s iconoclastic work assumed a monotonic personality.
Building off of recent archival studies of Shin’ichi Isa, the first half of this chapter
reconstructs Jahana’s shifts and growths by perusing primary sources. Some scholars also
argued that immigration came into being only after the oppositional movement was
crushed by the tyrannical prefectural governor Shigeru Narahara, because they
interpreted that immigration was merely an escapist alternative and incompatible with
resistance from within the Okinawan islands. I will argue differently. Those who joined
Jahana, such as Kyuzo Toyama and Shinsuke Taira, contrived immigration while they
were heavily involved in the movement, and campaigned for economic and political
justice for Okinawans.
166

The economic subjugation of the Okinawan prefecture was basically reconstituted

166
Koei Osato, Jahana Noboru den: Okinawa kaiho no senkusha [A Biography of Noboru Jahana: A
Precursor of Okinawan Liberation] (Tokyo: Taihei Shuppansha, 1970); Masahide Ota, Okinawa no minshu
ishiki [Popular Consciousness of Okinawa] (Tokyo: Shinsensha, 1995); Akira Arakawa, Izoku to tenno no
kokka: Okinawa minshushi heno kokoromi [Okinawans and Emperor’s State: An Attempt of Okinawan
Popular History](Tokyo: Nigetsusha, 1973); Shin’ichi Isa ed., Jahana Noboru shu [Historical Documents
by and of Jahana Noboru] (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobo, 1998).
155
from Satsuma’s control of the Ryukyu Kingdom during the Tokugawa period. The
increase of sugar production commodities and farming of sugarcane in the Meiji period is
central to this picture. Simply put, economic dependency on the monoculture of sugar
made the population become less self-sufficient in farming its own food and increasingly
dependent on food importation. How did that start? The Ryukyu Kingdom attempted to
pay off the debt it owed the Satsuma feudal domain by monopolizing sales of muscovado
(a type of unrefined brown sugar with a strong molasses flavor), which accelerated the
planting of sugarcane. The feudal lords under the Ryukyu king widened sugarcane
production, which spread out crops. They had no centralized plan and it was in this
uncontrollable arena that farmers started experiencing food shortage. In 1697, the
Ryukyu kingdom limited sugarcane acreage in direct proportions to each Jiwari farmland
that farmers had and even limited sugarcane planting in fifteen magiri of Shimajiri
County, eleven magiri of Nakagami County, and three magiri of the Kunigami area (Kin,
Motobu, and Nakijin). Magiri was a collection of villages and an administrative unit
within the Ryukyu feudal system. The Jiwari system of farming involved the rotation of
feudal farming lots every ten years or so among villagers. As the sugar trade became one
of the most dominant sources of revenue, the kingdom encouraged the planting of
sugarcane in excess of land beyond conventional limitations.
167

In 1888, he Meiji government abolished the limitation on acreage of sugarcane
fields in Okinawa because it wanted to decrease the import of sugar from other countries.
Open trade between Okinawa and the Japanese mainland meant an influx of cheaper rice.

167
Isao Kinjo, Kindai Okinawa no togyo [Sugar Industry of Modern Okinawa] (Naha: Hirugisha, 1985),
13–29.
156
Cultivation of sweet potato and rice, the main stables of Okinawa, relatively decreased.
Okinawan farmers also suffered from high interest rates forced by loan sharks when they
ran out of money before the actual sale of sugar in the fall. Although in 1879 the Japanese
central government loaned 69,000 yen to Okinawan farmers with zero interest in order to
rescue them from this situation, they did it so as to hold down pro-China factions and to
keep a new colony under control. When the second governor of this new prefecture,
Mochinori Uesugi, toured the farming villages in 1881, one village leader said “many
farmers are trying to utilize the increasing price of sugar in order to pay off their debt.”
Therefore, “they are short of sweet potatoes and have to eat cycad.” This structural
subjugation ultimately lead to “1924 Cycad Hell,” when the world sugar price plummeted,
leaving numerous Okinawan people to starve. Somewhat similar to the way some Pacific
slanders make Sago from palm and cycad, Okinawans cooked cycad’s stem and seeds.
However, without sufficient duration and the proper process of immersion in water and
fermenting, many people died from the plant’s poisonous ingredient, Cycasin.
168

Another key configuration of power relations in Okinawa was between the
ex-Ryukyu royal family (Kazoku) and the warrior class (Shizoku), who remained
privileged and made up for one-third of the population of the Shuri and Naha wards. The
Japanese government and Qing China left Ryukyu’s holdings issues in gray; that is,
China held the Yaeyama islands and Japan held the rest of the Okinawan islands. Until
1894 during the Sino-Japanese War, privileged Okinawans had two factions. One was the

168
Fumio Nishihara, Okinawa kindai keizaishi no hoho [Method of Economic History of Modern
Okinawa] (Naha: Hirugisha, 1991), 3–21; Yasukatsu Matsushima, Okinawa tosho keizaishi [Okinawa
Economic History] (Tokyo: Fujiwara Shoten, 2002), 131.
157
Ganko faction, symbolized by the black flag that pledged allegiance to the Chinese Qing
dynasty and sought independence of Ryukyu under the auspices of China. The other is
the Kaika faction, symbolized by white, which insisted on accepting Japanese rule and
modernization. After the Japanese victory in the Sino-Japanese War, Okinawans of the
Kaika faction strived to retain a status of tax exemption and other privileges by willingly
allowing themselves to be coopted by the Japanese governor and other officials. They
established an organization called Kodo-kai and published Ryukyu Shimpo, the first
newspaper of Okinawa. By doing so, they attempted to maintain the remaining
conventional attitude of Kanson-Mimpi (respect for bureaucrats and disrespect for
ordinary people) as a dominant force and preserve the class distinction in Okinawa. Later,
they would criticize and suppress Jahana and others, who published an oppositional
journal, Okinawa Jiron, to expose the corruption of Okinawan elites bribed by the
infamous Governor Narahara.
169

Colonization of Okinawa was institutionalized in political, economic, and social
aspects. When the Okinawa prefecture did not yet have its own assembly, the
bureaucratic positions of the prefectural office were occupied by ex-Satsuma personnel.
This meant that an extension of the tyrannical Meiji government, which itself was deeply
entrenched in Satsuma-Choshu (Kagoshima-Yamaguchi) factionalism, was solidly in
place. Less than twenty percent of Okinawan native officials were in position. Japanese
mainlanders, mainly Kagoshimans (Satsumans), occupied not only bureaucratic and
administrative posts, but also those of educational institutions such as school principals

169
Osato, Jahana Noboru den, 86–99; Ota, Okinawa no Minshu Ishiki, 11, 18–126.
158
and teachers. Many Kagoshiman merchants were invited and given exclusive privileges
to conduct business. The criminal justice system was also affected by the colonial system.
Most of the policemen were Kagoshimans. An official court of law was not established
until 1891. As for political representation, the prefectural assembly was opened in 1895,
though with indirect representation, meaning mayors of cities and villages chose the
governor. Though the Japanese Diet opened in 1891 under pressure of the People’s Right
and Freedom Movement, Okinawa did not have any representation in the central Diet
until 1909.
170

Noboru Jahana, Protection of Somayama, and Resistance against Privatization of
Land
Flames of opposition bellowed, however, because the Okinawan society of farmers
did not stay quiet. When, in 1894, a new governor of the Satsuma faction, Shigeru
Narahara, started to requisition and seize common forestland and give or sell it to
Japanese mainlanders, Ryukyu Kazoku (ex-royal family of Ryukyu kingdom), and
Shizoku (ex-ruling elites of the kingdom), the farmers of Kunigami county strongly
opposed. Noboru Jahana, who was a civil engineer at that time, found himself in between
those two sides.
Jahana was born in 1865 in Kochinda Village on the Okinawan main island in a
well-to-do farming family. Because he excelled in school, he was sent by the prefecture
to Tokyo to be schooled in higher education institutions with four other youth—all of

170
Osato, Jahana Noboru den, 36–37, 41–44.
159
them from Ryukyu Kazoku and Shizoku families. As a son of farmers, Jahana was an
exception in this scholarship. In Gakushuin high school, Okinawan youngsters, as well as
Hawaiian international students, were seen as “different races” by mainlanders. While all
four of the others eventually went to Keio University, (which oriented students toward
becoming politicians and businessmen), Jahana chose to study agriculture and forestry at
the Tokyo School of Forestry, which became a part of the Imperial University of
Agriculture in 1890. At his return to Okinawa in 1891, Jahana was appointed as a civil
engineer. A year later, Shigeru Narahara became the governor of Okinawa with strong
support of the then-Prime Minister Masayoshi Matsukata, after Narahara had held an
office of president of the Japanese Railroad Company. When Jahana was appointed as a
commissioner of land survey in 1893, Governor Narahara announced a plan to clear
forestland on a large scale for cultivation. Narahara argued that deforestation was to
provide destitute Shizoku with farmland, rescue them, and even to solve the food
shortage problem of the whole prefecture.
171

171
Ibid., 47–75. One of his mentors at the university, Tokiyoshi Yokoi, was very active in reporting the
environmental pollution derived from Ashio copper mines and its devastating effect on surrounding
farming communities. Yokoi facilitated Jahana’s stay in Tokyo. As to the Hawaiian students, see Ryukyu
Shimpo, March 20, 1932. At that time, pseudo-scientific anthropological discourse of “race” emerged under
the strong influence of the “race science” foregrounded by the West to justify the rule of “racial superiors”.
For example, the Forth National Industrial Exposition of Japan exhibited Ainu, Koreans, Taiwan aborigines,
and Okinawans in cages in 1895, which is very reminiscent of similar exhibition at the World Fairs. The
fifth exposition in 1905 followed the suit.

160

Map 4: Okinawa Prefecture and Ryukyu Islands
172

172
This map is reproduced from Ethnic Studies Oral History Project, United Okinawan Association of
161

Map 5: Island of Okinawa
173

Hawaii, Uchinanchu (Honolulu: Ethnic Studies Program, University of Hawaii, 1981), xxx–xxxi.

173
This map is reproduced from Ethnic Studies Oral History Project, United Okinawan Association of
162
Contrary to what Koei Osato described in the biography, Jahana did not
immediately oppose it. Jahana, a young and new civil servant, believed in the cause that
Narahara raised and seemingly obeyed his order. A historian, Shin’ichi Isa, revealed that
Jahana, as a young official, gave the ex-royal family of Ryukyu permission to open 407
acres of land of Mt. Hira in Yara Village, of the Chatan area of Nakagami County on
November 18, 1893. Furthermore, Jahana approved another expropriation of land on
December 6, 1893. This time, 3,670 acres of land in Ishigaki island went into the hands
of the Yaeyama Sugar Company, which had just been established by Eiichi Shibusawa,
Taku Oe, Shojiro Goto, and other merchants, who were elites thriving in and around the
Japanese central government. Obviously, state support in the form of land seizure
facilitated the building of sugarcane farmland in the Japanese colony. Ironically, one of
the first Okinawan native prefectural officials, Noboru Jahana, became part of the process.
The sugar enterprise on Yaeyama Islands, though, did not go well because of malaria,
typhoons, and resistance from the islanders. Eventually, it failed completely and closed
by 1898. However, the above-mentioned entrepreneurs, like Shibusawa, aimed at another
island nearby, Taiwan. The then-Minister of Finance Kaoru Inoue facilitated the
foundation of the Taiwan Sugar Company in 1900, with the state’s support. Its founders
included Takashi Masuda and Robert W. Irwin. They took tools and machines from the
Yaeyama Sugar Company and transported them to Taiwan. This is just one example that
the capital accumulated through the government-sponsored immigration to Hawaii

Hawaii, Uchinanchu (Honolulu: Ethnic Studies Program, University of Hawaii, 1981), xxix.
163
circulated to an enterprise of colonization.
174

Jahana’s ambivalence in his early career can be observed in his interaction with
farmers too. In January 1894, Jahana inspected Kunigami County on Okinawan Island,
where there was a deep forest called Yambaru. When he went through Nago on the 13th
and Motobu on the 14th of the month, he found some forestland cleared without
permission. When he told a village representative that the “forest is the resource that you
have to use wisely and with plans so that you will sustain water resource, not run out of
wood, and not deteriorate condition of field and rice paddy.” Then the representative
replied that they “cleared the land because the prefecture announced requisition of sixteen
acres of forestland and leased it to textile factory that was built for hiring destitute
Shizoku” in October 1890. The villagers even thought “it would be better to take the
lumber for themselves if somebody is going to come and clear the land anyway. What is
the point of keeping it if the government can take it away anytime they want?” Jahana
gave them a bureaucratic reply, “the prefecture’s intension of clearing the land is to
provide destitute Shizoku with a way of living. The prefecture will not start doing that
without notice. So you can take as good care of Somayama [common forestland] as
before. If you villagers want to cultivate new land, you can apply for it too. So trust the

174
Shibusawa Eiichi denki shiryo [Birographical Documents of Eiichi Shibusawa] (Tokyo: Shibusawa
Eiichi Denki Shiryo Kankokai, 1956), 11:209–210, 216–217, 251–261; Isa, Jahana Noboru shu, 142, no.
105; Obviously, Jahana had narrow social eyesight and had to come to terms with the harsh condition of
poor farmers’ lives, given that no historical record shows Jahana was aware of the Miyako islanders, whose
representative went to Tokyo to demand abolishment of poll tax on that island in 1893. For the case of
Miyako islanders’ petition, see Arakawa, Izoku to tenno, 97–158. According to Shuncho Higa, a few cases
of land disposal occurred even before Narahara’s period. Okinawa prefecture’s fourth governor, Sutezo
Nishimura, allowed about 5200 sojourning Shizoku to clear a limited width of forestland in Motobu village
in 1885, but they cleared more than they were permitted and affected local village farmers’ lives negatively.
See Shuncho Higa, Okinawa no Rekishi [History of Okinawa] (Tokyo: San’ichi Shobo, 1970), 433–4.
164
prefecture.”
175

The truth was that Narahara’s predecessor, Governor Maruoka, had sold sixteen
acres of Somayama land to the sons of Shizoku from Shuri so that they could turn it into
an indigo field. But they did not grow indigo. Instead, they leased it to peasants in
Motobu and pocketed the rent and tenant fees. Jahana found himself in a more difficult
position when one village representative in the Motobu area asked him whether the
prefecture would not expropriate a portion of land if the villagers were opposed to it. He
realized that five out of eighteen villages of Motobu were applying for clearing some
portions of land but rest of the thirteen villages would reject any intruders’ attempt to
clear up and obtain their Somayama. One farmer even complained that he had not seen
destitute applicants come and check the land, but some rich people had. At this point,
Jahana realized he could not fully stand with farmers and ended up stating, “[It] is
difficult to reject prefectural decision, but you can submit a petition directly to the
Governor.” In his report, Jahana concluded that about 5200 destitute Shizoku in the
Motobu area had been intruding and mismanaging the forest, and that even fines had not
stopped those without permission from recklessly opening the land, and that some of
them directly bought the land from a village, not provided by the prefecture.
176

On May 11, farmers of ten villages in the Nago, Motobu, and Nakijin areas sent
their representatives, Seisaburo Oshiro, Bun’ichiro Uehara, Jin’ichiro Tamaki, and Seikei
Kina to the prefectural capital, Naha, to submit a petition to demand a halt to the

175
Noboru Jahana, “Kunigami-chiho Motobu-magiri Somayama no Keikyo [Situation of Somayama in
Motobu Village of Kunigami County]” (February 7, 1894) in Isa, Jahana Noboru shu, 41–42.

176
Ibid., 41–42.
165
land-clearing. They collected three rin (0.003 yen) from each villager to cover 1.60 yen
of travelling cost for four representatives. They stated, “If one village has decreasing
amount of wood, demand for wood in an adjacent village increases, which then creates a
deforestation spiral among multiple villages.” They emphasized that they “had to sustain
the supply of lumber for shipbuilding, home building, firewood for sugar making, wood
for barrel making and house-repairs.” Moreover, they were “badly in need of grass in the
forest as fertilizer for sugarcane, indigo, hemp, and other crops in addition to hay for
cows.” The detailed concerns that farmers brought must have made Jahana realize the
seriousness of the on-going land grab. On July 10, Jahana rejected applications for land
clearing in the Nago, Motobu, and Nakijin areas that had been handed in by twenty-eight
different groups of Shizoku. Soon after, Governor Narahara demoted Jahana (sometime
in September 1894) and appointed Sasuke Kurokawa, one of his underlings—who did not
have any expertise on this issue—as his successor.
177

Jahana learned from those farmers to appreciate what a famous eighteenth-century
Ryukyu policy-maker, Saion (also known as Bunjaku Gushichan), had intended to do
with his so-called Somayama forest management. On islands where typhoons brought
lots of rainfall and wind blew strong and as fast as 25 to 30 miles per hour every summer,
it was crucial to plant Adan (Pandanus odoratissimus), Ryukyu pine, and Yarabo
(Calophyllum inophyllum) to form shelter belts along the coastal lines. It was also
essential to line village roads with pines and Fukugi (Garcinia subelliptica), and avoid
reckless deforestation around the villages, because those trees maintained water in the

177
Farmers’ petition written on May 7
th
, 1894 as quoted in Osato, Jahana Noboru den, 114–116; Isa,
Jahana Noboru shu, 47; Osato, Jahana Noboru den, 105–117.
166
ground, and prevented landslides and floods. The Somayama method of forest
management intended to protect and raise their common forestland with a long-range
plan of protecting villages and their agricultural harvest from wind and flood damage.
Well-managed forest land retains water, which can maintain stream stability, flow, and
thereby prevent drought. Furthermore, the Somayama forest was also a source of
firewood, charcoal, fertilizer, hay, and lumber. Because it took so much time and money
for the inhabitants of those isolated islands to import wood from locations further away, it
was especially important to take care of wood resources at a sustainable pace and plant
new trees for later generation. To build and repair houses and boats, they cut out lumber
from this forest. But, at the same time, they had to preserve their forest. Jahana might
have felt that the college education in modern agriculture he received in Tokyo did not
compare to the localized living knowledge of how to collectively manage common
resources.
178

After Kurokawa, who was under Narahara’s thumb, came into in that position,
approval of land cultivation became more consistent and rampant. Shizoku (from Shuri)
and Naha cleared 416 acres in the Haneji, Motobu, Nakijin, Kin, Onna, and Kunigami
areas throughout December of 1894. One-thousand seventy-nine acres were cleared in the
Nago, Motobu, Nakijin, and Haneji areas in 1895, and 1,428 acres in the Nago, Onna,
Kin, Kushi, Kunigami, Ogimi, Haneji, Nakijin, and Motobu areas in 1897—all by
ex-royal families Ryukyu and Shizoku, in addition to non-Okinawan outsiders, including
Kagoshimans. The list of people who acquired land surpluses includes Narahara’s

178
Osato, Jahana Noboru den, 102–106.
167
relatives, some politicians, zaibatsu
179
from the Japanese mainland, such as Eiichi
Shibusawa, Hachiemon Kawasaki, and Junzo Go. Governor Narahara, who largely
privatized the historically communally managed land, and lined his own pockets by
purchasing land under a relative’s name (to be divided later) and receiving bribes when
he facilitated land deals with rich land grabbers, including coopted Okinawan elites.
Furthermore, Narahara sold the lumber as railroad ties to Taiwan, for its railroad
construction project, which had been under new Japanese colonial rule since the cession
resulted from the 1894 Sino-Japanese War. What is ironic is that more and more
individual farmers and villages started applying for and actually obtaining land. They
might have thought cultivating more land would be more beneficial than remaining
bystanders in the land grabs. But the consequences were severe. Drought, wind, and flood
damage came year after year. Starvation became more serious. Farmers now had to cover
the cost of purchasing lumber for building and repairing public buildings such as schools
and village offices.
180

The 1894 Sino-Japanese War was a watershed moment for the Japanese capitalist
transformation. When a peasant rebellion by the believers of the Donghak religion spread
throughout Korea, farmers demanded reductions of taxation and recuperation of their
living conditions, Korea asked China to help quell the uprising. Instead, Japan

179

Zaibatsu are the industrial and financial business conglomerates in the Empire of Japan, whose
influence and size allowed control over significant parts of the Japanese economy from the Meiji period
until the end of World War II. The so-called Big Four are such entities as Sumitomo, Mitsui, Mitsubishi,
and Yasuda.

180
Osato, Jahana Noboru den, 118–123, 138–139, 141–142. For Narahara’s selling wood to Taiwan, see
“Okinawa kenchiji Narahara-shi no danwa [Conversation with Governor Narahara],” Taiwan Shimpo,
October 15, 1896, as quoted in Isa, Jahana Noboru shu, 184–185.

168
Official Kurokawa Kurokawa Kurokawa Kurokawa Jahana Jahana
Year 1899 1897 1895 1894 1894 1893
Kazoku 28.5 145 208 574 407
Shizoku 1,210 528 372
Non-Okinawans 103.5 356 32.6 3,670
Local individual 450 449
Local village 3,015 1296.5 854.6
Table 2: Distribution of Land Approval in Okinawa (acres)
181

self-righteously intervened, which led to the Sino-Japanese War. As Chapter 1 explained,
the Japanese government carried out militarization through its Matsukata deflation policy,
which entailed the oppression of the agricultural sector, and kept wage levels very low in
order to compete with European and American products. The government used
‘dumping,’ and preposterously justified obtaining foreign markets in East Asia because of
the insufficient purchasing power inside Japan. After the war, the indemnity of national
bonds tax increases allowed Japan to remain focused on policies of industrialization and
militarization. Those policies included (1) the expansion of the Army and Navy, (2) the

181
This table is produced from these works. Eisho Miyagi and Kunigami-son Yakusho, ed., Kunigami
Son-shi [Village History of Kunigami](Tokyo: Tōtoku, 1967), 331–338; Takeo Minamoto et, al, eds.,
Nahashi-shi [History of Naha City](Naha: Naha City Hall, 1966), 5; Osato, Jahana Noboru den, 119–121;
Arakawa, Izoku to tenno, 222–223. According to Nahashi-shi, all approval was given in December as far as
the year 1894 is concerned. Since Jahana was demoted in September, the deal done in December was by his
successor Kurokawa. An exception is approval of land-clearing in Goeku area given by Jahana in March.
Obviously, the area that Jahana approved for ex-royal Kazoku is huge and so is the land of Ishigaki island
that Jahana approved for mainland merchants. Arakawa argued that Jahana was an opportunist based on
this. However, I would argue that this incident, which Jahana must have felt guilty of, was one of the main
reasons of later changes of Jahana.
169
building of ironworks, (3) the improvement of railroads, (4) the technical improvement
and expansion of the telegraph, telephone, and navigation systems; (5) the establishment
of banks (to further encouragement of agriculture and industry), and (6) the promotion of
industry in Taiwan. It was in this context that tax increases in tandem with land
reformation, conscription, and the establishment of the Bank for Agriculture and Industry
all occurred to Okinawa in the late 1890s.
182

In the late 1890s, the Japanese national budget remained bloated, caused by
swollen military expenditures of the 1894 Sino-Japanese War. The repercussions of this
reached Okinawa in the form of land tax reform, sugar sales tax (we will discuss this
later), and further land seizures. As far as considering the immediate interest of land tax,
the burden did not necessarily become heavier. Peasants who had been working on leased
farmland for a long time could become land owners. The state aimed at the stabilization
of land tax revenue. Also, those who finished clearing land by the end of land surveys
(done between 1899 and 1903) could own land. However, the government came to own
all the parts of Somayama that they deemed untouched. “State owned” did not mean that
local villagers could access the resource. Rather, it was a part of a land privatization
scheme. The government could sell and buy land as a commodity if it wanted to, without
adjacent villagers’ permission or consideration of their ecologically sustainable
practices.
183

182
For Donghak Peasant Rebellion, see Juntetsu Shin and Shin'ei Ri, trans., U-sik An, Jitsuroku Tōgaku
nōmin kakumeishi [Record: History of Donghak Peasant Revolution](Zenshū : Tōgaku Nōmin Kakumei
Kinen Jigyōkai, 2008) and Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1997), Chapter 2; Nishihara, Okinawa kindai keizaishi no hoho, 38–41.

183
Nishihara, Okinawa kindai keizaishi no hoho, 48–49.
170
The concerns of impoverished farmers and antagonism toward Narahara grew in
Jahana in the late 1890s. Although he was demoted in 1894, he kept working as a civil
engineer for the Department of the Interior, a sugar promotion official (1893, 1896, 1898),
a prefectural administrative commissioner for the forth industrial exposition in 1895, a
survey commissioner for civil law enforcement (1897~), and a member of preparatory
committee of the Bank for Agriculture and Industry (1897~). But he was a bystander of
the land-clearings in December 1895 and in May 1897. While he kept working as a
public servant, he grew impatient with Narahara’s dictatorship. When Jahana was in
Tokyo for an official trip between September 15 and October 1, 1898, he relayed the
following message to his Okinawan friends, Kyutaro Aragaki, Kyuzo Toyama, and
Shojiro Kamiya, “Narahara is a public thief. He and his underlings are destructing
Okinawa’s forest for their own benefit. He has kept Okinawan natives at the lower level
of public service and there is no way for voices of ordinary Okinawans to be heard.”
184

Jahana resigned from employment of the Department of the Interior as a civil
engineer, collected two hundred yen from sympathizers in all counties of the Okinawan
main island, and went to Tokyo again in early December 1898 to work on the issues of
land reformation and Okinawan’s rights of political participation. By this time, some
Okinawans, who were several years younger than Jahana, also grew antagonistic against
Narahara’s reign and were attracted to Jahana’s leadership. Kichiro Kamimura and

184
Isa, Jahana Noboru shu, 177–192. According to Osato, during his stay in Tokyo in summer of 1898,
Jahana met with the Secretary of the Interior, Taisuke Itagaki, of the first progressive administration in
Japan. Itagaki gave Jahana his private consent to change Okinawan governor to Ujifusa Kaetsu, an active
member of Freedom Party leader in Kumamoto. However, this administration collapsed in four months
(June 30–Oct. 31). The promise between Jahana and Itagaki did not realize and Narahara stayed as
Okinawan governor. I could not prove this deal between Jahana and Itagaki with any other materials, so I
leave it in this note.
171
Kosuke Uema, people’s representatives of, respectively, Nakagami County and Kunigami
County, followed Jahana to Tokyo. Jahana and like-minded Okinawans organized a
group named the Okinawa Club in Tokyo, whose members would come to include Kyuzo
Toyama, Kosuke Uema, Yumitaro Arakaki, Shojiro Kamiya, Choko Moromizato,
Heikichi Ishara, Homon Gushi, Shomatsu Kina, Hajime Tokeshi, Hiroki Miyagi, Hideo
Nagata, Shinsuke Taira, and Kichiro Kamimura. They published their journal, the
Okinawa Jiron, three times per month to keep Narahara’s policies in check and publicize
the latest news on issues of land reformation and renewal of Election Law.
185

Jahana articulated the problem with Narahara’s further seizure of Somayama
forestlands in his article, the “Forest of Kunigami” in the first issue of Okinawa Jiron on
January 31, 1899. By this time he clearly advocated for farmers. First, deforestation had
been intensifying since 1894. When people of Kunigami County were in unified
opposition to deforestation, Governor Narahara suppressed the opinion of the local
people. This suppression changed the way the farmers thought about negotiation and it
seemed that suppression forced them to choose either gain or loss. Many actually chose
the former, and applied for and joined the land-clearing projects (rather than being left
out and kept off of their own land within the forest). Within six years, numerous parts of

185
Isa, Jahana Noboru shu, 194–196. Osato, Jahana Noboru den, 168–9, 173–4. Kyuzo Toyama, three
years younger than Jahana, was a teacher at Haneji elementary school. He criticized the then county mayor
Kanjo Asabushi in face regarding the work condition where non-Okinawans dominated. He taught at an
elementary school in Kin, his hometown. In April 1896, Toyama moved to Tokyo and started living
together at Jahana’s acquaintance, Shojiro Kamiya. He came back to Okinawa and taught at Naha Jinjo
elementary school from November 1897. He moved to Tokyo again in February 1898 and met Jahana for
the first time in Tokyo in the summer of 1898. Many of the sympathizers were teachers. Nagata Hideo was
working as a teacher at Kaneshiro elementary school. Kichiro Kamimura, a teacher at a junior high school.
Kyoshiro Nohara, who worked as a teacher at Ozato jinjo elementary school in Shimajiri county. Not only
Toyama, but also Kosuke Uema quit his schoolteacher job in his home village, Haneji, and joined Jahana’s
cause. Kyoshiro Nohara quit his teaching job in Kochinda village too. Gintaro Akamine quit his job as a
prison watch in Haebaru village. They all joined Jahana’s movement.
172
the long-protected forest became bald land. Traditional forest managers were substituted
with policemen, who had not effectively dealt with illegal or non-permitted land clearing.
Secondly, as Jahana states, “what government’s seizure of forestland means for jobless
and property-less people is that those impoverished people are forced to choose to
become a criminal by just cutting trees that are somebody else’s property or starve to
death.”
186

Third, Jahana pointed out that “land reformation in the Japanese mainland since
1873 allows us to realize that the government did not understand the relationship between
people and the common forest. Some people complained and succeeded in taking their
forest back. But some of it was disposed to be sold and used as a way for politicians and
bureaucrats to line their pockets.” Jahana concluded that to officially recognize common
forestland as “people’s land” was to recuperate their “Jichi” (self-governing) capability.
Villages traditionally had forest management rules, and managers and overseers were
responsible for protecting and sustaining their forest. People never cut shelterbelts. They
grow cedars, pines, and bamboos with long-ranged plans. They secured a separate portion
of forest for everybody to obtain firewood, lumber, wood for charcoal, and material for
thatching. Managers and overseers called Yama-atai and Yama-bissa supervised all those
processes and were compensated by their village community members. They continued to
properly manage their forests on their own, and their agricultural productivity was not
disturbed by deforestation; as a result, they were also able to economicly manage
themselves without having to import lumber and wood from Kyushu or Taiwan. Jahana

186
Okinawa Jiron, January 31, 1899.
173
submitted an advisory to the congressional committee for Okinawan land reformation on
February 14.
187

Okinawa Club members also worked on Okinawans’ rights of political
participation in the central Diet while in Tokyo. They did not demand universal suffrage,
but did demand Okinawan representation in the Japanese Diet with a proper number of
seats based on population ratio to other prefectures. At that time, only males 25 years old
or older who submitted more than fifteen yen in tax were allowed to vote. In February
1899, a bill to include Okinawa within the congressional election laws of Japan was
introduced before the Diet. Jahana, Kyuzo Toyama, and Kosuke Uema met congressmen
Toru Hoshi, Seinen Takagi, and Saburo Shimada, who constituted the committee crafting
the bill. They understood how Okinawans were deprived of economic and political rights
and suggested to other committee members that Okinawa deserves four seats, and the bill
should determine when the first Okinawan congressional election happens. However,
their suggestion was shoved aside by governmental bureaucrats, who argued that until the
land reformation and calculation of land price and tax ended, they would not know how
many eligible taxpayers there were in Okinawa.
Eventually, the Diet passed a revised bill, which allotted only two seats for
Okinawa, excluding the islands of Miyako and Yaeyama from election, and did not
clarify when the election would occur. Members of the Okinawa Club were disappointed
at this news. A few years later, Narahara clearly stated “I am a gradualist in essence, but
when it comes to colony-like Okinawa and Taiwan, whose people do not share historical

187
Okinawa Jiron, January 31, 1899.
174
sentiment, we have to wait longer than usual until they get out of ignorance and reach
popular knowledge [of political system and rights].” This summarized quite well how
Kodokai, composed of privileged Okinawans and Narahara together, saw ordinary
Okinawans—as secondary citizens, which was coterminous with the view on Okinawans
by the Japanese central government.
188

After they came back to Okinawa on March 6, Jahana planned to tour villages with
Kyuzo Toyama and Kosuke Uema, to disseminate knowledge about what the government
was trying to do and how and why it would not benefit ordinary farmers. Governor
Narahara publicly counterargued that the government owned the land and the people
owned trees, therefore land requisition by the government did not mean they could not
get wood out of the forest. He added that if the trees were government-owned, then
people would not have to pay taxes on their harvests of wood. Jahana and his comrades
felt the need to shed a light on this trickery. Kyuzo Toyama set up the first occasion to
hold a lecture and speech by Jahana in his home village, Kin. Prefectural officials were in
the audience and witnessed the crowd’s of support of Jahana’s views. Perhaps what
prefectural officials did not expect was the massive response of people fired up about
protecting the village forest from governmental seizure. Bewildered prefectural
authorities now attempted to prohibit the crowd from using “public space,” ordered them
to disband when they gathered days later in the Nakijin village, and threatened another

188
Congressman Toru Hoshi made a statement at the third meeting of the committee on February 18, 1899
that “One seat for Naha [ward], where there are 34,102 residents. Another for Shuri [ward], where 24,787
residents live. Another for Miyako Island, where 37,750 live. Another for Yaeyama Island, where 17,689
live. Three seats for all other counties of Okinawa main island except Naha and Shuri, where 339,274 live.”
Osato, Jahana Noboru den, 209; Kagoshima Jitsugyo Shimbun, April 16, 1902, as quoted Ota, Okinawa no
minshu ishiki, 148.
175
audience at the Haneji village.
189

Narahara also used the police to suppress the distribution of their journalistic
magazine, Okinawa Jiron. Despite the suppression, they continued to maintain their
movement by establishing an enterprise called Nan’yosha to fund their own activism.
Nan’yosha had a printing section and a sales section. Jahana bought a printing machine in
Tokyo and brought it back. They soon became very busy printing documents for schools,
local banks, and even city and prefectural offices. The sales section dealt with fertilizer to
cater for farmers, grains for the Okinawan masses, and stationery for schools, the city,
and prefectural offices.
190

On June 22, 1899, as the central government decided on the details of land tax
reformation in Okinawa, it turned out that peasants had to pay three years’ of tenant fees
to become owners of farmlands that had been leased since the feudal period. Jahana,
Toyama, Nagata, Tokeshi, Kina, Choken Kishaba, and Nakahodo went to Tokyo in
November in order to demand the abolishment of “fee for a tenant farmer to become an
owner of the land” and again to demand revision of the Election Law to have four seats
for Okinawa in the Diet. The Diet accepted neither of the demands. This meant that in
cases where peasants could not pay the tenant fee, they would not be able to continue to
live on and farm the land they had taken care of for many years. According to Kyuzo
Toyama’s biographer, Seiei Wakukawa, “Toyama advised farmers of Kin village to bring
in stones to their farming fields and make them look not as attended as the best ones

189
Okinawa Jiron, no. 27 and 28; Osato, Jahana Noboru den, 168–172, 189–193, 201–217.

190
Okinawa Jiron, no. 27 and 28; Osato, Jahana Noboru den, 168–172, 189–193, 201–217.
176
when the prefectural officials come to assess land price.” Though farmers tried to reduce
land tax by outsmarting land surveyors, peasants and farmers had to collectively buy
some part of their common forest back from the government when land reformation
ended in 1903. As a matter of fact, twenty-four magiris had to pay off 30-year loans
starting from 1906. The total amount
of all the villages’ loans was 83,752 yen.
191

While their campaigns did not bear fruit, Toyama, Uema, and Jahana had been
planning Okinawan Emigration to Hawaii. One of Jahana’s college mentors, Kizo
Tamari, was a strong advocate of emigration, which, in his rationale, would solve the
problems of population increase and food shortage in Japan. According to Jahana’s
Table 3: Amount of 30-Year Loan for Each Magiri to Regain Somayama (Yen)
192

191
Osato, Jahana Noboru den, 146–148, 158–161; Seiei Wakugawa, Okinawa minken no zasetsu to
tenkai: Toyama Kyuzo no shiso to kodo [Setback and Development of Okinawan People’s Right
Movement: Thoughts and Deeds of Kyuzo Toyama](Tokyo: Taihei Shuppansha, 1972),; Isa, Jahana
Noboru shu, 209, 211–2; February 20, 1899. Stenographic Notes of Japanese Diet, No. 32.

Nago 5,554 Nakijin 1,232 Onna 5,730
Motobu 1,162 Kin 8,328 Yomitan 1,112
Kushi 15,380 Misato 1,952 Kunigami 16,923
Chatan 262 Ogimi 7,853 Goeku 1,153
Haneji 5,216 Gushikawa 683 Kumejima 884
Shimoji 59 Iheya 1,529 Gusukube 117
Zamami 152 Irabu 58 Nakazato 2,062
Miyako 835 Taira 546 Yaeyama 4,970
177
biographer Osato, it was Tamari who enthusiastically recommended Okinawan
emigration to Hawaii and America and introduced Jahana and Toyama to Makoto
Morioka, the owner of an emigration company, Morioka Imingaisha. Jahana asked
Yumitaro Arakaki, who lived in Tokyo, to start preparing the contract with the
company.
193

Kyuzo Toyama himself had considered emigration years before, too. While he was
staying in Tokyo between 1896 and 1898, he tried to study the issues of food shortage
and population increase in Okinawa. One day he found a book about emigration and,
soon after, came across a newspaper advertisement for Hawaii-bound emigration. When
Toyama met Congressman Shozo Tanaka on February 1, 1899, Tanaka is said to have
recommended emigration. Tanaka was a strong supporter of Jahana and Toyama, because
he saw similarities between Okinawan farmers and the 300,000 farmers who had been
fatally affected by the Ashio copper mine contamination of the Watarase river that was
operated by Koga zaibatsu, and had been substantially ignored by government. Tanaka
had been investigating and interrogating officials regarding the responsibility of the
government and the Koga financial group, and he also harshly criticized Governor
Narahara at a congressional meeting on land reformation in Okinawa.
194

With those supports, Toyama started recruiting immigrants in Okinawa. He went to
see Governor Narahara because he needed the Governor’s approval. Narahara did not

192
This table is produced from Osato, Jahana Noboru den, 148.

193
Zen’ei Chinen, ed., Shiryo: Nogakushi Jahana Noboru [Historical Material: Agriculturalist Jahana
Noboru] (Naha: Naha Shuppansha, 1983), 362–366.

194
Ibid., 362–366.
178
grant it. His reasons were, “it is a premature decision to send Okinawans abroad because
they do not even know proper Japanese language and it would be a shame to expose the
ignorance of such subjects.” Toyama counter argued that “You do not need Japanese
language to work in Hawaii. . . . How come a Governor of Okinawa can close off an
Okinawan youth’s future? . . . Okinawa is not a junkyard for Japanese mainlanders.”
Finally, Narahara gave permission with a condition that Toyama had to recruit
immigrants from not only Kin village but also other locales of the prefecture. Another
condition was that the governor of Okinawa would examine all letters from Okinawan
emigrants. While Jahana and Toyama were back in Tokyo in December 1899 to advocate
for peasants’ ownership of leased land and revision of election law, they saw off
twenty-seven Okinawans (ten from Kin, three from Shuri, six from Naha, three from
Koroku, one each respectively from Itoman, Haebaru, Nishibaru, and Tokashiki, from
ages 21 to 35) at Yokohama port on December 30. Thus, the Okinawan immigration to
Hawaii began in the middle of the struggles for economic and political justice for
Okinawans. It was not incompatible with other campaigns that focused on the political
economy of the island, because they all aimed at the well-being of farmers and ordinary
people.
195

However, they had to reassess their activisim and what they could do when their
lines of campaign got pushed back. They worked hard to keep their critical journalism

195
Tomonori Ishikawa et al., eds., Toyama Kyuzo shoden [Minibiography of Kyuzo Toyama (revised
version)] (Kin, Okinawan: Kin Town Office, 2000), 10–13; Seiei Wakugawa, Okinawa minken no zasetsu
to tenkai: Toyama Kyuzo no shiso to kodo [Setback and Development of Okinawan People’s Right
Movement: Thoughts and Deeds of Kyuzo Toyama](Tokyo: Taihei Shuppansha, 1972), 108. The condition
on the letters seems to give us a glimpse of counter-insurgent mechanism though he announced it rather
than secretly carry out.
179
alive. They kept publishing Okinawa Jiron and continued to raise awareness of how land
reformation would affect ordinary farmers. Jahana revealed that the Okinawan prefectural
office sold levied sugar at the Osakan market, submitted sugar tax in money to the Tokyo
government, and secretly put the difference into a Tokyo bank account. Moreover, the
prefectural office had sold its emergency rice storage and put the profit in the account.
Surprisingly, one of their officials lent this money, which amounted 10,000 yen, to a
merchant in Kyushu, only to be bilked. Jahana asked Kiyoshi Enjoji, an editor of a
progressive newspaper, Yorozu Choho, to publish an exposè. This stroke of
sensationalism infuriated Narahara. He hired and sent mobs to Jahana to threaten him
with swords at Kudan-ue, Tokyo.
196

For Jahana and his comrades, it was obvious that Narahara’s oppression in his
prefectural dictatorship and the unfavorable treatment they received in the Diet was
creating a serious setback for their activism. Now they had to reassess their strategy. At
this point, the reelection of executive board members of the Agricultural and Industrial
Bank looked like a last place to intervene. When Jahana helped established this bank, he
made an effort to render each village a stockholder in order to avoid monopoly by the
haves and allow farmers to borrow money at lower interest rates. Thinking that Okinawa
Club members should maintain their influence in the operation of the bank, Jahana stood
as a candidate for the Bank’s executive representative of Shimajiri County, Kyuzo
Toyama for Kunigami, Kichiro Kamimura for Nakagami County, and Masaaki Toguchi
for the Naha ward. However, Governor Narahara also saw this as a chance to push them

196
Okinawa Jiron, no. 27, May 17, 1900; Osato, Jahana Noboru den, 168–173.
180
away and sent his own candidates. His bribe and threats toward village leaders turned the
reelection around, even though the Okinawa Jiron revealed this injustice and harshly
criticized it. Jahana and the Okinawa Club lost the election, and therefore their
involvement in the operation of the Bank. Especially shocking to Jahana was the betrayal
by his comrade Kichiro Kamimura, who had become elected but soon after went under
Narahara’s thumb.
197

Governor Narahara’s reactionary suppressions against Jahana’s movement and his
cooption of Okinawan elites were far-reaching. By the time of the bank’s executive
election, Narahara had stopped all business deals between the prefectural office and
Nan’yosha and put pressure on farmers not to buy fertilizer from the company. He had
also cooperated with an upper-class Okinawan newspaper, Ryukyu Shimpo, to criticize
Jahana and undermine the credibility of Okinawa Jiron. Narahara’s appeasement to
Okinawa’s privileged class went rampant. Narahara gave the Ryukyu Shimpo newspaper
company prefectural subsidiary status and some land to build their company building on.
Ex-royal family member, Jun Sho, was allowed to own Ko-un Company (a shipping
company) and substantially monopoly to the shipping industry in Okinawa. In the same
way, the founders of Ryukyu Shimpo and ex-ruling elites of Ryukyu such as Chokyo
Takamine, Choi Goeku, and Chofu Ota, respectively, became the presidents of Okinawa
Bank, Okinawa Shokuhin Company (a food company), and Okinawa Sugar Company.
198

Jahana was devastated. He was broke from spending all his private money in

197
Osato, Jahana Noboru den, 220–226.

198
Ota, Okinawa no minshu ishiki, 126, 147; Chinen, Shiryo, 344.
181
travelling back and forth to and from Tokyo. Some of his comrades—Kyuzo Toyama,
Kosuke Uema, and Shinsuke Taira—had already emigrated to Hawaii or California,
beginning in late-1899. Jahana might have felt there was no place for him to be in
Okinawa. In 1901, he got a job in the Yamaguchi prefecture. While travelling there, he
had what was probably a nervous breakdown at Kobe station and became hospitalized.
His comrade and brother-in-law, Hideo Nagata, took him back to Okinawa, but he spent
his last years with a mental disorder. He died in 1908 at the age of 44, leaving behind a
wife and son. Many Okinawans, including his comrades, farmers in Okinawa and
immigrants in California, contributed donations for the support of his bereaved family.
Memory of Jahana’s work and the Okinawan people’s struggle at large was very much on
the minds of Okinawan immigrants.
199

Although their movement was short-lived, it is noteworthy that it emerged from the
harsh realities of Okinawan farmers. Unlike the self-righteous independence movement
by Ganko-to and the conservative gradualism of Kaika-to, both of which represented
privileged Okinawans, Jahana, Toyama, and other young visionaries, rather, looked

199
Osato, Jahana Noboru den, 249–255. The tragic ending of Jahana’s life was so shocking to many
farmers and supporters that they later started donating in1909 for the bereaved family with coordination by
the office of Jahana’s home village, Kochinda. The list of donators suggests that many poor farmers tried to
honor Jahana’s activism by contributing as small amount as 25 rin (0.025 yen). A set of donation, to which
183 people contributed 3109.405 yen, went to cover the educational cost of the only living child, Shosei
Jahana, who later studies at Kyushu Medical University. The other set, for which at least 856 people
contributed 3700 yen by 1935, was used to build a bronze statue of Noboru Jahana in Kochinda village.
One of the executive members of this statue project, Rakuichiro Ganeko, wrote to Shosei Jahana on
January 17
th
1935 to report the completion of statue and expressed respect and appreciation of late Jahana’s
love of Okinawan ordinary farmers and sense of justice. Ryukyu Shimpo reported an unveiling ceremony at
Kochinda village held on November 30, 1935. Importantly, the list of donators includes Okinawans living
outside of Japan. For example, Shinsuke Taira’s name on the list suggests that memory of Jahana’s work
and Okinawan people’s struggle at large was in the minds of Okinawan immigrants. For more detail,
Rakuichiro Ganeko to Shosei Jahana, January 17 1935. This letter is kept in “Jahana Noboru Historical
Material” at Ryukyu University Library; Ryukyu Shimpo, Novemer 30, 1935.
182
closely into the reality of Okinawan ordinary people, farmers, and peasants under
subjugation by Japan. They acknowledged and used farmers’ traditional knowledge,
resorted to the idea of political rights as leverage to protect the Somayama common forest,
pursued political and economic justice for Okinawa, and resisted Narahara’s prefectural
dictatorship. Significantly, their opposition to land privatization marked profound
resistance against the commodification of land, which neglected age-old forest
management and the deep connection between village life and forests. They brought a
sharp focus onto Narahara’s infringement of the Okinawan people’s rights and justice and
on its colonial structure. One remaining question is whether Jahana thought about the
colonial structure of the sugar industry itself, though he was opposed to the sugar sales
tax. He seems to have thought of it as the main cash crop that would help Okinawan
farmers survive. One might argue that Jahana’s vision was not as far-reaching as the
liberation of the Okinawan people and their agriculture from capitalism and colonialism.
However, the Okinawa Club and their Okinawa Jiron treatises were the first
well-organized vehicle for ordinary Okinawans’ voices to be brought to the political stage,
and they strenuously challenged the power relations of that time.
200

200
As a sidenote, it seems that they did not base their movement upon religious and spiritual connection
between villagers and forest. For example, when Kyuzo Toyama was a local headman of Namisato village,
he tried to dispel superstitious beliefs about forest where a guardian god resides and began clearing the
forestland. Toyama also cut abolished Shimakusara ritual, which had been thought of as a way of epidemic
prevention, and burned festival costume and lion masks since he thought they would keep youth lazy. He
encouraged to stop traditional hairstyle and discouraged finger tattoo of married women, called Hajichi.
This might be only the case for Toyama and not for Jahana, Taira, or Uema. But if that was the common
ground for those activists, it could be argued that their modern, somewhat materialist, view enabled them to
grasp their economic condition in secular term. See Wakugawa, Okinawa minken, 23–27. Plantation system
existed only on the islands of Minami Daitojima and Kita Daitoujima from 1918, where Toyo Seito
Company owned all the land. 90% of land was used for growing sugarcane and rest of the 10% was used
for growing sweet potatoes, which were given to livestock, whose dung was used as fertilizer. The
company threatened tenant farmers that they would get less allotment if they were doing any other things
183
Relationships between Prefectural Groups in Hawaii
So what happened to those Okinawans who went to Hawaii? Did they bring their
oppositional tendencies and a strong sense of justice with them? Their story is not that
simple. There is little material that directly articulates that the struggle regarding the land
relation in Okinawa translated into militancy in labor strikes in Hawaii. Certainly, a
struggle to maintain the autonomous management of their ancestral land and a struggle to
improve their labor and living conditions on foreign monoculture plantations were
different kinds of struggles, which needed different understandings of power relations
among parties involved for which Okinawans had to seek practical ways of intervention.
Though communication between the early immigrants and the ex-movement leaders,
such as Kyuzo Toyama and Shinsuke Taira, who accompanied early Okinawan
immigrants, could remain a source of political awareness, they encountered prejudice
from their neighboring Japanese laborers on the plantation on a daily basis. This was a
somewhat new experience and could be another thrust for racial justice.
This section argues that the addition of Okinawan immigrants into the Japanese
immigrant communities at numerous plantations in Hawaii complicates the narrative that
features the transition from Japanese nationalism or “blood unionism” as the organizing
principle in the 1909 Oahu Sugar Strike to a principle of interethnic class solidarity with
Filipinos in the 1920 Oahu Sugar Strike. While both Ronald Takaki and Gary Okihiro
basically describe such a developmental narrative of Japanese labor organizing, Arnold T.

than farming. Toyo company forced them to buy necessities at company’s store with coupons and forced
children to work on the island to pay off family’s debt even after they studied on the Okinawan mainland.
See Kinjo, Kindai Okinawa no togyo, 56–66; Matsushima, Okinawa tosho keizaishi, 132–133.
184
Hiura and Vinnie K. Terada suggest the deep involvement of Okinawans in Hawaii’s
labor movement, thereby implying the already interethnic relationships in the “national”
outlook. Leading toward the “left-oriented movement” of the 1920s spearheaded by a
strong, pro-labor Okinawan leader, the Reverend Seikan Higa, the Okinawan
involvement must have grown like an underground stream that fed Japanese cooperation
and collective action. In 1909, Ryoka Yano, a Naichi
201
newspaperman, wrote an article
for the periodical Okinawa Doho, published in Hilo, titled “Imin toshite Okinawa kenjin
ni naraubeki ten” (“Points to Learn from Okinawan Immigrants”). It says “[W]hen the
labor disputes broke out for a wage increase, all Okinawans were firmly united and
avoided committing any hasty action. However, once the strike was carried out, as
Hawaii residents know, Okinawans stood in firm unity.”
202

It is significant to reexamine the Okinawan-Japanese relationship because, on one
hand, there existed different treatments and prejudices against Okinawans in Japanese
communities, despite the lesser extent of institutionalization compared with white racism.

201
The terms such as Naichi and Gaichi have colonialist implication. Naichi literally means “interior.”
Naichijin implies “people from the Japanese interior.” Indeed, Japan is an archipelago, but Gaichi, which
literally means “exterior,” implies the land acquired by Japan through its modern colonial expansion, i.e.,
Ryukyu/Okinawa, Hokkaido, Korea, Manchuria, and so on.

202
Takaki, Pau Hana, 153–176; Gary Okihiro, Cane Fire: The Anti-Japanese Movement in Hawaii, 1865–
1945 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 41–60; Arnold T. Hiura and Vinnie K. Terada,
“Okinawan Involvement in Hawaii’s Labor Movement,” in Uchinanchu: A History of Okinawans in
Hawaii, ed. Ethnic Studies Oral History Project (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, Ethnic Studies Program,
1981), 223–232; Okinawa Mainichi Shimbun, December 6, 1909; Ryukyu Seifu, ed., Okinawa kenshi, vol.
19 (Naha: Ryukyu Seifu, 1969), 421–422; Tomonori Ishikawa, “A Study of the Historical Geography of
Early Okinawan Immigrants to the Hawaiian Islands,” in Uchinanchu, 102–103. Ryoka Yano continues to
say “This strength stems from the mutual financial aid organization among Okinawans. One more
characteristics of Okinawans is their tendency to unite as a group. Once Okinawans are united, no
individual violates or breaks from the group. In this regard the Chinese ‘company’ functions exactly the
same for it also overcomes any hardships it encounters and eventually attains its goal. Okinawan laborers,
besides having these two admirable qualities, are characterized as being industrious, and are not the kind of
people who are lazy in their dispositions as are Koreans. At least in those fine traits of character, I believe,
Okinawans surpass the people from Naichi.”
185
With that in consideration, cooperation for collective action might look a little different.
As Evelyn Nakano Glenn explains, “race making” occurred on the Hawaiian plantations
in two senses. First, “it forged culturally and linguistically disparate immigrants into
larger ‘nationality’ groups.” Just as the Hakka and the Punti became “Chinese” and
Tagalogs, Visayans, and Ilocanos became “Filipinos,” Okinawans became “Japanese.”
Second, “the plantation system created the racial-class category of haole—that is, the
white proprietorial and managerial class—to which all others were counterpoised.” While
Okinawans were lumped together as “Japanese,” they experienced discrimination from
Naichi Japanese and white racism.
203

Multiple testimonies from interviews of Okinawan Issei by scholar Yukiko Kimura
attest to the prejudice against Okinawans. One of the prevalent “Othering” practices was
that Naichi Japanese, even immigration inspectors, called those from the Okinawa
prefecture “Okinawa” instead of their names to the extent which the lunas began calling
them “Okinawa” too, thereby reducing the acknowledgement of individuality and
personality to a derogatory stereotype of people with strange dialects and customs.
Discrimination ranged from skirmishes on the plantations, the interruption of Okinawans
when they did happaiko (loading of cut cane), the throwing of stones at and alienating
Okinawan children by children of Naichi parentage, the refusal to rent Japanese-owned
apartments in McCully to Okinawans, the rejection of marriage with Okinawans, the
regard of Hajichi tattoos on Okinawan women’s fingers as savage and unfeminine, and

203
Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and
Labor (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002), 207–8. Glenn also notes that “it was not until
they [the Germans, Norwegians, Poles, Russians, and Spanish, who came to Hawaii as laborers] moved
into the less class conscious atmosphere of the city, or the plantation developed to its later stage, that they
were able to become associated with the haole community.” (Ibid.)
186
other confrontations and insults. On the plantation in Lahaina, the Japanese housing area
was evenly divided into two sections, Okinawans and “Naichijins.”
204

However, the situation was not as simple as a binary state between the Okinawans
and Naichijins. Interviews by Yukiko Kimura also reveal that not all of the other
prefectural groups treated Okinawans as an inferior out-group. For example, as
newcomers, many Okinawan immigrants received practical advice from their
Kumamoton or Fukuokan friends and mingled with them. However, the most dominant
group in number, Hiroshimans and Yamaguchins, usually looked down on the
Okinawans. The people from Tohoku region, such as Fukushimans, treated them
kindly—especially because, according to Charlie S., Fukushimans too suffered insults by
the dominant Hiroshima-Yamaguchi dialect speakers, who did not understand the
Fukushiman dialect, called Zuzuben. The Ewa plantation was one site where
Okinawan-Fukushiman mingled. Wakayamans, who were mainly in fishery, and those
from the Kinki region, who were numerically small and mostly in trading business, were
independent of the prejudice that prevailed in the plantation communities. The
discrimination was not institutionalized in the way that the difference was used for
justifying the dividing of resources and the denial of particular rights within the Japanese
communities, or under the auspices of the Japanese Immigration Bureau and Consulate.
From the viewpoint of the Japanese bureaucratic elites, they were all meager laborers on

204
An elderly housewife (name unknown), who immigrated from Wakayama in 1923, interview by
Yukiko Kimura (1980), in Kimura, Issei, 31; Ushisuke Taira, interview by Yukiko Kimura (1957), in
Kimura, Issei, 65; Sadao Asato and other Okinawans, interview by Yukiko Kimura (1965, 1978, 1979,
1980, 1981), as quoted Kimura, Issei, 74–8. Hajichi tattoos were for decorative purpose and for
symbolizing marital status. For more detail about Okinawan tattooing culture, see Yoshimi Yamamoto,
Irezumi no sekai (Tokyo: Kawade Shobo, 2005).
187
plantations. Japanese language schools and newspapers played a part in homogenizing
and “uniting” immigrants from different regions and the semi-colony into a “community
of Japanese nationality,” which obviously would establish itself by the 1909 Oahu Sugar
Strike. It is within this context that this study investigates the Okinawan contribution to
the emergence of interethnic labor organizing.
205

Japanese Nationalism
Several incidents show the growth of Japanese nationalism in the Japanese
immigrant community in Hawaii. To borrow the analytical framework foregrounded by
historian Eiichiro Azuma, Hawaii was “between two empires,” where Japanese
nationalism negotiated with the American colonial rule of Hawaii, which was tinged with
white supremacy. One aspect of such conflict was over the voting rights of Japanese
immigrants—in other words, the racialized and gendered definition of citizenship. The
Japan-Hawaii Labor Contract Migration Treaty of 1886 stipulated that Japanese
immigrants were given thorough and valid protections based on the Hawaiian
constitution. As Chapter 1 mentioned, King Kalakaua, with the idea of “cognate race”

205
Charlie S., interview by Yukiko Kimura (1980), in Kimura, Issei, 44–46. As to the geographical
distribution of early Japanese contract laborers and Okinawan newcomers in Hawaiian plantations, see
Kimura, Issei, 24–25, and Ishikawa, “A Study of the Historical Geography of Early Okinawan Immigrants
to the Hawaiian Islands,” 90–95. During the early years of contract labor, the sugar planters had a policy of
sending immigrants from the same prefecture to the same plantation and assigning them to the same living
quarters. For example, the thirty-seven immigrants from Niigata on the second ship, arriving on June 17,
1885, were sent to Wainaku plantation near Hilo. All of the fifteen immigants from Ise, Mie prefecture,
arriving on the very first ship in 1885, were placed on Papaaloa plantation on Hawaii Island. The tendency
of immigrants to move to the plantations where their friends were after completing the contracts
contributed to the concentration of the members of the same prefectural group on the same plantation. In
this way, Fukushimans moved to Ewa and Waipahu plantations on Oahu and Puunene and Paia plantations
on Maui. The five largest groups such as Hiroshimans, Yamaguchians, Kumamotons, Okinawans, and
Fukuokans were found on practically all the plantations on all the islands of Hawaii.
188
solidarity between Japanese and Hawaiian, intended to allow the 61st and 62nd articles of
the Hawaiian constitution to be applied to Japanese immigrants to counter the inroad of
white Americans, thereby giving them voting rights. The two articles said that tax-paying,
literate males older than 20, who have lived in Hawaii for more than three years and
possess real estate whose value is more than $500 or annual income of more than $250,
have the right to be electoral candidates and that those who have lived for more than a
year in Hawaii and possess $150 worth real estate or annual income of more than $75,
can vote for elections.
In 1887 the Reform Party, founded by an American white minority that occupied
most government positions and had an armed militia called the Honolulu Rifles, seized
the royal palace and forced the king to promulgate the so-called Bayonet Constitution.
The Reform Party was frustrated with growing debts, Kalakaua’s attempt to create a
Polynesian Federation, and his refusal to renew the Reciprocity Treaty. The 1887
constitution stripped the monarchy of its authority and completely disenfranchised all
Asians, thereby assigning three-fourths of the votes to whites and excluding 6000
Chinese and 4000 Japanese males on the islands from electoral politics. One of the results
of this increasing American colonial rule was the establishment of a permanent U.S.
naval base at Pearl Harbor on Oʻahu. The Japanese consul in Hawaii, Taro Ando,
requested an official protest from the Japanese government, but the then-Foreign Minister,
Kaoru Inoue, dismissed it.
206

The Committee of Safety (also known as the Annexation Club), closely tied to the

206
Okahata, Hawaii Nihonjin iminshi, 142–3.
189
white elite business and political leaders of the Reform Party, committed to the removal
of Queen Liliʻuokalani, who was trying to restore the monarchy's authority. The
Committee planned and eventually carried out the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom
on January 17, 1893. Concurrently, some of the Japanese establishment community saw
it as an opportunity to advocate for Japanese voting rights again. Thus, middle-class
Japanese founded Nihonjin Domeikai (Japanese Alliance Society) with a doctor, Jukichi
Uchida, as president of its Honolulu headquarters, and appointed Shin Yamamoto, a
Japanese immigration inspector, as the head of its Hilo branch. Their membership
reached 450, joined by several political advocates coming from San Francisco. These
were Den Sugawara, Keijiro Inoue, Keisuke Kamio, Shinobu Inoue, Kojiro Sakurada,
and others. Keijiro Inoue, for example, was an active advocate of the anti-government
Liberal Party during the period of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement back in
Japan. He was jailed twice for his criticism of the Japanese government’s foreign loan
and its failure to revise unequal treaties with Western countries. He studied abroad for
two years in San Francisco with Toru Hoshi, who would help Jahana and Toyama push a
bill into the Japanese Diet to gain Okinawan participation in Japanese electoral politics.
Den Sugawara, who had studied at Pacific University in California in 1886 and formed
Aikoku Yushi Domeikai (Patriotic Voluntary Alliance Society) in San Francisco, came to
Hawaii with a desire to help Sun Yat-sen achieve his vision of a Chinese revolution. He
was also willing to help his Hawaiian acquaintance, whose parents were native Hawaiian
and British, to carry out a restoration of the Hawaiian monarchy.
207

207
Ibid., 143; Alan Moriyama, Nichibei imin shigaku—Nihon, Hawai, Amerika, trans. Sachiko Kaneko
190
With a mixture of patriotic and colonial rhetoric that said the development of
Japanese community in Hawaii had been indicative of the Japanese as “the fittest of the
colonizing race,” they shaped the opinion of the Japanese community with the demand of
voting rights accompanied by six specific items. First, they said the Japanese government
should dispatch an ambassador plenipotentiary and a warship. Second, a warship of the
Japanese Imperial Navy should be stationed in Hawaii. Third, the protection of Japanese
laborers should be improved. Fourth, the present immigrant labor contract should be
revised and later abolished. Fifth, the Japanese government should promote permanent
residency of Japanese subjects in Hawaii. Sixth, the government should heighten the
morale level of Japanese laborers. The first two items drew the attention of the
Provisional Government led by Sanford Dole because Japanese naval ships, Kongo and
Naniwa, anchored at the Honolulu, respectively, on January 28 and February 23, 1893,
under the guise of the protection of Japanese subjects. The Provisional Government
suspected that the Japanese government might help Queen Liliʻuokalani be reinstated, but
no further substantial move was taken by the Japanese government and soon the Society
ceased its activities.
208

This incident had a few important implications. Although they recognized the need
to improve the labor and living conditions of Japanese laborers on plantations, it was not
a laborers’ organization. Their patriotic agitation with militaristic thrust, however, seems

(Tokyo: PMC Shuppan, 1988), 161; Keijiro Inoue, “Jijoden: Haran chojo no nanajunen,” Kyoyu Zasshi
Higo 18, no. 6 (1938). The excerpt from Keijiro Inoue’s autobiographical article in the abovementioned
magazine can be read in the website of Japanese National Diet Library.
http://www.ndl.go.jp/brasil/text/t003.html (accessed October 1, 2014).

208
Okahata, Hawaii Nihonjin iminshi, 144–5.
191
to have emboldened some plantation workers, especially when pumped up by the
Sino-Japanese War, which started in July of the following year. According to the 1889
revision of Japanese conscription law, eligible Japanese emigrants could postpone their
enrollment until they reached the age of twenty-six. Some Japanese immigrants in Hawaii
went back to fight in the Sino-Japanese War, drawing the attention of fellow laborers and
families to news reports of the war. A few of the participants of the Kahuku plantation
strike, in November 1894, who marched through Pali to Honolulu, told a Pacific
Commercial Advertiser reporter that “they were going back to Japan to be soldiers.” The
daily continued to tell “[O]ne fellow savagely remarked that he hoped to be in an army to
come [back] to the islands [of Hawaii] and ravage them from end to end.”
209

No matter how oppositional the emergent discourse of Japanese nationalism could
be against American colonialism and its white supremacy, it tended to pour fuel into the
analogous racial thinking of Japanese centrism and supremacy when it did not intersect
with radical anti-capitalist and anti-war streak of thoughts. Patriotic newspapers that
carried war reports and celebratory events after the Japanese victory of the Sino-Japanese
War, in many parts of Hawaii, probably reinforced a discourse that differentiated
Japanese laborers from Chinese ones in hierarchical thinking. For example, the Japanese
establishment community carried out a grand celebration with a military review in
Honolulu on May 1, 1895. Three years later, friction between Chinese laborers and
Japanese laborers on the Kahuku plantation developed into a riot. About 300 Japanese

209
Moriyama, Imingaisha, 87. With the 1904 revision, this was extended so that men returning to Japan
under the age of thirty-two could be enrolled upon arrival, and those above that age would be made
members of the militia service. Pacific Commercial Advertiser, November 22, 1894.
192
plantation hands, triggered by trivial fights between individuals, assaulted the Chinese
camp, killing three Chinese and seriously injuring more than twenty on March 26, 1898.
Many Japanese were arrested and indicted. The ringleader, Ishigoro Ihara, was given the
death penalty, a sentence that was later reduced to life in prison, and ultimately pardoned
after thirteen years of confinement. After this, such extra-legal mob violence by Japanese
immigrants did not occur again, but it symbolizes the potential frictions and conflicts that
could occur between groups pitted against each other under the system of labor hierarchy
with nationally differentiated wage systems. Of course even under such conditions, or
because of them, a sprout of interethnic cooperation can be still observed. On June 22,
1900, Chinese and Japanese laborers on the Puehuehu Plantation struck together to
protest the retention of part of their wages.
210

Another implication is that the Provisional Government began its precautionary
measures against the increase of the Japanese population and its influence in Hawaii in
addition to the aforementioned disenfranchisement. In 1893, the Japanese population
reached 22,016, with about 12,000 of them being plantation hands and the annual total
remittance to the homeland amounting to two million yen, equivalent of about half a
million dollars at that time. Soon the Japanese government privatized the emigration
enterprise from April of 1894, and the period of labor migration through private
emigration companies called imingaisha started. The steady influx of Japanese
immigrants continued, as at least fifty-two immigration companies recruited more than
124,000 between 1894 and 1908. The Board of Immigration of the Provisional

210
Okahata, Hawaii Nihonjin iminshi, 148–150; Bureau of Labor Statistics, Report of the Commissioner of
Labor on Hawaii (1901), 112–115, quoted in Takaki, Pau Hana, 149.
193
Government sent a letter to H. Hackfeld and Company on August 9 1895, which read:
“your application for 545 Japanese laborers was approved on the following conditions,
viz: That you agree to accept from the government in Honolulu a number of Portuguese
laborers equal to twenty per cent of the total number of Japanese.” Later this was raised
to 30 percent and revised to “workers from America in addition to Europeans.” J. A. King,
the president of the Immigration Board, sent a letter to the sugar planters on May 23,
1899, which suggested their policy of reversing the ratio of Asian race in the population
in Hawaii. It states: “The government . . . considers the importance of keeping the
introduction of Asiatic labor immigrants down to the absolute requirements. . . . ”
211

J. A. King’s remark summarizes the intention of outright rejection of Japanese
immigrants at the port, which frequently happened in 1897. Since 1894, the Hawaiian
government obligated Japanese free immigrants—who did not have proof of employment,
unlike contract immigrants—to show they had $50 when they entered the country, in
order to prove that they would not be a social burden. Many immigrants borrowed $50
from Japanese immigration companies. The Hawaiian Immigration Office saw this as
illegal and rejected the entrance of more than 1,100 Japanese immigrants in 1897. Most
of them were confined at the quarantine station. Some succeeded in suspending
deportation by using the principle of habeas corpus, but most of them were sent back to
Japan. The Japanese government sent their diplomatic delegates on the naval ship the
Naniwa and again argued that the Hawaiian Immigration Office illegally prevented

211
Moriyama, Nichibei imin shigaku, 77, 182; Taylor to H. Hackfeld and Company, August 9 1895,
Archive of Hawaii Bureau Letters (1893–1897), 155; Taylor to H. Hackfeld and Company, March 24 1896,
AH Bureau Letters (1893-1897), 199; attachment to a letter from Taylor to Kobe immigration Company,
December 1 1896, AH Bureau Letters (1893–1897), 235; quoted in Moriyama, Imingaisha, 92-3.
194
Japanese immigrants from hiring lawyers, and demanded $75,000 of compensation. The
U.S. government felt the need to solve this diplomatic complication while it recognized
the crucial position of Hawaii in the Pacific during its Spanish-American War, which
started in April of 1898. The U.S. government and Sanford Dole eventually decided to
partially pay three-fifths of the demanded compensation just one month before the
annexation of Hawaii in July 1898. Although the then-minister of Japan in Washington,
Toru Hoshi, prompted the official protest by the Japanese government against the
American annexation of Hawaii, the United States dismissed it.
212

What is noteworthy about Keijiro Inoue and Den Sugawara is that the
configuration of their ideas of Japanese nationalism, naturalization, and permanent
residency was aligned with the discourse of Japanese colonialism. When Keijiro Inoue
and Den Sugawara joined the Japanese Alliance Society of San Francisco in 1893 to
demand voting rights for the Japanese, these two, who had already been naturalized in the
U.S. mainland, toured the islands and urged their countrymen to also become naturalized.
As a result, Tamekichi Abe and Kenzaburo Ozawa applied for naturalization and became
subjects of the Kingdom of Hawaii, which remained valid even after the annexation,
while two others, Masakichi Suzuki and Jo Makino, were denied their American
citizenship.
213
It is true that Inoue and Sugawara were among the proponents of the
Freedom and People’s Rights Movement in Japan who advocated for democratization
through opening the Japanese parliament (Diet), reduction of land tax, and freedom of

212
Okahata, Hawaii Nihonjin iminshi, 150–152.

213
This ambiguity would continue until the landmark case, Takao Ozawa v. United States, 260 U.S. 178
(1922).
195
speech in the name of Aikoku (Patriotism). Escaping from repression by a
Satsuma-Choshu factionalist government, those advocates sojourned in San Francisco in
the 1880s, where they formed the Japanese Patriotic Voluntary Society, kept publishing
their newspapers, and, interestingly, became naturalized. However, when they maintained,
“[The] Japanese government should promote permanent residency of Japanese subjects in
Hawaii,” they implied patriotic colonization and tried to get an upper hand of the
interstitial position of Hawaii that existed between two empires. To make the best use of
the condition that allowed them dual or multiple citizenships did not contradict with their
patriotic deeds in the name of colonization, it actually contributed to them. This story was
very different for Abiko Kyutaro, who later advocated for permanent residency in
California while at the same time detachment from Japanese patriotic education and for
assimilation effort to Americanism. Yet another distinctiveness was their ideology of
supporting Asian revolutionaries under the influence of Toten Miyazaki and his brothers
from Kumamoto. While it proves their sense of assisting transnational struggles for
Chinese independence from feudalism, there is no record that they attempted to bring
about practical improvements in ordinary laborers’ lives in Hawaii, whether Japanese,
Chinese, or native Hawaiian.
214

Moreover, they were ultimately making profit out of the emigration/colonization

214
Kimura, Issei, 15–16; Okahata, Hawaii Nihonjin iminshi, 146–7; Moriyama, Nichibei imin shigaku, 161.
The very first emigration company, Kissa Imin Gomei Kaisha, had been operating since 1891 to send
Japanese to other destinations than Hawaii, such as New Caledonia, Queensland Australia, Fiji, Guadalupe,
and later Brazil. This company was established by Yasujiro Yoshikawa, the president of Nippon Yusen, a
core part of Mitsubishi company group, and Teiichi Sakuma, a president of printing company, Shueisha.
Sakuma also helps Fusataro Takano to start the first labor union in Japan, which the next chapter examines.
For more details, see Matao Toyohara, Sakuma Teiichi shoden (Tokyo: Shueisha Teikinkai, 1904). This
book has been digitized by Japanese National Diet Library. http://kindai.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/781454/61
(accessed December 4, 2014)
196
scheme, deeply embedded in the global labor relocation system. Labor selection for
maximizing the productivity was taken for granted by private companies even after
government-sponsored immigration ceased. Like other immigration companies such as
Toyo Imin Goshigaisha, which promised its customers “bona fide agricultural laborers,”
the Kumamoto Emigration Company established by those political advocates advertised,
“We will not only supply ABLE BODIED LABORERS but will endeavor to introduce a
superior class of men and women, strictly Agricultural Laborers selected not from one,
but from every available Agricultural District in Japan.” Furthermore, their nationalism
had a totally different effect on the nationalism of plantation hands in Hawaii in the
following years, because the Kumamoto Immigration Company and Hiroshima Overseas
Migration Company, in tandem with the Keihin Bank that Terutake Hinata founded,
exploited immigrants through forced deposit and the purchase of insurance. Not only
some of the 26,130 Japanese contract laborers, who the Hawaiian sugar planters hastily
introduced in 1899 because they anticipated the application of the Chinese Exclusion Act
and the ban on import of contract laborers to Hawaii, but free immigrants who came after
the ban also suffered from those exploitative practices.
215

While it seems that the planters thought the three-year contracts made before the
American laws come into effect would remain valid, this was not the case. Voluntary
labor contracts were still allowed, but they were no longer enforced by penal actions.
Without those punishments, Japanese laborers felt their resistance would become more
militant in the labor disputes. They would also struggle to stop the exploitative practices

215
Moriyama, Imingaisha, 71; Okahata, Hawaii Nihonjin iminshi, 153–4.
197
of immigration companies through the formation of Kakushin Doshikai, also known as
the Japanese Reform Association, which will be explored in the next section.

Early Okinawan Immigrants
Okinawans arrived in this context of intensifying labor disputes after the Organic
Act. Hawaii experienced over twenty Japanese strikes that swept through plantations in
1900 when Congress passed the Organic Act, making the laws and Constitution of the
United States applicable to Hawaii, and nullifying contract labor immigration on June 14.
The termination of penal contracts led to an upsurge in worker militancy. Some strikes
happened even before the passing of the Organic Act. For example, the accidental deaths
of three mill hands crushed under a collapsed sugar pan triggered a ten-day-long strike
beginning April 4 by Japanese workers at Pioneer Mill in Lahaina. The laborers protested
management’s blaming the accident on the carelessness and poor maintenance of the mill.
The strikers paraded in the town under Japanese flags and even demolished the house and
property of a store clerk, who would not give them credit (indicative of the manner of
Uchikowashi). The strike resulted in $500 compensation for the relatives of each
deceased laborer and a nine-hour workday for all workers. In its vicinity, Japanese
laborers at the Olowalu plantation struck and won the discharge of brutal lunas, an
abolition of the docking system, a shorter workday, and $1000 to cover the cost of the
strike. Meanwhile, two hundred strikers on the Spreckelsville Plantation fought a posse of
sixty policemen and lunas with clubs and stones, winning the cancellation of their labor
198
contracts.
216

From this remarkable year, through large-scale strikes—from the 1904 Waipahu
and Waialua strikes and the 1905 Lahaina strike, to the 1909 Oahu Sugar
strike—accounts of early Okinawan Issei’s involvement are sketchy. When the
population of Japanese in Hawaii reached 61,111 in 1900, occupying 39.7 percent of the
whole population of Hawaii, the Okinawan immigrants were more or less 3 percent of
Japanese. The number of Okinawan immigrants began to increase from the third group,
which had 260 in 1904. Twelve hundred followed next year. The year 1906 carried nearly
4,500 and 1907 brought approximately 2,500 Okinawans. Although there have not been
found enough materials to prove the Okinawan Issei’s involvement in labor activism, the
investigation of the first groups of Okinawan immigrants reveals the problems of
adjustment, sanitary conditions, and violent nature of plantation labor.
217

Twenty-seven Okinawans arrived at Honolulu on January 8, 1900 with 641 other
Japanese. After they managed to deal with an immigration officer, whose Japanese
translator did not understand Uchinaguchi (an Okinawan dialect), twenty-six Okinawans
were brought to the Ewa plantation of the Oahu island (minus Saburo To-ma, who did not
pass the inspection). Soon, those twenty-six Okinawans were released from their labor
contracts. While Kyuzo remained in Okinawa to prepare to recruit another group, he

216
Honolulu Record, April 28, 1949 and August 12 1948, quoted in Takaki, Pau Hana, 148-9; C. A.
Peterson, Inspector of Immigrants, to Alexander Young, President of the Board, May 4 1900, AH Bureau
Misc. Files, document 37, as quoted in Moriyama, Imingaisha, 103. It states “Two Japanese
Commissioners from the Immigration companies have labored among their countrymen [to mediate the
disputes] at Lahaina, Olowalu, Kihei, Sprecklesville and beyond, but seem to have no influence whatever.”

217
Kimura, Issei, 53; Ishikawa, “A Study of the Historical Geography of Early Okinawan Immigrants to
the Hawaiian Islands,” 86.
199
grew concerned about the first group, because none had sent any letters. Toyama asked
his comrade, Shinsuke Taira, who had left Okinawa and was studying in Tokyo, to travel
to Hawaii to investigate and report on what had become of them.
218

The fact that Okinawans were familiar with the tropical climate or the cultivation
of sugarcane did not mean that they were able to adjust to the coercive nature of
plantation labor. It had become a myth that the Okinawans were best suited for labor that
involved long workdays, physical violence, and unsanitary living conditions that harmed
health and that they could be provided with insufficient food and water supply. After he
arrived in Hawaii on June 17, 1901, Taira went to the Ewa plantation first and found 8 or
9 Okinawans who remained there. He went to the Aiea plantation from Ewa and visited
Kuhachiro Uehara, a thirty-two-year-old school teacher from Itoman, who was the leader
of the first group. They all told Taira about the brutal treatment and harsh labor
conditions. They explained that they had not been allowed to rest and kept working under
the blazing sun for long hours and were whipped by a luna as if they were cows and
horses. Taira came to know that Kyuzo Toyama’s younger brother, Matasuke Toyama,
and a few others went on to San Francisco (and others dispersed, too) after contract was
nullified on June 14, 1900. Taira sent a report to Toyama in Okinawa and decided to
work at the Aiea plantation for 16 yen for 24 days a month and saved money for a trip
back to Japan.
219

218
Seiei Wakugawa, Toyama Kyuzo den (Tokyo: Taihei Shuppansha, 1973), 110–114, 121, 125–127.

219
Koei Osato, Taira Shinsuke den [Biography of Shisuke Taira] (Okinawa: Daido Insatsu, 1969), 143–6.
According to Osato, Taira reported that he had been surprised at “the mingling of languages, habits and
customs, and races.” But most likely he did not work long enough or at many plantations to realize that
there existed a wage hierarchy differentiated by racial and ethnic lines. He just reported the labor condition
200
Chinzen Kinjo, from Naha, Okinawa, one of the first twenty-six Okinawans sent to
the Ewa Plantation on Oahu, later told the story of the luna’s brutality in which he
explained his resistance to that violence. When he woke up every morning, the rigorous
labor of cutting sugarcane and loading it on rail cars for ten hours a day was waiting for
him, often coupled with the humiliation doled out by a mounted overseer with a whip in
his hand. Kinjo dared to challenge this brutality singlehandedly with Karate. He recalls:

There was no one who wasn’t whipped. Once when this luna whipped me by taking
me for someone else, I was really mad and all the anger which had hitherto been
suppressed in me exploded and I challenged him with karate. Since this luna was a
big man, a six-footer, it wasn’t easy for me. But, finally, I threw him to the
ground . . . I was at the point of jumping at him, risking my whole life in that one
blow. Just at that moment, Big Luna [superior overseer] came and calmed me down,
saying, ‘Wait, wait. I will fix everything all right.’ Thus, the incident ended short of
serious consequences. We wanted revenge even to the point of committing murder.
You can understand how brutally the laborers of early years were treated.
220

Kyuzo Toyama planned to investigate the feasibility and (un)favorability of labor
emigration in terms of the very content of plantation labor for himself, after he received
reports from the first group. He tried to prepare the second group by opening his “Night
School for the Poor in Kin village” and taught some 160 young Okinawans both
languages of Japanese and English. Toyama realized that immigrants from urban areas
like Shuri and Naha had not adjusted to agricultural labor. Then for the second ship, he
recruited forty-five youth all from Kin village. This time he accompanied the group and
stayed on the Hawaii and Oahu islands for six months, to experience plantation labor
first-hand and to improve his English. Five youngsters did not pass the inspection at

of Okinawan immigrants were getting better after the ban of labor contract came into effect. He
recommended that Toyama should come to Hawaii and take a look at the plantations himself.

220
Hawaii Times, January 1, 1959, quoted in Kimura, Issei, 50.
201
Yokohama. Forty Okinawan youth, plus Toyama, arrived at Honolulu on April 6, 1903,
and soon after were taken to the Honokaa plantation of Hawaii Island. Their day wage
was 60 cents, two cents more than that in Oahu (10 hours a day, 30 days a month
amounts to 18 dollars). Many of them got sick with diarrhea from bad-quality water,
which they had to distill themselves from seawater, as they had no rainfall for many days.
Toyama himself got sick and telegraphed Shinsuke Taira, who was then staying in Hilo
on Hawaii Island, to come and take care of the new immigrants. Toyama stayed in Hilo
for three months, earned some money by teaching Japanese during the day and learned
English at night. He toured some plantations in the Hilo vicinity and later on Oahu to see
the working conditions. His brief report was evidently written for the purpose of
persuading Governor Narahara that Okinawa should keep sending immigrants to Hawaii,
whose remittance would save Okinawa’s economic crisis.
221

While many immigrants from other prefectures were suffering from an eye disease,
the Okinawans were free from it. As laborers they are considered physically fit and
have a reputation as the best immigrant workers from japan . . . we were separated
into groups of four persons each and lodged in plantation compounds. Presently the
monthly wage is $18, yet if we work on a piecework basis, as soon as we get used
to the new situation, we expect to earn more than $1.15 a day. Since our food and
other miscellaneous expenses cost us $7.00 to $7.50 right now, we can send only
$10 home. However, after six months or so, it won’t be difficult to send remittances
of nearly $15 a month home . . . The weather here is very similar to that of

221
In September 1902, Toyama toured regions of Kyushu, San’in, Kansai, and Tokaido to see how those
communities carried out emigration, though what he specifically learned from this tour is unclear.
Wakugawa, Toyama Kyuzo den, 131–138; Osato, Taira Shinsuke den, 150. Although Toyama was very
close to the immigrants themselves unlike Kaoru Inoue, an elite politician in the central government, who
was distant from the reality of plantations, Toyama happen to align with the capitalist discourse of
“remittance saves the homeland.” This is not to blame Toyama. My point is that once the land relation
dissolves to that of capitalist privatization scheme, those labor reserve ripped off of land seeks a new
destination where ‘wage is relatively higher’ by swallowing the idea that “value of labor is primarily shown
by monetary amount.” Like Marx separates “labor” from “labor power,” which equates with wage, i.e. the
exchange value. It is quite different from the old way in their homeland where their “labor” used to be not
reduced to exchange value but meaningfully interweaves with their culturally encoded environment, whose
reward was not necessarily wage but the sustenance and spiritual preservation of their homeland.
202
Okinawa. The land is so fertile that burdock will grow to the size of daikon-radish,
and no fertilizer is required to cultivate sugarcane, providing a steady rainfall. The
sugarcane raised here is of the same variety as the Ogasawara. This plantation is
said to produce 1,500 units of sugar (120 pounds a unit) a day… I understand that
this plantation is more than seven miles square, with laborers camps located all
over. Depending on their location, some would take a train to work. Usually our
work starts at six and continues until 4:00 or 4:30. Sunday no one works.
222

Toyama’s remark of Okinawans as good laberers did not mean that they remained
docile. Some forty young Okinawans at Honokaa plantation asked the plantation owners
to let them go to another plantation because the shortage of usable water was unbearable
and kept them sick all of the time. The owner refused and said they would have to work
there for at least six months. They walked out in the dark of night. They went to the
Piihonua plantation and worked there for a month. Then they moved on to the Olaa
plantation, where a Japanese middleman named Iwasaki said he would pay 70 cents a day
per worker. Unfortunately, many of them got beriberi (vitamin B deficiency), so they
decided to move again to the Ewa plantation, where the first group had been. At that time,
people had to show proof that they had paid a poll tax in order to move between islands.
Shinsuke Taira managed to borrow fifteen poll tax receipts from other Japanese living in
Hilo and made Okinawan youngsters learn those names by heart. They completed three
trips to get the whole group to Oahu. At the Ewa plantation, they joined Tattsu Yogi,
Tara Shimabukuro, and Ryochi Matsushima, who had come with the first group in 1900.
With the care of their forerunners, the second group recovered. Many of the second group
did the hard work of happaiko and paid off the debt they owed for departure within two

222
Ryukyu Shimpo, May 13, 1903.
203
or three years.
223

Toyama visited plantations around Honouriuri, and tried examining labor
conditions and disputes. He himself worked as a happaiko laborer and paid attention to
what other working opportunities were available in the advertisements of Japanese
newspapers, in case any of the Okinawans wanted to change their job to one in an urban
environment. After six months in Hawaii, Toyama left for Okinawa to recruit more
laborers. Toyama subsequently affiliated himself with Teikoku Shokumin Goshigaisha
(Imperial Overseas Emigration Company, Ltd.) and set up an office in Naha to promote
overseas emigration (not only to Hawaii but later to the Philippines). The third shipment
of laborers was 260 Okinawan young men that arrived in Hawaii in 1904. The next year
the number of Okinawan laborers increased to 1200. The years 1906 and 1907 saw huge
increases, respectively bringing nearly 4,500 and 2,500 workers to Hawaii. The
Okinawan immigrants constituted approximately one-fifth of a total Japanese
immigration of more than 44,000 during the “free immigration” period between 1900 and
1907.
224

Many Okinawans actually joined the mass movement to the West Coast of
mainland United States around this time. Shinsuke Taira was one of them. In June 1904,
he moved on to San Francisco, where he might have got together with another comrade
of Jahana’s Okinawa Club, Kosuke Uema, who had landed in San Francisco in 1902. In
this way, Okinawan ex-movement leaders left the islands of Hawaii. Although Toyama

223
Wakugawa, Toyama Kyuzo den, 138–139; Osato, Taira Shinsuke den, 154–157.

224
Wakugawa, Toyama Kyuzo den, 121, 142–144, 164.
204
did not leave concrete descriptions of any particular labor disputes he encountered, he
and Taira overall helped the first and second groups adjust to life in Hawaii and paved the
way for more to come. They talked to Okinawan immigrants every Saturday evening at
Honouliuli to remind that “they were pioneers in Okinawa’s overseas emigration,
stressing that industry, thrift, and unity among them would save their homeland from
poverty and stimulate further emigration to Hawaii.”
225

Kakushin Doshikai (Japanese Reform Association) and Plantation Workers
The Japanese plantation laborers sought an organization that could truly advocate
and protect the interest of laborers. In 1903, many became members of the Central
Japanese League. This organization came into being out of two struggles of the Japanese
community. When fire from the city’s anti-bubonic plague measure burnt down parts of
the Japanese and Chinese districts in 1900, a provisional Japanese organization was
formed to legally demand compensation in cooperation with a Chinese counterpart and
eventually won the four-year legal battle. In July of next year, another temporal Japanese
organization led the protest that demanded dismissal of a U.S. quarantine officer,
Coepher, who had molested four Japanese women at their entry inspection. Itoko
Imanishi, a Nisei woman, sharply criticized it both as racist discrimination and sexual

225
Kimura, Issei, 52-53; Osato, Taira Shinsuke den, 159–164. Taira strategized where to go next while
worked as a dishwasher in San Francisco. He moved down to New Mexico and worked as a house boy, a
garden boy, a cook, and a bartender for two years. After a while he was able to buy some land and built a
house at Raton, New Mexico. Possession of real estate allowed Japanese immigrants to come back and
forth between Japan and the U.S. Taira once again moved to Brawley, California in 1919. The stories of
success in farming of tomato, lettuce, melon, onion, and squash in Imperial Valley attracted many
Okinawans at that time. Taira opened a restaurant in Brawley, where about 600 Okinawans lived by then.
New generation of Okinawans, who started a socialist reading group called Reimeikai, must have met
Shinsuke Taira in the dry land, which we will examine in the sixth chapter.
205
violence in her speech at a mass meeting with two thousand people in attendance at a
Honolulu Japanese elementary school on August 2. They won not only the dismissal of
Coepher, but also the appointment of female officers for quarantine of female immigrants.
As a result of these struggles, the Central Japanese League (CJL) was formed as a
standing committee for solutions to any problems in the Japanese community in Hawaii
in 1903. They aimed at a “reduction” of labor disputes, prevention of the exodus of
Japanese laborers to the U.S. mainland, and improvement of the educational environment
for Hawaii-born Japanese children. Many plantation hands joined, hoping that they would
play a positive role in frequent labor disputes. The number of the members who paid the
sixty-cent membership dues reached 25,000.
226

However, the Central Japanese League was essentially an elite establishment
organization consisting of Miki Saito, the Japanese Consul in Hawaii, the representatives
of the Japanese immigrant newspapers, the Hawaii branch managers of Keihin Bank and
Yokohama Shokin Bank, and doctors and lawyers. Prevention of mass exodus to the U.S.
mainland was an attempt to reduce life options the workers had, and it wasn’t long before
Japanese laborers soon lost their trust in the League—especially once they came to know
its real agenda (class distinction) through a strike at the Ewa plantation and two strikes at
the Waipahu plantation in 1904. On May 28, 1904, all of the Japanese plantation hands
struck over plantation violence and brutality imposed by the big luna and plantation
police officer. The League immediately intervened and reconciled to make the workers

226
Okahata, Hawaii Nihonjin iminshi, 157–161. As to the analysis of the development of public health
bureaucracies through sanitary regulations on Chinese people in San Francisco, see Nayan Shah,
Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: Univeristy of
California Press, 2001).
206
return to the field. Fellow workers on the Waipahu plantation struck in the same month
over a big luna’s forcible lottery sale but refused to let the League mediate the
negotiation. The locally well-known person, Sakae Morita, led the negotiation and they
finally won the dismissal of several lunas, including the big luna Patterson and policeman
for the Japanese camps. The League stated “Strikes and all other violent acts, especially
for trivial causes, are, in their nature, like doings of unruly children or like the acts of
barbarians, rather than of civilized men. We are absolutely opposed to them” and
instructed to avoid strikes “to maintain just and cordial relations” with the planters.
Meanwhile, the Japanese cane cutters were intensifying their collective action at the
Waialua plantation on Oahu in December 1904. Some 1,200 Japanese field hands, who
had understood the price shift of Hawaiian sugar on the world market, demanded a
proportionate rise in pay and shut down the entire strippers’ and mill laborers’ operation
after a full day of cutting because “the longer the cut cane lay in the field, the greater the
loss of sugar content in each stalk.” But the 1904 Waialua strike also saw the introduction
of 256 newly arrived Koreans as strikebreakers to load the cane left in the fields. Thus the
haole (whites in Hawaii) sugar planters continued hard to exploit ethnic and racial lines
as convenient dividends in the hierarchy of the labor market.
227

For Japanese immigrant workers, the exploitative practices by the Keihin Bank and
other immigration companies were also a huge yoke. In May of the following year, the
Kakushin Doshikai (Japanese Reform Association) was formed against the Central

227
Okahata, Hawaii Nihonjin iminshi, 128; House of Representatives, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Third
Report of the Commissioner of Labor on Hawaii, 1905, 59th Cong., 1
st
sess., 1906, 137–139; Beechert,
Working in Hawaii, 163–166; Okihiro, Cane Fire, 44.
207
Japanese League to grapple with this issue. With Tadasaburo Shihosawa, the president of
Hawai Shimpo, Shintaro Anno, the president of Shin Nihon, U.C. Berkeley graduate and
lawyer Motoyuki Negoro as its leaders, it announced their petition sent to the Japanese
Foreign Minister at its founding forum, with two thousand people in the audience on May
19, 1905. It demanded transfer of the present consul and therefore a new appointment for
the post and halt of the illegal treatment of immigrants by Keihin Bank and related
emigration companies. The Association succeeded in effectively criticizing their
wrongdoings and corruption in the newspapers, including Hawaii Shimpo, Shin Nihon,
and HawaiiNichi Nichi Shimbun, which ultimately led to the expulsion of those
emigration companies from Hawaii after a few years.
228

Another large-scale strike during that year saw the same ending to the introduction
of strikebreakers, with an intensifying degree of intervention by state violence. Only five
days after the founding forum of the Japanese Reform Association, another large-scale
strike erupted at Lahaina, Maui. In addition to other demands, fourteen hundred Japanese
strikers demonstrated at a mass meeting and called for the dismissal of the luna who had
beaten and blinded a fellow worker named Iwamoto. When some strikers surrounded the
house of a cane-planting contractor who refused to join in, policemen arrived and tried to
arrest the strike’s leaders. In the skirmish, policemen killed a striker and wounded a few
others with bullets. Additionally, sixty special officers, forty-five policemen and thirty
National Guardsmen were dispatched to suppress the ensuing riot. Although the Japanese
Reform Association limited itself to the issue of “extricating the 70,000 Japanese clutches

228
Okahata, Hawaii Nihonjin iminshi, 163–164; Okihiro, Cane Fire, 28.
208
of the Keihin Bank and the immigration companies,” one of the leaders, Shihosawa’s
Hawaii Shimpo, was evidently on the side of the strikers. It wrote, “Behind a strike like
that at Lahaina, there is always a long list of grievances which have been ignored by
managers who usually do not take the trouble to understand them. The management is
surprised when a strike begins by a list of fifteen or twenty ‘demands’ and thinks they are
made up for the occasion. If he had kept in touch with the difficulties of his men he
would know that they are the accumulation of months, perhaps years, of small troubles
which need not have existed.” Obviously, strikers had to learn how to fight against the
hiring of “scabs” of other races. Some Chinese and Hawaiian strikebreakers were hired at
premium rates of pay though their numbers were scarcely equal to the number of
strikers.
229

Alan Moriyama observes a change in the nature of the twelve strikes that occurred
between 1903 and 1905. Unlike the previous demand for consistent pay on a decided day,
and protest against the piecework system in 1900 and 1901, there were new demands for
wage increases seen in the five cases between 1903 and 1905—but only two of them
partially succeeded. While the plantation hands suffered from an increase in living costs
and demanded higher wages, the planters preferred to fire lunas if that alone appeased the
laborers, rather than risk financial loss by raising wages. Ultimately, lunas were
intermediary managerial personnel, and were replaceable. The second Waipahu strike in
July, 1904, was over the brutality of a Japanese luna named Suehiro. The planters
adamantly resisted changes in wages and asked police authorities for protection for

229
Honolulu Record, November 8, 15, 22, 1951; Takaki, Pau Hana, 150–1; Beechert, Working in Hawaii,
168.
209
themselves and what they perceived as the personal safety of whites, and for intervention
with regard to plantation discipline when lunas were not sufficient.
230

Police presence obviously increased on plantations as the size of strikes became
larger and the demands for higher wages were foregrounded. An example of increased
policing is the January 16, 1906 strike for higher wages at the Papaikou and Waipahu
plantations. The protesters requested a reliable lawyer, Chillingworth, and an interpreter,
Kin’ichiro Maruyama, to mediate negotiations, and eventually won the higher wage they
demanded. Seventeen hundred Japanese on the Waipahu plantation struck for higher
wages and stood firm even when the plantation manager E. K. Bull housed and fed
forty-seven policemen who were armed with rifles, and had them march into the
plantation, patrol the camps, and stop and question all the stragglers. Despite the fact that
Bull threatened to use the police to evict the strikers, the Japanese laborers won some of
their demands.
231

230
Bureau of Labor Statistics, Third Report of the Commissioner of Labor on Hawaii, 1905, 144;
Moriyama, Imingaisha, 131. What Moriyama very briefly commented but no scholar has explored is the
fact that “Three of the five strikes in 1905 were ordered by Japanese labor organizations.” I need to do
more investigation on this. Okahata, Hawaii Nihonjin iminshi, 128.

231
Honolulu Record, January 19, 1950; Takaki, Pau Hana, 151. The effect of Russo-Japanese war on the
Hawaiian immigration has not been assessed scholarly. The immigration was stimulated in 1906 by the
enthusiasm for overseas emigration after the Japanese victory of Japanese-Russo War and the economic
repression in Japan after the War, which was especially felt badly in agricultural villages. Many of those
immigrants who came around this time were those who finished their service from the recent war. Shozo
Yokokawa, one of the agents of the infamous Kumamoto Emigration Company, became a spy employed by
the Japanese Minister at Beijing, Kosai Uchida, and was assigned to sabotage the Siberian railroad at Hulan
Ergi, close to Qiqihar. He was caught by Russian Watch guards and executed by a firing squad in Harbin.
The year of 1906 brought 30,393 Japanese to Hawaii, of which 28,411 were male and 1,982 female. See
Okahata, Hawaii Nihonjin iminshi, 147, 169–170; Tetsuya Ohama, Shomin no mita Nisshin Nichiro Senso
[Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars Seen from Eyes of Ordinary Japanese] (Tokyo: Tosui Shobo,
2003), 114–9.
210
1909 Oahu Sugar Strike
In the 1909 Oahu Sugar strike, the articulation of the racially discriminatory wage
hierarchy comes to a higher level of clarification. The strategic coordination between
Japanese plantation hands, Japanese newspapers, and some Japanese business entities in
urban areas were based on strong nationalist sentiment and slogans, but it came with a
hint of an approach toward American democratic values. They saw themselves as a group
with obligatory solidarity, an extended network knit together by obligations of mutual
support. It was different from the preceding spontaneous walkouts in the sense that the
decision was made after more than eight months of discussion and preparation. The
duration of the strike was four months.
232

It was Japanese language newspapers in Hawaii that revamped the public attention
toward the need for higher wages. A Honolulu-based attorney, Motoyuki Negoro, a
graduate of the University of California at Berkeley law school, wrote a series of articles
for Nippu Jiji, some of which were co-written by Yokichi Tasaka. Negoro had gone back
to Berkeley in 1908 and submitted his J.D. thesis titled “The Anti-Trust Legislation under
the Constitution,” in which he examined the monopoly in the sugar industry of Hawaii.
Negoro’s expertise definitely took the understanding of the economic structure of
Hawaii’s main industry to a higher level and contributed to the growth of
class-consciousness among Japanese laborers. He argued in his newspaper articles,

232
In the following paragraphs on the 1909 Oahu Sugar strike, I referred to those works: Alan Moriyama,
“The 1909 and 1920 Strikes of Japanese Sugar Plantation Workers in Hawaii,” in Emma Gee, ed.,
Counterpoint (Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Center of UCLA, 1976), 169–180; Takaki, Pau Hana,
Chapter 5 and 6; Beechert, Working in Hawaii, Chapter 10 and 11; Gary Okihiro, Cane Fire; Akemi
Kikumura, Issei Pioneers: Hawaii and the Mainland, 1885 to 1924 (Los Angeles: Japanese American
National Museum, 1992).
211
“Hawaii’s economy is dependent on sugar. However, the prosperity enjoyed by the sugar
industry does not extend to the Japanese who are suffering from steadily rising costs and
weighted down by a practice of a discriminatory wage system.” He protested the “pitiable
condition” where the Japanese “are assigned pigsty like homes and receive only $18.00
per month, while Portuguese and Puerto Rican workers doing the same type of work are
paid $22.50 and given single family cottages to live in . . . There is no reason why the
Japanese laborers who are just as efficient as foreign laborers should not be given equal
treatment with other race.” While Negoro invoked nationalist sentiment by arguing that
Japan was “well aware that its subjects are not born to be slaves of the capitalists of
Hawaii,” he also rationalized the demand of higher wages by showing the shift of
mentality from Dekasegi, or migrant work, to Eiju, or permanent residency. Especially
after the Gentlemen’s Agreement limited Japanese immigration to that of relatives and
reentrance, the Japanese immigrant community felt the need to solidify its foundation in
order to accommodate the increasing number of families formed in Hawaii, and about
17,500 children under the age of fifteen.
233

Indeed, the descendants of the early haole missionary families had established a
monopoly of an entire industry, which produced over 425,000 tons in 1906. In 1915,
sugar constituted nine-tenths the value of all the agricultural produce in Hawaii. The
Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association (HSPA) had recruited diverse labor immigrants and
established the racial and ethnic hierarchy of labor, in which the daily income of the
average laborer in 1902, for example, was $4.22 for Caucasians, $1.80 for Hawaiians,

233
Nippu Jiji, July 31, 1908; Okihiro, Cane Fire, 46.
212
$1.69 for Portuguese, $1.22 for Chinese, and $1.06 for Japanese. Naturally, the major
grievance was this differential wage system among ethnicities, and the demand was equal
pay for equal work.
234

This discussion in the Japanese newspaper incited a number of public meetings in
Honolulu. The Higher Wages Association (HWA) was formed out of these meetings on
December 1, 1908. It functioned as the mechanism through which representatives from
different plantations on the Oahu Island could meet, articulate demands, and form a
support network for striking. Community leaders occupied the board. Kinsaburo Fred
Makino, who was a successful drug store owner, was elected as its president. Motoyuki
Negoro was secretary, and Matsutaro Yamashiro, a hotel owner, was treasurer. The editor
of Nippu Jiji, Yasutaro Soga, also supported the association. Makino and Negoro toured
plantations on Oahu in a rented automobile and spoke to large crowds, distributed
bilingual pamphlets on higher wages, and urged workers to submit requests for higher
wages to their plantation managers. The HWA effectively provoked and seized on the
nationalist upsurge from the working-class Japanese in their struggle for racial and
economic justice. Workers on various plantations formed their own higher wage
associations, actively responding to the urban, educated leadership. Japanese plantation
workers on Hawaii, Maui, and Kauai, having been requested to support their countrymen
on Oahu, expressed their solidarity. Partly responding to Makino’s provocation of
“Yamato Damashii (Japanese spirit),” many supportive declarations followed. Prefectural
associations of Hiroshimans, Yamaguchins, Niigatans, Wakayamans, and Chibans, and

234
Moriyama, “The 1909 and 1920 Strikes,” 170–1.
213
working-class occupational associations, such as the Public Bath Operators Association,
Carpenters Association, Japanese Hotel and Inn Association, Barbers Association, and
Honolulu Retail Merchants Association, pledged their support.
235

In contrast, the Japanese consul general, Senichi Ueno, maintained that the labor
strikers were criminal breakers of peace and harmony in the labor market. Newspapers
like Hawaii Shimpo, which was now edited by Sometaro Shiba, and Hawaii Nichi Nichi,
verbally attacked those HWA leaders and Nippu Jiji reporters by calling them “agitators”
and “thugs.” Other newspapers of individual islands were also divided into two sides.
Eventually the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association (HSPA) refused to recognize the
demands of the HWA.
236

On May 8, 1909, the strike began at Aiea and within a month spread to Waipahu,
Waialua, Kahuku, Wainaea, Ewa, and Waimanalo, thereby involving 7,000 Japanese
plantation hands on Oahu. The trustees of HSPA immediately counteracted and agreed to
compensate all plantations for any property losses incurred during the strike. They
required plantations to be guided by the association’s policies in dealing with the strike
and instructed planters to evict the strikers from plantation-owned quarters. By the end of
June, 5,000 evicted strikers and their families made their way to Honolulu, where they
were housed in vacant buildings and theaters and fed at four outdoor kitchens in the
Japanese districts of Kakaako, Moiliili, and Palama. They were also given medical care.
The prefectural associations of Hiroshimans, Yamaguchins, Niigatans, Wakayamans, and

235
Takaki, Pau Hana, 155; Okihiro, Cane Fire, 46–49.

236
Takaki, Pau Hana, 155; Okihiro, Cane Fire, 49.
214
Chibans contributed greatly. Chinese merchants in Honolulu also gave assistance by
extending credit generously and supplying much needed rice during the summer months
of striking.
237

The nature of leadership was not top-down. Rather, as they urged workers to
submit requests to plantation managers for higher wages, they respected and were able to
draw the spontaneity of workers. For example, Waipahu laborers gave a letter to their
manager E. K. Bull, signed by eighty-six men and their representatives, Masao Haneda,
Watanabe, Shigeta, Hamada, Miyauchi, Seo, and Takeyama. They requested monthly
raises of $8 for field hands, $10.50 for mill workers, 10 cents per ton for cane cutters and
carriers, twice the daily rate for Sunday work, and ten-hour workdays with overtime pay
for hours beyond that limit. They clearly explained that the stagnant wage level in the
past years did not correspond to the rise in living costs. Moreover, they continued, having
elderly parents who depended on remittances, and the raising of new families, added
more reasons for a reasonable increase of wages. They deftly questioned “Is it not a
matter of simple justice, and moral duty to give [the] same wages and same treatment to
laborers of equal efficiency, irrespective of race, color, creed, nationality, or previous
condition of servitude?”
238

The police carried out repressive measures, and harassed and arrested the four
major leaders, Makino, Negoro, Soga, Yamashiro, reporters Keitaro Kawamura and
Yokichi Tasaka, three other Nippu Jiji staff and many other strikers and strike

237
Okihiro, Cane Fire, 50–51.

238
House of Representatives, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Fourth Report of the Commissioner of Labor on
Hawaii, 1910, 79–82.
215
sympathizers. The four major leaders were tried at court on July 26 for coconspiracy.
During the proceedings, a striker stabbed Sometaro Shiba, the owner of the conservative
Japanese newspaper Hawaii Shimpo, on August 3. This incident was used to frame up the
leaders with the reason that they instigated and conspired the attempted murder. The
defendants were eventually sentenced to 10 months in prison and fined $300 each. The
HSPA tenaciously tried to defend the principle that they would not concede that laborers
had the right to collective bargaining on these islands. It was discovered later, in 1912,
that the Japanese newspapers, the Hawaii Shimpo and the Hawaii Nichi Nichi, had been
receiving monthly subsidies of $100 from the HSPA since 1908, and special subsidies
totaling $11,700. No wonder these conservative papers had argued against Japanese
workers going out on strike.
239

Meanwhile, Chinese, Hawaiians, Koreans, and Portuguese were brought in as
strikebreakers and paid $1.50 per day, which was more than what the strikers were asking.
Many of the scabs demanded that overseers be appointed from their own groups. Those
Portuguese and Chinese who had already been employed objected to introducing
strikebreakers at higher rates than their own wages. As the strike funds of the Japanese
community began to dwindle, small groups of Japanese strikers started returning to their
plantations. At the end of July, the delegates voted to end the three-month strike, which
cost the planters $2 million and the supporters of the strike about $40,000. Three months
after the strike, the HSPA made several appeasing concessions. They increased Japanese
wages from $18.00 to $22.00 and introduced improved housing and sanitary facilities and

239
Okihiro, Cane Fire, 52–3.
216
a bonus system that considers individual ability. This paternalistic gesture of the HSPA
aimed at not giving Japanese immigrant laborers any confidence in their bargaining
power, though the strikers would continue to persist in the 1920 strike.
240

Okinawan Involvement
Not much has been revealed with regard to the Okinawans’ involvement in labor
strikes, except Japanese journalist Ryoka Yano’s short article in 1909 that Okinawans
had adherence when they striked. Scholar Teruo Hiyane has discovered, though, that
there was a group of Okinawan intellectuals, who founded Kyuyo Club for the
improvement of Okinawans’ life in Hawaii in 1910. The founding members were Saburo
Konaha, Kisho Yogi, Tokusuke Yamashiro, Moriaki Tonaki, Morinaga Matsuda, Kenden
Yabe, and Chojun Nozato. Kenden Yabe, who would later move to Los Angeles and help
start a leftist study group among Okinawan Youth in early 1920s, was then the oratorical
leader of Kyuyo Club.
241

Born in Shuri, Okinawa in 1888, Kenden grew up in the time when Governor
Narahara began insisting on imbuing Japanese loyalty and patriotism toward the emperor
into the hearts of young Okinawan through the new education system. The career of his
father, Kentsu Yabe, as a renowned Japanese soldier of the Sino-Japanese War, was a
symbol of colonial logic, as Kentsu himself explained, “Okinawans cannot win civil
rights unless they contribute to military service, taxation, and education.” Kentsu was one

240
Okihiro, Cane Fire, 52.

241
Teruo Hiyane, “Rafu no jidai 5,” Shin Okinawa bungaku, no. 93 (1992): 118–130.
217
of those who voluntarily joined the Japanese military before the conscription system was
set up in Okinawa in 1898. Despite the gradual Japanization campaign, the sense of new
belonging to the Japanese state remained a weak sentiment among youth. The Motobu
Incident epitomized that oppositional view. In 1910, a Japanese draft inspector rudely
suspected that an Okinawan young man in Motobu village was a draft dodger, which
triggered a conflict between police and Motobu villagers. Kenden hated the fact that his
father and uncle bolstered the warring country of Japan as soldiers of Japanese military
and deeply devoted himself to Christianity, because it helped Kenden be critical of the
secular authority of state and Emperor. Under the influence of Tolstoyan beliefs and his
anti-Russo-Japanese war advocacy, Kenden was more inclined to pacifism and the idea
of not belonging to any institutional churches. At the age of twenty, in 1908, Kenden
came to Hawaii in order to evade conscription. Kenden visited Okinawan fellow workers
at plantations in Koloa and Lahai to spread the gospel, while he worked as a schoolboy at
the house of Pastor Takie Okumura.
242

For Kenden Yabe, “spreading of gospel was social education” rather than salvation
of individual agony. The Kyuyo Club, which Yabe helped found in 1910, aimed to
illuminate the young minds of fellow Okinawans by holding public forums, setting up a
library, and publishing their organ Gyosho (Bell at Dawn). Kenden particularly “felt
urged to imbue habit of reading book into young Okinawans” in Hawai because “there
are those who think nothing matters but money.” An Okinawan contemporary, Seiei

242
Ryukyu Shimpo, March 18, 1932; June 4, 1910. As cited in Hiyane, “Rafu no jidai 5,” 120, 123. One of
Kenden’s close friends, Shuncho Higa recalls that Kenden also practiced vegetarianism along Tolstoyan
belief.
218
Wakugawa explained the motivation of Kyuyo Club as that the derogatory treatment of
Okinawans in Hawaii incited those educated Okinawans to launch “an enlightenment
movement.” While Chojun Nozato taught an English class at night through Kyuyo Club,
he worked as a reporter of Nippu Jiji. Kenden echoed Nozato, when Nozato defended the
idea of removing the doctrine of “Chukun Aikoku (Loyalty to Emperor and Patriotism)”
from the texts used in Japanese language schools in Hawaii and maintained that the
purpose of education was to create free individuals, not to subject them to chauvinism.
243

Though more research is needed to assess the influence of the Kyuyo Club on
Okinawan workers, there was an incident that suggested Okinawans never remained
subservient. Some 400 Okinawan field hands of the Paia plantation struck on March 20,
1912 for the discharge of a luna and camp policemen, who had intimidated Okinawans by
trying to break up their traditional wedding party.
244

Chapter Conclusion
Importantly, the Japanese strike leaders’ and participants’ ideological stance in
their struggle for racial and economic justice during the first decade of the twentieth
century was unique in many ways. They used their national identity as their main
leverage in mobilizing strikers and supporters, but the invocation of nationalism was not
a separatist or colonialist move like the post Sino-Japanese War agitation. Rather, they
made a gesture toward the Americanization of Japanese. The HWA pamphlet criticized

243
Hiyane, “Rafu no jidai 5,” 119–130; Teruo Hiyane, “Rafu no jidai 6,” Shin Okinawa bungaku, no. 94
(1993), 146–160; Seiei Wakugawa, “A Brief History of Thought Activities of Okinawan in Hawaii,” in
Uchinanchu, ed. Ethnic Studies Oral History Project, 235–238.

244
Pacific Commercial Advertiser, March 21, 1912.
219
power relations in Hawaii as an “undemocratic, un-American condition,” with “plutocrats
and coolies,” and emphasized the desire to become settled laborers, thereby forming “a
thriving and contented middle class—the realization of the high ideal of Americanism.”
So was their dynamic process of class-consciousness formation directed toward that of
middle-class liberalism at this juncture?
Certainly, striking and labor protests could enable people of various nationalities to
gain a deeper understanding of themselves as laborers by recognizing that their strength
lay in collective action of withholding their labor. But this is also an experiential lesson
that Japanese immigrants had carried over from the premigration struggles of peasant
rebellion in Japan also. What is remarkable is the way they intensified the scale of
collectivity through nationalistic solidarity from the bottom. Their demand of equal pay
for equal work was what would benefit all of the ethnic and racial groups in the lowly
paid strata. This challenge against the racially differentiated labor hierarchy was of great
importance. However, it is also true that grasp of the concept of international working
class solidarity was yet to come. Though they certainly understood economic principles
of competition and profits, markets and prices, and production and labor, they had not yet
created a way to organize multiethnic and multiracial body of laborers, who can be
potentially pit against themselves as strikebreakers by the planters.
The truth is that the 1909 Oahu Sugar Strike caused planters to introduce Filipino
laborers as a way to reduce the percentage of Japanese work force in sugar plantations.
The interethnic labor organizing of Japanese and Filipino was yet to come until the 1920
Oahu Sugar Strike. Indeed, it might be impressive that the ideology of nationalism was
220
embodied in a unified Japanese community that was willing to support Japanese workers
financially and spiritually. However, they learned rather harsh historical lessons. First,
not all of the leaders remain on the side of workers. After all, four leaders were pardoned.
Yasutaro Soga, the president of the now most popular newspaper among workers, Nippu
Jiji, went over to side with the capitalist of sugar industry—to the surprise of many—and
came to argue that those who were against the capitalists that were the backbone of
Hawaii’s industry should leave the islands. This meant that there was no longer a
Japanese-language newspaper that represented the interest of the laborers. Then another
leader, Fred Makino felt the need to secure the outlet of the voices of working-class
Japanese, and started Hawaii Hochi.
Second, they had to realize that the Hawaiian society was designed and built upon
their oppression. They did not have political power. Economically, they were embedded
in the labor hierarchy with whites on top, whatever the “in-between” order was. The
corporations of sugar industry (also known as the Big Five: American Factors, C Brewer,
Theo. H. Davies, Castle & Cooke, and Alexander and Baldwin) prospered as agents for
plantations by handling the shipping and sales of sugar, purchasing equipment and
materials, financing expansion, and insuring the operations. They had purchased almost
all the sugar plantations and diversified their business into transportation, utilities,
insurance, banking, and retailing. Through their dominance over Hawaii’s economy, the
haole (white) owners and managers exerted extraordinary power in wages and living
conditions. Socioculturally, their language retention, especially during the later disputes
of the 1920 strike, came to be attacked as the inability of Japanese workers to assimilate
221
into white-centered Hawaiian society. The specific objects of the attack were the
Japanese language press, the Japanese language schools, practice of Buddhism and
Shintoism, picture brides, dual citizenship of the Hawaiian born and so on. With a very
limited channel of submitting grievances, they would again organize a collective bargain
through labor activism in 1920. But this time they would attempt to cooperate with
Filipinos across the ethnic lines.

222
Part 2:
Class Struggles in the Pacific
Labor Movements in Japan and California

223
Chapter 4: Trans-Pacific Movement of Japanese Socialists and Anarchists

This chapter examines groups of Japanese student-laborers, who came together to
study socialism and build a labor movement that contained organizational coherency and
continuity within a geographical network between major cities of the U.S. West Coast in
the first two decades of the twentieth century. San Francisco was their pivot, as it had the
biggest concentration of Japanese immigrants during that time. This community
gradually grew in the 1880s, with Christian institutions, such as the Gospel
Society—which provided many student-laborers with English classes, room and board,
job information, and social havens—at its center. According to Yuji Ichioka’s estimate,
2,500 Japanese resided in San Francisco in 1890. While also attending school, they
worked as newspaper carriers, milk delivery boys, rickshaw men, domestic workers,
dishwashers, window-cleaners, janitors, waiters, and cooks. Live-in domestic workers,
who had time-off during the day to attend school, were called “schoolboys.” Their
entrance into the agricultural field did not begin to increase until the 1890s, when a great
number of Japanese began to arrive at the shore. From 1891 to 1900, 27,440
Japanese—the majority of whom were laborers—were admitted to educational
institutions. From 1901 to 1907, 42,457 more persons were admitted, joined by the
over-38,000 who entered the United States via the Hawaiian Islands.
245

Unlike Hawaii during the nineteenth century, contract labor had been outlawed in
the United States since 1885. Therefore, emigration companies played an insignificant

245
Ichioka, Issei, 9, 22–23, 28.
224
role in the migration of so-called “free immigrants.” The 1891 amendments to the
immigration statute also excluded “prostitutes, idiots, paupers, criminals, bearers of
contagious diseases, and the insane,” in addition to contract laborers. Considered as
potential public charges, these free immigrants had to prove they had possession of at
least $30 upon entry to satisfy immigration officials.
246

The labor immigration of Japanese to the United States had two watershed events.
One was in August of 1900, when the Japanese government, afraid of likely diplomatic
complications hinted at by agitated West Coast officials, prohibited laborers from going
to the continental United States and Canada. As Yasuo Sakata and Geiger argue,
Japanese elites, who still had had a strong sense of caste-like hierarchy and had
internalized the Western gaze, believed that it was “filthy,” “uncivilized,” “indecent”
“lower class Japanese” that made Americans think that Japanese laborers would degrade
their labor and civilization, “like Chinese,” and regard Japanese labor immigration
undesirable. As Ichioka suggests, though, a certain number of laborers undoubtedly
managed to emigrate with student, commercial, and other passports under false pretexts.
The Japanese government loosened restrictions in June 1902 and allowed onetime
laborers, who had returned to Japan, to go back to the United States. Many others used
the Hawaiian Islands as a stepping-stone to the United States, because laborers were still

246
Ibid., 53. Contract-Labor Act, February 26, 1885. United States Congress, Senate, Reports of the
Immigration Commission: Vol. 39, Immigration Legislation (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing
Office, 1911), App. C, 125–126. “It shall be unlawful for any person, company, partnership, or corporation,
in any manner whatsoever, to prepay the transportation, or in any way assist or encourage the importation
or migration of any alien or aliens, any foreigners, into the United States… under contract or agreement,
parole or special, express or implied, made previous to the importation or migration of such alien or aliens,
foreigner or foreigners, to perform labor or service of any kind in the United States.” (Ibid.)
225
able to obtain passports for Hawaii.
247

The second event, which basically closed this loophole, was the combination of the
Executive Order 589, signed by President Theodore Roosevelt on March 17, 1907, and
the Gentlemen’s Agreement. The former stipulated that Japanese or Korean laborers,
skilled and unskilled, who had received passports to go to Mexico, Canada, or Hawaii,
and come from there, be refused permission to enter the continental territory of the
United States. To ascertain the effectiveness of the executive order, the American
government drew up an agreement with the Japanese government. The collective notes
exchanged during their negotiations, known as the Gentlemen’s Agreement, came into
force in the summer of 1908. After this, the only categories of people who the Japanese
government issued passports were for merchants, students, diplomats, and tourists; bona
fide Japanese residents in the United States who returned to visit Japan and wished to go
back to the United States; parents, wives, and children of such residents; and so-called
“settled agriculturalists” who were special farmers bound mainly for Texas.
The Japanese immigrant laborers, who came to the West Coast of the United States,
were relatively dispersed, unlike their countrymen in Hawaii, who lived close together in
camps on the plantations, with close connections to their urban extensions. Those on the
West Coast were without multiple-year contracts, and had relatively more mobility as far
as their geographical scale. These factors contributed to the difficulty and discontinuity in
Japanese immigrants’ organization of labor in the first two decades of the twentieth

247
Ichioka, Issei, 51–53; Yasuo Sakata, “Datsua no shishi to tozasareta hakusekijin no rakuen” in Beikoku
shoki no Nihongo shimbun, ed. Norio Tamura and Shigehiko Shiramizu (Tokyo; Keiso Shobo, 1986), 54–
62.
226
century. Certainly, there are sporadic examples of successful organization of labor strikes,
such as the 1903 Oxnard Sugar Beet Strike by Japanese and Mexican workers, the United
Mine Workers of America whose locals in southern Wyoming admitted Japanese and a
few Chinese coal miners in 1907—though this did not derive from labor solidarity—and
organizing of section hands in Seattle.
248

However, this chapter delves into the community of student-laborer immigrants,
which ultimately became the template for the emergence of the Japanese radical
intellectual community. In short, the labor and socialist movements in Japan and that of
Japanese immigrant communities in North America grew relative to each other. In order
to delve into the significant communications and interactions, this chapter also takes a
trans-Pacific approach to the writing of the history Japanese immigrants’ labor activism
by heeding the movement of ideas and practice. It pays close attention to the relationship
between the political economy of two emerging empires—Japan and the United
States—thereby examining the global growth of capitalism over the Pacific. This chapter
also interweaves the critical analysis of trans-Pacific racial capitalism with a thick
description of what was happening on the ground level.
To give an overview, Fusataro Takano was stimulated by the American Federation
of Labor, which brought the idea of labor unions to Japan for the first time. The concept
of labor unions became a conduit through which Sen Katayama and Shusui Kotoku grew

248
For the details of the 1903 Oxnard Sugar Beet Strike by Japanese and Mexican workers, see Thomas
Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994), esp. Chapter 7; For the details of the United Mine Workers of
America whose locals in southern Wyoming admitted Japanese and a few Chinese coal miners in 1907, see
Ichioka, Issei, 113–125; For the Japanese labor history in Seattle area, see Katsutoshi Kurokawa, America
rodo undo to Nihonjin imin: Seattle ni okeru haiseki to rentai [American Labor Movement and Japanese
Immigrants: Exclusion and Solidarity in Seattle](Okayama: Daigaku kyoiku shuppan, 1998).
227
into socialists. Katayama and Kotoku played significant roles in founding socialist study
groups and organizations among Japanese immigrants in North America. They patiently
tried to educate workers about their economic rights and the power struggles between
capitalists and laborers in this modern world. But the socialist texts that they introduced
from Europe and the United States did not have much to offer when it came to
developing methods on how to fight racism. Katayama, Kotoku, and numerous other
Japanese immigrant workers had to learn how to intervene using their own experiences.
Their growing ideological understanding of racial capitalism is central to the argument of
this chapter, as is the genealogy of organizations of labor activism they founded across
the Pacific.
Two main dimensions of the chapter’s argument are the process of emergence of
“organic intellectuals” and the way those activists tried to understand why the socialist
slogan of international class solidarity, regardless of race and nationality, had not been
easily achieved in America. Employing the mixture of intellectual and social history, this
historical study delves into the dialectics of, rather than the dichotomy of, the discursive
and ideological and the material, experiential, and daily-life levels. Indeed, it often seems
that while intellectuals engaged in theoretical discussion regarding the direction of social
movement, ordinary people and workers experienced these social problems first-hand,
with or without referring to intellectuals. This chapter will examine the gap between
socialist or anarchist intellectuals and ordinary workers as a working space—one where
they had to come together somehow.
Second, I also explain when and how Japanese socialists and anarchists came to
228
understand racism, and what specificities of their experience enabled them to see racism
as an enormous force that pushed its discriminatory and differentiating functions through
political, economic, legal, and social institutions. Indeed, many Japanese student and
journalist immigrants experienced domestic labor, as well as other menial labor. But, they
had to realize that the theory they absorbed from Western socialist texts tended to
disclose class-consciousness, not as it was, but as it should have been, and also learned
that class-consciousness tended to be handled more frequently with politico-cultural
terms of nationalism, racism, and Americanism. Workers, too, had to learn, from
belonging to labor unions, a larger picture of capitalist exploitation and its intersection
with racial discrimination. It took a long time for Japanese immigrants to learn how
important the practice of multi-racial and multi-ethnic labor organizing was and is. In that
sense, this chapter is indispensable to the next two chapters. After the accumulation of
racial oppression, state violence, and struggle against them at their worksites, the new
generation of organic intellectuals was able to work in the late 1920s and 1930s in the
Communist labor movement.

Fusataro Takano and Shokko Giyukai
Fusataro Takano organized Shokko Giyukai (The Friends of Labor) with Jo
Tsunetaro, Sawada Hannosuke, Eitaro Hirano, Buzen Muto, and Genzo Kinoshita in July
of 1891 in San Francisco. It was formed “to have Japanese people understand the benefit
of labor unionism . . . and to correct the wrong and harmful in the world of laborers.”
They held meetings on the first and third Saturdays of every month at 1108 Mission
229
Street, where Jo managed his shoe repair business, and Sawada managed his tailoring
business. They intended to introduce labor unionism to Japan, and anticipated organizing
workers there. What Takano and others put into practice six years later in Japan, in the
formation of Rodo Kumiai Kiseikai (Society for the Promotion of Trade-Unions), was
based on these ideas, which Takano began to formulate in the United States.
249

Takano was essentially an economic nationalist and entrepreneur, as reflected in
the way Takano understood labor unionism. First, he called machines, immigrants, and
convict labor the “three enemies of North American laborers” because they heightened
the unemployment rate. While he himself was an immigrant to the United States, he
never considered organizing Japanese immigrant workers to pursue economic justice on
American land. Instead, he tried to apply labor unionism to Japanese society. He was not
aware of the implications of Asian exclusion from the labor market, labor union
membership, or immigration demanded by American labor unions, because in his mind,
he was not an “uncivilized” laborer. Second, he argued that striking was an indispensable
means for workers to stand on equal ground with capitalists, since many workers could
not always freely move on to other employment, stating, “[A] strike is the only way to
protect the rights of workers.” Yet he believed that the increase of the labor unions’
increased power led to “more peaceful relations between labor and capital” and that this
was “more preferable than frequent strikes that impose much physical and financial

249
Kazuo Nimura, Rodo ha shinsei nari ketsugo ha seiryoku nari: Takano Fusataro to sono jidai [Labor is
Sacred, Union is Power: Fusataro Takano and His Time] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2008), 86–90. Since
Yuji Ichioka wrote Issei back in 1980s, recent work in Japanese language on Issei labor activists, socialists
and anarchists have not been integrated into the work written in English language. Vice versa, the historical
analysis of racial formations in the U.S. has not been sufficiently introduced to the scholarship in Japan on
the early Japanese socialists, many of whom actually sojourned for several years or lived long years in the
U.S.
230
burden on the side of workers.”
Third, when it came to the condition of laborers in Japan, he usually emphasized
the ignorance of laborers and the need to educate them, rather than make them experience
the dominance and hegemony doled out by capitalists, which was harmful to laborers.
“Not only that Japanese workers are of no education, but also they are not able to send
their children to school with their income. Even disabled children have to work. Isn’t this
such a misfortune for Japanese empire?” he wrote. While he maintained “[T]o unite
workers is the only source of power,” he showed a sense of elitism by saying
“[P]rominent intellectuals need to educate workers because they do not have the
capability of improving themselves.”
Fourth, he saw the rationale for the movement for an eight-hour workday, which he
theorized would allow workers to have more time for education and in turn would
strengthen the workers’ movement. He also thought the shortening of work time would
lead to a decline in the unemployment rate, which suggested an idea close to work
sharing.
Fifth, he interpreted the state-level protective regulations regarding safety and
duration in labor conditions as what labor unionism had achieved in the United States.
But he also argued that workers would have liked to have “direct benefit as well as
indirect ones.” Direct benefits were, he explained, “offered through a cooperative. Labor
unions collect funds to financially help members or their family in case that members
experience sickness, death, and other misfortune including fire.” The aspect of a mutual
aid society would be Takano’s main focus when he attempted to take his ideas back to
231
Japan.
250

Takano was essentially a nationalist entrepreneur who did not have any antagonism
toward capitalists. Born in 1869 to a merchant family in Nagasaki, and raised in Tokyo as
one of the first generations to experience the modern school system, which emphasized
Western knowledge rather than Confucian tradition, Fusataro Takano had to struggle to
support his family after his father passed away in 1879. He did this by working at his
uncle’s hotel for ship travelers in Yokohama, which was, at that time, the only open-door
port of Japan. Like many other youths in Yokohama, Fusatoro aspired to study in
America, after hearing many stories from the travelers who stayed at the hotel. He
worked during the day and attended Yokohama Commercial Law School at night, and
there became imbued with economic nationalism, which was advocated by Yukichi
Fukuzawa through his teacher Susumu Misawa. Takano witnessed Western dominancy in
the business of import and export. In the trade route through Yokohama, all the goods
had to go through foreign merchants. As a matter of fact, Western captains predominantly
occupied the jobs of steering the ships going to foreign countries even when Japanese
people owned the ships. Takano thought that economic nationalism was intended to,
“push this external force back and allow Japan to truly be independent.” He formed a
youth group called Kogakukai in order to collectively buy books, which were very
expensive at that time, and hold a lecture series on such themes as “Free Trade and
Protect Trade” and “Should foreigners be allowed to live outside of concessions in

250
I summarized his eleven articles titled “Description of Laborers’ Society in the United States” that he
contributed to Yomiuri Shimbun between April and June 27
th
, 1890. He wrote them while he was in Tacoma.
As quoted in Nimura, Rodo ha shinsei nari, 92–94.
232
Yokohama?” Interestingly, along the line of the idea of economic independence, one of
the lecturers, Sanae Takada, talked about, “whether Ireland has the right of independence
from Britain,” though its impact on Takano’s line of thinking is unknown. Growing up in
Tokyo and Yokohama, the center of Meiji’s political economy, Takano’s interest was not
in the impoverished conditions of life in the Japanese hinterland. He focused his gaze on
political and economic sovereignty, which led him to liberal ideas of freedom of
economic activity. When his uncle died in 1886 due to a Cholera outbreak in Yokohama,
he decided to go to San Francisco with the dream of becoming a successful
entrepreneur.
251

Takano was the type of person who kept changing his abode, and sought out any
new and better opportunities he could, as he concomitantly managed his finances
somewhat recklessly. He worked hard as a “schoolboy” in San Francisco, worked at a
sawmill in Point Arena, Mendocino County, failed to keep a general shop he opened in
San Francisco, moved to Seattle to work as a waiter, and worked as a manager of a
Japanese-owned restaurant called the “Chop House” in Tacoma, Washington. He moved
back to San Francisco again to enroll in San Francisco Commercial School (for free)
while he juggled jobs as a schoolboy, a waiter at a Japanese restaurant, and a translator
for the Immigration Bureau. Despite his debt and his failure as a shop owner in San
Francisco two years earlier, he started planning to become involved in forestry and run a
sawmill in Japan. He pursued this future as an entrepreneur while also meeting his

251
Ibid., 1–46.
233
obligation of paying for his young brother’s school tuition.
252

Kazuo Nimura, a biographer of Takano, argues that it was not Takano’s experience
as a worker, but a nationalist belief in the need for Japanese prosperity that ignited his
interest in labor unions. Takano once wrote, “I advocate for the need of starting a labor
movement in Japan not because the living conditions of laborers are miserable and
adversarial. It is not because of humanitarian emotion either. I insist on the need of a
labor movement because Japan needs it to further prosper.” With an optimistic belief in
modern civilization and without much knowledge about how capital is incremented
through layers of exploitation, he simply thought labor unions had brought about the
wealth he saw American laborers enjoy. By the word “Americans,” Takano meant whites.
Now how did Takano understand race?
253

White supremacy seems to have been taken for granted in Takano’s eyes. As
Yasuo Sakata argued, the majority of Japanese government officials—including consuls,
ministers, and Japanese immigrants in San Francisco—deemed that “the immigration
problem is not a race problem” and that, along the same perception, the Chinese problem
is not a Japanese problem, until at least the San Francisco dailies began to harshly
criticize the increase of Japanese laborers in April of 1892. Takano was deeply embedded
in this discourse as well. With a great capacity to speak and communicate in English, he
was relatively quick to adapt to and also willing to accept conditions of the civilized
country. The United States, after all, was broadcast as a place where one could gain

252
Ibid., 52–78, 84.

253
Ibid., 68–9.
234
economic success and as it was, many Japanese elites had projected that idealized
American image. He even considered the Chinese Exclusion Act as proof of “what
(white) American laborers have accomplished through the political power of labor
organizations” and saw the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor,
which had been central to California’s anti-Chinese (and later, in the latter’s case, the
anti-Japanese movement), in a positive light. Takano’s nationalist view, aligned with the
idealization of western “civilization,” must have not only blinded him to the harshest
reality of racial discrimination against the Chinese, but also made him think he was
somewhere further up on the ladder of Westernization through differentiating himself
from being Chinese. In a letter to his mother, written in 1887 while he worked and lived
with a white family in Point Arena, he stated, “Fortunately, people here love the Japanese
as much as they hate the Chinese. If a Chinese makes a mistake, they will beat him. If a
Japanese does, they will just say ‘Alright, alright’ and let him go.” Even his
correspondence with a woman named Lucy Clark confirmed this; in Tacoma, she wrote,
“When you come back [to Tacoma], I wish the Chinese would not bother us . . . Henry
[Takano’s nickname], as you do, I wish there were no Chinese.” This shows that Takano
shared whites’ hostility toward Chinese and talked about it in casual correspondence and
in daily conversations.
254

Though in his personal perception Takano might have been treated nicely under the
veil of white paternalism, it probably did not mean that he had no idea Japanese suffered
economic discrimination and hostility from white people. One of the founders of the

254
Ibid., 70, 54, 111–112. In a letter to his mother, Takano also mentioned a farce that whites played with
blackened face, which he did not know as minstrel show.
235
Shokko Giyukai, Tsunetaro Jo, whom Takano met in the autumn of 1888 in San Francisco,
opened a small shoe shop with Tadayoshi Sekine on Mission Street in 1889. After they
contracted with a Japanese manufacturer, the Boot and Shoemakers’ White Labor League
pressured Jo and Sekine to remove the trademark from the Japanese-produced shoes and
to break their contract with them. Jo and Sekine lost their jobs and organized Nihonjin
Kutsuko Domeikai (Japanese Shoemakers’ League) as a defensive reaction in 1892. The
formation of Nihonjin Kutsuko Domeikai was one year after Takano and Jo founded
Shokko Giyukai, which suggests that Takano must have been aware of the fact his friend
had succumbed to white union hostility. Nihonjin Kutsuko Domeikai was a kind of guild
centered on the shoe repair trade that coordinated to avoid competition between Japanese
shoe workers.
255

Rather than interpret the difficulty of starting business in the United States as proof
of racially differentiated vulnerability imposed and practiced in the labor market, Takano
attributed it to what he called “national characters.” In his response to his brother’s letter,
which criticized Fusataro’s reckless plan to open a sawmill and venture into the forestry
industry in Japan despite his debt, he argued that the examples of business failures of
Japanese who had lived for a long time or had sufficient funds in the United States
attested to the Japanese national character that was reflected in the rough planning and
small scale of their entrepreneurship efforts. In contrast, he continues, “Jewish and
Chinese merchants succeeded in business despite the racial discrimination because their
national characters are similar to that of Americans.” Although he did not articulate what

255
Ibid., 70; Ichioka, Issei, 94–95.
236
he believed the American national character was—and seemed contradictory, having
despised Chinese people around him but praised an archetypical Chinese national
character reflected in their business successes—he went so far as to write “[W]e have to
stop being Japanese and become American in order to start business in the U.S.”
256

Before he returned to Japan—by working as a seaman on the U.S. Navy ship,
Vermont—Takano was influenced by the conservative idea of class harmony. Through
his encounters with books like The Labor Movement: Problem of Today, by George
McNeill, and Wealth and Progress, by George Gunton, he came to believe that “the
increase of wealth of working class will not be achieved by reducing the wealth of the
other class, but by increasing the gross wealth of the society. . . . The reduction of work
hours [to eight hours a day] will lead to more chances to consume, which ultimately is
beneficial to both classes.” In 1893, Takano connected this to his economic nationalism
by contributing an article to Tokyo Keizai Zasshi (The Tokyo Economist) in which he had
written, “it is necessary to improve workers’ living conditions and stimulate consumption
in order to increase the wealth of a country, Japan. . . . The amount of national
consumption corresponds to the level of social life that most of its citizens have, i.e.
workers. You can improve the social condition of life by educating laborers through labor
unions, disseminating the system of free compulsory education, limiting working hours
by law, and limiting child and woman’s labor.” Although it was based on a partial theory
that reduced people to consumers and distracted attention from people’s rights as workers

256
Nimura, Rodo ha Shinsei nari, 78–81. Scott Sandage’s Born Losers can articulate the way Takano’s
entrepreneurial dream was well aligned with ‘American Dream’ discourse, social ladder with broken rungs.
See Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press, 2005).
237
and producers, what Takano did, practically, at his return to Japan in 1896, was lay the
foundation of the first Japanese labor union.
257

American Federation of Labor and Anti-Asian Movement in the West Coast
Before and during a year and a half of service on the Vermont, from November,
1894 to June, 1896, Takano made inquiries to the American Federation of Labor and the
Knights of Labor regarding what organizational form he should take in Japan. He was
oscillating between forming trade unions organized along exclusive craft lines or on an
industrial basis. His concern was whether small trade unions, jumbled up and without
sufficient education of workers, could be effective or not. On the same issue, he also
inquired to the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, the Stokers’ Union,
the industrial-based American Railroad Union—which recently fought nationwide
railroad strike, the Pullman Strike of 1894—and the American Cigar Manufacturer Union.
Takano especially asked the last entity for details of the mutual aid system. He was
advised that (1) a union should start with a few benefits that it could manage (allowances
for strikes, sickness, travel, death, and unemployment); ( 2) funds should be integrated
into one account, rather than separate ones; (3) every union member must join the mutual
aid programs, and; (4) Takano’s union should decide the amount of dues that were fair
and doable in the specific conditions of Japanese workers.
258

His correspondence in this period suggests that he had not been aware of the

257
Nimura, Rodo ha shinsei nari, 105–110.

258
Ibid., 123–128.
238
anti-Chinese and, more recently, anti-Japanese campaigns of the AFL and Knights of
Labor. The Knights grafted purges of the Chinese from the white labor movement in the
early 1880s and promised to unite as many workers as possible, except the Chinese. Led
by Millard Fillmore Gardner, the Knights organized assemblies from Crescent City down
to the Mendocino County line. While Takano was in Point Arena, Mendocino County, he
found a book by George McNeill, who was a Knights of Labor advocate. Although it is
unknown what kind of interaction Takano had with any members of the Knights of Labor,
Jean Pfaelzer wrote in her book, Driven Out, a meticulously researched work on Chinese
exclusion, that, “Humboldt County organizers visit mills along the coast in Mendocino,
Gualala, and Point Arena, demanding that they employ only white men. Point Arena is
pressured not to support any man running for office who employs Chinese help” in
March 1886, a year before Takano’s arrival there. There is no evidence that the Japanese
immigrant press followed the news on the on-going lawsuit, Wing Hing v. City of Eureka,
in which the Chinese boldly and justly sought redress and reparation after the numerous
roundups for racial violence, economic loss, property loss, and dignity of the community
they held dear. An article of Dai Jukyu Seiki, a newspaper issued by the Japanese Patriot
League, a small group of political exiles of about thirty young men who had participated
in the People’s Rights Movement in Japan, described Chinese immigrants as “people who
only had moneymaking in their mind,” thereby differentiating from themselves, who
“came here to pursue knowledge.” Without knowing the fact that many Chinese, expelled
by roundups by whites in numerous West Coast towns, sought refuge in San Francisco,
those Japanese wondered “why the number of Chinese in this city are still increasing
239
even after the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act?”
259

As the number of Japanese laborers increased, and the immigration office rejected
the entrance of many alleged Japanese paupers after the 1891 amendment to the
immigration law, San Francisco dailies like Examiner, Call, and Bulletin started their
nativist attack against Japanese immigrants in late April, 1892. A Bulletin issue argued
that “Japanese students work as domestic workers and have deprived white female
workers of their jobs.” A famous anti-Chinese labor leader, Dennis Kearney, who spoke
anti-Japanese rhetoric in his oratory on the streets, joined the nativist presses. In this
upsurge of anti-Japanese agitation, the AFL, which had opposed Chinese immigration in
openly racist terms, clearly opposed Japanese affiliation in the 1903 Oxnard Beet Strike.
The AFL passed the 1904 resolution calling for the 1902 Chinese Exclusion Act (twice
extended since 1882) to be amended to include Koreans and Japanese . As a historian,
Yuji Ichioka, once argued, the correspondent articles written by Takano in AFL’s organ,
American Federationist and Coast Seamen’s Journal (organ of the International
Seamen’s Union of the Pacific, an AFL-affiliated union headquartered in San Francisco)
between 1894 and 1899, could have helped Samuel Gompers and others to understand
that “Japanese were interested in modern labor problems and had actually started their

259
Jean Pfaelzer, Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2007), 198–209, 276; Dai Jukyu Seiki, July 13, 1888. A scholar, Katsuhiro Arai
discovered the earliest Japanese immigrant newspapers published by Japanese Patriot League, a small
group of political exiles of about 30 young men, who had participated in the People’s Rights Movement in
Japan. Because they escaped from the oppression of freedom of speech by the Japanese government, they
saw the U.S. as a land of freedom and thus kept sending their newspapers into Japan despite the
suppression of the circulation. The members of Patriot League include Den (Tsutau) Sugawara, Tokuji
Watari, Masao Yamato, Masatsugu Ishizuka, Terutake Hinata, Zenro Hirota, Yuya Yamaguchi, and others.
Some of them would later start emigration companies to bring Japanese emigrants to Hawaii. See Sakata,
“Datsua no shishi,” 113–123; Ichioka, Issei, 14–16, 19–22.
240
own labor movement.” However, Takano’s letters in no way changed Gompers’ or the
AFL’s anti-Japanese policy.
260

A strike in California epitomizes the ambiguous position of Japanese laborers at
this time; they were on both sides—the strikers and the scabs. In September, 1893, white
and Japanese pickers halted labor in the hop fields near Sacramento, reasoning that they
could not live on the same wage level as that of Chinese workers. Decaying vegetables
were left in piles on the streets. Then, 300 white, Japanese, Mexican, and Mission Indians
were introduced as scabs. In March of 1894, hostilities, in the form of outright mob
violence, turned against newly arrived Japanese workers. A white mob in the town of
Winters (on the outskirts of Sacramento) looked antagonistically on both recent Japanese
immigrants and Chinese farmworkers, who accepted lower wages than whites. In April, a
crowd grabbed a Japanese man at random, brutalized him, and threw him from a bridge.
The next day, white citizens from Winters informed ranchers that they must fire their
Chinese and Japanese workers. But ranchers, desperate for cheap field labor, refused.
Letters of law clarified where Japanese stood in relation to American citizenry and white
society. In June 1894, in the case of Sheblato Saito, the United States Circuit Court
denied citizenship to Japanese immigrants with an argument that naturalization was
available only to “aliens being free white persons, and to aliens of African nativity . . .
and descent.” A Japanese person, “like the Chinese, belong[s] to the Mongolian race” and

260
There are so many anti-Japanese articles published around this time, but for the examples of the earliest
ones, see Examiner, April 28, 1892; Call, April 29, 1892; Bulletin, May 4, 1892; Yasuo Sakata, “Datsua no
shishi,” 129–138; Pfaelzer, Driven Out, 150–152; Ichioka, Issei, 99–102. In its 1893 national convention,
AFL asserted that the Chinese “are a degraded people, and bring with them nothing but filth, vice and
disease.” (Ibid.)
241
did not constitute a “white person.”
261

Tekko Kumiai (Iron Workers’ Union) and Sen Katayama’s Trajectory
Takano left the West Coast for Massachusetts in 1893, and left Massachusetts for
New York in 1894, and likely evaded this upsurge of anti-Japanese labor propaganda in
the Bay Area. Without having experienced (probably) any serious racist confrontation
against the Japanese in America, Takano proudly started applying the American
knowledge of labor unions he had obtained to emergent Japanese industrial workers.
After he worked as a translator for the Daily Advertiser in Yokohama in the fall of 1896,
Takano reconnected with Tsunetaro Jo and Hannosuke Sawada in Tokyo, and crafted a
pamphlet titled “You, Factory Hands!” They distributed it at Takano’s March 22, 1897,
lecture to twenty-six guilds of construction workers, carpenters, plasterers, stonemasons,
casters, blacksmiths, printers, bookbinders, and others. In June, Takano instructed and
supported a strike by 200 shipwrights in Yokohama and two surrounding counties.
Encouraged by the feedback from shipwrights after the first lecture, they decided to
conduct more public lectures, which were a kind of leisure activity at a time when there
were far fewer entertainment and cultural options. At a public lecture at the YMCA at
Kanda, Sen Katayama joined Jo and Takano as a speaker in front of an audience of 1200.
Soon after, they organized the Rodo Kumiai Kiseikai in July and the first industrial union,
the Tekko Kumiai (Iron Workers’ Union) in December. Importantly, they launched the
Rodo Sekai (Labor World) and the first labor journal under the editorship of Sen

261
Pfaelzer, Driven Out, 321–322; Sacramento Bee, September 19, 1893; Los Angeles Evening Express,
September 19, 1893; San Francisco Chronicle, April 13, 1894; June 28, 1894.
242
Katayama.
262

Sen Katayama had a uniquely different path from that of Takano. While Takano
grew up in a merchant family in port cities like Nagasaki and Tokyo-Yokohama, (and
dreamed of becoming a successful entrepreneur), Katayama grew up in a small farming
village in the Okayama prefecture, and, as Chapter 1 explores, came to Tokyo in 1881,
aspiring to acquire a higher education. But he struggled to support himself, working as an
assistant typesetter at a print shop. He found himself frustrated at Oka Juku, a small
Confucian preparatory school in Tokyo, because he realized that the prospect of earning a
respectable livelihood as a teacher of the Confucian classics is little. However, he found a
fateful friendship with Seishichi Iwasaki, the nephew of Yataro Iwasaki, whose shipping
empire became the Mitsubishi holding company, one of the “Big Four” of the financial
oligarchies, or zaibatsu. When he read a letter from Seishichi Iwasaki, who had been in
the United States since the summer of 1884, saying “poverty was no barrier to a higher
education,” Katayama decided to go to San Francisco to “work one’s way through
college” as Iwasaki’s letter suggested. His humbler start as a schoolboy is epitomized in
the episode that he only had a Mexican peso in his pocket and was wearing borrowed
Western clothes upon his arrival to San Francisco.
263

Takano and Katayama’s actions in America also contrast. Takano’s main interest
was in business, as he worked various jobs and briefly attended San Francisco
Commercial School, and he quickly changed his places of living with the idea that the

262
Nimura, Rodo ha shinsei nari, 156–171.

263
Hyman Kublin, Asian Revolutionary: The Life of Sen Katayama (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1964), 48.
243
new move would open up a new “possibility” in his life. He moved around, not only
between San Francisco, Tacoma, Seattle, and Point Arena, but also two return trips to
Japan and other sojourns in Chicago and New York. In contrast, Katayama stubbornly
and patiently tried to reach a goal once he set it. Katayama spent eight years (from
January 1887 to May 1895) finishing his degrees. There are two things to note from his
period of attendance at Hopkins Academy in Oakland, California, Maryville College in
Tennessee, Grinnell College in Iowa, Andover Theological Seminary and Yale
University, Theology department. One is race, and the other is his conversion to
Christianity, through which his interest in social problems grew.
264

Katayama recorded his experiences of hostility and bears witness to discrimination
against blacks in one of his autobiographies, Jiden. He quickly became an object of racial
hostility as an “Oriental” by Americans. At Hopkins Academy, where he studied in 1887,
his much younger white classmates called him “Kitty” with ridicule, and sometimes beat
him. Sometimes Katayama had to “react by force” and defend himself. After bearing
eleven months of incessant mockery, he transferred to Maryville College in Tennessee.
Although he himself encountered little embarrassments when he was asked “if Japanese
are still cannibalistic,” he was very critical of the mistreatment of African Americans. He
wrote “[I]n Maryville, a village in the ex-slave state . . . people are so bigoted that I
suspect their contempt for Negro is by nature.” “Maryville College was originally
established by,” Katayama continued, “the Northern donors, who envisioned an
education for poor whites and Negroes. . . . [However] There are always only a few

264
Nimura, Rodo ha shinsei nari, 184–5. Takano later moved onto China to start his business after the
decline of his labor organizations in Japan.
244
Negro students. . . . I was always uncomfortable with how unfairly both professors and
students treat Negro students.” Katayama’s experience poses a crucial question: When
did Japanese socialists and anarchists come to experientially understand racism, and what
specificities of their experiences enabled them realize racism as an encompassing force
that articulated its discriminatory and differentiating function through political, economic,
legal and social institutions?
265

When Takano asked Katayama to give a speech at the abovementioned public
meeting in 1897, Katayama was a Christian reformist without much knowledge of
socialism or the labor movement—not to mention he had not considered race as the main
problem of modern society yet. Christianity had become a conduit of his interest into the
social problem. Although he had initially “wanted to find a way to ask God, instead of
ancestral spirits that were too far away, to keep him alive in America” and get “solace for
hunger and hard labor,” his eyes were opened wide when he took Social Economics, a
course newly added by Professor William Jewett Tucker at Andover Theological
Seminary. Concerned with the living conditions of the growing number of laborers in
rapidly industrializing urban America, Tucker and his student Robert Archey Woods
studied the settlement house movement in England and opened Andover House in the
South End district of Boston. They renamed it the South End Settlement House five years
later. Katayama closely followed their efforts and even decided to spend the vacation

265
Sen Katayama, Jiden [Autobiography](Tokyo: Kaizosha, 1922), 208–218. Kublin, Asian Revolutionary,
56–57. It is not clear whether he regarded his personal incidents and discrimination against blacks in a
larger social context of racism as a larger social force at that time. In other words, this autobiography was
retrospectively written later in his life in 1922 when he had more profound understanding of racism and
class struggle as seen in his approach to African diasporic intellectual-activists like Otto Huiswood and
Garveyites in New York around this time. We will discuss this in the sixth chapter.
245
period of the summer of 1894 in England with his classmate Rollin Lynde Hartt. He
studied how institutions such as Toynbee Hall, Oxford House, and the recently founded
Salvation Army attempted to solve the problems of poverty, disease, juvenile
delinquency, alcoholism, and prostitution. The settlement houses usually provided
services, including daycare, education, and healthcare, to improve the lives of the poor.
There, middle-class “settlement” workers would live with their low-income neighbors to
alleviate their poverty. Though Katayama realized there was a need for settlement houses
and neighborhood associations in the slums, which ultimately led him to establish
(arguably the first) settlement house in Japan—Kingsley Hall in Kanda, Tokyo—after his
return there, he would later criticize that philanthropic social reform program on the basis
that it depended on the rich and did not necessarily lend self-empowerment to the poor.
266

Takano and Katayama were looking at Japan, whose capitalist transformation had
been propelled by the Sino-Japanese War (1894-5). In the early 1890s, Japan
strengthened its control over Korea. When Korean governors of the Pyongan and
Hamgyong regions banned the export of rice because of poor rice crops in 1889, the
Japanese government forced Korea to lift the ban. Japan also deprived Korea of gold by
forcibly obtaining gold through yen paper money, which Japan made Korea allow the use

266
Satoshi Ohara, Katayama Sen no shiso to Taigyaku Jiken [Sen Katayama’s Thoughts and High Treason
Incident](Tokyo: Ronsosha, 1995), 16; Kublin, Asian Revolutionary, 81–84. His visit to the city of
Glasgow, however, gave him a push toward socialist vision. “Slums had been cleared away and municipal
housing had been erected for the poor. The private supply of water had been abolished; the water works
being owned by the city. With reform of the sewage system, waste matter was converted into fertilizer. The
refuse of the community was used as fuel for the production of electric power. The normal house-rent for
workers was set at one-fifth the amount of their wages…And at just the time I arrived in Glasgow the local
transit lines were being taken over from the private companies without compensation and being placed
under municipal management.” As to Katayama’s municipal socialism, see Eitaro Kishimoto, Nihon rodo
undo shi (Tokyo: Kobundo, 1950), 34–36.
246
of in the Japan-Korea Treaty of 1876. The gold Japan gained from Korea amounted to 68
percent of imported gold by 1893, and played a key role in establishing the gold standard
system in Japan, which was key in its relationship to Western powers. When the Donghak
Peasant Rebellion spread all over Korea in 1894, the Korean government requested Qing
China to dispatch the military to suppress the rebellion. Soon after, the Japanese military
occupied the Korean royal palace and carried out a coups d’etat. Two days later, the
Japanese Navy bombarded Chinese Navy ships near Pungdo, without a proclamation of
war.
267

The war changed interethnic relationships in Japan. Kanson Arahata, who was born
and raised in Yokohama and would later become a socialist activist, recalls in his
autobiography that, “before the war, everybody in the port town held Chinese fabric
venders dear. They always come with a big bundle wrapped with a Furoshiki cloth during
spring time.” The then-seven-year old boy, Arahata, was totally puzzled by the
war-drawn hatred and hostility toward Chinese. He remembers that the famous drama of
that time featured a Chinese father, who has to leave Japan for China, and his Japanese
wife . . . or a son who is going to the war as a Japanese soldier. Hitoshi Yamakawa, who
would be also a socialist activist, described a change in his hometown of Kurashiki,
Okayama with a sense of induced enthusiasm. “A year before I graduated from
elementary school, the Sino-Japanese war started. . . . Many from my town went to the
war. . . . However, it was not that I heard gunshots or saw enemy planes flying. The war
was something going on far, far away and I felt nothing about it in my immediate

267
Toshio Itoya, Kotoku Shusui kenkyu [Shusui Kotoku Studies](Tokyo: Aoki shoten, 1967), 102–104.
247
environment. . . . In school, teachers made us sing patriotic songs. . . . The victory
celebration was just like other seasonal festivals of the town.” It is important to clarify
that many socialists of this generation knew the pre-Sino-Japanese war period when no
anti-Chinese sentiment was prevalent. But the economic change brought about by the war
was more visible.
268

During and after the Sino-Japanese War, the military industry grew a great deal and
the indemnity of 3,6000,0000 yen also stimulated the economy. The number of factories
increased from about 6,000, in 1894, to approximately 10,000, in 1904. The number of
laborers increased, too, from 140,000 male workers and 239,000 female workers in 1894
to 210,000 male workers and 310,000 female workers in 1904. Gennosuke Yokoyama
wrote in his Nihon no Kaso Shakai (Underclass in Japan), published in 1899, “the
increase in prices after the Sino-Japanese War caused further impoverishment of
Japanese underclass, especially those wage workers.” Spontaneous labor strikes without
any coordinating unions began to occur more frequently, especially after late 1896.
269

The Rodo Kumiai Kiseikai and the Tekko Kumiai were organized in 1897 by
Takano, Katayama, and others, and were considered to be two wheels of the same vehicle.
They put a great deal of weight on publicity tours of the coastal industrial areas of Tokyo
and Yokohama and in the Northern region of the Japanese mainland, campaigned for the
revision of factory legislation, and started a cooperative in late 1898. The number of
Tekko Kumiai membership soared up to 2.717 that year, most of whom were

268
Ohama, Shomin no mita Nisshin Nichiro Senso, 49–52.

269
Rodo Undo Shiryo Iinkai, ed., Nihon rodo undo shiryo [Historical Record of Japanese Labor
Movement], vol. 10 (Tokyo: Rodo undo shiryo iinkai, 1959); Kishimoto, Nihon Rodo Undo-shi; Kazuo
Okochi, Reimeiki Nihon no rodo undo [Labor Movement at its Dawn](Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1952).
248
metalworkers at the Ammunition and Weaponry Factories of the Japanese Military in
Tokyo and Yokosuka.
270

Tekko Kumiai was supposed to be an industrial-based union and invited mechanics,
blacksmiths, can-makers, casters, model-makers, copper-processors, ironworkers,
electricians, stokers and engine drivers at ironworks. There were several reasons that
metalworkers at the Ammunition and Weaponry Factories of the Japanese Military—who
earned higher wages than most workers of that time—occupied the majority of its
membership. Obviously, workers’ economic destitution and working conditions do not
explain this. Rather, they intended to regain the admired social status traditional
craftsmen had that they themselves did not. Managerial-level workers, in an attempt to
establish their status against the younger supervisors who had just gradated from the
military academy, led other metal workers of the factories to join the union. Even the
authorities did not regard labor unions as militant or oppositional.
271

Tekko Kumiai also tried to organize train drivers and stokers of the Nittetsu, a
private railroad company that was larger than the Japanese nationally owned railroad.
Nittetsu workers struck for better treatment and wages by stopping all the trains from
Aomori to Ueno beginning February 24, 1898, even though the company tried to repress
it by firing the strike’s leaders, Rokujiro Ishida and Hikotaro Yasui. When instead the
strike seemed to spread to other railroad companies, the Nittetsu Company promised to
meet the protestors’ demands. Tekko Kumiai was a big supporter of these workers, and

270
Teiichi Sakuma was another person who contributed to the foundation of the two organizations. He was
also a founder of Kissa Emigration Company. See Toyohara, Sakuma Teiichi shoden.

271
Nimura, Rodo ha shinsei nari, 209–210.
249
that was the reason why Katayama and others toured the Tohoku (Northern) region.
Despite the invitation to join the Tekko Kumiai, the Nittetsu railroad workers voted
against it because they did not want to split their budget.
272

Along with their demand for an act that stipulated workers’ right to unite, assemble
and negotiate, Rodo Kumiai Kiseikai campaigned for factory legislation that banned child
labor for children younger than 10 years old, created limits on female labor and juvenile
labor (to keep them from working night shifts), and obligated factory owners to
compensate any injuries during work. Although their draft was passed at the preparatory
meeting of the Department of Agriculture and Commerce, the Okuma cabinet was in
collapse and the succeeding administration of Aritomo Yamagata crashed it. It was not
until 1911 that the factory legislation passed. It went into force in 1916.
273

In November 1898, Takano stepped down from the executive position of both
Rodo Kumiai Kiseikai and Tekko Kumiai. In December, he started a cooperative shop
that targeted the workers of the third branch of Tekko Kumiai in Yokohama. His
reasoning was that, although membership increased, 40 percent did not pay the dues,
which implied that mutual aid for workmen’s compensation did not attract healthy
workers, and that many of them did not appreciate the educational role of the union

272
Ibid., 222.

273
Ibid., 223–6. Their legislation draft includes 1) factories of more than five workers have to observe the
factory legislation regarding sanitation and work hour instead of government draft’s “fifty workers” since
smaller factories usually have worse condition, 2) deletion of “special exception can be permitted” from the
government’s draft on the prohibition of child labor younger than 10, 3) no exception to the limit of eight
hour labor per day for workers younger than 14, 4) factory workers of 14 years or up are not allowed to
work for more than 10 hours, 5) a non-work day must be given every week instead of twice a month, 6) in
case any workers younger than 14 have not finished their elementary education, factory owners are
obligated to have them finish. If violated, the employers have to pay fine of 200 yen, 7) in case of death or
injuries of an employee caused deliberately by third party (neither professional negligence nor natural
calamity) the cost of funeral must be paid by employer.
250
regarding workers’ rights. “At this stage of immature labor movement and weak
organization,” Takano analyzes, “the idea that united workers can collectively negotiate
for higher wage is nothing but a dream. . . . To solidify the engagement of workers in the
union, we need to offer what meets their direct interest.” In Takano’s mind, that was
provisions of daily necessities through a cooperative at more affordable prices during the
price increase. As Kazuo Nimura points out, the fact that Takano worked for both
organizations without any salary and supported himself by contributing articles to
newspapers made him turn to the cooperative project, his new entrepreneurial venture, at
the beginning of his new marriage life.
274

Two changes, both internal and external, led Takano and Katayama’s organizations
to decline around the turn of the century. For one, Takano and Katayama slowly diverged
in their ideological stances. For another, police started to prevent workers from marching
and demonstrating, and the Public Peace Preservation Act of 1900 reinforced police
repression on labor activism. Since Katayama started Shakaishugi Kenkyukai (Socialist
Study Society) with Iso Abe and Shusui Kotoku in October 1898, Katayama had invited
his socialist comrades to contribute their writings to Rodo Sekai, which he edited. Takano
expressed his concern because he opposed the idea of revolution for the reason that, “it is
a stupid idea for you to try to attain a yard-long thing when you cannot even get a
foot-long thing. . . . Though levelers insist on the revolution that brings about radical
change in society, the world is not that simple. Under extreme upheaval unexpected
incidents can happen and you end up unable to achieve what you aimed at the beginning.”

274
Ibid., 232–240.
251
Takano was ultimately an advocate for moderate reform and liberalist individualism,
arguing that, “laborers should enhance their morals so that they do not ruin their life and
can obtain trust from general society.” Katayama, on the other hand, did not loosen his
leadership or editorship in the organization Rodo Sekai. He started the “Socialist Column”
in 1899, and tried to transform his beliefs of a Christian social gospel into socialist ideas.
Although he argued that, “reformist policies oriented toward the harmony of capital and
labor have had no effect” and only by revolution could a socialist world be achieved, his
thoughts at that time were actually heavily based on German style social democracy.
275

The external pressure was increasing, too. When two organizers of Tekko Kumiai,
Kintaro Mamie and Sadakichi Takahashi, workers at the Ammunition and Weaponry
Factories of the Japanese Military in Tokyo, were fired for their activism, Rodo Sekai
failed to report this incident. Katayama learned a lesson about the nonsense of this
approach toward harmonious labor relations and about how important it was for a union
to protect its organizers who were fired for their labor unionism. When some other union
members got laid off at Nittetsu’s factory in Omiya in November 1899, Rodo Sekai,
under Katayama’s editorship, joined and reported the protest by the second branch of
Tekko Kumiai. Though they collected a one-time temporal due of five sen to hold a
public gathering and lecture in Omiya, ultimately, they could not make the company
undo the lay-off. The union also suffered from a decline in membership, a problem
accelerated by those incidents. They also had to downsize their mutual aid programs and

275
“Shokko shokun ni yosu (You, Factory Hands!),” as quoted in Nimura, Rodo ha shinsei nari, 159–160;
Sen Katayama, “Nihon ni okeru rodo (Labor in Japan)”, Shakai, June 1899; Sen Katayama, “Kongo no
rodo undo (Labor Movement From Now On),” Rikugo zasshi, October 1899; Sen Katayama, “Shakai
kairyo to kakumei (Social Reform and Revolution),” Rodo Sekai, May 1900; Yorozu Choho, February 17,
1900.
252
publish Rodo Sekai less frequently.
276

1900 Public Peace Preservation Act and Social Democratic Party
It was the 1900 Public Peace Preservation Act that pushed Katayama toward
parliamentarism, or the German-style social democracy that attempted to carry out social
policies through electoral representation. The Department of the Interior, as explained by
the words of its bureaucrat Hideyoshi Arimatsu, was concerned with “labor strikes
because strikes by railroad workers and laborers at ammunition and weaponry factories
could negatively affect transportation and provisions of military supply if it happened
during a war.” The second item of the seventeenth article of the act substantially
prohibited “one’s temptation and agitation of workers to strike.” Katayama, together with
Shusui Kotoku, criticized this new law in Rodo Sekai, arguing “Strike is a means of
laborers to negotiate their contract with their employer legally under the constitution and
peacefully without damaging any property. Therefore police intervention should not be
allowed into this realm.” However they eventually had to rethink their strategy.
Katayama now advocated for political representation of workers through Futsu Senkyo
Kisei Domeikai (Alliance For the Promotion of Universal Suffrage) to carry out socialist

276
As a side note, police intervened and repressed Rodo Kumiai Kiseikai for the first time when it planned
their “labor day march and sports day” on April 3, 1898. Despite Takano’s repeated request for the
permission of assembly, they received final no two days before the march and the 1500 Bentos, three
marching bands, hats and badges, which they had paid for, went in vain. Nimura, Rodo ha shinsei, 250–
253; This Public Peace Preservation Act eventually graded up to become the 1925 Peace Preservation Law,
which impose punishment up to death penalty to engagement with labor movement and social movement.
See Yasuzo Suzuki, Horitsushi [Legal History] (Tokyo: Toyo keizai shimposha, 1960), 244.

253
policies.
277

On May 20, 1901, Sen Katayama, Kojiro Nishikawa (a reporter for Rodo Sekai),
Kiyoshi Kawakami (a reporter for Yorozu Choho), Kiichi Kaneko, Shusui Kotoku, Iso
Abe, and Naoe Kinoshita founded Shakai Minshuto (Social Democratic Party) and
published its “declaration” in newspapers, including Rodo Sekai, Yorozu Choho,
Mainichi Shimbun, Hochi Shimbun, Shin Sobo, Tokai Shimbun, and Hinode Shimbun. It
said, “The House of Representatives is nothing but representation of the interest of
landlords and capitalists. . . . But remember! The great majority of the people are
peasants who work with hoes and spades on fields and laborers who squeeze their sweat
and blood at factories. Why don’t they possess voting rights?” They insisted on peaceful
and legal ways to implement socialism. Their declaration listed their platform with eight
principles and twenty-eight policies. The eight principles were: “1. Expand human
fellowship regardless of race or political difference; 2. Abolish all the military to bring
about peace; 3. Abolish the class system; 4. Publicly own land and capital necessary for
production; 5 Publicly own transportation including trains, ships, canals, and bridges; 6.
Equally redistribute properties; 7. Endow voting rights to all the Japanese people; 8. The
central government pays all the cost for equal universal education of people.”
278

Their policies also attempted to establish laws that protected labor unions and
peasants and stipulated the people’s right to referendum. The then-Ito administration
immediately ordered a disbandment of the political party, specifically regarding their

277
Nimura, Rodo ha shinsei nari, 260; Sen Katayama, “Chian Keisatsuho to rodosha [Public Peace
Preservation Act and laborers]” and Shusui Kotoku, “Chian Keisatsuho ha assei nari [Public Peace
Preservation Act is an oppression]”, Rodo Sekai, March 15, 1900.

278
Itoya, Kotoku Shusui kenkyu, 138–142.
254
ideas of “abolishment of military, referendum, [and] abolishment of the House of Peers.”
The founders changed the name to the Japanese Commoners’ Party and tried to
reestablish themselves, but were disbanded again soon after.
279

This again made Katayama and others reconsider the nature of state power, against
which they were struggling. While they directed their energy into educational campaigns
for the time being, Tekko Kumiai collapsed because of financial difficulties and internal
ideological frictions, and Rodo Sekai was transferred to Katayama’s individual
management. The newspaper would change its name to Shakaishugi (Socialism), Tobei
zasshi (Magazine for America-bound Migration), Amerika (America), Tobei (Migrating
to America), and continued on until 1908. While Katayama effectively used Kingsley
Hall to secure a foothold in the socialist movement by opening a kindergarten, a workers’
night school, and the Tobei Kyokai (an organization which encouraged youth to emigrate
to America), Fusataro Takano left the union in the face of its decline and went to
Tien-Tsin, China in July 1901, to seek a chance to make his business bloom. He worked
for the German military in Beijing during the Boxer’s Rebellion and passed away in
Qing-Dao three years later. While Takano’s last move was toward China, Katayama’s
Tobei Kyokai aimed to get the support of poor students who aspired to study in America.
Notably, Katayama used his journal as the news outlet of Tobei Kyokai and required
subscribers to be members of this organization. Thus, he kept promoting the labor and
socialist movement among the youth who were planning to go to the United States. This

279
Ibid., 138–142.
255
would result in the formation of a trans-Pacific Japanese socialist circle.
280

Shusui Kotoku and His Anti-Imperialism
During 1901 and 1903, the foundation of the movement was in the ideological
struggle, through the publication of books and newspaper by intellectuals and journalists
rather than in the effort of organizing workers. Shusui Kotoku, a reporter of Yorozu
Choho, began to distinguish himself as an opinion leader in the socialist circle during this
time. Unlike Takano and Katayama, Kotoku had never been abroad, but he grew socially
conscious during the decade he studied under Chomin Nakae. Nakae translated and
introduced the thoughts of Jean Jacques Rousseau to Japan and disseminated the ideas of
“sovereignty resting with the people” and “right to revolution,” which had stimulated the
Freedom and People’s Rights Movement back in the 1880s. Nakae also harshly criticized
the Japanese Imperial Constitution, which had been promulgated on January 11, 1889,
because it endowed the emperor with the prerogative to sacrifice the people’s power and
rights.
281
In 1890, with the support of some ex-outcaste people, now called burakumin, in

280
Nimura, Rodo ha shinsei nari, 271–282; Kublin, Asian Revolutionary, 101. While Kublin writes that
“the Kingsley Hall kindergarten, one of the first early childhood centers to be operated under private
auspices in Japan, met with conspicuous success,” Nimura writes that Tamekichi Ito, an architect who
designed the Kingsley Hall and mostly likely first introduced Katayama to Takano, put his kids in the
Kingsley kindergarten, which had had a difficult time to get kids in the neighborhood enrolled. See Nimura,
187. Also Kublin described the neighborhood Misaki of Kanda ward, where the Kingsley Hall was built, as
“a section of Tokyo largely inhabited by poor workers and perhaps even poorer university students.”
Kublin, Asian Revolutionary, 96. In contrast, Nimura explains that Misaki was, like Marunouchi, a town
newly developed by Mitsubishi holding company, to whom the government had sold the ex-army parade
ground. Tokyo factory of Ammunition and Weaponry was close and the Tekko Kumiai headquarter was
too. See Nimura, Rodo ha shinsei nari, 185-186.

281
The Meiji Constitution was founded on the principle that sovereignty resided in person of the Emperor,
by virtue of his divine ancestry “unbroken for ages eternal”, rather than in the people. Article 4 states that
the “Emperor is the head of the Empire, combining in himself the rights of sovereignty”. The Emperor,
256
the Watanabe village in Osaka, Nakae was able to run for Japan’s first congressional
election and succeeded, becoming a congressman from the fourth electoral district of
Osaka. He strongly advocated for rights to free speech, publication, and assembly, and
for the reduction of land tax and the military budget. But his efforts did not bear fruit.
Some of his fellow congressmen, from Rikken Jiyuto (Constitutional Freedom Party),
were bribed and compromised.
Under Nakae’s influence, Kotoku’s main interest was in what would become of the
political body, which consisted of the Satsuma-Choshu absolutist oligarchy and the
corrupt, seemingly progressive parties—parties that had stopped advocating for social
justice. As a journalist, Nakae believed that he could educate the masses by encouraging
people to watch and check the government. He criticized the oligarchy, the hereditary
titles of aristocracy, and the patriotic educational system, and insisted on rebuilding a
sense of justice through rejuvenation and the alliance of oppositional parties.
282

Shusui Kotoku founded the Socialist study group, Shakaishugi Kenkyukai, with
Sen Katayama, Kiichi Kaneko, and others in 1898, and grew as a socialist through
contributing articles to Rodo Sekai. His enthusiasm for commentary and journalism did
not waver after the decline of the Tekko Kumiai. One of the remarkable viewpoints that
Kotoku inherited from Nakae was the critical eye on Western colonialism in Asia. Nakae

nominally at least, united within himself all three branches (executive, legislative and judiciary) of
government, although legislation (Article 5) and the budget (Article 64) were subject to the “consent of the
Imperial Diet”. Laws were issued and justice administered by the courts “in the name of the Emperor”.
Meiji Constitution lacked the concept of civilian control. Article 11 declares that the Emperor commands
the army and navy. The heads of these services interpreted this to mean, “The army and navy obey only the
Emperor, and do not have to obey the cabinet and diet”, which ultimately allowed Japanese military to go
out of control in the period of WWII.

282
Itoya, Kotoku Shusui kenkyu, 86–94.
257
had been on the ship of the Iwakura embassy in 1871 to start his studies abroad, in Paris,
and witnessed the discriminatory treatment of people of color during the trip. Unlike
other Japanese officials, who saw colonial Europeans who behaved overbearingly and
violently against Asian and African people as outlaws and villains, abandoned by their
more righteous metropolitans, Nakae saw this behavior as the essence of European
colonialism. In April 1901, Kotoku published a book titled Teikokushugi: Nijusseiki no
kaibutsu (Imperialism: The Specter of the Twentieth Century) and argued that it is the
overproduction, characteristic of the capitalist production system, that caused Western
powers to enforce the imperialist policies embodied in the competitive grab of markets in
Asia and Africa and the expansion of the military. He also pointed out that patriotism,
particularly of Japan, used an imagined glory of the victories against foreign countires, to
distract its citizens from its domestic ills, which made them blind to war damages
ordinary Japanese citizens suffered on the home front, the war bereaved, and the people
living in the war zone. Furthermore, he added that the dangers of this process were even
greater in Japan than in European countries, because the possibility of repression was
greater in places where democratic standards were still so poorly developed. Kotoku
argued that imperialist wars only benefited capitalists and militarist states and left the
majority of people behind. He illuminated the commonality between the Sino-Japanese
War and the Boer War, the take-over of the Philippines by the United States as a result of
the Spanish American War, the German control of Jiaozhou, the First Italo-Ethiopian
War, and the Russian invasion to Manchuria. Criticism of war and Japanese imperialism
would come into sharp focus around the Russo-Japanese War, which also would touch
258
the heart of the socially conscious, young Japanese immigrants in San Francisco, which
we will discuss later.
283

The fact that Sen Katayama and Takano started with organizing urban factory
laborers poses a question about the distance between intellectuals and peasants. Since the
decline of Tekko Kumiai, intellectuals and journalists kept paying attention to the masses
of laborers and peasants while they advocated for socialist transformation of society. On
December 9, 1900, Kotoku wrote a direct appeal to the emperor on behalf of a fellow
congressman, Shozo Tanaka, who had been fighting for the rights of Yanaka villagers.
Villagers from Yanaka had suffered from an environmental disaster in which Ashio
copper mines, run by Koga zaibatsu, had been discharging liquid wastes into the

283
The works of Henry George stimulated Kotoku’s thoughts on social problem. In Japan, Tsunetaro Jo
had introduced America’s single tax movement, while Sanzo Eguchi had translated his Social Problem and
Goichiro Kakuta had translated The Land Question. For more details on Henry George’s life and economic
thoughts, see Kenneth C. Wenzer, ed., Henry George, The Transatlantic Irish, and Their Times (Bingley:
JAI Press, 2009). An African American intellectual, T. Thomas Fortune also drew on a strand of American
agrarian radicalism through the work of Henry George. Fortune contends “just as every human being has an
inherent and inalienable right to the air and water necessary to survival, so too sievery person entitled to
access to the land—which guarantees to each person the conditions for material subsistence.…When
people are deprived of free access to the soil, they are at the mercy of those who own the means of
production: they must pay extortionate rents to land-owners or accept exploitative wages in other kinds of
employment.” See T. Thomas Fortune, Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South (New
York: Washington Square Press, 2007[originally 1884]), xxi–xxiii, xxix. As to Nakae’s view on European
colonialism, see Tanaka, Iwakura Shisetsudan, 210–212, and Nakae Chomin shu: Kindai Nihon shiso taikei
3, ed. Shozo Matsunaga (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1974). As to Kotoku’s criticism on Imperialism, see
Shusui Kotoku, Teikokushugi [Imperialism] (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2004[originally published in 1901]);
Itoya, Kotoku Shusui kenkyu, 156–157; Ohara, Katayama Sen, 109–110; See also Marius B. Jansen,
“Japanese Imperialism: Late Meiji Perspectives,” in The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945, ed.,
Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 61–79; As to the
influence of a Scottish journalist, James M. Robertson, and his book, Patriotism and Empire (London: G
Richards, 1899) on Shusui Kotoku, see Akira Yamada, “Kotoku Shusui no teikokushugi ninshiki to Igirisu
‘New Radicalism’”, Nihonshi kenkyu, no. 265 (September 1984): 37–60; It is true that Kotoku did not have
detailed economist analysis of monopoly and export of financial capital (rather than export of commodity)
in the imperialist scramble for Africa and Asia. As to his contemporaries, who deftly analyzed this
dimension, see John A. Hobson, Imperialism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965[originally
1902]); Rudolph Hilferding, Financial Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development
(New York: Routledge, 1981[originally 1910]); Vladimir Ilich Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of
Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1969[originally 1917]).
259
Watarase River, which in turn emitted contaminated fumes, and devastated numerous
riverine village communities in the Tochigi, Saitama, Ibaragi, and Gumma prefectures.
The appeal criticized the Diet for not having drastically solved the problem, despite ten
years of protest by Congressman Tanaka and numerous villagers. The government used
the police force to prevent thousands of villagers from marching from Tatebayashi to
Tokyo in 1898 and 1900. Not to mention, in his criticism about this police repression,
Kotoku emphasized that livelihoods were devastated by the abusive and negligent mining
industry, which caused several hundred thousand people to lose fish from rivers and
vegetables from their fields. Some starved to death on the road, became sickened, and
died, without any medicine, resulting in many youths dispersing from the region. The
government ignored the urgent appeal by treating Tanaka as an insane man. Kotoku and
other journalist intellectuals sought a way to connect to laborers or peasants directly,
though they always found it too huge a task without a far-reaching organizational
foundation, both financially and in terms of limited staff, and prioritized
their“educational work” of journalism and public forums.
284

The letter to the emperor, however, suggests another crucial dimension in their
ideological struggle against capitalism and imperialism. While Kotoku criticized
Japanese imperialism that, according to his understanding, consisted of patriotism and
militarism, he was, like many other contemporary intellectuals, hesitant to openly
criticize the Tennosei or the emperor system, which was the key politico-cultural state
apparatus that mobilized imperial subjects as patriotic laborers and soldiers. Although

284
Itoya, Kotoku Shusui kenkyu, 143–148.
260
Kotoku considered the incidents of lèse-majesté involving Kanzo Uchimura and other
intellectuals as a sign of abusive power, Kotoku appeared to accept the symbolical value
of peace and prosperity implied in Japanese mythology, and failed to interrogate the
political implications of the system in his book, Shakaishugi Shinzui (Essence of
Socialism), published in July 1903. The repression of freedom of speech would become
harsher in the following years when it came to criticism of the emperor system. That
would be a fundamental context of why the foreign ministry of Japan, in tandem with the
consulate in San Francisco, would try to keep socialist and anarchist immigrants and
exiles under surveillance even from this earlier period.
285

Still, the book was one of the sharpest socialist writings of that time. It explicated
how the increasing concentration of means of production in the hands of capitalists led to
the polarization of the rich and the poor, how capitalist society entailed cyclical
depressions and existence of labor reserve, and how monopoly took the form of “trust” in
the United States Then it advocated for socialist policies of abolition of landlordism,
public ownership and management of land and means of production, and even and equal
distribution of social resources. The book also called for the abolition of war and the
military and for the founding of the Socialist Party as a means of carrying out those
policies, thereby taking the parliamentarism and suffrage movement as his vehicle. His
view on revolution remained vague; he believed it happened spontaneously when
material conditions were ready, which suggests that Kotoku did not consider the

285
As to Japanese Emperor system as a politico-cultural state-apparatus, see Masayuki Suzuki, Kindai
tennosei no shihai chitsujo [Ruling Order of Modern Emperor System] (Tokyo: Koso shobo, 1986) and
Yoshio Yasumaru, Kindai tennozo no keisei [Formation of Modern Emperor Image] (Tokyo: Iwanami
shoten, 1992); Shusui Kotoku, Shakaishugi shinzui (Tokyo: Chohosha, 1903).
261
subjectivity of laborers and peasants at that point.
286

Criticism of Russo-Japanese War and Foundation of Heiminsha (Commoners’
Organization)
The Japanese attempted to control the Liaodong peninsula in addition to Taiwan
after the Sino-Japanese War stimulated the imperialist scramble of Eastern China. Czarist
Russia, which had schemed to obtain an ice-free port, and established railroads and
military stations in Manchuria, saw a widespread upheaval (triggered by the Boxer
Rebellion in China) as a new opportunity to reinforce its control in Manchuria. Japan
tried to tenaciously defend its interest in Korea, and, under a power balance strategy,
willingly became a watchdog for Britain (and the United States) through the
Anglo-Japanese Alliance Treaty of 1902. By 1904, when the Russo-Japanese War started,
Japan had transformed into an imperialist power. Between 1894 and 1904, the size of the
railroad industry doubled; the shipbuilding industry grew five times; the total share of
capital of all companies increased quadplex; and the total amount of trade tripled. Exports
of cotton yarn increased by a multiple of thirty. Under this industrial growth, army
officials like Gentaro Kodama, bureaucrats, and bankers like Eiichi Shibusawa, came
together to push the daring idea that monopoly of the Manchurian market was crucial for
Japanese economic growth.
In this context, Kotoku and his fellow journalists played close attention to the
anti-war campaign and tried to introduce a dimension of internationalism into practice.

286
Itoya, Kotoku Shusui kenkyu, 162–167.
262
While most of the newspapers of that time, even before the war—including Osaka
Mainichi, Osaka Asahi, and Jijishimpo, among others—invoked enthusiasm for the
coming war among citizens. Only Yorozu Choho, Tokyo Mainichi, and Shakaishugi, the
successor to Rodo Sekai (edited by Sen Katayama), remained anti-war in perspective and
tone. When Ruiko Kuroiwa, the editor of Yorozu Choho, lured by the expected sale of
yellow journalism, let one of his reporters, Tenzan Enjoji, write a pro-war article, Shusui
Kotoku and Toshihiko Sakai immediately resigned from the paper. A month later,
Kotoku and Sakai founded Heiminsha (Commoners’ Organization) and started publishing
weekly Heimin Shimbun (Commoners’ News) on November 15, 1903. It basically
inherited the ideological stance of socialism and parliamentarism from Shakai Minshuto
(Social Democratic Party), which had been banned two-and-a-half years before. It
announced that its activity would be “within the limit of the law” to avoid a crash by the
government and significantly thought out a strategy to open up a dimension of
internationalism by dedicating an English section on the top page of every issue and
writing to the Russian Social Democratic Party “Oh, our comrades in Russia, . . . we are
not enemies of each other, but the militarist nationalists are!” and maintained that the
workers’ international solidarity could break the war effort. It was translated and
published in the organs of social democratic parties of European countries and America,
and even in Folks Zeitung, a German paper published in New York. Their publication
even reached Japanese immigrant communities in San Francisco, where Shigeki Oka had
established a branch of Heiminsha. We will look into this later.
287

287
Heimin Shimbun, March 3, 1904, July 24, 1904, and September 11, 1904. All issues of the Heimin
263
Domestically, Heiminsha significantly widened the reach of the socialist
publication and tried to reach as many commoners as possible by holding meetings and
seminars in many regions of Japan. According to the yearly report of Heimin Shimbun at
the end of 1904, it had 1,337 subscribers in forty-five prefectures, totaling 200,000 papers
sold that year, which suggests that there existed more secondary readers. Heiminsha held
public forums with socialist speakers forty times in Tokyo and seventeen times in other
regions, socialist seminars thirty times, and socialist lectures for women thirteen times.
Naoe Kinoshita, Kojiro Nishikawa, Sanshiro Ishikawa, Sakai, and Kotoku, among others,
toured the prefectures of Shizuoka, Ibaragi, Gumma, Saitama, Aichi, Chiba, and
Kanagawa—the result of which was an emergence of numerous socialist study groups in
many regions. It also distributed 32,000 socialist propaganda flyers and 3,000 petition
papers for universal suffrage. It also sold an eight-book series of its own socialist
literature, totaling 15,270 sales.
288

However, the Japanese absolutist, imperial government did not wait too long to
repress those socialists. When Kotoku and Nishikawa strongly criticized patriotic
education in Japan, which imbued youth with the ethos of “fight and die for the emperor,”

Shimbun were compiled and reprinted. See Shiso Hattori and Shiro Konishi, comps., Shiryo kindai
Nihonshi, shakaishugi shiryo: Heimin Shimbun, 4 vols. (Tokyo: Sogensha, 1953–58).

288
Heimin Shimbun, December 25, 1904. As to the numerous socialist organizations that sprouted as the
result of public forums held by Heiminsha intellectuals, see Rodo Undo Shiryo Iinkai, Nihon rodo undo
ahiryo (Japanese Labor Movement Historical Materials)(Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku shuppankai, 1963), 2:531–
549. There were at least 64 organizations dispersed in many prefectures and also Taiwan. Most of the
members at the regional organizations were doctors, teachers, students, newspaper reporters, bank
employees, city hall employees, merchants, military officers, and pharmacists. Few peasants and factory
workers joined, except Hokuso Heimin Kurabu, where farmers discussed issues of land ownership, tenant
farmers, and landlordism of Immba county of Chiba prefecture. See also Tetsuya Hashimoto, “Minshu
undo to shoki shakaishugi,” in Koza Nihonshi, ed. Rekishigaku kenkyukai and Nihonshi kenkyukai (Tokyo:
Tokyo Daigaku shuppankai, 1985), vol. 8.
264
on their paper on Nov. 6 1904, and a week later carried Kotoku and Sakai’s translation of
the Communist Manifest on their first anniversary issue on Nov. 13, 1904, they were
indicted for committing choken bunran (damaging state’s governance system) and
violating the newspaper legislation. Both were sentenced to seven months’ imprisonment
and fined fifty yen. Their printing machine was confiscated. On January 29, 1905, the
sixty-fourth Heimin Shimbun, printed in all-red, announced its discontinuation, but
Kotoku implied his return, writing, “They cannot kill our spirit.” Symbolically, the
second page of the last issue was dedicated to the “Fire of the [1905] Russian
Revolution.”
289

Sen Katayama’s Speech Tour on the West Coast in 1904
While those socialists went through harsh oppression during their anti-war
campaign, and some of them would come to adopt anarchist strategies after 1906 as a
response, Sen Katayama had a slightly different path. He was abroad between December
of 1903 and January 1906, trying to establish socialist groups in the communities of
Japanese immigrants in North America. But what prompted Katayama to go abroad
again? The year 1903 brought many changes to Katayama’s life. The death of his wife,
Fude, devastated him, but he pushed himself to tour the regions of Shikoku, Kyushu, and
Hokkaido (visiting Kesson Kutsumi in Hakodate and Sukematsu Minami in a mining
town of Yubari) for public forums. Also shocking for him was that Kojiro Nishikawa,
who had been his right-hand man and co-published Nihon no Rodo Undo (The Labor

289
Heimin Shimbun, November 6, 1904; November 13, 1904; January 29, 1905.
265
Movement in Japan) in 1901, left Katayama in October over a money issue caused by
deficits from the public speaking tours. In December, 1903, Katayama left for America
again, leaving his beloved five-year-old daughter and three-year-old son. He announced
in Shakaishugi “his plan to spend about a year abroad,” “to make tens of thousand
Japanese working in the North American fields unite with laborers in Japan to build a
labor movement by corresponding between East and West,” and attend the sixth
International Congress of Socialist Party in Amsterdam. He emphasized, “It is time for
laborers to carry out [socialist practices of labor strikes] as I advocated [for over the] past
seven years.” He continues “it is none other than laborers themselves who solve labor
problems, and relieve and protect” themselves as the builders of the material basis of
their modern world. The bold statement on one hand, a need for a hiatus was on the other.
After he entrusted Goichi Yamane with editorship of his periodical, Katayama sailed
away and confided to Kiyoshi Kawakami in Seattle “I am worn out after an unceasing
toil of seven years and I need a good rest.”
290

Scholars Hyman Kublin and Satoshi Ohara both interpreted this transition as

290
Goichi Yamane had been a school teacher and principal between 1894 and 1899 in Hokkaido and been
a reporter of Hokkaido Mainichi Shimbun between 1899 and 1900. Later he became a manager of
Heiminsha. Karl Kiyoshi Kawakami, “Japanese on American Farms,” Independent 54 (October 26, 1905),
966. As quoted in Kublin, Asian Revolutionary, 164; A scholar, Nobuo Okabayashi explains the detail of
the separation of Katayama and Nishikawa. Shakaishugi, the successor of Rodo Sekai was under
Katayama’s management and Nishikawa’s editorship with an assistant editor, Genkichi Matsuzaki. When
they came back from the two-month long tour of holding public forums in Kyushu and Shikoku regions,
they conflicted over how they would deal with the deficit. Katayama was a very strict person when it comes
to money, unlike some other paternalistic intellectuals who always played a role of helping young fellows
financially. Furthermore, Nishikawa took from Kingsley Hall the account book and the safe of the Socialist
Association, for which he was newly elected as a secretary and Katayama did not get elected. Katayama
asked Goichi Yamane, a supporter of Heimin Shimbun, to take over the management of both Shakaishugi
and Kingley Hall, not to mention raising of his five-year old daughter and three-year old son. See Nobuo
Okabayashi, “San Francisco no Jiro Nakazawa,” Shoki Shakaishugi kenkyu, no. 18 (2005): 231–245; Sen
Katayama, “Kaigai toko ni atarite rodosha shokun ni tsugu,” Shakaishugi, no. 26 (December (Katayama,
1903).
266
Katayama feeling a sense of incongruity with Heiminsha’s anti-war campaign with
Kotoku at its center. Ohara argues that the campaigns were centering on intellectuals and
leaving the working masses behind, failing to mobilize the laborers in the military
industry. Of course, it is not that Katayama opposed their campaign. He was a part of it
and a huge supporter of Heiminsha. But in a situation in which labor strikes had been
substantially prohibited and parliamentarist approaches had been blocked with the
dissolution order of their political party, he probably saw his move to the United States as
a good chance to reevaluate his strategies, and possibly rebuild the socialist movement
from abroad, as well as reassess his own position in the anti-war campaign.
291

Sen Katayama arrived in Seattle on January 16, 1904, and met with Kiyoshi
Kawakami, who had been one of the founding members of the Japanese Social
Democratic Party in 1901. Kawakami had come to Seattle after the disbandment order
and worked for Seattle’s daily, Shin Nihon. Two days later, Katayama visited the office
of the Socialist Party of America, at 509 3
rd
Street, and met the chief editor of their

291
Ohara, Katayama Sen, 32; Kublin, Asian Revolutionary, 164–168, 188, 192. Hyman Kublin wrongly
neglected Katayama’s organizing effort in the West Coast probably because he focused more on
Katayama’s individual ideological growth and its widening gap with that of Kotoku in this period. As much
contrast as Kublin makes between Katayama’s less radical attitude and good sense of approaching the
masses and Kotoku’s intellectualism and lack of understanding how successful their mobilization of
working masses, it seems, Kublin does not do justice to either of them. Kublin referred to Kotoku’s move
toward anarchism as “his desire to enrich his knowledge of this extreme Utopian philosophy, which had
been explored only superficially in Japan.” Moreover, Kublin described ex-Heiminsha journalists and
intellectual, when they founded Nihon Shakaito in 1906 as those “with incredibly naïve illusions about the
nature and extent of their influence.” Kublin also suggests a hint of escapism in Katayama and emphasizes
his “decision to sit out the [Russo-Japanese] war in the Uinted States and to be a spectator to the desperate
and futile struggles of his ideological comrades at home.” Kublin strengthens the contrast solely on Kiyoshi
Kawakami’s statement that Katayama was “exceedingly law-abiding, and shrinks from radicalism of a
fire-and-blood nature.” If we consider the regional socialist organizations that Heiminsha stimulated and try
to leave the binary judgment of “intellectual elitism or up-from-masses-at-the-bottom activism” and try to
see the gradation, interaction, or dialectics in between, we can more effectively observe the germination of
“organic intellectuals,” which actually took more than one generation and requires our long-term historical
investigation. In the case of my research, Karl Yoneda, for example, should be regarded as an organic
intellectual, who came after the accumulation of historical experience that Japanese socialists had obtained.
267
organization, Dr. Hermon Titus. Titus encouraged Katayama to hold a public lecture to
reach Japanese people in the city and offered the party office’s hall for that purpose. An
organizer of the party, Robinson (full name unknown), told Katayama “nowadays, there
are labor unions that exclude Japanese workers. But we, socialists, should never agree
upon such an injustice, which has been causing conflict inside the unions. You should
explain what socialism is to Japanese and make them join the Socialist Party.” This
suggests the existence of rank-and-file unionists, who saw AFL’s Asian exclusion as an
obstacle to the socialist society and also portended the growth of the radical syndicalist
wing in the party and the arrival of the IWW later in 1906. Meanwhile, Katsuji Nakajima
and Kiyoshi Kawakami of the Shin Nihon newspaper company advised that they would
have a better turnout if they held it at the hall of the Japanese Association. Some 300
people, including eighty-nine Socialist Party members, showed up and listened to Mr.
Robinson, who talked about the unity of workers, and invited the audience to a Sunday
meeting of the party, and Katayama, who talked about the anti-war campaign in Japan
and the need to spread socialist organizational ideals among Japanese immigrant
communities for their development. Katayama also asked for donations to support his
financially struggling periodical, Shakaishugi (Socialism), sold his book, Waga
Shakaishugi (My Socialism), to thirty Japanese, and collected $23.60. Katayama once
wrote that most of the workers did not even have time to go to a bookstore and that was
why selling socialist literature at speaking engagements was an important part of
expanding the movement. At the end of the forum, Katayama helped eight
comrades—Kiyoshi Kawakami, Kotoku Imashiro, Yoshiki Ozaki, Shuji Nakanishi,
268
Otokichi Osawa, Tamesaburo Shimizu, and Katsuji Nakajima found Japanese Socialist
Party on the night of January 19.
292

Three days later, he had a similar meeting in Portland. Pastor Sugihara, of the
Methodist Church, allowed the use of church space. An organizer of the Socialist Party,
Steven (or Stephen) agreed to give a speech. On January 22, they were able to reach an
audience of about one hundred. Steven maintained, “while many Japanese immigrants are
grateful of the education they can get in this country, you should study economic facts
much deeper than what capitalist economists teach you at the universities organized by
capitalists.” A few people approached Katayama and expressed their willingness to learn
more about socialism. He was able to collect $6 in donations and had “a well-known
Japanese, Shinzaburo Ban” donate $5 for Kingsley Hall. Having felt much less concerned
about police intervention at the forums than in Japan, where even a one-hour speech had
never been possible, Katayama travelled on to Sacramento. There he gave a speech in
front of some 500 people at the youth center, with the help of Kimura of the Nichibei
newspaper company, and others like Shiba, Karaki, Kondo, Imashiro, Takeoka, Kitagawa,
and Matsuura. A few days later, he tried a street oratory in front of seventy or eighty
American people and said, “Japanese workers in North America do not harm you. What
makes you, American workers, suffer is American capitalists.” He also came across Mr.
and Mrs. Jensen, who ran a notions store, were socialists, and persuaded them to sell his

292
Katayama Sen chosakushu [The Complete Works of Sen Katayama](Tokyo: Katayama Sen Seitan
Hyakunen Kinenkai, 1960), 2:163–168, 172. As to Dr. Hermon Titus and his later involvement in the
Greek strike of 1912, which took place under IWW auspices in Hoquiam, Washington, see Philip J.
Dreyfus, “The IWW and the Limits of Inter-Ethnic Organizing: Reds, Whites, and Greeks in Grays Harbor,
Washington, 1912,” Labor History 38, no. 4 (Fall 1997): 450–470.
269
books.
293

When he travelled down to San Francisco (for the first time in twenty-one years),
Katayama again started the trip by visiting the newspaper companies Shin Sekai and
Nichibei.
294
His friend, Hayashi, helped him plan a public forum at the Golden Gate Hall
on January 30, and asked the papers to print an advertisement for the forum. Many young
Japanese of the Japanese Gospel Society on Gary Street volunteered to coordinate. Four
hundred chairs were occupied; the rest of the audience took up the gallery space. With an
SPA organizer, Thomas Berthold, giving a supporting speech, Katayama attracted a
bunch of young spirits—eighteen of which expressed willingness to become more
involved. According to Sakutaro Iwasa, Katayama sold many newspapers and pamphlets
that he had brought from Japan. He also collected donations in the amount of $63. A few
days later, Katayama helped the youth he had spoken with at the rally establish the San
Francisco Japanese Socialist Party, with thirty-eight members, appointing Sakutaro Iwasa
and Toichi Ichikawa as managers and Ganketsu Akaba as a secretary. In Oakland, he
became acquainted with a SPA member Thomas Baumhold and a lawyer, Olker (full
name unknown), who was the manager of a railroad workers’ union. With their help,
Katayama gave a speech at the Party’s hall with another socialist orator, Marlow Lewis.
Approximately 300 people stayed to listen until 11:00 p.m. Fourteen people from the
audience approached him to express interest in joining the socialist movement. He

293
Katayama Sen chosakushu, 2:169–170.

294
Shin Sekai was founded by Hachiro Soejima on May 25, 1894 in San Francisco. Soejima, born in Saga
Prefecture and came to the U.S. in 1884, solely managed covering stories, typesetting, printing, and
delivering of his newspaper. When he failed in starting a sake brewing enterprise, he sold Shin Sekai to a
labor contractor, Terusaburo Kuranaga.
270
traveled on to Los Angeles and had his Japanese friends Kishi and Mine, as well as a
manager of SPA’s organ, Mr. Helfenstein, help him acquire Burbank Hall for a public
forum. The night before the event, he was invited by touring socialist Schit Wilson to join
a socialist gathering in Pasadena. There Katayama gave a ten-minute speech. The next
day, on February 8 1904, the Los Angeles forum went well, with a turnout of about 600
people. From there, Katayama left for Houston to see the Japanese immigrant
rice-farming communities, which had become the talk of some Tokyo dailies recently.
295

Katayama’s abrupt touring of these cities should make us wonder how much
interaction he had with ordinary workers, and how familiar he had become with
American labor practices and the problems that those workers faced. Although there is no
source to directly clarify, there are interesting facts to point out. As Yuji Ichioka’s
meticulous research shows, the main problems that Japanese immigrant workers had had
were the intermediary exploitation by the labor contracting system, which flourished
from 1891 to 1907, and the exclusion of the Japanese from labor unions, especially
AFL’s trade unions. Shinzaburo Ban, a well-known figure who had donated to
Katayama’s Kingsley Hall in Portland, was one of the largest contractors. As an
ex-secretary of the Foreign Ministry of Japan, stationed in Honolulu between 1888 and
1891 and dispatched to San Francisco in 1891, Ban had a shrewd eye on Japanese labor
migration and differing wages of the three labor markets in Japan, Hawaii, and the U.S.
West Coast. Right after he resigned from office, he came back to the United States and
established himself as the owner of the S. Ban Company of Portland, Oregon. He

295
Katayama Sen chosakushu, 2:171–174; Thomas K. Walls, Tekisasu no Nihonjin [The Japanese Texans],
trans. Kunio Mamiya (Tokyo: Fuyo Shobo, 1997), 42–43, 58–62.
271
supplied section hands to the lines of the Southern Pacific, the Oregon Railway and
Navigation Company, the Astoria and Columbia River Railway, and the Chicago,
Burlington and Quincy Railroad. He extended his business by opening three retail stores
in Portland, Oregon; Denver, Colorado; and Sheridan, Wyoming and operating a sawmill
in Quincy, Oregon—which produced telephone poles with timber from forestland owned
by Ban. Additionally, he ran a dairy farm and a sugar beet farm on which he employed
section hands in the off-season. After the turn of the century, Ban had 3,000 workers
under his employ at his company’s peak.
296

While newly arriving Japanese, neither fluent in English nor familiar with
American labor practices, might have perceived this mediation for initial employment as
helping hands held out to them by their fellow countrymen, the exploitation through daily
commission, translation-office fees, exclusive retailing, remittance service fees, and
medical fees was intensive. Ban’s daily commission was five cents for his workers on the
Oregon Railway and Navigation Company, who in 1899 earned $1.10 per day. In
addition, Ban extracted a dollar in the name of translation-office fees every month. All
those fees provided contractors with lucrative incomes. Some workers pejoratively called
them “corrupt bosses.” After labor immigration from Japan was drastically limited in
1900 by a foreign ministry that was fearful of intensifying the anti-Japanese movement

296
Yuji Ichioka, Issei, 58–9. The Nichibei newspaper company that Katayama depended on for getting
connected to some key figures of Japanese immigrant communities was also a part of the contracting
business establishment. Kyutaro Abiko, who started San Francisco-based Nichibei newspaper in 1899 and
established Nichibei Bank, founded a labor contracting company, Nichibei Kangyosha (Japanese American
Industrial Corporation), in 1903 and provided railroad construction sites, farms, and coal mines with total
two to three thousand Japanese workers. The company profited tremendously from monthly fee of one
dollar from every contracted worker, without mentioning profit through remittance agency and sales of
necessities.
272
on the West Coast, Ban and other contractors induced Japanese immigrant workers in
Hawaii to move to the West Coast with the lure of double wages. Not only did the labor
contract system play the role of a control valve for moving labor reserves around the
Pacific, but also it articulated the racial hierarchy of the labor market. The Brotherhood of
Maintenance of Way Employees barred nonwhites from its membership. When Japanese
workers struck, their demands were addressed not to the companies but to their
contractors—who were not paid by the company but were extracting agency fees from
the workers. These companies were able to mostly remain intact.
297

Although the SPA organizer in Seattle gave Katayama significant insight into the
racial hierarchization in the American labor force by mentioning Japanese exclusion from
labor unions, there is no material that shows Katayama took up the issue in a serious and
consistent manner at this point. When Katayama received $5 of donations from
Shinzaburo Ban, did he ask about his workers in terms of labor conditions and the
relation of Japanese workers to white workers? Did Ban tell Katayama that on one night
in December of 1898 white mobs had assaulted his railroad workers at one of his camps,
forcibly took them to the Rainier ferry, and threatened, “We will shoot you if you do not
evacuate within thirty minutes”? Or when Katayama went down to Los Angeles, did he
hear anything about the railroad contractor, Yoshimatsu Kataura, based in the Fresno area,
who supplied about fifteen Japanese workers as scabs to Henry Huntington’s Pacific
Electric Railway in Los Angeles in the spring of 1903, when American section hands
struck for higher wages and later supplied 200 more nonunion Japanese workers when

297
Ibid., 57–90.
273
the company extended its lines? We do not have answers to these questions yet. But what
is clear is that Katayama had high hopes for the Socialist Party, as evidenced by his
efforts to contact SPA offices in every city he went to, even though Japanese immigrants
had no voting rights or naturalization rights, in contrast with recent Jewish, Finnish, and
German immigrants, who were a significant part of the SPA’s voting strength after they
acquired citizenship.
298

The Relationship between the AFL and the Socialist Party of America
In 1904, the AFL national convention adopted its first anti-Japanese resolution.
The resolution called for the 1902 Chinese Exclusion Act (extended twice since 1882) to
be amended to include Japanese and Koreans because, unlike white men, including
southern and eastern European immigrants, who were capable of uplifting themselves by
learning the fundamentals of unionism, Japanese and Koreans were supposedly unable to
be either Americanized or unionized. At this point in 1904, there was no material written
by Katayama that carried anti-racist critiques when it came to Japanese exclusion by
AFL-affiliated trade unions.
299

Katayama must have felt encouraged by the warm welcomes of SPA members in
each city he visited, and it was probably this kind of camaraderie that kept him
going—eventually to the national convention of the Socialist Party of America in
Chicago, at the beginning of May, 1904, and the Sixth Congress of the Second

298
John H. M. Laslett, Sunshine Was Never Enough: Los Angeles Workers, 1880–2010 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2012), 33–34; Karl Goso Yoneda, Zaibei Nihonjin rodosha no rekishi
[History of Japanese Workers in the U.S.] (Tokyo: Shin Nihon shuppansha, 1967), 42–3.

299
American Federation of Labor, Proceedings (1904), 100; Augusta H. Pio, “Exclude Japanese Labor,”
American Federationist (May 1905), 274–76. As quoted in Ichioka, Issei, 100.
274
International in Amsterdam in August. However, he kept relatively silent until he went
back to Japan in January of 1906. He was not organizing Japanese workers in America
either. He sojourned St. Louis, Milwaukee, and New York, and then went back to
Houston, where he stayed to plan the foundation and management of a large rice farm.
The plan was to build a somewhat autonomous Japanese socialist colony. Given that
Katayama was inspecting the Japanese agricultural “successors” in Florin and Pasadena
during the tour, he probably looked at agricultural entrepreneurs as an extension of
self-sustaining agrarian radicalism in a country where vast land was available for poor
farmers. Although he did not explicate a socialist implication of such a plan, he actually
tried to collect money and recruit farmers. Eventually, the plan failed due to a betrayal by
his enterprise partner.
300

No matter how calmly Katayama emerged in these years, he definitely stimulated
young minds and helped create a stream of Japanese immigrant socialists to the American
West Coast by continuing to connect young, socially conscious Japanese with people of
the Heiminsha group, and having them contribute to his own periodical, Shakaishugi. It
was also because his agency program of U.S.-bound migration at the Kingsley Hall,
Tobei Kyokai required participants to subscribe to his periodical Shakaishugi. It
frequently carried articles that reported on immigrant life, mostly of schoolboys in
America. What was looming was a transnational network of Japanese socialists with the
Bay Area as its pivot.

300
Kublin, Asian Revolutionary, 185–189.
275
The Japanese Immigrant Socialist Circle and Their Understanding of Racism
Japanese socialists had to develop their own experiential understanding of the
intersection of race and class. It would take a long time for Japanese immigrant socialists
to understand white racism as systematic structural forces in American society. Jiro
Nakazawa (born in the Yamanashi prefecture in 1884), who had helped edit Katayama’s
Shakaishugi in 1903, and came to the United States shortly after Katayama, tells how the
Russo-Japanese War affected the white-Japanese racial relationship in San Francisco.
Nakazawa arrived in San Francisco on March 21, 1904, following the encouragement
from his socialist friends in the United States, Seito Kodama, Tatemoto Kikuchi and his
brother, Masayoshi Kikuchi, who was working for Seattle’s daily Shin Nihon. Nakazawa
worked as a schoolboy (student laborer) with Kodama, who had experienced, “being
called out ‘Japs’, thrown stones at, and beaten by American kids on the street.” He
reported “the Russo-Japanese has affected Japanese immigrant community here in San
Francisco in the way that their families in homeland begged money to donate for war
effort.” He at the beginning criticized that those Japanese “who are enthusiastic about the
fall of Lushunko (Port Arthur) and collecting donations for the Japanese war effort”
“think, too simplistically, that a victory would stop Americans from verbally and
physically intimidating us.” But, to the readers’ surprise, he flips his logic and admits
“they had a point, because I now see less confrontations on the street.”
301

Katayama saw the war as a fight against Russian racism toward Finns and Jews and
as oppression of labor activism in Russia, which was different from Kotoku’s

301
Shakaishugi 8, no. 9 (July 3, 1904), no. 10 (August 3, 1904). See also Okabayashi, “San Francisco no
Jiro Nakazawa,” 231–245.
276
straightforward anti-war logic. While Kotoku and his socialist circle in Japan did not
retreat from their uncompromising position, Katayama condemned the Russo-Japanese
war in principle, but supported a Japanese victory because he believed Japan should not
succumb to racism evidenced in a Russian pogrom of Jews and their discrimination
against Finns. “I am opposed to this war,” he stated “but as a Japanese I do not wish
Japan to be beaten by Russia who in the past treated the Jews as she has in Kishineff, and
is still dealing with Fins [sic] in the most brutal fashion, and moreover she has shot down
many laborers during strikes.” Although one might regard it as Katayama’s expression of
nationalism, which marred his proletarian internationalist principles, it is worthwhile to
describe the ways in which Japanese socialists attempted to articulate the intersection of
race and class. Let us further examine the fact that the Japanese socialists, especially
those in America, saw the modern world through a lens that was sensitive to racial
discrimination, though with their own limitations.
302

For Kiichi Kaneko, his journalist activity in America not only widened his
understanding of socialism, but also caused a sense of distrust in the American ideal

302
Sen Katayama, “Les socialites japonais et la guerre,” Mouvement Socialist 12, no. 135 (April 15, 1904),
458; Sen Katayama, “Attitude of Japanese Socialists toward Present War,” Internatinal Socialist Review 4,
no. 9 (1903–4), 514. While he was in California, Katayama published an article on a French socialist
newspaper, L’Aurore, that predicts a war would not happen between Russia and Japan. “I do not personally
believe that the occupation of Manchuria by Russia is a question of life or death for Japan. Far from it:
Japanese workers have no vital interest in the matter. They do not wish to engage in mutual slaughter with
the Russian workers for the possession of Manuchuria and even Korea. We are certain that Russian workers
think as we do on this question… I cannot foresee with certainty what will come out of the present crisis,
but it seems probable to me that there will be no war, for the moment at least, because the great majority of
the Japanese people are opposed to it, especially the proletariat who are convinced that it would result in
the immediate rise in the cost of the necessities of life….The workers as well as the peasants in japan are
equally hostile and I believe that in the face of these sentiments on the part of the great mass of the
population the government will not be able to undertake war despite the desire of certain capitalists.” It
seems that Katayama did not take stock of the strong tide of pro-war public opinion generated by yellow
journalism and patriotic education, given that the war broke out a month later. See also Kublin, Asian
Revolutionary, 165–6.
277
reflected upon the reality of racial oppression. In 1898, Kaneko founded the Socialist
study group, Shakaishugi Kenkyukai, with Shusui Kotoku, Sen Katayama, and others in
Tokyo and came to New York via Seattle in May 1899 as a correspondent of periodicals,
including Jogaku Zasshi and Yorozu Choho. As early as 1900, he was working as a
servant at a building associated with a Christian church on 104
th
street in New York, and
reported “[A]s far as I see, no country is as uncivilized as America . . . The brutal
treatment of the Negro tells us the infringement of humanity, as evidently shown by the
lynching in the South, with the government quietly encouraging the cruelty, with its
people taking it for granted. . . . It pierces my heart to see white people give ill treatment
to Chinese, Japanese, and Black people.” Questioning his stance after he witnessed the
polarization of American society, as demonstrated in the sight of “many unemployed
people around the saloons,” “female factory hands,” and “swarms of children in the
impoverished Jewish and Italian quarters,” he joined the American Socialist Party on
April 22, 1903, to seek an answer as to “whether the principle of ‘survival of the fittest’ is
actually ignoring humanity.” While he followed the current updates of socialists in Japan
by subscribing to Heimin Shimbun and other Japanese periodicals, in 1906 he moved to
Chicago with his wife and socialist journalist, who wrote for Appeal to Reason, Josephine
Conger, whom he had recently married. There he worked for the Chicago Daily Socialist
and came to realize that the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War had given birth to a
new racial discourse of Yellow Peril. We will discuss the articles he contributed to
Chicago Daily Socialist in 1906 and 1907 on the Yellow Peril discourse a little later.
278
Now let us turn back to San Francisco.
303

Chapter Conclusion
It was the trans-Pacific movement of Fusataro Takano and Sen Katayama that
introduced the idea and practice of labor unionism into Japan. The development of
socialist organizations and newspapers in Japan became the central force that
foregrounded workers’ right and solidarity against the patriotic discourse during the
Russo-Japanese War. Shusui Kotoku articulated the necessary connection between
workers’ movement and anti-war campaigns. When Katayama came back to the West
Coast and tried to establish connections with the Socialist Party of America, he tried
forming socialist study groups in major cities and bringing the rippling effects of socialist
activism back from Japan. Although his attempt to sew seeds of labor activism cannot be
underestimated, the question lingers around what organizational strategy and analysis of
racialized political economy Katayama had. In short, Japanese immigrant laborers,
including section hands, miners, and farmhands, were introduced as strike-breakers from
the very beginning, which were crucial for the continuation of white-supremacist labor
hierarchy. As the next chapter reveals, Shusui Kotoku pushes the anti-racist critique
among Japanese immigrant socialist circle forward during his sojourn in 1905 and 1906.

303
Kiichi Kaneko, “Yabankoku toshiteno Amerika (America as an Uncivilized Country),” Jogaku zasshi,
no. 511 (July 1900), 18–22; Kiichi Kaneko, “Yo ha ikanishite shakaishugisha to narishika (How I Became
a Socialist),” Yorozu Choho, July 4–6, 1903.
279
Chapter 5: Shusui Kotoku, IWW, and the Fresno Labor League

The arrival of the prominent socialist advocate, Shusui Kotoku, in the Bay Area in
late 1905 gave a booster to the burgeoning movement. Vice versa, Kotoku’s stay in
America and the contact he had with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)
sharpened his analysis of racialized capitalism and critique on whites’ reluctance to
include Asian immigrants in the AFL and the SPA. Even after Kotoku returned to Japan,
trans-Pacific interaction in the building of the movement continued. The attention they
paid to the condition of workers in Japan trained members to see the power relations
between the militarizing Imperial government and the majority of the impoverished
nationals under capitalist society, while the desire of Japanese student-laborers to
intervene in the racialized political economy of California’s agriculture led them to form
the Fresno Labor League. It is significant that they grappled with the working conditions
of grape pickers and tried to collaborate with the Fresno branch of IWW. While they
effectively cut into the corruption of the Japanese immigrant communities around the
registration fee issue, their attempt at multiethnic organizing halted because of the 1910
High Treason Incident, which put Shusui and twelve other anarchist and socialist
comrades to death and substantially reversed immigrants’ attitude toward anarchists and
socialists in North America.

Shusui Kotoku’s Sojourn in Bay Area in 1905–06
Young Japanese journalists and workers in the Bay area needed, but could not get,
280
hands-on instruction from Katayama after he left for Houston. According to Sakutaro
Iwasa in his memoir, he was a little overwhelmed by the blunt way that Katayama left
them with only sample drafts of the declaration, platform, and member rules of the
socialist party. Therefore, the “San Francisco branch was not as active as those in
Oakland and Los Angeles.” However the anti-war journalism that flowed from Kotoku’s
pen greatly stimulated them, and in March, 1904, Iwasa and Ganketsu Akaba held a
public forum at the San Francisco Methodist Episcopal Church to protest the
Russo-Japanese War. They were joined by the Oakland group (led by Jitaro Ueyama,
who had been a preacher in Yokohama) and Tetsugoro Takeuchi. The forum actually
received a great turnout, but half of the audience was patriots, who accused them of being
Japanese traitors. These young Japaneses’ backgrounds were either journalists or
student-laborers. Ganketsu Akaba, born in Chikuma County of the Nagano prefecture in
1875, had graduated from Tokyo Legal School (presently Chuo University), and worked
as a reporter for Kobe Shimbun and progressive magazines Kakushin (edited by Saburo
Shimada), and Keisei (edited by Kaiseki Matsumura). After he wrote Aa, Sokoku (Oh,
Homeland), a book of harsh criticism on the state’s role in people’s impoverishment, he
came to San Francisco in 1902, worked as a reporter on Shin Sekai, and mingled at the
Gospel Society with other immigrants who were interested in the transformation of
society. Sakutaro Iwasa, born in Chiba, went to the same Tokyo Legal School and came
to the United States through Karayama’s Tobei Kyokai’s guidance. Toichi Ichikawa,
born in Nakajima County of the Aichi prefecture in 1881, worked as a schoolteacher in
Japan, came to the United States in 1901, and became a reporter for Shin Sekai in March
281
1903. He was an older brother of the feminist activist Fusae Ichikawa, and later became
director of the Nichibei newspaper branch in Denver in 1907.
304

Shigeki Oka was also involved. He was born in the Kochi prefecture in 1878, and,
as a relative of the Yorozu Choho founder, Ruiko Kuroiwa, became a reporter of this
progressive newspaper as well as a colleague of Kotoku Shusui and Toshihiko Sakai.
After he got fired for his fight with a popular drama writer hired by the paper, Shoyo
Matsui, he went to San Francisco (with the financial help of ex-colleagues, including
Kotoku and Sakai), in the spring of 1902. After working in an Alaskan cannery, he
became a member of the Japanese Gospel Society on Haight Street (which later moved to
Gary Street) and earned a living from domestic work. Later, in October, 1905, Oka
opened a San Francisco branch of Heiminsha on Post Street and retailed the Japanese
socialist newspapers and books that the company published. Another socialist fellow and
pharmacist from Sapporo, Hokkaido, Yosojiro Takenouchi, took the eagerness for
socialism to Fresno. He had come to the United States in September of 1904 through
Tobei Kyokai, worked on a 200-acre bean farm on lease in Courtland near Sacramento,
managed by a Japanese man named Inano, and later came to San Francisco to work as a
reporter for Shin Sekai while he mingled with other socialists. When he was assigned as a

304
Shakai Bunko, ed., Shakaishugisha, museifushugisha: Jinbutsu kenkyu shiryo (Tokyo: Kashiwa shobo,
1964), 1:41–43 (hereafter cited as SBSMJKS). In 1960s, a Scholar Satoshi Ohara found the pre-war secret
documents made by the Department of Interior and its spies who had watched over the Japanese socialists
and anarchists abroad. Shakai Bunko, an organization led by Mosaburo Suzuki, who had grown into a
socialist/communist under Katayama’s influence in 1920s in New York, published these materials found by
Ohara after the World War II. For Akaba’s path and thought, see Yoshimi Fujita, Meijiteki ningenzo:
Kinoshita Naoe, Akaba Ganketsu, and Tezuka Hosei (Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, 1968). A brief description of
Akaba’s book, Oh Homeland, is helpful. It gave vent to his deep disappointment and anger toward his
country that “had been creating the rich who suck the blood of the poor, the capitalist beasts who bite
laborers’ flesh, the aristocrats who are bizarre lazy creature, the bureaucrats who are machines with eyes,
mouths and noses, the military servicemen who are nothing but murderers, and the prostitutes who are the
slaves of the twentieth century.” (Ibid., 106)
282
manager of the Shin Sekai Fresno branch, he founded a socialist study group just as he
had done in Sapporo in 1902.
305

According to the record produced by spies of the Japanese consulate, there was an
Okinawan, named Sishu Aniya, who mingled with Jitaro Ueyama and other Japanese
socialists. Aniya was born on August 5, 1875, in Tomigusuku, Shimajiri County, of the
Okinawa prefecture. He worked as a leader of the Okinawan group of the Methodist
Church in San Francisco and later as an agent for an insurance company after he moved
to Los Angeles in 1916. He dropped out of the elite high school in Okinawa, studied
English at Aoyama Gakuin College in Tokyo, and came to San Francisco. He did not
graduate but studied Economics at Stanford University (1902–1904, 1905–1908). The
record does not clarify the extent of his involvement of socialist activity in the Bay Area,
but according to Frank Odo, Aniya sometimes attended the meetings of the Okinawan
Youth’s Reimeikai (New Dawn Society) in Los Angeles in 1921, thereby stimulating and
assisting the new generation of Okinawans with interest in social justice.
306

There was another group called Nisshin-gumi in San Francisco. Kankichi Hara,
who was already a member of the Socialist Party of America, and Chimpei Takagi, a son
of a jewelry merchant in Tokyo who opened a “general store on Sacramento Street 715

305
Yoneda, Zaibei Nihonjin rodosha, 68–9; Ohara, Katayama Sen, 33; SBSMJKS, 1:82-83; Shakai Bunko,
ed., Shakaishugisha, museifushugisha: Jinbutsu kenkyu shiryo (Tokyo: Kashiwa Shobo, 1966), 2:119–120
(hereafter SBSMJKS); Nobuo Okabayashi, “Hoko no Takenouchi Yosojiro,” Shoki Shakaishugi kenkyu, no.
16 (2003): 126–178. The chief editor of Shin Sekai, Kan’ichi Yukawa was Takenouchi’ acquaintance from
his days at Sapporo Independence Church. Yukawa’s wife, Kameko Nishikawa, who had also been a
church member and studied abroad at Mills College, and Tamaki Fujita, also from the same church, got
together in San Francisco. Tamaki Fujita sometimes hosted gatherings of those socialists.

306
SBSMJKS, 1:223–4; Franklin Odo, ed., The Columbia Documentary History of Asian American
Experience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 242–6.
283
that is run on the socialist principle and sells both American and Japanese food stuff.”
Jiro Nakazawa joined their group and got together every Saturday night to have
discussions with Seito Kodama, who had worked as a farmhand in Coyote, Santa Clara
County and as a schoolboy in San Francisco, and others, including Tatemoto Kikuchi,
Tomojiro Kato, and Rinjiro Okabe. Jiro Nakazawa reported anti-Japanese incidents in
Tobei Zasshi, a successor of Katayama’s Shakaishugi and now edited by Goichi Yamane.
One anti-Japanese incident was submitted by a superintendent named Langdon on
September 1, 1904, to City Attorney Long, on the question of school congestion and
whether the Board of Education had the right to exclude 250 Japanese pupils. Although
the supervisor concluded that they had neither power nor money for separate institutes for
the Japanese, this issue would again recur in 1905 and 1906. The other issue that
Nakazawa reported on was the AFL’s appeal to include Japanese and Koreans in the
Chinese Exclusion Act. Probably, this was the first article about Japanese exclusion from
social sites, such as schools and workplaces in the Japanese socialist presses, thus
opening a way to more accurate and articulated understandings of racial capitalism.
307

While the two groups in San Francisco briefly came together when a Christian
socialist Isoo Abe visited San Francisco in late April of 1905, it was Kotoku’s sojourn to
the Bay Area between November of 1905 and June 5, 1906, that energized their activism.
Kotoku had gotten out of Sugamo prison on July 28, 1905, unsound from the harsh
treatment in jail, but intellectually refreshed by having repeatedly read Kropotkin’s From

307
Examiner, September 2, 1904; September 27, 1904; Okabayashi, “San Francisco,” 231–245.
284
Fields, Factories and Workshops.
308
In jail, Kotoku was convinced that the state’s
abusive power had been well-expressed, embodied, and articulated in the systems of law,
courts, and prison through his own experience. While Kotoku was in prison, Heiminsha
started publishing Chokugen (Straight Word) as a successor to Heimin Shimbun, but
when Chokugen was suspended/banned by the government in September, 1905, the main
contributors and managers—Toshihiko Sakai, Naoe Kinoshita, Sanshiro Ishikawa,
Kotoku, and recently released Kojiro Nishikawa—made the decision to break up
Heiminsha. Nishikawa, with Kotoku and Sakai as supporters, began a new periodical
titled Hikari (Light), and Naoe Kinoshita and Sanshiro Ishikawa, with an orientation
toward Christian Socialism, started Shin Kigen (New Epoch). Their split was not so much
an ideological division as personal frictions, but Kotoku himself had begun to drastically
shift away from parliamentarism toward anarchism. He decided to leave Japan—where
the government stifled the socialist movement—for the United States. (He hoped to go to
Europe as well). He expressed his desire to practice “communicating in foreign languages
that are necessary for joining internationalist movement of anarchists or communists.” He

308
Kropotkin’s From Fields, Factories and Workshops basically maintains the “integration of labor” as
oppose to the division of labor and the permanent subdivision. In a society of integrated, combined labor,
each individual is a producer of both manual and intellectual work, working both in the field and the
industrial workshop. He did not necessarily advocate for small-scale production, but for appropriate levels
of production and technology. This book might have affected the way Kotoku saw Japanese migrant
farmhands in California. Kropotkin wrote “the agricultural labourer, who formerly used to find a relief
from the hardships of his life in the home of his ancesters—the future home of his children—in his love of
the field and in a keen intercourse with nature…has been doomed to disappear…and substituted by an
occasional servant hired for the summer and discharged as the autumn comes: a tramp who will never again
see the field he has harvested once in his life. ‘An affair of a few years,’ the economists say, ‘to reform
agriculture in accordance with the true principles of division of labour and modern industrial organization.’”
Although it is a meaningful critique of capitalist modern agriculture, it is ambiguous how much this book
could contribute to Kotoku’s capacity to grasp problems of working-class community from within. See Iain
McKay, ed., Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology (Oakland: AK Press, 2014),
647–676.
285
also intended “to meet leaders of revolutionary parties and learn about their movements,”
and to “publish his critical writings on the political and economic system of Japan from
where the pernicious hands of ‘His Majesty’ cannot reach,” and lastly he planned to
“organize Japanese workers in the U.S.”
309

Kotoku arrived at Seattle on November 29, 1905, with his nephew, Yukie Kotoku,
and Tokinari Kato, a son of Tokijiro Kato—who was a doctor running Commoners’
Hospital in Tokyo and was a sympathizer of their movement—as well as Yaeko
Nishizawa, whose socialist husband, Gonjiro Yamauchi, had already been already in the
United States. Like Katayama, Kotoku gave a speech at a public forum that lasted an
hour and a half, with an audience of 500, at the hall of the Japanese Association, and felt
the “freedom of speech” that he could not enjoy and was denied in Japan. At his arrival at
Oakland, Shigeki Oka, with whom Kotoku had been corresponding, picked him up. As
soon as they got to one of the wharves of San Francisco, many more comrades welcomed
him, including Oka’s wife, Toshiko Oka, Sakutaro Iwasa, Toichi Ichikawa, Jiro
Nakazawa, Zenzaburo Kuramochi, Seiichi Sagitani, Albert Johnson—who had
corresponded with Kotoku through Oka—and more than ten others. Albert Johnson was
an elder laborer, accompanied by a seventeen-year-old girl, Fritz, whose mother was a

309
When Isoo Abe spoke “You should refrain from radical movement. Shusui Kotoku always sees the
government as an evil because he came up to age when the oligarchy government harshly suppressed the
Freedom Party [of the People’s Right Movement]. The perspective is not good,” those young Japanese
were disappointed. See Yoneda, Zaibei Nihonjin rodosha, 72; Itoya, Kotoku Shusui kenkyu, 196–203;
Shusui Kotoku to Albert Johnson, August 10, 1905; Kotoku to Johnson, October 11, 1905. See also Shobei
Shioda, Kotoku Shusui no nikki to shokan [Shusui Kotoku’s Diary and Correspondences] (Tokyo: Miraisha,
1965).

286
relative of Emma Goldman.
310

Despite his intentions, Kotoku could not organize Japanese immigrant workers
during his sojourn. However, while he recuperated his health, Kotoku spoke publicly
several times and encouraged Japanese young workers to be involved, thereby trying to
establish an exile community of Japanese socialists, which he compared to Russian exile
revolutionaries in Switzerland. Kotoku became a member of the Socialist Party of
America after an organizer George Williams and Eitel (full name unknown) from SPA
often visited him, gave him various periodicals, and invited him to their meetings.
Kotoku gave a talk on the impoverishment of Japanese people at a forum on December
16 in San Francisco at the Golden Gate Hall on Sutter Street after the Russo-Japanese
War due to increased tax, with another speaker from SPA, C. H. King. Kotoku was
visited by three members of the Industrial Workers of the World on December 15 and
was invited to give a talk at their gathering. At this point, Kotoku did not know what kind
of organization IWW was, though he would have more communication with
IWW-related socialists later. Another public talk was held in Oakland, at the hall of the
Socialist Party’s state headquarters, where Jitaro Ueyama was facilitator, and with an
audience of 200. The reporter of Socialist Voice, McDavid (full name unknown) joined
Kotoku’s speech. Kotoku sold socialist literature and postcards of portraits of Socialist
thinkers and revolutionaries, printed by Heiminsha back in Japan. On a day in December,
Sen Katayama stopped by on his way back to Japan, took Kotoku—who was still

310
Shusui Kotoku, “Soko Yori (1),” [From San Francisco (1)] Hikari, January 20, 1906; See Susumu
Yamaizumi, ed., Kotoku Shusui: Heiminsha Collection, Volume One (Tokyo: Ronsosha, 2002) for select
writings of Kotoku.
287
suffering from a digestive disorder—to a bar-restaurant on Market Street, treated him a
beer (according to Shigeki Oka), and told him about his new venture of building a new
Japanese rice-farming community near Houston, Texas. Kotoku’s response is unknown.
311

On January 21, 1906, Kotoku and forty other Japanese comrades attended a
gathering in Oakland to express solidarity to the 1905 Russian Revolution on its first
anniversary. In front of approximately 400 men and women, Anthony (full name
unknown), from IWW, spoke. He advocated for revolutionary unions as opposed to
harmonious union-capitalist relations. So did Mrs. Olive Johnson, who mentioned the
genealogy of internationalism from First International to Second International, Austin
Lewis from the Socialist Party, who criticized the cruelty of Russian despotism, and
Kotoku, who stated the “Russian Revolution is a precursor of revolution elsewhere in the
world. We should do our best to protect and support this revolution.” The donations
added up to $58, to be sent to Russia. The next day, another solidarity gathering was held
in San Francisco, with three times the audience. Donations amounted to $240.
Encouraged by Kotoku’s presence, young Japanese folks made time to get together for
monthly meetings at Heiminsha. Their first meeting at the Gospel Society on January 13
included Iwasa, Ichikawa, Kuramochi, Toru Saijo, and Ichimatsu Hasegawa. The second
meeting was on February 11, at which they decided to share the burden of Heiminsha

311
Shusui Kotoku, “Soko Yori, (2),”Hikari, February 20, 1906; Itoya, Kotoku Shusui kenkyu, 206; Naoki
Oka, Shobei Shioda, and Akira Fujiwara, eds., Sokoku o teki to shite: Ichi zaibei Nihonjin no hansen undo
[Home Country as an enemy: Anti-War Activism of a Japanese in America] (Tokyo: Meiji Bunken, 1965),
91–92.
288
management with Oka.
312

Kotoku saw the transoceanic imperialist ambition of the United States and the
Yellow Peril discourse as two sides of the same coin. “When the U.S. has 6.4 million
unemployed people, 22 % of American working population,” he wrote in Nichibei “there
is no ground for the argument that Japanese and Koreans are taking jobs from Americans.”
“There is enough land in the West Coast for both yellow and white races to work on,” he
continued, “but laborers are deprived of land and means of production.” “America, why
don’t you see millions of your poor citizens starving and lacking clothes? Why don’t you
stop trying to grab Oriental market” of “China, Korea, and Japan” to “sell your goods”
and “give that stuff to your own needy countrymen.” Because “it is the fear of losing jobs
that drives Americans to exclude Chinese, Koreans, Japanese and non-uniozed laborers,”
he concluded, “once Socialism removes the source of the fear of wage decrease,
unemployment, and starvation by making land and capital a common property of laborers
and by allowing them to produce what they need, the race problem would disappear.”
Although it is a sort of economic determinism that lacks the perspective of
overdetermination, to borrow Althusser’s term, it was one of the most acute criticisms of
American racial capitalism presented by Japanese socialists of that time. Being an
intellectual, though, might have kept Kotoku from understanding the laborer daily life as
it was. After he questioned “whether Japanese people would come to America only to
become a mere domestic worker and schoolboy if Japan has sufficient resources,” he
continued by writing, “A life of the Japanese immigrant is a spiritual desert without home,

312
Shusui Kotoku, “Soko yori, (3),”Hikari, March 5, 1906; Shusui Kotoku, “Soko yori, (4),”Hikari, April
5, 1906.
289
social empathy, or a decent hobby.”
313

It had been one year since both houses of the California State Assembly had passed
the resolution on the exclusion of Japanese workers in March, 1905. By this time, Kotoku
came to know more about IWW and saw increased possibilities in their anti-racist labor
organizing, but also predicted a vast amount of work to inform widely dispersed Japanese
workers on the West Coast. One day, probably in February or March, Kotoku dropped by
an office of the Socialist Labor Party of America, which still existed after the disaffected
elements merged with the Social Democratic Party to form the Socialist Party in 1901.
He walked in from the backstreet (Jessie Street) and found out that some of the people
there were friends of Freischmann (full name unknown), who had come to Japan and met
Kotoku a year before. In a lively conversation, he asked those comrades what they
thought about the issue of Japanese exclusion from unions. Their enthusiastic response
explained their close relationship with the Industrial Workers of the World, founded in
June of 1905. They emphasized that the IWW had no racial discrimination and had been
organizing unskilled workers on an industry basis unlike AFL’s trade unions. Kotoku
wrote, “If Japanese workers become members of this union [IWW] our socialist
movement will gain a huge support. Unfortunately, most of them [Japanese immigrants]
do not know much about socialism nor IWW. What is worse, they mistook labor unions
that exclude Japanese workers as socialist.” This misunderstanding is somewhat similar
to what Fusataro Takano perceived about American unions, because they regarded the

313
Shusui Kotoku, “Nichibei kankei no shorai,” Nichibei Shimbun, January 21, 1906. Toshio Itoya argues
that two of Kotoku’s newspaper articles clearly show his dislike toward vulgarity of Japanese underclass
life in Tokyo slums. See Shusui Kotoku, “Setagaya no Ranruichi,” Heimin Shimbun, December 27, 1903;
Shusui Kotoku, “Tokyo no kichinyado,” Heimin Shimbun, January 10, 17, 24, 31, 1904.
290
power to exclude Chinese or Japanese through electoral representation and economic
discrimination, along with outright violence, as one of the essences of labor unions.
314

The 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which struck the city on April 18, gave a
glimpse of “Anarchist Communist” utopia to Kotoku. As Rebecca Solnit demonstrated in
her book, A Paradise Built in Hell, communities of generosity, openhandedness, and
spontaneous cooperation sprang up all over the city right after the devastation. The
voluntarily opened relief kitchens and the improvised emergency hospitals were evidence
of people’s capacity for independence, mutual aid, and self-management—as opposed to
their being characterized by the authorities as disaster victims, powerless and waiting for
help or desperately looting property. Sakutaro Iwasa recollects, “Every citizen, whether
they were young or old, men or women, seldom rob a thing from others or fight [for
limited resource]. . . . That proved human nature of mutual aid in the time of emergency.”
The Japanese Gospel Society, too, according to Iwasa, “immediately opened itself as a
makeshift hospital to accommodate the injured and the elderly and young, especially
Japanese.” Despite their request, neither the Japanese consulate nor the Japanese
Association provided them with doctors or medical equipment. The Gospel Society
directly talked to the city’s emergency headquarters and was able to obtain medical
necessities. Kotoku reported excitedly, “All commerce has stopped. Postal service,
railroad, ferries are all for free. Transportation and distribution of food, accommodation
and care of injured persons, clearing of burnt debris, building of temporal shelters are all

314
Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle
for Japanese Exclusion (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 27; Shusui Kotoku, “Soko yori, (5),” Hikari, April 5,
1906.
291
managed and worked out spontaneously. Money is useless because there is no
merchandise. Private property now seemed to disappear.” As he evacuated to Oakland
and stayed at Tetsugoro Takeuchi’s place, Kotoku wrote he would miss this ideal
relationship among people and social organization as soon as the capitalist organization
of society recovered itself.
315

Kotoku’s guidance and assistance to young socialists gave them some confidence
and experiential reference. He helped them in holding three monthly study group
meetings, weekly Sunday gatherings, and public lectures—including one on woman’s
rights that featured Yaeko Nishizawa as the speaker. He participated with other youths in
a protest in San Francisco against the incarceration of the organizers of United Mine
Workers of America in Colorado, where they saw the police raid. He led a street rally and
oratory in Japantown. He helped youth take orders of Hikari, Shin Kigen, and the Heimin
Book Series from Japanese living in major cities on the West Coast. He also exemplified
how Japanese socialists could communicate with other American and immigrant labor
activists, including a Russian comrade, Myefski, the chief editor of Russian Review. In all
these deeds, Kotoku was able to show his fellow socialists what an ideological struggle
looks like and how important it is to create an audience and supporters of their own

315
Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New
York: Penguin Group, 2009), especially chapter one, 1–57; Sakutaro Iwasa, “Zaibei undoshiwa,” Heimin
Shimbun, June 18, 1947; Shusui Kotoku, “Museifu kyosansei no jitsugen [Realization of Anarchist
Communism],” Hikari, May 20, 1906. Of course, some others experienced the quake differently. One of
the young Japanese in the socialist circle, Kesaya Yamazaki, who came to Seattle in 1903 and to San
Francisco in 1904 to work as a school boy and would later become a socialist lawyer in Japan, remembers
“When I was walking with guys after the San Francisco Earthquake, Policemen forced us to dig a hole for a
makeshift toilet… So next time I walked with Ms. Yamada then they did not pull me over.” See Eisaburo
Morinaga, Yamazaki Kesaya (Tokyo: Kinokuniya shoten, 1972), 48–51. Despite the relief donation of
$246,000 sent from the citizens and government of Japan, the anti-Japanese campaign was becoming
vigorous again. See Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice, 33.
292
movement through voices and pens of ideological intervention. Furthermore, Kotoku
consolidated their organizational coherency in the formation of the Shakai Kakumeito
(Social Revolutionary Party) on June 1, 1906, at the office of SPA on Telegraph Street in
Berkeley. About fifty Japanese joined the Party this day, with the active core being
Zenzaburo Kuramochi, Sakutaro Iwasa, Tetsugoro Takeuchi, and Shigeki Oka. Their
platform read:
1) We shall abolish the current system of industrial and economic competition,
making all land and capital the common property of the people, thereby rooting
out the cause of poverty;
2) We shall reform the traditional and superstitious class system and guarantee
equal rights to all;
3) We shall eliminate national and racial prejudices and strive for true
brotherhood and international peace;
4) To achieve the aforesaid goals, we recognize the necessity of uniting with the
comrades of the world to carry out a great social revolution.
316

Although Kotoku left for Japan four days later, on June 5, with Shigeki Oka, who
decided to purchase a printing machine in Japan with Japanese movable type, the Social
Revolutionary Party did not lose momentum. On the evening of June 10, their street rally
on the corner of 8th and Franklin Street attracted 700 people. Their red flag, inscribed
with the Chinese characters “Shakai Kakumeito,” must have drawn some Chinese in the
heart of the Japanese and Chinese settlements, though soon police intervened and arrested
two party members.
317

316
Shusui Kotoku, “Shakai Kakumeito okoru,” Hikari, July 20, 1906.

317
Sakutaro Iwasa, “Beikoku Yori,” Hikari, 1906.
293
Who Are the True Allies?
What they encountered next epitomized the intersection of race and class, and the
need to find true allies. In mid-June, 1906, Sakutaro Iwasa and Toru Saijo led the
campaign to support the strike for higher wages by the International Seamen’s Union of
the Pacific. When the shipping companies sought Japanese people scab labor, the strikers
exhorted the Japanese not to become scabs by distributing leaflets and dissuading them at
the dock. But Union President Andrew Furuseth and his AFL-affiliated union were
fiercely anti-Japanese and had unswervingly endorsed Japanese exclusion. The young
Japanese socialists probably jumped on the cause of international unity and the
brotherhood of workers without much investigation of who could be a real ally to fight
alongside them for workers’ rights.
318

The issue of Asian immigration loomed large for the American Socialist Party. The
California Socialist Party and the National Executive Committee of the American
Socialist Party adopted a resolution favoring the restriction of Asian labor immigration,
respectively, in 1906 and 1907. The resolution was submitted to the International
Socialist Congress in Stuttgart, Germany, and called on all Socialist parties to educate
immigrants in the principles of socialism and trade unionism, but at the same time “to
combat with all means at their command the willful importation of cheap foreign labor
calculated to destroy labor organizations, to lower the standard of living of the working
class, and retard the ultimate realization of Socialism.” The Congress rejected the

318
Zenzaburo Kuramochi, “Shakai Kakumeito okoru,” Hikari, no. 17, 1906; Nichibei, June 23, 1906;
Hyman Weintraub, Andrew Furuseth: Emancipator of the Seamen (Berkeley: Sage Publication, 1959),
112–3; An IWW-organizer, J. H. Walsh also wrote about similar incident involving “Sailors’ Union.” See
Daniel Rosenberg, “The IWW and Organization of Asian Workers in Early 20
th
Century America,” Labor
History 36, no. 1 (January, 1995): 77–87.
294
American resolution and instead clarified “the only way to overcome those hardships is
through organizing the immigrants and through securing legislation granting them equal
political and economic rights.” Many ideologues of the SPA countered. Even a left-wing
member of the party, Herman Titus, who had been with Sen Katayama on the podium a
few years before, wrote that racial incompatibility was a fact and “no amount of
Proletarian Solidarity or International Unity can ignore it. We must face facts.” A right
wing member, Victor Berger, said that if something was not done at once, “this country is
absolutely sure to become a black-and-yellow country within a few generations.”
319

An African American socialist preacher, Reverend George Washington Woodbey,
adamantly opposed the idea of the immigration restrictions of Asians. At the 1908
convention, he stated “I am in favor of throwing the entire world open to the inhabitants
of the world. . . . It would be a curious state of affairs for immigrants or descendants of
immigrants from Europe themselves to get control of affairs in this country, and then say
to the Oriental immigrants that they should not come here. . . . Are the Socialists of this
country to say to the Socialists of Germany, or the Socialists of Sweden, Norway, Japan,
China, or any other country, that they are not to go anywhere on the face of the earth? It
seems to me absurd to take that position. Therefore, I hope and move that any sort of

319
Oakland Socialist Voice, December 8, 1906; Ira Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement, 1897–1912
(New York: Greenwood Press, 1952), 277–279; “Labor Leader Says Exclude Japanese,” Chicago Daily
Socialist, December 5, 1906; “Minutes of the National Executive Committee, March 2, 1907,” Socialist
Party Official Bulletin, March 1907; Herman F. Titus, The Socialist (Seattle), December 7, 1907. In
February 1908, the National Committee, after the internal power struggle, finally and officially endorsed
the immigration restriction applied to laborers “coming from Oriental countries, or others backward in
economic de (Kaneko, The Japanese Situation 1906)velopment, where the workers of such countries have
shown themselves, as a body, to be unapproachable with the philosophy of Socialism.”
295
restriction of immigration will be stricken out of the committee’s resolution.”
320

Shusui Kotoku, who had gone back to Japan to support the Japan Socialist Party
that Toshihiko Sakai, Kojiro Nishikawa, and Sen Katayama had founded back in
February 1906 in the hiatus of oppression, protested by sending an open letter to the SPA.
It read:
Comrades: We believe that the expulsion question of the Japanese laborers in
California is much due to racial prejudice. The Japanese Socialist Party, therefore,
hopes that the American Socialist Party will endeavor to bring the question to a
satisfactory issue in accordance with the spirit of international unity among
workingmen. We also ask the American Socialist Party to acquaint us with its
opinion as to this question.
321

The American Socialist Party never answered this letter. Kiichi Kaneko, a reporter
of the Chicago Daily Socialist and a remote supporter of the Social Revolutionary Party,
disappointed by the SPA and the Yellow Peril discourse, observed in the Chicago Daily
Socialist that whiteness had prevented the international solidarity of workers. He wrote,
“I want to know whether American laborers abhor immigrant laborers who work for
cheaper wages. If so, what about Italians? . . . I want to know whether Asian laborers are
the only race who lowered the living condition in this country.” He also stated “Do
American Socialists think they can quit Capitalism by excluding Japanese workers from
this country? They should think about more pressing problems before they throw stones
at their needy comrades [from Japan].” Kaneko would quit working for the Chicago
Daily Socialist in June and begin a new magazine, The Socialist Woman, with his wife,

320
Philip S. Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans: From the Age of Jackson to World War II
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977), 166–167.

321
Oakland Socialist Voice, January 19, 1907.
296
Josephine Conger, on June 5, 1907.
322

Direct Action or Parliamentarism?
The Social Revolutionary Party’s trajectory needs to be considered with the
influence of Kotoku, who was driving toward “direct action” as the Party’s main tactic.
Here, a side step might be helpful to see what Kotoku did after his return to Japan. Japan
had gone through some changes during this time. Japanese Imperialism surely extended
itself by cession of Sakhalin and the Liaodong Peninsula and strengthened its control on
Korea, Manchuria, and the Chinese market. The Russo-Japanese War left Japan with the
deaths of 200,000 soldiers, 215 million yen of tax increases and 1.56 billion yen of
national debt, 68 percent of which was foreign loans, mainly from Britain and the United
States. The foreign loans simply point to the thesis that the Japanese and American
empires grew together. These led to inflation and increases in prices, which made the
Japanese working masses suffer tremendously. Numerous firings of factory hands and
decreased wages ignited a series of strikes in the major factories in Kure, Koishikawa,
Ominato, and Ishikawajima. Even the right-wingers agitated workers into a riot for the
cancellation of the Treaty of Portsmouth because it did not obligate Russia to pay
indemnity. As a response to the nation-wide eruptions of frustration, the Katsura
administration’s cabinet members resigned en masse and a new cabinet came into being.
At this juncture, Minister of the Interior Takashi Hara of the new Saionji administration,

322
Kiichi Kaneko, “The Japanese Situation,” Chicago Daily Socialist, December 8, 1906; Kiichi Kaneko,
“American Socialists and Japanese,” Kakumei, February 10, 1907; Oakland Socialist Voice, March 16,
1907. See also Hideko Ohashi, “Chicago ni okeru Kaneko Kiichi,” Shoki Shakaishugi kenkyu, no.14
(2001): 75–92.
297
temporarily loosened the administration’s oppression against the socialist movement
when he attempted to detach Aritomo Yamagata, an absolutist defender of the emperor
system, and his military clique in the bureaucracy from the police institution.
When the government accepted the application of the formation of the Japanese
Commoners’ Party by Kojiro Nishikawa and Den Higuchi on January 14, 1906,
Toshihiko Sakai and Sho Fukao followed suit and formed the Japanese Socialist Party. In
February, they merged as the Japanese Socialist Party and declared that the group would
pursue socialism within the limits of Japanese laws. Sen Katayama, who had just arrived
back from the United States, actually persuaded his comrades to insert a clause of legal
approach by arguing “our workers were not educated in the tactics of the labor movement
and therefore [we] should go slow in order to lead and educate them.” Their first
campaign was to protest against a proposed increase in carfare on the local trolley system
in Tokyo. The socialist speakers, at a mass meeting, excited the audience by their strong
denunciations of the three streetcar company owners. The crowd went on a rampage,
destroying the company’s property. Their demonstration and the boycott strategy after
September drew many supporters, and membership grew to 2,000 within a few months.
When Shusui Kotoku came back to Japan in June, he questioned which direction
the party should head in his speech on direct action and ignited an enthusiastic discussion
on the directions of parliamentarism—strongly advocated by Tetsuji Tazoe—and direct
action. He argued that his stay in America convinced him that parliamentarism would not
be able to bring about changes due to exclusion from electoral politics, and that direct
action of general striking was the only path towards revolution. He emphasized that the
298
world had witnessed “general strikes in Spain in 1874, the U.S. in 1886, Belgium in 1893,
Austria in 1897, Barcelona, Genève, Sweden in 1902, Netherland in 1903, Hungary and
Italy in 1904.” However, some others remained skeptical about its automatic application
in a Japanese context. Kojiro Nishikawa counter-argued, “Socialism is a movement of
masses. It is absurd if [movement leaders] leave ordinary people behind to go forward
hastily and get frustrated with those [who are slow to follow] . . . Not all good seeds bear
fruit. It depends on what kind of soil you sow seeds on. [Just like sowing seeds without
considering soil could end up fruitless,] A movement that ignores national context is a
vain effort. . . . We are ordinary men who have no other ways in order to embody
socialism than to hold hands with other ordinary people and go on a safe path.” Kanson
Arahata, a fellow socialist since the Heiminsha period, recalled and echoed Nishikawa in
his autobiography, “Kotoku’s criticism of parliament was right in itself. However, there
were not any substantial laborers’ organizations that could lead, instruct, and coordinate a
general strike at that time. The class-consciousness of workers was pretty immature. The
Japan Socialist Party had no actual industrial laborer in the twenty members of the
executive committee.” Arahata further articulates the necessity of struggle for democracy
within the socialist movement because “we, of course, had to resort to a suffrage
movement and parliament to remove the Public Peace Preservation Act that had
prevented workers’ unification and to secure people’s rights to freedom of speech,
assembly, and association.” Without it, it seemed to Arahata, mass movement would not
be possible.
323

323
Shusui Kotoku, “Kinkikan ni okeru enzetsu no taiyo,” Hikari, July 5, 1906; Morikuni Yoshikawa,
299
The controversy of direct action and parliamentarism must have put Japanese
socialist immigrants in an ambiguous realm. On one hand, they were excluded from
American electoral politics. On the other, they were excluded from most of the labor
unions. Another controversy between two socialists, Tetsuji Tazoe and Seinosuke Oishi,
also must have made them feel a contradiction in their situation and reconsider their own
historical contexts and social conditions. Tazoe, who had studied in the United States
from 1897 to 1900 at Baker University and at the University of Chicago, argued in
Shakai Shimbun on August 18, 1907, that, “movement of social transformation must be
born spontaneously from the soil of Japanese society with awareness in each citizen . . .
and be adjusted to the particularities of Japanese society. . . . Why is it necessary to
always quote Marx, Engels, and Kropotkin?” Oishi, a Socialist doctor who had studied in
Oregon, travelled to India for an epidemiological study, and witnessed colonization by
Britain, disagreed in Osaka Heimin Shimbun on September 20, 1907, that, “since the
movement of capitalists is now bankokuteki [ranging over all countries], why should the
class struggle in Japan not refer to August Bebel [of the German Socialist Party], Eugene
Debs [of SPA], and sometimes Kropotkin and Bakunin?” First, while Tazoe’s emphasis
on workers’ subjectivity was provocative, Japanese immigrant socialists in the Bay Area
were in a foreign land and therefore had to think about the particularity of their own
conditions of life and struggle. Second, unlike Oishi, they were aware of the SPA’s
anti-Asian policy. They had to gain their own voice and strategy.
324

Keigyaku seisoshi (Tokyo: Aoki shoten, 1957), 108.

324
Shakai Shimbun, August 18, 1907; Osaka Heimin Shimbun, September 20, 1907. Rodo Undoshi
300

Social Revolutionary Party’s Organ, Kakumei
The members of the Social Revolutionary Party in San Francisco published the first
issue of their bimonthly paper, Kakumei (Revolution), on December 20, 1906. Sen
Katayama, who was then in Houston attempting to carry out the rice farming project,
contributed a congratulatory greeting in English on the first page, and harshly criticized
white racism against Japanese workers. “[O]wing to the ignorance of the white fellow
workers as to the actual interests of the working class the world over, we may expect that
the white fellow workers will demand the exclusion of our race more and more. Oh,
foolish white fellow workers, if you have a brain to think and eyes to see can you not see
that the concentration of capital and the lions share of the Capitalist Class of all products
is the direct cause of the lowering of your standard of living?” While he praises his
comrades’ endeavor to “fight and advocate the cause of socialism among Japanese on the
Pacific coast and Hawaii,” he emphasized that “our mission to tell the American workers
also that we are capable of organizing ourselves into a Union and fighting the cause of
the workers as well as they do here in the United States. I can testify the fact by my own
experience in Japan, as well as they can see it so themselves at the very place San
Francisco.” While Katayama admits that Japanese “fruit pickers and sugar beets workers”

Kenkyukai (Study Group for Labor History) has reprinted Osaka Heimin Shimbun as a part of Meiji
Shakashugi Shiryoshu [Historical Materials of Meiji Socialism]. See Rodo Undoshi Kenkyukai, ed., Meiji
shakai shugi shiryoshu, vol. 5, Osaka Heimin Shimbun (Tokyo: Meiji Bunken Shiryo Kankokai, 1962),
120; For biographies of Oishi, see Shingo Kitamura, Oishi Seinosuke and the Great Treason Incident, trans.
Joseph Cronin (Kyoto: White Tiger Press, 2004) and Eizo Hamahata, Oishi Seinosuke shoden (Shingu:
Arao Seibundo, 1972); Eugene Debs himself “always insisted on absolute equality. But he failed to accept
the view that special measures were sometimes needed to achieve this equality.” See Ray Ginger, The
Bending Cross (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1949), 260. Debs’ opposition to the anti-Asian
bias was not as vociferous as that of the Black socialist minister George Washington Woodbey.
301
are “getting the better and higher wages than American workers,” he asserts the ultimate
aim for workers to cooperate nationally and internationally in order to break through the
disadvantageous situation of Japanese exclusion from unionization.
325

The first issue also reported that the party had a public forum on November 9, 1906,
on the issue of the segregation of Japanese school children, joined by supporting speakers
of Osborne (full name unknown) from the SPA, and Sullivan (full name unknown) from
the Socialist Labor Party. It also kept the network of Japanese socialists, by reporting that
Kiichi Kaneko in Chicago, Sen Katayama in Houston, Toru Saijo in Debuque, Iowa, and
Tokiya Kato in Salinas were all trying to disseminate the message of Socialism and that
Japanese students—including Shozo Nagata, who had founded a socialist study group in
Los Angeles the previous November—were preparing to publish their monthly magazine
titled Honoo (Fire).
326

The Japanese government’s oppression of the socialist movement intensified again
when Katayama wrote in the first issue “Our policy is toward the overthrow of Mikado,
King, President as representing the Capitalist Class as soon as possible, and we do not
hesitate as to the means.” The San Francisco Chronicle, the Examiner, and the Call
sensationally took it up as an alarm of Yellow Peril and a plot of the assassination of
Roosevelt. The matter came before a Special Board of Inquiry of the San Francisco
Immigration Commission, and Tetsugoro Takeuchi was ordered to appear. Supported by
Austin Lewis, a lawyer and one-time socialist candidate for the governorship of

325
Kakumei, December 20, 1906. Shakai Bunko, ed., Zaibei shakaishugisha museifushugisha enkaku
(Tokyo: Kashiwa shobo, 1964), 462 (hereafter cited as SBZSME).

326
Kakumei, December 20, 1906.
302
California, Tetsugoro was able to exonerate himself. Though the bewildered Japanese
consul asked the U.S. government to deport the responsible person, the existing statutes
required proof that he had been an anarchist at the time of his entry, or that he had been in
the country less than three full years and had committed an overt act of anarchism.
Therefore, Takeuchi, who had only expressed his thoughts, did not get deported. But
across the Pacific, the Minister of the Interior, Takashi Hara, sent special secret service
police to Kotoku’s house and investigated the connection, intensifying surveillance on the
group.
327

When they published the second issue of Kakumei, the Japanese printer did not
want to get involved in their journalism and they had to use a mimeograph process,
except for the first and last pages, which were in English. With support from a
Hungarian-born anarchist, Alexander Horr and his wife, according to Iwasa’s recollection,
they were able to publish the second issue on February 10, 1907. Kiichi Kaneko
contributed to the first page from Chicago, criticizing Japanese exclusion by the SPA. He
stated “they have vainly tried to narrow the [scope of? Illegible] socialism by joining with
the cheap political grafters . . . in disapprobation of the Japanese immigration. So far as I
know, not a [illegible] Socialist paper in this country spoke out plainly on the Japanese
question without showing race prejudice.” Kaneko went so far as prioritizing his class
identity over his nationality for the sake of true socialism by writing, “Do they not see
that even among American workers, under the competitive system, the lowering of the

327
Kakumei, December 20, 1906; Ibid., February 10, 1907; San Francisco Chronicle, December 30, 1906;
San Francisco Examiner, December 30, 1906; San Francisco Call, December 30, 1906; SBZSME, 462, 470,
529-531; “Iwayuru Kakumei-Jiken, jo,” Heimin Shimbun, March 14, 1907; “Iwayuru Kakumei-Jiken, ge,”
Heimin Shimbun, March 15, 1907. Daily Heimin Shimbun succeeded Hikari from January 15, 1907.
303
standard of living is an unavoidable fact? Do they not think that it is rather advantageous
for them to welcome all workers and teach them socialism and unite them in our fight? I
am, however, looking forward when all American Socialists will give up ‘America’ just
as I did ‘Japan,’ and come to real, international, scientific socialism.”
328

The second issue also reported that the young Japanese socialists had held a mass
meeting on January 5 in an empty store on Sutter Street in San Francisco to clear public
suspicion against them. Eight Japanese speakers and two American comrades spoke to an
audience of 150. They had a similar mass meeting in Berkeley a week later on January 13,
1907. Another report proudly states, “We are sorry for the Japanese government because
more than three hundred of the first issue have been already smuggled into Japan.”
Although it was not obviously a good idea to disclose this kind of information, given the
intensified surveillance, their report shows that they had to tenaciously advocate for
freedom of speech for people in Japan as well, and had to counteract the pastors and JA
officials bought out by the Japanese consulate to suppress their advocacy for workers’
rights.
329

The third issue featured a short article contributed by a member of the Socialist
Labor Party and the IWW, Olive M. Johnson of Fruitvale. While she explained that the
IWW organizeed “world’s workers regardless of creed, race or sex” in comparison with

328
Kakumei, February 10, 1907; SBZSME, 470, 532. Alexander Horr (1871–1947) was a friend of Emma
Goldman and a member of Freeland League. He joined the Equality Colony in Puget Sound in 1904 and
distributed Mother Earth in Seattle. Moving to San Francisco, he operated a bookstore and ran a jitney
service for a several years. In 1922, having abandoned anarchism, he ran for Governor of California on the
Socialist ticket. He published a pamphlet, Freeland Movement (1904) and a journal, Freeland (1904 and
1909). See Paul Avrich, Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America (Oakland: AK Press,
2005), 482.

329
Kakumei, February 10, 1907; SBZSME, 470-2.
304
the AFL, which refused Japanese “admittance on race line” and “great mass of the
working class by exorbitant initiation fees,” she pointed out that “the mass of Mongolians
is almost inaccessible on account of the great difference of languages.” Without any
suggestion of hiring Japanese organizers or other special method of outreach, she
concluded “the great mission of the Japanese Socialists in this country, who understand
the two languages, should be to form the connecting link between the American labor
movement and the Japanese workers.” Unable to critically look at American racial
capitalism, which considered Japanese as unassimilable aliens, she happened to reduce
race to a class issue by writing “We . . . are looking to teaching the Japanese workers
class-consciousness instead of race consciousness and to organize them for their own
emancipation.” Probably, Johnson accidently or subconsciously attributed the lesser
extent of Japanese unionization not to white supremacist American nativism, but to the
Japanese language. This issue also carried correspondence from the Industrial Union
Bulletin, which stated, “Their [SPA’s] socialism is American socialism and not scientific
socialism. It is national socialism, but not international socialism . . . Japanese workmen
already hold cards in the I.W.W. and more are coming . . . we will have strong local
unions of the I.W.W. in the principal industrial centers of Japan.”
330

They also inherited Kotoku’s criticism of the emperor system, but they expressed it
more explicitly than Kotoku did in Japan with consideration of lèse-majesté and potential
punishments. Calling the Meiji dictum “chukun aikoku” (loyalty to Emperor and love of
Nation) as a “slave morality,” the position of the Kakumei strongly regarded the

330
Kakumei, April 1, 1907.
305
institution of an emperor system as a tool of the ruling class and a denial of scientific
knowledge because it mythically deemed the Emperor as God.
The discussion of parliamentarism and direct action greatly affected the Social
Revolutionary Party in San Francisco. Without voting rights in the hostile land, they
supported Kotoku’s Syndicalist ideas of direct action and general strike by reporting and
reprinting the hot debate between Tetsuji Tazoe and Shusui Kotoku at the first
convention of the Japanese Socialist Party on February 17, 1907, in the third issue of
Kakumei. The English translation of Kotoku’s speech by the Bay Area group shows how
heavy Kotoku’s advocacy weighed with them:
It is impossible to overthrow capitalism by political force. As you know the
Congress is the product of the present system of capitalism and it was the best
machine of the bourgeoisie to overthrow the despotic administration of the feudal
lords. But . . . [it is for capitalists] to rob the working class of its product . . . As
you know, the Socialists and many European countries and the U.S. used the
ballot, but how much has the working class gained by political force? Nothing!
But they have gained shorter hours and higher wages by the strike…When the
workingmen are class-conscious and united there is no power in the world able to
oppose them…We need not capture the political robbing machine but take hold of
the industrial machines and the land . . . . [P]eople have. . . . believed that
without these [law and government] there can be no peace, happiness, freedom,
etc . . . . [But] ‘if a slave is taught from childhood that he cannot work without
chains he will fear very much to be made free’. . . Of course when the strikers are
fought by the army there are more or less sacrifices on the workers’ side and this
is reason [sic] enough for proletarian to be discouraged. But to us revolutionists
the terrible vision of the bloodshed of today is far more cruel. Do you realize the
great rate at which capitalism is killing our fellow workers today? How they are
buried in mines, poisoned in chemical factories, struck by electric currents, and
torn to pieces by boiler explosions? Statistics show that 7,500 are killed yearly in
Japan by accidents and disease due to the social conditions, and in the
Russian-Japanese war the terrible number of 400,000 victims were sacrificed for
the benefit of the capitalist class. . . . Why then balk at a few sacrifices to the
revolution?
331

331
Kakumei, April 1, 1907.
306
The third issue of Kakumei also widely reported on the rebellion by Ashio copper
mine workers on February 4, 1907, as Kotoku excitedly mentioned, “if the workers
understood thoroughly their position relative to the capitalist class, there is no necessity
of a leader. For example . . . [in] the revolt of the copper mines at this time, there was no
leader. The working men themselves took action.” Kotoku probably did not sufficiently
weigh the importance of leadership and coordination of collective action when he
idealized the revolutionary potential of the masses. His view also accentuated the
demarcation between the modern general strike and the old peasant rebellion of the
pre-capitalist period. He stated at his return to Japan, “A bomb, a guillotine, a bamboo
spade, and a straw mat flag [used in the old peasant rebellion] are all relic of the
nineteenth century and out of date. . . . A general strike is the new means for revolution.”
However, such distinctions cannot be effective without the analysis of the political
economy that peasants had tried to intervene and the extent and manner of coordination.
Although Kotoku seemed to assume a chaotic nature for peasant rebellion vis-à-vis
modern coordination of general strike, such a distinctin might have not been that easy.
332

It is necessary to clarify the nature of the Ashio copper miners’ rebellion to further
consider the debate. A quarrel over requests for wage increases between Ashio miners
and managers ignited pent-up fury of a few thousand workers regarding the company’s
brutal treatment and corruption. Tsuruzo Nagaoka and Sukematsu Minami, who had been
supporters of socialism and had organized at the Yubari coal mine in Hokkaido, were
trying to organize mine workers of Ashio, but when the police threw them into jail, the

332
Kotoku, “Kinkikan,” Hikari, July 5, 1906; Kakumei, April 1, 1907.
307
workers lost their negotiators and became determined— or even went ballistic, one could
say—to get their leaders back. They destroyed and burned the company office, assaulted
the secretary at his home, and threw dynamite into the company’s gasoline and
ammunition warehouse. The government dispatched three infantry companies of the
Japanese army and arrested 629 workers and journalists, including Kojiro Nishikawa,
who had been dispatched from Tokyo. Eventually, the company granted a 20 percent
wage increase, after Nagaoka and Minami mediated negotiations on peaceful terms.
Kotoku praised, “Three days of Ashio mine workers’ rebellion were more effective than
Shozo Tanaka’s twenty-year effort in the Japanese Diet,” and tried to convince his
comrades of the benefits and effect of direct action. What was missing in his logic,
however, was the role of negotiating leaders and an understanding of popular protest
culture that still existed among the masses of peasants and laborers. The popular sense of
justice might not have derived from Marxist class analysis, but from a more general,
righteous treatment of humanity. To connect it to the analysis of class struggle under a
global capitalist society had to be done by intellectuals like Kotoku in a way that workers
could understand.
333

However, the gap between direct actionists and parliamentarists was deepening. At
the end of the convention, the Japanese Socialist Party eventually changed party rules by
revising, “The party advocates for socialism within the limit of law” to “The party aims
to carry out socialism.” Two days later, the Ministry of the Interior ordered the party to
disband. Katayama and Kojiro Nishikawa cofounded a separate weekly news outlet

333
Heimin Shimbun, Feb. 19, 1907.
308
called Shakai Shimbun in June, and maintained in its first issue “leaders, who prioritize
their own intellectual progress with new ideas over workers’ education and leave workers
behind, are worthless.” By the fall of 1907, they had declared the group’s break from
anarchist tendencies.
334

Japanese immigrant socialists in the Bay area pondered this split. Social
Revolutionary Party members, on the one hand, expounded on the revolutionary use of
the bomb and stuck copies of a document that advocated for assassination of the Emperor
on the buildings of schools and banks in Japantown of Berkeley and Oakland on
November 3, 1907. Certainly, this document was, as scholar Toshio Itoya evaluated, the
first historical document that criticized the emperor system outright, by pointing out that
Japanese people, who had been raised as loyal, obedient soldiers and workers under the
patriotic, brain-washing education, died in the Russo-Japanese War for nothing in a futile
effort to gain better everyday life conditions. It was because, the document continued to
reason, when they managed to get back home alive, they were harshly oppressed as
workers—and even shot or jailed—that they rebelled. It called the emperor “a slaughterer”
who stifled his national subjects with starvation and heavy taxation and killed his soldiers
and the innocent fellow laborers of China and Russia in unjust wars. The document
incisively condemned media oppression and protested against the dissolution of the Japan
Socialist Party. But, while they acquired an understanding of power manipulation in their
home country through the study of socialism and class division within shared nationality,
they still had to deal with American labor practices. What could “direct action” look like

334
Yoshikawa, Keigyaku Seisoshi, 126; Shakai Shimbun, June 2, 1907.
309
as a collectively organized action rather than a somewhat individualistic deed of
assassination? Did they embody a labor organizing capacity of workers themselves?
What did their internationalist view do to their lives on the ground level? They seemingly
went through a year of reassessment of their activities and organizing capacity. They
reemerged with the formation of the Fresno Labor League on August 21, 1908, which
would attempt to work on very concrete issues and concerns of Japanese farm workers.
335

Fresno Labor League
The active core of the Social Revolutionary Party—Sakutaro Iwasa, Tetsugoro
Takeuchi, Shigeki Oka, Zenzaburo Kuramochi, Ichimatsu Hasegawa and Jitaro Ueyama,
who had been meeting at Ueyama’s place in Berkeley—stopped publishing Kakumei.
They did this because they sought a chance to build a movement that was more deeply
rooted in workers’ communities. Some actually dispersed to other locales. Tetsugoro
Takeuchi sojourned in Vacaville, Sacramento, and Walnut Grove while working as a
field hand, and kept practicing soapbox oratory every Sunday, addressing “the exclusion
of Japanese and Koreans in California,” and “fundamental principles of socialism.” He
went to Fresno in August, 1908, and founded Furesuno Rodo Domeikai (Fresno Labor
League) with Otokusu Ito, Shozo Kishi, Naonosuke Tachibana, and Yasumatsu Domoto
on August 21. With the help of Iwasa, Kuramochi, Tsunero Onarida, and Kinji Ogawa,

335
Yoneda, Zaibei Nihonjin rodosha, 59. Nihonjin Kyorokai merges with Nihonjin Koyukai, a similar
organization for Japanese domestic workers in Richmond in 1910 and renamed itself Rodo Kyoyukai; The
Call, November 11, 1907; SBZSME, 178–89. On one hand, some socialists tried to bring about tangible
change in daily life by helping establish schoolboys and day workers’ organization, Nihonjin Kyorokai
(Japanese Cooperation and Labor Association) for the purpose of mutual aid in 1906. But their relationship
to the Social Revolutionary Party is not clear.
310
who stayed in Berkeley, they crafted and declared their goals at the founding public
forum. It read:
1) to prevent the lowering of wages and to secure the highest possible;
2) to attack vigorously the unfair competition of corrupt labor contractors; and
3) to unify members to take concerted action to elevate the status of workers and
to gain the confidence of grape-growers.
336

These were formulated within the context of the struggle against the corrupt
contractor bosses, who lent substance to the charge that Japanese laborers worked for
cheap wages. In 1908, there were some 3,000 Japanese living in Fresno. During the grape
harvest season of summer to fall, there came a total of 10,000 Japanese workers. Some
sympathetic contractors had tried to keep the wage levels of their countrymen on par with
whites. The Central California Contractors Association, composed of fifty-three Japanese
contractors, had set $1.65 per ton as the rate for harvesting grapes in June. But three
“corrupt” contractors, including Riichi Kamikawa and his brother, contracted with the
900-acre Tarpey Ranch for $1.25 per ton in early August. The Association opposed them
with patriotic language, arguing the duty of Japanese laborers was to remit money to
enrich Japan. The newspaper, Shin Sekai, supported the Association. The Fresno Labor
League joined them because their view was that Japanese workers should demand the
same wages as white workers.
Their organizing effort was very effective. They distributed copies of their platform
at the train station every time trains stopped and brought more migrant Japanese
farmworkers (many were sent from Los Angeles through the network of contractors),
held public forums, and dispatched members to Fowler and other places to obstruct

336
Shin Sekai, May 13, 1908; Ibid., May 27, 1908; Ibid., June 24, 1908; SBZSME, 213.
311
attempts to recruit laborers. In two months from its foundation, the League obtained more
than 4,000 members. It started asking for donations to start their organ, while they also
told the members that they would collect donations only the first year. With three or four
thousand dollars collected, they published the Rodo (Labor), with Takeuchi, Zenpei
Matsushita, Sakutaro Iwasa, and comrades in San Francisco as the editorial staff in
November 1908. They used a loan to purchase the Japanese type Iwasa. One article
addressed the premature death of the working class:
“According to recent statistics, out of 1,000 persons 343 ruling class members live
to the age of 60 year old, but only 256 members of the working class. Why is this
so? We workers die early from physical ailments caused by excessive labor, by
working in dangerous factories or in mines with inadequate facilities. Or by
working long hours with an injury, by unsanitary living conditions injurious to
health, and by mental disorders caused by living in perpetual poverty. . . . Today
the workers of the world are awakening to how wretched their conditions are. The
workers in Japan are awakening. This is natural. Thus we workers also must
unite.”
337

The League succeeded in keeping all the Japanese workers away from the corrupt
contractors. However, this led the contractors to hire Mexican, Indian, and Korean
laborers instead to fulfill their contract with the Tarpey Ranch. The League attempted to
secure a contract directly with the Tarpey Ranch in an effort to organize Japanese
laborers, who were free from labor contractors, into a genuine agricultural labor union.
Although the League failed to organize workers beyond ethnic lines to embody the unity
of all workers they advocated, they understood more work was necessary in their future,
as we see in their effort to work with IWW’s multi-racial and multi-ethnic organizing.
We will examine this later.

337
SBZSME 230–231, 532–3.
312
The growing membership of the Fresno Labor League and their cooperation with
the IWW made the nationalist capitalists of the Japanese immigrant community cautious.
Indeed, Japanese owned 5,745 acres and leased 12,033 acres in Fresno in 1908.
Meanwhile, the Fresno branch of the Japanese Association, the Japanese Chamber of
Commerce of Fresno, and Japanese newspapers like Los Angeles Mainichi, Hanford
Shimbun, and Shin Sekai began to try to break the Fresno Labor League. In fact, since the
“assassination document” incident, the Japanese government had begun to closely spy on
Japanese socialists and anarchists both in Japan and the United States, and attempted to
undermine their organizations. The Japanese consulate had hired Minotaro Kawasaki, a
reporter of Shin Sekai and a secretary of the San Francisco Japanese Association, and
Tetsuo Tatsumi, a secretary of the Oakland Japanese Association, as spies, and had them
join the Social Revolutionary Party after Kazuo Matsubara, an assistant secretary of
Japanese Consul, was asked by U.S. immigration officer North to submit evidence if the
Japanese government wanted the suspect deported. The surveillance continued on from
that time.
338

The Fresno Japanese Association, led by Kaizo Kino, put pressure on the Labor
League. When the League asked the Fresno JA to write references so that they could send
a dispatch to major cities in California, Kino turned it down. Furthermore, the Fresno JA
requested that the reporter club of Fresno eradicate the Labor League and called up the
chief of the Rodo printing office to tell him to stop the paper because it was harmful to
public safety. It also publicized that the League was a dangerous group of anarchist

338
Zaibei Nihonjinkai Jiseki Hozon-bu, ed., Zaibei Nihonjinshi (1940), 164–170; Ichioka, Issei, 111;
Satoshi Ohara, Katayama Sen, 134-35; Itoya, Kotoku Shusui kenkyu, 236-244.
313
terrorists and prevented advertisements of their organ Rodo. The corrupt contractor,
Riichi Kamikawa, whose store had been boycotted by the members of the Labor League,
attempted to get revenge by suing Otokusu Ito for a trumped-up charge, and by bribing
Tensai Fujii, the owner of Soko Shimbun, to attack the League on his paper.
339

Despite the slanderous campaigns, the Fresno Labor League held a labor
convention on August 24, 1909, at the Oriental Theater, to advocate for higher wages
than the previous year, based on good harvest and intent to help workers secure the jobs.
An audience of 300 workers listened to speeches from Tesseki Nakamizo, a
representative from Los Angeles, Otokusu Ito from Fresno, Sakae Abe, Tomiharu Tahara,
Gengetsu Miyakoshi from Sacramento, and Sakutaro from San Francisco. The Fresno
Labor league passed a resolution “to affiliate with labor groups in other locales and to
establish Labor League branches elsewhere to further the labor movement” and “to
publish an English monthly to educate and inform ignorant anti-Japanese white workers.”
Other resolutions called the Japanese Associations, religious leaders, self-proclaimed
reformists, and reporters of major newspapers in Japanese immigrant communities
“ingratiating slaves of capitalist class” and maintained that workers should not depend on
them but resort to principles of justice based on their own solidarity. It also had obvious
influence from Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread, recently translated to Japanese by Shusui
Kotoku, when a resolution said “[I]f you do not produce your own bread, you have to
depend on bread produced by someone else. [Those people] eat the bread that we made.”
“What we produced should belong to ourselves.” “There is always people who

339
Kaizo Kino to Shozo Matsui (an acting consul of Japanese consulate in San Francisco), April 12, 1909;
Rodo, August 5, 1909; Rodo, August 14, 1909.
314
parasitically live on others’ labor. . . . Therefore human history is history of bread.”
Although it did not go into the further argument of Kropotkin, that is, a more
decentralized economic system based on mutual aid and voluntary cooperation; they—at
least, the editors of the organ—tried to understand their social condition by digesting new
literature, as the eighth issue of Rodo reported the ban on Kotoku’s translation in
Japan.
340

The League held a joint rally in the Japanese district of Fresno with the Fresno
branch of the IWW on September 19, 1909. Local 66, which met above the Cosmopolitan
Restaurant on Mariposa Street, had been organized by Frank Little in the city, where
much of the membership was drawn from Mexican railroad workers and migratory farm
hands in addition to Armenians and Italians. It must have seemed an ideal opportunity to
reach out to yet another Japanese immigrant community and imbue the casual laborers
with class-consciousness with its agitation and propaganda.
341

After Takeuchi’s introduction, Frank Little went upon the stage “with excitement
and pleasure on his face” and spoke on the IWW’s platform, stating,“[S]ince the interest
of the working class is the same regardless of whether you are from East or West, you are
of Yellow or White race, workers of the world must all unite to fight against the cruel and
violent capitalist class.” Subsequently, a Mexican organizer, Consuelos (full name

340
SBZSME, 248-54.

341
Ibid., 248-54, 261-263. Frank H. Little, born 1879, was an IWW organizer, trade unionist, and antiwar
activist. He organized lumberjacks, oil field workers, and miners and was lynched on August 1, 1917 in
Butte Montana for his union and anti-war activities. Little played a huge role in IWW’s fight for freedom of
speech in Missoula, Montana and Spokane, Washington, culminating that in Fresno in 1910. See Ronald
Genini, “Industrial Workers of the World and Their Fresno Free Speech Fight, 1910-11,” California
Historical Quarterly 53, no. 2 (Summer, 1974): 101-114.
315
unknown) and an Italian organizer, Degata (full name unknown), spoke that “only
workers themselves can work to improve their condition and secure their interest.” Lastly,
Tetsugoro Takeuchi talked about what was at stake in Japanese labor strikes in Hawaii.
To surmise the content of his speech from the coverage of the 1909 Oahu Sugar Strike in
the eighth issue of Rodo, Takeuchi must have clarified that the fellow Japanese
farmhands in Hawaii proved unity was possible among Japanese workers, despite failure
due to the harsh oppression of capitalist planters. Takeuchi also emphasized the
importance of muti-racial and multi-ethnic solidarity, something he learned through the
Tarpey Ranch dispute, and strongly advocated for the international brotherhood of
workers and the necessity of workers to unite irrespective of color or nationality.
342

Months earlier, J. H. Walsh, an IWW organizer in Portland, Oregon with work
experience in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, urged Japanese and Chinese workers to
organize in an Industrial Union Bulletin on April 11, 1908. His explanation of the
absurdity of how racism prevented class solidarity and Japanese labor militancy might
have stimulated some IWW organizers like Frank Little. What is noteworthy in Walsh’s
article, though, is how the logic of capitalism that pursues cheaper labor beyond national
borders had not only damaged the living and working conditions of Japanese immigrants,
but also white Americans. He showed statistics taken from the report of Special Agent W.
A. Graham Clark of the Department of Commerce and Labor, and explicated export and
investments of American capital into Japanese cotton manufacturing. He wrote that “it is
this greater profit” derived from lower wages and lack of labor protections such as child

342
Kakumei, August 5, 1909; SBZSME, 261-263, 490.
316
labor laws, “that lures the American capitalist to invest in the Orient.” Walsh’s point was,
“[G]ranting that the Japanese are excluded, the American worker still stands in the
world’s market to sell his labor power at a price that his employer may manufacture and
sell goods at a profit, and compete in the world’s market.” While Walsh offered this
internationalist view of class struggle and understanding of the world market, he reported
on the organization of Japanese in the IWW in the Pacific Northwest by stating that those
Japanese who the IWW had organized were able to pay dues consistently and stick to the
organization, but “the old story of lack of finances sufficient to employ a Japanese
organizer and place him in the field, is why the work was not carried on successfully.”
The financial situation of the IWW Fresno local might have been similar.
343
The effort of reinforcing socialist networks among the major cities of California by
the Fresno Labor League contributed to the success of a so-called “anti-registration
campaign” in 1910. On January 30, 1908, Chozo Koike, Japanese consul at San
Francisco, transformed Zaibei Nihonjin Renraku Kyogikai, which was Kyutaro Abiko’s
private organization for protesting the anti-Japanese movement, into the Japanese
Association (formal and also subsumed by consulate) with Kinji Ushijima, or the Potato

343
Rosenberg, “The IWW and Organization of Asian,” 77-87. In the split resulted from the Fourth
convention of IWW, Vincent St. John and J. H. Walsh led direct actionists while Daniel DeLeon of the SLP
led political actionists. In the article, Walsh first points out the absurdity that all the “fight for exclusion of
the Orientals in the interest of the white working men and women” through “the agitation of the Oriental
Exclusion League,” is fought in the name of “poor working man.” Second, he tells that Japanese workers
know of their labor fields well and how to win. For example, he continues, Japanese at Port Blakely, where
both white and Japanese men are driven like peons in a lumber mill, Japanese won 20 cent raise by sticking
together in their strike, now earning 7 cent more than the white workingmen. Fellow workers from Japan at
the Tidewater mill, Tacoma, who won $2 per day, even said, Walsh quotes, “If we can get the American
workers,” who hung their head with $1.75, “to come with us we can win $2.25 per day.” Walsh also cites
from a report of the Labor Commissioner of California that “the Japanese do not strike, but they work on,
whatever the condition may be, until all idle labor is out of the field, and then, just when the crop is ripest,
when the work must be done, they walk out, making a demand for better wages or shorter hours without
any mercy for the employer whatsoever. In other words, they eliminate the scab before they strike.” (Ibid.)
317
King George Shima, as its president. The spy, Tetsuo Tatsumi’s letter, said that Japanese
socialists took over, or rendered some JAs under their influence. Jitaro Ueyama and
others took over the Berkeley Japanese Association. When the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs of Japan obligated Japanese citizens abroad to register their foreign addresses
with Japanese consulates and the San Francisco consul, and the Japanese Association
decided to impose $2 of registration fees every year, despite the fact that the new
Japanese registration prohibited it, the Berkeley Japanese Association unanimously
passed a resolution that criticized “the unjust taxation.” The campaign immediately
spread all over California through the network of the Fresno Labor League. Those
socialists and their supporters were also concerned with their status of temporal
exemption from conscription, which might not be extended if they did not pay the
registration fee. Knowing that most of the Japanese newspapers were siding with the
establishment of JAs, they had the Chronicle, Examiner, and Call write an expose, “The
Japanese consul and Japanese Association are trying to levy a new poll tax within the
territory of the United States and enlist those immigrants in the Japanese military with
anticipation of U.S.-Japan war.” Bewildered by the voice of wide opposition, the acting
consul, Shozo Nagai, revised the fee to “fifty cents donation” and made the vice president
and secretary resign.
344

Tatsumi’s letter conveyed his concern about the growth of the socialist groups. It
read “At this point of May 1910, there are approximately fifty socialists in Berkeley,
twenty in San Francisco, twenty five in Sacramento, thirty in Los Angeles, twenty five in

344
Tetsuo Tatsumi to Sakue Takahashi, March 21, 1910.
318
Fresno, plus ten more who are dispersed around those cities. If I add those in Seattle, Salt
Lake, Denver, and Chicago, the total will be three or four hundred” and “their organ,
Rodo, was printed two thousand five hundred copies every time. About a thousand copies
of Japanese translation of Kroptkin’s pamphlet, An Appeal to the Young, have been sold.”
Although the League ceased publication of the Rodo on September 14, 1909, because of
lack of funds (from costly legal expenses to defend Takeuchi in court for the charge of
injuring the assailant, Zenjiro Otsuka), it was the news of a high treason affair in Japan
which made it difficult for anyone associated with Shusui Kotoku to operate in any
Japanese community in the United States.
345

Taigyaku Jiken / High Treason Affair
Shusui Kotoku was still suffering from his illness after the disbandment of the
Japan Socialist Party on February 19, 1907. The split between the parliamentarists and
advocates of direct action did not mean that they did not have common ground. One of
the remarkable developments in the socialist movement around this time was the seeking
of solidarity by both the parliamentarists and direct-actionists with Asian revolutionary
exiles in Japan. The news reached the American West Coast too, as the Bay Area-based
Social Revolutionary Party reported a foundation of socialist study groups by Chinese
students in the third issue of their organ, Kakumei. In spring of 1907, Ikki Kita introduced
Kotoku to Chang Ki and others, who had been members of Tongmenghui (Chinese
United League), founded by Sun Yat-sen and others in Tokyo in August, 1905. Zhang

345
Ibid.
319
Binglin, who had begun attending the Friday Public Forums held by Kotoku and
Toshihiko Sakai, started two organizations in the summer of 1907, Shakaishugi Koshukai
(Socialist Study Group) and Ashu Washinkai (Association for Asian Amity), which were
two wheels of the same vehicle, aimed at the “liberation of Asiatic nations” and “study of
socialism” in the context of anti-imperialist struggles in Asia. The study group featured
Kotoku as a lecturer at its first meeting. According to Liu Shipei, participants of their
fourth meeting clearly recognized Japan as an imperialist power in Asia, and therefore
saw a majority of Pan-Asianist organizations, many of which had been supported by the
Japanese government, as imperialist institutions, through which the Japanese government
attempted to extend its economic interest, with military backing. At the meetings of the
Association for Asian Amity, Japanese socialists and anarchists such as Toshihiko Sakai,
Sakae Osugi, and Hitoshi Yamakawa, Chinese exiles such as Chang Ki, Liu Shipei, Hu
Han-ming, Song Jiaoren, and Zhang Binglin—who would later contribute to the 1911
Xinhai Revolution and establishment of Kuomintang—a Korean student, Cho So-ang,
and Indian and Vietnamese comrades, gathered. The statement of the association clarified
that the group intended to build alliances and mutual aid between Asian nationals who
struggled for independence and the recovery of sovereignty, and that it would establish
branches in China, Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam.
346

There was a significant possibility that this transnational network of
anti-imperialist struggle would extend itself to the American West Coast and Hawaii

346
Kakumei, April 1, 1907. The third issue of Kakumei reported that Kotoku’s Shakaishugi Shinzui
(Essence of Socialism) had been translated by a Chinese revolutionist Donkonyo; Liu Shipei, “Ashu
Genseiron,” Tengi, no. 11-12, (October, 1907). As quoted in Kyong-sok Rhee, “Heiminsha ni okeru kaikyu
to minzoku: Ashu Shinwakai tono kanren wo chushin’ni [Class and Nation at Heiminsha: With a Focus on
Association For Asian Amity],” in Naoyuki Umemori, ed., Teikoku o ute (Tokyo: Ronsosha, 2005), 93-116.
320
through Asian diaspora. However, the oppression of those Asian revolutionaries in Japan
by the Japanese government coincided with the oppression of Japanese socialists and
anarchists. The government banned the publication of organs of their organizations and
deported many of them. On January 17, 1908, the Friday Forum that Toshihiko Sakai and
Hitoshi Yamakawa held, was ordered to disband, on-site, by the police. When they
privately congregated again shortly after, they were ordered to disband once again. When
Sakai astutely criticized the police repression, the police arrested him, Yamakawa, and
Sakae Osugi. This incident ultimately forced Chang Ki to leave Japan. Soon after, Zhang
Binglin was indicted for violating the Newspaper Act. Five months later, many more
were arrested. When both parliamentarist and “direct action” groups held a
welcome-back party on June 22 for one of their comrades, Koken Yamaguchi, who had
been in jail for a year and two months for publishing their organs, the police ordered
them to wrap up the red flag that was “curtailing public safety.” When they did not
follow the police’s order, a skirmish erupted. In the end, the police arrested thirteen
comrades, including Toshihiko Sakai, Hitoshi Yamakawa, Sakae Osugi, and Kanson
Arahata. Arahata and Osugi were harshly tortured, and many were sentenced to
imprisonment. Around the same time, the government stopped their organs Nihon Heimin
Shimbun, Min Bao, Tian Yi, and Heng Bao. At the beginning of 1909, the Japanese
government oppressed Vietnamese revolutionaries and associated students at the request
of the French government. Phan Boi Chau had to leave Japan in March.
347

347
Itoya, Kotoku Shusui kenkyu, 244-248; Rhee, “Heiminsha ni okeru kaikyu to minzoku,” 99-101. By
1910, the Department of Interior of Japan confiscated not only Socialist periodicals and books shipped by
Japanese in Bay Area but also Korean nationalist newspapers, Shinhan Minbo [New Korea] Published by
321
The repression of their movement culminated at what is called Taigyaku Jiken or
the High Treason Affair in May, 1910. Although Kotoku had not been caught in the
abovementioned “Red Flag Incident,” General Katsura, appointed premier for the second
time on July 14, 1908, introduced a harsh and systematic policy to extinguish socialist
radicalism. For example, four policemen put Kotoku’s house under surveillance. Two
policemen also dogged Sen Katayama, who had kept insisting on the realization of
socialism through electoral politics and the suffrage movement, in contrast with direct
actionists. All socialist publications were banned and confiscated. As mentioned above,
surveillance on Japanese socialists had intensified since Japanese comrades in the Bay
Area had criticized the Japanese emperor system. The High Treason Affair occurred in
this context on May 25, 1910. The government scraped together years of reports of
spying on socialists and anarchists, and fabricated a plot to assassinate the emperor,
thereby indicting them for lèse-majesté. By connecting to Kotoku a brief conversation
that had taken place among his disciples Takichi Miyashita, Sugako Kanno, and Tadao
Niimura, on their hope of proving that the emperor was a human being who bled if
injured by a bomb, the government framed and rounded up twenty-six socialists and
anarchists and sentenced twenty-four of them the death penalty with unusually speedy
trials on January 18, 1911. Twelve of them, including Kotoku, were hanged within a
week of that sentence. Genros, Aritomo Yamagata and Kaoru Inoue all played a role of
bulldozing the constitutional scholars who objected to the execution, thereby solidifying

the Kongnip Hyŏphoe (Mutual Assistance Society) organized by Korean immigrants in San Francisco, Sin
Han’gukpo, a Korean weekly published in Honolulu by the Korean National Association, Kungminhoe
with a nationalist and journalist Pak Yong-man as one of its editors, and Heng Bao published and shipped
by Chinese in Macao. They clearly intended to prevent the solidarity between Japanese socialists and
anarchists’ anti-imperialism and Korean and Chinese independent movement. See SBZSME, 401-418.
322
the police state.
348

The voices of protest rose up in the United States. Emma Goldman, Alexander
Berkman, and Sadakichi Hartman sent a protest letter to the Japanese minister in the
United States on November 12, 1910. On November 29, 1910 in the New York Tribune,
Goldman demanded that the Japanese government disclose “the facts and evidences” of
this unjust trial against anarchist comrades, and criticized the secret trials in her Mother
Earth in early 1911. The Social Revolutionary Party publicly protested the tyranny of
Japan and the broken judicial system on the next day of the persecution. Encouraged by
the protest meetings organized by Goldman and her associates at the Lyric Hall in
Manhattan on December 12, 1910, and Webster Hall on January 29, 1911, Japanese and
American comrades in the Bay Area came together to hold protest meetings and
demonstrations at the Golden Gate on February 12, 1911. Two of the protests against the
unjust roundup by the Japanese government were held at the Mechanic Pavilion and the
Alhambra Theater in San Francisco. Many IWW members participated, but SPA and SLP
members did not because Kotoku was an anarchist. Sakutaro Iwasa was one of the main
speakers and read out their open letter to the Japanese consul in San Francisco, Shozo
Matsui. The letter denounced the fact that Kotoku and others were not allowed to contact
their lawyers in the illegally speedy trial in which there was no clear disclosure of
evidence.
349

348
Genrō was an unofficial designation given to certain retired elder Japanese statesmen, who served as
informal extra-constitutional advisors to the emperor, during the Meiji, Taishō and early Shōwa periods.

349
SBZSME, 311-373; Heimin Shimbun, July 23, 1947.
323
Sen Katayama’s Reaction to High Treason Incident
Sen Katayama was undoubtedly shocked by the political imprisonments and
murders. Superficially, though, Katayama didn’t seem to be affected by the arrest, even
under the evident culmination of political and ideological oppression. Indeed, he kept
hosting forums on the outskirts of Tokyo, with a moderate line of social democracy as
main themes, and submitted his alternative draft of the Factory Act that was under
examination in the then-Diet. He retained his legal approach and demanded universal
suffrage, the Factory Act with more protective measures for laborers, other new bills that
would protect the economic rights of tenant farmers and laborers, and social welfare in
his periodical Shakai Shimbun—which was practically stopped by the authorities a few
months after the trial. While other leftist comrades remained silent, given that Toshihiko
Sakai, Kanson Arahata, Sakae Osugi, and Hitoshi Yamakawa were still in jail for the
“Red Flag Incident,” Katayama patiently held on to the discursive and physical space
where they could talk about labor issues—which he had strenuously established in the
past decade. He led the labor strike by the workers of Tokyo City Streetcars on New
Year’s Eve in 1912 to make it more effective, and won a satisfactory settlement.
However, two weeks later the police arrested Katayama and sixty others and charged him
with incitement to strike. This was his first experience being jailed and he would remain
in jail until a general amnesty was proclaimed at the decease of the Meiji Emperor on
July 30, 1912. He later stated that his imprisonment made him understand the torturing
method to draw confessions and the “patchwork evidencing” that had trapped Kotoku and
other comrades. According to the informant of the Interior Department’s surveillance,
324
Katayama started the study of Syndicalism after his release. He lost his trust in the
Second International when the Socialist Parties of European countries declared their
support for the war effort at the inception of the World War. In 1914, Katayama decided
to leave for the United States once again. Katayama brought with him his comrades’
correspondence from prison before their persecution, which Toshihiko Sakai collected
and circulated among comrades later, in order to help the surviving families. Katayama
copied them by hand and crossed the Pacific with them in tow.
350

Return with American Experience
While Katayama crossed the Pacific to the Untied States, some socialist and
anarchist comrades in the Bay Area crossed the Pacific in the opposite direction, back to
Japan. Some of them would play crucial roles later in organizing in Japan. Ganketsu
Akaba went back to Japan in 1907, privately published Nomin no Fukuin (Gospel for
Peasants), got arrested for publishing the agitative publication, and died in jail in 1909.
Ichimatsu Hasegawa, who had joined the Social Revolutionary Party, went back to Japan
in 1908. In 1914, He reconnected with Naozo Hemmi in Osaka, who had been in the
United States between 1899 and 1908 and had become acquainted with Hasegawa in San
Francisco in 1905.
351
This reconnection stimulated Hemmi to be a socialist activist and
he would be a leading figure in the movement for affordable housing in the Osakan

350
Ohara, Katayama Sen, 79-87; Kublin, Asian Revolutionary, 203-212.

351
Naozo Hemmi encountered outright racist violence in Seattle at the end of 1905. He opened a small
restaurant with two Chinese friends, which thrived due to its cheaper price targeting laborers. One day,
more than a dozen white mobs “hired by white restaurateurs” destroyed it. See Takashi Sakai, Tsutenkaku:
Shin Nihon Shihonshugi Hattatsushi (Tokyo: Seidosha, 2011).
325
laborers’ district. Sakutaro Iwasa would play a central role in building the organizational
connections of anarchist agrarian groups and in publishing their organs.
352

Katayama’s Fourth-time Stay in the United States
How did Katayama envision his labor organizing in America, given his own
financial difficulties and the ostracism of Japanese socialists and anarchists from the
establishment of Japanese immigrant communities in the United States? Katayama’s view
on the Alien Land Law heeded attention both in terms of foregrounding “perspective of
workers in Japan” and the sense of distance from Japanese laborers in California. In July,
1913, about a year before his arrival to the Bay Area in the summer of 1914, Katayama
wrote an article titled “California and the Japanese” for the International Socialist Review,
published by Charles Kerr, a left-wing Socialist Party member based in Chicago. Sen
Katayama criticized that the protest campaign in Japan against the Alien Land Law of
California, which barred Japanese immigrant farmers from buying or leasing farmland,
had been led by “Baron [Eiichi] Shibusawa, Messrs. Nokano, Shimada and others” in the
business establishment “recently entertained by the rich Japanese on the Pacific Coast”
and the jingoistic politicians including “the present Premier, Count [Gombee] Yamamoto,”
who had advocated for Navy expansion. Katayama explains that laborers in Japan were
not as much concerned with the “passage of the much talked-of Land bill” as “the higher
and ever higher prices of food and in low wages,” which was in stark contrast with
“one-third of the national budget (575 million yen) for military affairs” with a new naval

352
Sakai, Tsutenkaku, Chapter 4.
326
plan to “spend three hundred and fifty million yen extra for expansion or building of
man-of-war in ten years.” Katayama concluded “We [workers in Japan] want
international peace” and they are not “interested in whether a few hundred Japanese in
California may or may not own the land” given that “almost no one is permitted to sail
for” the United States at that time.
353

It is unknown whether Katayama assessed a potential job-loss for Japanese
farmhands in California, though there is now general agreement that the 1913 California
Alien Land Law had little impact because Japanese immigrants found a loophole in
which they could make their American-born children be the owner or leasee. It is
noteworthy that Katayama always emphasized the intra-ethnic class distinction of interest
even in the historical course of the development of what John Modell later called
“ethnic-based welfare capitalism,” which “was quite compatible with (and indeed,
sustained by) racial separation.” But this did not mean that Katayama always kept himself
aloof from the mainstream Japanese immigrant community. He needed to get by as soon
as he arrived in San Francisco and applied for a chief secretary job of the Japanese
Association of America through his old friend, Kiyoshi Kawakami, who then ran a news
company, Taiheiyo Tsushinsha (Pacific News Agency), and had been “appeasing the
anti-Japanese movement.” Due to much opposition to hiring “a socialist and subversive,”
he could not get the job. Then Katayama undertook many types of employment as a day
laborer during the two years he lived in California, including a cook, a street-cleaner, a
window cleaner, a day-store manager, a domestic worker, and a translator. Soon

353
Sen Katayama, “California and the Japanese,” International Socialist Review, July 1913, 31-32; Kublin,
Asian Revolutionary, 213-220; Yoneda, 80.
327
Katayama realized that the Japanese government would continue its surveillance through
consulates, when the local Japanese vice-consul even blocked his plans to earn a living
by farming.
354

When Katayama went to the West Coast in 1914, the exclusion of Japanese
workers from the AFL was unchanged, which meant that the exploitation and
hierarchization of Japanese workers as scabs had still persisted. The Ludlow Massacre in
Colorado, in which four Japanese strikebreakers were caught in the middle of striking
miners and coal operators controlled by the anti-union John D. Rockefeller’s companies,
epitomized this oppressive system. Starting in 1903, the coal operators had recruited
many Mexican, Italian, Slavic, and Greek immigrant laborers into the southern field as
nonunion miners. Kinji Okajima, a Japanese labor contractor, who used to manage the
Sheridan labor office of Shinzaburo Ban’s company, brought in Japanese strike breakers

354
John Modell, The Economics and Politics of Racial Accommodation: The Japanese of Los Angeles,
1900-1942 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 94; Oka et al., Sokoku wo teki toshite, 95; Kublin,
Asian Revolutionary, 213-220; Yoneda, 80. Katayama continued to earn some money from writing articles
for International Socialist Review. While he tried, in his writings, to retain a streak of hope in the Japanese
popular protest against the filibuster by the Katsura administration in 1913, he also attempted to foreground
a transnational perspective on the socialist movement by reporting the aftermath of the 1911 Xinghai
Revolution. Katayama harshly criticized the counter-revolutionary oppression by Yuan Shikai, who had
assassinated Song Jiaoren, a proponent of parliamentary system, expelled socialist-oriented Sun Yat-sen,
and suppressed liberal media. All those reactionary moves were achieved, Katayama argued, through the
financial and military power based on the loan he got from Russia, Japan, Britain, France and Germany,
who in turn wanted the abundant natural resource in China. Katayama anticipated that he would see Sun
Yat-sen and Huang Xing, who would move on to America since Japanese government accepted their exile
on the condition that they would not pursue any revolutionary activities. Katayama also opposed Japan’s
entry into the World War One by censuring how Japanese politicians and militarists had justified it based
on the Anglo-Japanese Alliance Treaty, passed a war expenditure bill of 25 million dollars, and had
advocated for revenge of the Triple Intervention twenty years ago notwithstanding the fact it was led by
Russia. He reported the fifty to sixty percent of decline in silk price, which caused many silkworm keepers
in Japan unable to pay for mulberry leaves to feed them. At the end of the article, Katayama recollected the
acute anti-Russo-Japanese War campaign that Shusui Kotoku had carried out a decade ago and lamented
the lack of equivalent anti-war journalism in Japan. See Sen Katayama, “Democratic Elevation in Japan,”
International Socialist Review 13, no. 10 (April 1913); “Chinese Exile in Japan,” International Socialist
Review 14, no. 5 (November 1913); “The War and Japanese,” International Socialist Review 15, no. 5
(November 1914).
328
in 1914. When the state militia mobilized against the strikers and fired machine guns and
rifles into a tent colony set up by evicted workers, the Japanese immigrant workers
became the target of retaliation and were killed.
355

Katayama had to navigate a path through the double dominance of the persistent
exclusion of Japanese by the AFL and the ostracism by the Japanese consulate. Overall,
Katayama was too distracted with making ends meet and could not effectively organize
intervention efforts in racial and ethnic labor hierarchization—although he had criticized
it repeatedly before. When Bunji Suzuki, a delegate handpicked by the Japanese
government and invited by Paul Scharrenberg, secretary of the California State
Federation of Labor, came to the United States to attend the annual conventions of the
California State Federation of Labor and the AFL in 1915 and 1916, Katayama had to see
whether they really would try to defy the Japanese exclusion from trade unions. In 1912,
Suzuki, a graduate of Tokyo Imperial University and without a working class background,
had organized the Yuai-kai (Friendly Society) in Tokyo. He was supported and advised
by an American Unitarian missionary, Clay Macaulay, for whom he worked as a
secretary before. The Society, with its 6,500 members in 1915, was not a labor union, but
a benevolent mutual aid association of workers. Their objectives were the improvement
of the general welfare of workers and the encouragement of more harmonious relations
between employer and employee. Unable to see the intersection of race and economy,
Suzuki could not effectively denounce anti-Asiatic resolutions. He told Charles Child,
head of the Anti-Jap Laundry League, that he had no objection to Japanese exclusion for

355
Ichioka, Issei, 125-128.
329
“economic reason,” but he could not condone it if it were based upon “race prejudice.”
Katayama critically stated, “if Mr. Suzuki is pleased at the hand-shake between workers
of both countries and gloss over the mistreatment of a hundred thousand Japanese
laborers in the United States, I am extremely unpleasant.”
356

The suppression of Katayama’s activity by the Japanese consulate intensified. At
the beginning of Suzuki’s visit, Consul Yasutaro Numano ordered him not to publicly
speak on labor issues, bother Japanese labor representative Suzuki, or “publicize the dark
side of Japan to white workers, especially the statistics of women’s and children’s labor
in Japan.” Although Katayama was able to facilitate the holding of two public forums,
featuring Bunji Suzuki with day laborer’s Rodo Kyoyukai (Laborer’s Cooperation and
Friendship Association) in San Francisco and the Japanese Laundry Workers’ League in
Oakland, Katayama and other socialists Riemon Chiba and Takehei Hirai vigorously
rebutted Suzuki’s speech, which praised social reform while denying socialism. When
Suzuki helped build a labor organization in November of 1915 by integrating the
aforementioned two organizations, Katayama attempted to take on the role of manager of
the labor club attached to the new organization. But vice-consul Heikichi Yamazaki
blocked Katayama’s involvement because he had been labeled subversive by the
Japanese government. At its inauguration gathering at the San Francisco Buddhist Hall,
Katayama had his long-time comrade, Shigeki Oka, disseminate leaflets, which criticized
the new labor organization as the Japanese government’s manipulation for the sake of

356
Sen Katayama, “Nihon rodosha haiseki izen [Unchanging Exclusion of Japanese Workers],” Shin
Shakai 2, no. 4 (November 1915). At the beginning of 1915 Katayama resumed writing for Japanese
periodical, Shin Shakai (The New Society), which Toshihiko Sakai and other socialists launched in January
1915 in Tokyo; Kublin, Asian Revolutionary, 223.
330
diplomatic goodwill. During his next visit, which took place the next year, Suzuki
developed the organization into the Japanese Federation of Labor, which was supposed to
enhance Japanese workers’ wages and work conditions to the level of AFL-affiliated
union workers, so that the AFL could accept Japanese workers. The new consul, Masanao
Hanihara, interrogated Kinji Ogawa, who had once been active in the Social
Revolutionary Party, about his intent regarding his involvement with the new
organization. Its operation never got on the right track because of the consulate’s
intervention and manipulation, and Suzuki’s economic reductionist view of the race issue.
As Shigeki Oka recalled, “the Japanese Federation of Labor disappeared as soon as the
1,000 yen donation from the famous capitalist, Eiichi Shibusawa, depleted.”
357

During the second visit, though, Suzuki indirectly raised the question of organizing
Japanese immigrant laborers in American unions. Referring to the recent strike by San
Francisco culinary workers in August, to which Japanese employment agencies had
refused to provide scabs, Suzuki emphasized “though the Japanese were not union men,
they respected the wishes of the union men and walked out with them.” Suzuki’s remark
found supporters at the State Federation convention. Hugo Ernst, a leader of the San
Francisco Waiter’s Union and a socialist delegate, argued, “If the Japanese are properly
organized, they will be removed as a source of unfair competition in the labor market.”
Harry Mohr, president of the Street Car Men’s Union of Oakland echoed, “We should
organize the Asiatics who are already in this country and put them on an equal basis with

357
Sen Katayama, “Nihon rodo daihyosha to Soko ryoji [Delegate of Japanese Laborers and Consul in San
Francisco],” Shin Shakai 2, no. 3 (November 1915); Sen Katayama, “Soko Dayori [Correspondence from
San Francisco],” Shin Sekai, 2, no. 5, 6, 8, 12 (Jan, Feb, April, July, 1916); Ichioka, Issei, 128-136, 141;
Oka et al., Sokoku o teki toshite, 97-8.
331
the white men.” James Maloney of the Los Angeles Web Pressmen’s Union called for
“immediate steps” for “the organizing of all Asiatics in the State of California.” Despite
those opinions, Suzuki’s diplomacy bore no fruit in fighting against organized labor’s
anti-Japanese policy.
358

As Yuji Ichioka analyzed, the series of diplomacy marked a change of strategy
taken by AFL leaders and Paul Scharrenberg, who had closely worked with anti-Asian
exclusionists Walter Macarthur, Andrew Furuseth, and V. S. McClatchy in past decades.
They no longer publicly declared anti-Japanese sentiment. They now took an appeasing
approach by welcoming conservatives like Bunji Suzuki to advance the exclusion
policies. When Japan entered World War I on the side of the allies and declared
investment of half a million dollars to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, in
addition to the expectation of money dropped by Japanese tourists at the Expo,
Scharrenberg likely intended to avoid any diplomatic complication, but lobbied for an
amendment to the 1913 California Alien Land Law to eliminate the right to lease
agricultural land altogether in 1915. His white supremacist view was clear in the
comment he made on Japanese labor militancy several years later in Hawaii. He wrote,
“Hawaii is the most complete and convincing object lesson to the mainland as to what
would have happened in California if the workers of the state, and the people generally,
had not been so determined to hold the state as a heritage to the white race.”
359

358
Ibid., 137-139.

359
Ichioka, Issei, 137, 143; Paul Scharrenberg, “The Japanese in Hawaii,” American Federationist 29, no.
10 (1922), 742; Katayama wrote “Japan has invested 1.2 million yen (half a million dollars) to the
Panama-Pacific International Exposition to cool down the anti-Japanese sentiment, but they ended up with
putting shame on themselves.” Sen Katayama, “San Francisco dayori,” Shin Shakai 2, no. 2 (October
332
Katayama shrewdly commented in Heimin, a bilingual monthly journal he
launched in May 1916 with assistance from Masayuki Nonaka, an immigrant residing in
Los Angeles, and Shigeki Oka, one of the ex-Social Revolutionary Party members, who
was then the publisher of the Japanese language paper, Hokubei Shimbun, in San
Francisco, that the only reason for the “anti-Japanese movement” was “racial prejudice,”
which had been “purposely incited against Japanese.” “Labor leaders like Shorenberg
[sic] and others framed up the anti-Japanese movement,” he continued, by “putting up
every imaginable scheme and false pretext shamelessly.” Equally important was
Katayama’s criticism of the Japanese consulate. He clarified that Japanese laborers’
hesitancy to join the labor movement lay not only in the exclusion of Japanese by
American unions, but also the fear that the Japanese consulate implanted in the minds of
the laborers. Japanese laborers, who “wish to go back to Japan or send for a wife and
family,” were afraid that they might not be able to obtain necessary permissions from the
consul. The workers were desperate, Katayama points out, “to save $800 in bank deposits
for more than five months in order for them to send for a picture bride.” Because one had
to live in a house and manage an independent business or farm to be qualified for sending
for a family, “there sprang up Japanese small business owners everywhere and they
compete and prey on one another.” This consulate authority, in tandem with its
anti-socialist propaganda to ostracize people like Katayama, curtailed Japanese
immigrant workers’ willingness to associate with the labor movement.
360

1915).

360
Kublin, Asian Revolutionary, 230; Sen Katayama, Heimin, 12 (August 1917). Katayama himself was
333
The deportation of a socialist, Fusajiro Ota on October 19, 1915, by the Japanese
consul in Seattle, Seizo Takahashi, also indicated ongoing suppression of the socialist
movement. Of course, the Japanese consulate did not have an extraterritoriality that could
justify such an act. The origin of incident was that when the Imperial Household Agency
received a letter stamped in Seattle, saying a person in the tourist groups from Seattle was
going to “carry out a plot” at the Imperial Palace, the Agency and the Foreign Ministry
immediately pressured the Seattle consul to catch the suspect. Without finding any clue,
the consul used a socialist as a scapegoat. Katayama sent a Nichibei article on this to his
Dutch comrade in New York, S. J. Rutgers, who then asked a socialist congressman,
Meyer London, to interrogate it in Congress. Journalists, such as Dengo Matsubara and
Kiyoshi Kiyosawa of Shin Sekai, reported on it frequently. The consul Takahashi had
with a competing newspaper wrote defamatory articles on Japanese socialists in the
United States and tried to label liberal journalists like Matsubara and Kiyosawa as
subversives, too. The consul was eventually demoted to somewhere else. Slander against
socialists ensued. One opinion came from Shigeharu Kasai, who called Katayama’s
article in New York Call “treacherous.” Katayama explained what effect this
anti-socialist campaign had on them by writing in Shin Shakai on September 1, 1916,
“Because the Japanese police put pressure on the family members in Japan of our
socialist comrades in the United States, they naturally stopped corresponding with their
family in Japan and the deepening hatred toward the Japanese government has turned

responsible for setting up and issuing the entire paper. But it failed to attract supporters during his transition
to New York. The newspaper does not seem to have been preserved except a few scattered issues; Ichioka,
Issei, 145.
334
them into desperate anarchists living in alienation.”
361

Invited by Rutgers, Katayama soon moved to New York. He would continue to
educate American readers about the condition of Japanese workers through his articles in
the International Socialist Review and Class Struggles. While he started a socialist study
group with young Japanese student laborers, including Eizo Kondo, Unzo Taguchi,
Tsunao Inomata, Suekichi Mamiya, Haruo Watanabe, and Eitaro Ishigaki, his
involvement with the Rand School of Social Science gave him a crucial encounter with
Otto Huiswoud. This would lead him to meet Claude McKay and other African diasporic
intellectual-activists, which would eventually enhance Katayama’s understanding of
Japanese exclusion from labor unions in a broader context of global color lines practiced
through racial capitalism of America and its imperialist extensions.

Chapter Conclusion
In the first decade of the twentieth century, groups of Japanese student-laborers
formed socialist study groups and labor organizations under the strong influences of
prominent Japanese socialists Sen Katayama and Shusui Kotoku, who came to stay in
California. Their growth as socialists was the product of the trans-Pacific movement of
ideas, practices, capital, and laborers. Fusataro Takano first brought back the idea and
practice of labor unionism to Japan, which then gave Sen Katayama and Shusui
opportunities to deepen their understanding of socialist praxis. The shift of ideas and
practices from campaigning for universal suffrage to the direct action of general strikes

361
Oka et al., Sokoku o teki toshite, 99-100.
335
traced divergence and convergence in the trans-Pacific socialist movement.
In the particular racial formations of the West Coast, which violently excluded
Chinese from the protection of law and exploited them in a differentiated labor hierarchy,
the Japanese had to accumulate historical experiences to understand the intersection of
race and class. The introduction of Japanese laborers as strikebreakers symbolizes and
embodies the logic of America’s white supremacist and nativist labor unions. While they
excluded Asian immigrants from union membership, they slandered Asian workers as
those who kept the wage level low by working as scabs. From the perspective of white
capitalists, this was a very beneficial system because they were able to reduce the labor
union’s power by racial and ethnic division and retain cheaper labor reserves of color.
Japanese socialists harshly criticized Asian exclusion by the American Federation of
Labor and the Socialist Party of America. When the Industrial Workers of the World
came into California with multi-racial and multi-ethnic organizing on an industrial basis,
Japanese labor organizers of the Fresno Labor League were ready to work together.
Although there were numerous sprouts of possibility of organizing laborers of
color with and by Japanese based on substantial labor solidarity, Japanese immigrant
socialists and anarchists experienced suppression by Japanese consulates and the
Japanese language newspapers that were under the Japanese consul’s influence. This
counter-insurgency surveillance by the Japanese government and consulates culminated
in the High Treason Incident, which eventually put Shusui Kotoku to death. Sen
Katayama’s fourth stay in America barely recaptured the momentum of the movement.
However, Katayama sowed the seeds of labor activism that would sprout and bloom in
336
the 1930s in true multi-racial and multi-ethnic labor organizing by communist activists in
California.

337
Chapter 6: Japanese Communists in California

This chapter explores how new generation of labor activists emerged both
independent of and dependent on the heritage of Sen Katayama and Shusui Kotoku. A
new generation was brewing and conflating into the Communist-led labor movement
from the mid-1920s to the 1930s. The New York-based student-laborers under the
influence of Katayama came to California and found Okinawan leftist youth groups and
many Issei and Kibei-Nisei, who were willing and ready to organize Japanese immigrant
laborers and other laborers of color.

Sen Katayama’s Encounter with Otto Huiswoud and his Work in Mexico
World War I, Russia’s Bolshevik revolution in 1917, and the establishment of the
Third Communist International in 1919 had a huge influence on the shifting political
landscape of American leftists. A wave of strikes engulfed the country in 1919. There
were strikes by railroad workers and clothing workers in major cities on the East Coast,
the New York City dock workers’ strike, a general strike in Seattle in support of shipyard
workers, and a strike of 32,000 textile mill workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Three
hundred sixty-five thousand steel workers challenged a steel trust. Five hundred thousand
coal miners struck, too. As a result of its staunch opposition to the World War, the
Socialist Party of America faced intense repression by the Department of Justice and
Bureau of Investigation. Furthermore, the left-wing factions of the party, which declared
its support of the Russian Revolution and were supported by the Language Federation in
338
(mainly Eastern European) immigrant communities, were suspended and expelled. These
factions founded the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party in 1919, which
later merged and morphed into the Workers’ Party of America in 1921, partly because of
harsh repression. It changed its name in 1925 to the Workers (Communist) Party and to
the Communist Party USA in 1929.
362

Around this time, Katayama had a very important encounter with
activist-intellectuals of color in New York, which helped him deepen his analysis on race.
Sebald Justinus Rutgers, a Dutch socialist and engineer who Katayama had built a
relationship with since the 1904 Amsterdam Congress, invited him to move to New York.
While he promoted the concept of mass action, Rutgers came to realize that “far more
than one-third of the workers do not even have a vote: Negroes in the South, immigrants
in the North, and men who must keep moving in pursuit of jobs.” Through Rutgers,
Katayama reinforced his connection to the left-wing group of the Socialist Party of
America and their publications. While Katayama contributed articles to the American
Labor Year Book, published by the socialist Rand School of Social Science from 1916 to
1918, he met Otto Huiswoud, who immigrated to the United States from Dutch Guiana in
1910 and had entered the Rand School’s Workers’ Training Course in November 1918.
While Katayama knew all too well the exclusion of Japanese workers from
white-supremacist labor unions in the United States, Huiswoud had also experienced the
same treatment of African Americans when he organized a grievance committee in the
Fall River Line he worked for in 1918. Their discussion of the labor movement, with

362
For the solidarity of Japanese workers with the Seattle General Strike, see Kurokawa, America rodo
undo to Nihonjin imin, 39–79.
339
others like Claude McKay, helped them to envision a true internationalism that would
seriously analyze the structural forces of racism as one of the most significant hindrances
to organizing of workers all over the world, as the socialist slogan goes.
363

The 1919 Paris Peace Conference must have been a source of disappointment for
Katayama and Huiswoud. When Japan wanted to solve the anti-Japanese problem on the
West Coast, it proposed a bill against racial discrimination to be integrated in the
principles of the League of Nations. Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement
Association decided to delegate A. Philip Randolph, Ida B. Wells Burnett, and a
translator named Eliezel Cadet to attend the conference. Only Cadet was able to obtain a
passport to meet with Japanese ambassador plenipotentiary, Nobuaki Makino, in Paris.
Madam C. J. Walker, who created the International League of Darker People jointly with
Marcus Garvey, A. Philip Randolph, and Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., also contacted
Ruiko Kuroiwa (also known as Shuroku Kuroiwa), the owner of the Japanese newspaper,
Yorozu Choho, at the conference. W. E. B. Du Bois, who attended the conference as a
reporter for the NAACP monthly magazine, The Crisis, met with members of the
Pan-African Association and other African American delegates, called for racial justice
and self-determination. Despite channels of communication being open between the
aforementioned, the Japanese and American empires—both of which had aimed to take

363
Joyce Moore Turner, Carribean Crusaders and the Harlem Renaissance (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2005), 21–23; Minkah Makalani, “Internationalizing the Third International:
The African Blood Brotherhood, Asian Radicals, and Race, 1919–1922,” Journal of African American
History 96, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 159; Sen Katayama, “Japan—International Socialist Movement,” in
American Labor Year Book 1916, ed. The Department of Labor Research of the Rand School of Social
Science (New York: Rand School of Social Science, 1916), 225–228; Sen Katayama,
“Japan---International Socialist Movement,” in American Labor Year Book 1917–18, ed. The Department
of Labor Research of the Rand School of Social Science (New York: Rand School of Social Science, 1917),
288–291.
340
over Shandong from Germany—made a deal. Japan took Shandong in exchange for
withdrawing the racial equality bill. Meanwhile, the anti-Japanese, anti-imperialist May
Fourth Movement erupted in China, sparking the March First Movement in Korea. The
Race Riots of the “Red Summer” in the United States also reverberated the global uproar
for self-determination, racial justice, and anti-imperialism.
364

Katayama’s involvement in the merger of Communist parties and the setup of the
Pan-American Agency made him realize that, as his retrospective report written on
January 10, 1922, reveals, “American comrades, especially the old leaders of UCP,
including Scott, are not able to grasp the condition of the Communist movement in a
broader international perspective and to see it beyond the national boundary.” At one
meeting of the Pan-American Agency, “Harper (Julius Heiman) proposed the closure of
the Negro Bureau and the cancellation of dispatching Allen (Maximilian Cohen) to
Argentina and me [Katayama] to Mexico.” Though Katayama opposed, they concluded
that Allen and Katayama would leave for Latin American countries with reduced budget
and Rose Stokes and Jenny Dean would keep the Negro Bureau but with no pay.” Even
after Katayama revealed through Louis Fraina that Harper did not have such an
appointment, as treasurer of the American Bureau of the Profintern, Harper threatened
Katayama that he would discharge him from his position if he reported it to the
Comintern. General white hostility from American to colored comrades, often spinning
around issues of budget distribution to organizing colored people, was actually observed

364
Robert A. Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 1:304–308, 408–410, 345; Paul Gordon Lauren, Power
And Prejudice: The Politics And Diplomacy Of Racial Discrimination (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
1996); Benita M. Johnson, “African-Americans and American Foreign Policy,” Journal of Pan African
Studies 1, no. 8 (June 2007): 33–39.
341
at the Fourth Congress of Comintern in 1922.
365

Katayama left New York for Mexico on March 18, 1921 with $3000 that he
obtained after many persuasive attempts. His mission was to support the foundation of
the Communist Party and to disseminate Communist literature. According to Katayama,
neither M. N. Roy nor Linn A. E. Gale left a substantial Communist network. In early
April, Katayama and others founded the Provisional Bureau in Mexico of Profintern with
representatives from the Communist Youth League, the anarcho-syndicalist CGT
(Confederación General de Trabajadores), the IWW of Mexico, and CROM
(Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana). The sudden arrest of fourteen comrades in
May caused a huge setback. Katayama had to move three times, and at one point went
into hiding in a sympathizer’s house for over two months. He kept working through the
only contacts he had with two Mexican comrades. He asked several organizations to join
Profintern by sending propagandist letters to a regional conference of CROM at Puebla,
Mexico on June 25, to the national meeting of the CROM at Orizaba on July 1, and to the
national meeting of the Socialist Party in the southeast of Mexico at Izamal of Yucatan
on August 1.
366

Katayama addressed the issue of global racism in those letters. In his letters to the
Mexican Federation of Labor (CROM), which was under the Pan American Federation of
Labor established by Samuel Gompers in 1918, Katayama warned “The Denver

365
Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (Hereafter RGASPI), 5/3/145/2–5, as quoted in Akito
Yamanouchi, “Zaiboku Katayama Sen no shokan to sokorui, 1921 nen [The Correspondences and Drafts
by Sen Katayama in Mexico in 1921],” Ohara Shakai Mondai Kenkyujo Zasshi, no. 506 (January 2001):
64–69; Makalani, “Internationalizing the Third International,” 168–174.

366
RGASPI, 521/1/17/1–4, 521/1/17/6, 521/1/17/15, 521/1/17/89–90, 521/1/17/96–101, as quoted in
Yamanouchi, “Zaiboku Katayama Sen,” 32–42.
342
convention of AFL [in June 1921] neglected and suppressed the bill that Blacks
submitted to criticize ‘the mob violence’ of the Ku Klux Klan. Instead it accepted a
message of fraternity from the American Legion!. . . [You] should not be satisfied with
high wages and shorter work times. . . . [You] should join an international organization
[like Profintern] to fight against global Capitalism and Imperialism.” To fight against
Capitalist dominance in a transnational manner seemed plausible. When the Mexican
government raised the tariff for petroleum in June of 1921, the foreign oil companies
stopped loading oil to the ships and rendered about 20,000 workers unemployed within
two months. With the appearance of two American battleships located offshore at
Tampico, the Mexican government could not help but lower the tariff in August. While
Katayama saw monopolistic control of Mexican industry by American and British
Capital as similar to Indian and Cuban situations, he pointed out that more than 60,000
oil industry workers in Tampico and other locations had remained unorganized, but now
were becoming organized by Profintern.
367

The publication was a very important part of their ideological intervention in the
conceptualization of the international fight against global Imperialism. In addition to a
weekly newspaper, El Trabajador, which Katayama began publishing on April 23, in
August he published Spanish translations of Lenin’s State and Revolution and Bukharin’s
Principles of Bolshevism (The ABC’s of Communism in English). Five thousand copies of
each translation were printed for distribution to the Mexican public, where
anarcho-syndicalist literature was dominant. Katayama wrote that the distrust of political

367
RGASPI, 521/1/17/54–58, as quoted in Yamanouchi, “Zaiboku Katayama Sen,” 53–54.
343
parties among anarcho-syndicalists could be attributed to the corruption of the parties in
Mexico. However, Katayama continued, the sole strategy of general striking would not
win against the bourgeoisie. People needed an organized and coherent party to coordinate
strategies over national boundaries,to protect workers’ rights, to build true international
solidarity..
368

The New York Times’ coverage of the Turlock incident aroused Katayama’s nerve
with regard to its negative implication for international solidarity of workers. On July 20,
a mass expulsion of fifty-eight Japanese laborers took place in the town of Turlock,
California. Approximately 150 armed white men carefully coordinated their attack. The
armed men woke up the workers, loaded them on trucks, and expelled them with firm
warning that they should not return. The local police was conveniently unavailable. It
was only a week after that armed white men drove ten Japanese workers out of nearby
Livingston. Katayama was familiar with the issue of mob violence imposed on workers
of color, but what struck him was that the New York Times’s article attributed the incident
to workers affiliated with the IWW, which had dedicated itself to multiracial organizing
for the past fifteen years. Katayama commented that such violent acts disgraced the
reputation and organization of the IWW and that since “Bill Haywood, the founder and
leader of it, is now in Moscow supporting the Profintern,. . . the leaders of IWW should
advise its members not to be involved in such dirty acts, or if not they should leave the
Profintern.”
369

368
RGASPI, 521/1/17/89–90, 60–67, as quoted in Yamanouchi, “Zaiboku Katayama Sen,” 55–56.

369
RGASPI, 521/1/17/118–119, as quoted in Yamanouchi, “Zaiboku Katayama Sen,” 60–61; New York
344
For Katayama, the organizing of Japanese workers in Japan and America were two
wheels of the same vehicle. Katayama wrote from Mexico to Masayuki Nonaka, whom
he had invited to New York from Los Angeles before he left for Mexico, that “I want you
to write about the Japanese on the Pacific Coast . . . I believe that the work [to provide
the Communist literature] has to be done from the United States, because it is absolutely
impossible in Japan . . . We need to gain about 250 Japanese comrades to build our own
Japanese Bureau . . . the more the labor and socialist movement grows in Japan, the more
ready Japanese in America get to listen to the voices of Communists.” Another letter to
his New York-based comrades in the socialist study group says “We need to spread our
[network of] JG [Japanese Group] in America and Hawaii.” Thus, Katayama considered
California and Hawaii as strategic nexuses of the trans-Pacific Communist movement.
Some of these comrades, “Katayama’s boys” would come to California in 1924 and help
found Japanese workers’ associations, which actually functioned as Japanese branches of
the CPUSA.
370

Times, July 23, 1921; Ichioka, Issei, 251; Brian Niiya, ed., Japanese American History: An A-to-Z
Reference from 1868 to the Present (New York: Facts On File, 1993), 337–338.

370
RGASPI, 521/1/17/89–90, 93–94, as quoted in Yamanouchi, “Zaiboku Katayama Sen,” 41–46.
Katayama wrote in the letter “Comrade Sada [Tsunao Inomata], if comrade N. [Masayuki Nonaka] is not
coming to New York or not going to Moscow, you should enter Los Angeles, and take him back to Japan.”
In another letter to Unzo Taguchi and Taro Yoshihara, Katayama wrote “We have to maintain the growth
of our organization in America so that we will be able to provide [our home country with] proficient
Communist comrades when a decisive opportunity arises. We can expound Communists’ ideal and
principles toward Japanese workers in American rather than in Japan. We need to spread our [network of]
JG [Japanese Group] in America and Hawaii.” See RGASPI, 521/1/17/95, as quoted in Yamanouchi,
“Zaiboku Katayama Sen,” 46–48.
345
Formation of Communist Party in California
Anita Whitney, a suffragist and member of the Oakland branch of the Socialist
Party, left the party after the factional conflict and founded the California Communist
Labor Party in Oakland in 1919. The hierarchy of authority was supposed to function
without deviation or interruption throughout a descending order of district, subdistrict,
section or local, unit or nucleus, and fractions. However, according to Josephine Fowler,
“patterns of communication and lines of authority were far more variable, unpredictable,
and fractured.” This was partly because the party was semi-legal and underground and
also because California was so remote from the party headquarters. Ralph E. Shaffer
points to the flip side of the same coin by arguing with testimonies from the 1930s that
“California communism in the early 1920s was an independent-minded, fairly
autonomous movement which determined its course without dictation from the outside.”
According to Los Angeles City Secretary William Schneiderman, there were more
transient members in Los Angeles than anywhere else in the country who did not always
leave traces of their presence in party documents. This fact suggests the need of further
research on the autonomous character of Asian and Latino immigrant radicals in the
movement.
371

Given the CP’s general inability to direct the work of people of color,
Communism’s internationalism and libratory nationalism were not necessarily mutually
exclusive for racialized subjects. For example, Douglas Monroy argued that a nationalist

371
Fowler, Japanese and Chinese Immigrant Activists, 34–5; Ralph E. Shaffer, “Communism in California,
1919–1924: ‘Orders from Moscow’ or Independent Western Radicalism?” Science & Society 34, no. 4
(Winter 1970): 414, 416n6, 421.
346
and class-conscious tradition, stemming mainly from the Mexican Revolution of 1910–
1914, survived and even thrived among Mexicans in Los Angeles. While the mainstream
Japanese American community adopted what Eiichiro Azuma called “dual nationalism,”
reacting to anti-Japanese policies in California, Japanese immigrant radicals mainly
targeted their countrymen for actual labor organizing and maintained a sense of
anti-imperial proletarian internationalism. Indeed, nationality and ethnicity often
inaugurated a different trajectory of politicization. Proletarian movements were activated
in different ethnic groups in particular ways. However, we can also examine how ready
they were to cooperate and coordinate labor across racial and ethnic boundaries. They
paid attention to Japanese organizers at the ground level, in which small groups of party
members were spontaneously and organically working both in Party-led organizations
such as the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL) and the Trade Union Unity League
(TUUL) and in nonparty “mass” or “front” organizations such as the International Labor
Defense (ILD) and the All-America Anti-Imperialist League (AAAIL).
372

372
Douglas Monroy, “Anarquismo y Comunismo: Mexican Radicalism and the Communist Party in Los
Angeles during the 1930s.” Labor History 24, no. 1 (Winter 1983): 34. passim.; Fowler, Japanese and
Chinese Immigrant Activists, 31; Dorothy Ray Healey and Maurice Isserman, California Red: A Life in the
American Communist Party (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 40–1; Fowler,
Japanese and Chinese Immigrant Activists, 32–3; Vivian McGuckin Raineri, The Red Angel: The Life and
Times of Elaine Black Yoneda (New York: Internatioanl Publisher, 1991), 7, 9, 13, 18. The Trade Union
Educational League (TUEL), organized in 1920, was bringing new vigor and unity into a divided labor
movement by 1922. “Its aim was to transform the existing trade union movement into a militant fighting
force capable of waging successful struggle” by paying special attention to the problems of minority
workers. The International Labor Defense was founded in 1925 “to coordinate the legal defense of arrested
and jailed labor and political activists.” Its birth was mandated by the need for one national permanent
defense organization. Its militant program included fights “against national oppression and lynchings of
Negroes,” “for the defense of foreign born workers, against deportation and for the right of political
asylum.” In the same year, the American Negro Labor Council was formed to fight discrimination in the
labor movement.
347
Japanese Immigrants in California
Racial exclusion policies in California had a deleterious impact on the lives of
Asian immigrants. The new 1920 Alien Land Law was much more restrictive than that of
1913. It forbade leasing and sharecropping by Japanese immigrants in an attempt to limit
their role in agriculture to that of laborers. By the end of World War I, the Los Angeles
region housed the largest Japanese American community— whose population now
numbered at ten thousand—in the continental United States. In Los Angeles, “Japs” were
kept out of districts such as Rose Hill, Pico Heights, Belvedere, Sherman, and Hollywood
by redlining and restrictive covenant. “This experience taught the area’s Japanese
immigrants that white America would not tolerate them unless they remained segregated
in Little Tokyo.”
373

On one hand, the merchant leaders in Japanese American communities, represented
by the Japanese Association (which was supervised by the Japanese consul), tried to
represent themselves as an overseas branch of “modernized leaders of Asia” and appealed
to American morality by reforming their morals and behaviors in tandem with white
progressives. On the other hand, the Okinawan and Japanese immigrant radicals had their
finger on the pulse of the common degraded conditions to which people of color were
exposed— through racial capitalism—and therefore on the possibilities of workers’
solidarity.
374

373
Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race, 18; George Sanchez, “The History of Segregation in Los
Angeles: A Report on Racial Discrimination and Its Legacy.”

374
Azuma, Between Two Empires, 65–6, 73–4, 78. The Japanese Association obviously excluded radicals.
For example, by the end of March 1910, the socialists were almost completely purged from the Japanese
Association of Berkeley.
348

Okinawan Youth Group: Reimeikai (New Dawn Society)
When Reisuke (or Ryosuke) Yada, Takahashi (alias), and two of Katayama’s
comrades moved from New York to San Francisco and Los Angeles in order to look into
organizing a Japanese section of the Communist Party on the West Coast in 1924, they
found some left-oriented Isseis. Especially noteworthy was the Okinawan youth group
called Reimeikai (New Dawn Society). It had been founded in Los Angeles in 1921 by
the original members of Jun Matayoshi, Kenden Yabe, (Paul) Shinsei Kochi, Seisho Kiya,
Chusei Teruya, Jinkichi Matsuda, Zentei Oshiro, Seikyo Toguchi, Seishin Toguchi, Koki
Nakamura, Taisa Yamahata, and Yotoku Miyagi. They were familiar with the conditions
of farm workers of color in California, given the fact that many of the young Okinawans
had experience as farm workers in Central Valley, Orange County, the Imperial Valley.
These so-called “blanket boys” followed the farming season “to pack tomatoes and
cantaloupes in the Imperial Valley and wandering on to do piecework in Arizona,
Turlock, or Fresno.” They often worked in the early summers picking cucumbers and
strawberries, and later in the fall, picking grapes in the San Joaquin Valley. Given the
itinerant nature of the group’s members, the Reimeikai study group tended to be with
them and thus became a travelling society.
375

Each member deserves careful attention with regard to his trajectory of
immigration and politicization process. As briefly introduced in Chapter Three, Kenden

375
Ippei Nomoto, Miyagi Yotoku: Imin seinen gaka no hikari to kage [Light and Shadow of a Young
Immigrant Painter] (Okinawa: Okinawa Taimusu-sha, 1997), 59–72; History of the Okinwans in North
America, ed. The Okinawa Club of America, trans. Ben Kobashigawa (Los Angeles: Asian American
Studies Center University of California, Los Angeles, 1988), 28–9.
349
Yabe crossed over from Hawaii, where he toured plantations and attempted to guide
Okinawan young workers to socially conscious literacy through Kyuyo Club, to San
Francisco and onto Los Angeles in 1912. His life changed from that of schoolboy at his
pastor’s house, where he spent two years for Bible study, to that of laborer in continental
America. He became one of the leaders of the Reimeikai and, importantly, had a
historical understanding of the Okinawan people’s struggle. “The History of Okinawan
Immigrants in America,” which Yabe chronicled for their prefectural association’s
journal, Ryukyu, in 1939, shows his deep appreciation for the work of activist precursors.
The memory of the movement for Okinawans’ rights to land, led by Noboru Jahana and
his comrades, was inspiring to Yabe. He rightly situated “public-spirited,” “tough
political activist” Kosuke Uema in his early life, in the oppositional struggle against the
tyranny of Governor Narahara, and independent journalism through the Nan’yosha
Publishing Company, which would “spur the awakening of the [Okinawan] people as a
whole.” Uema’s presence and help in Los Angeles were indispensable, especially for
those who came up from Mexico.
376

Yabe was aware of the trans-Pacific communication that the early Okinawans
established. Kamado Ota, one of the Okinawan immigrants who escaped the coal mines
of Las Esperanças in Coahuila and came through El Paso to find Kosuke Uema in Los
Angeles in 1905 or 1906, expressed his sympathy for the movement against the clannish
oligarchy both in Naichi Japan and Okinawa. Ota wrote for far-off Okinawan newspapers
about politics and the Okinawan community in Los Angeles. Yabe also made an

376
Ibid., 17, 428.
350
important remark about Seishu Aniya, who came to study at Stanford University in 1900
and mingled with Japanese socialist groups in the Bay Area. Aniya “sent the first news
dispatches from North America to the Okinawa Shimpo.” “His timely articles were read
avidly by Okinawans everywhere, and for young activists in particular, America became
the land of their dreams.” As a matter of fact, Yabe too sent reports on immigrant life
from Hawaii and San Francisco to an Okinawa’s daily, Okinawa Mainichi.
377

Yabe emphasized the need for youthful minds of Okinawan immigrants who
looked over to the wide world from the valleys and urban centers of California. He wrote:
With the end of the Great War in Europe, humankind stood at a major crossroad:
a resettling of accounts in politics, philosophy, and the arts. The emergence of
soviet republics in European Russia, in particular, rang the alarm for the world’s
proletarian culture to shock the whole world. Such a world-wide current couldn’t
help but find its wary into the impressionable hearts of young Okinawan workers
who were just then searching for a purposeful life.
378

Okinawan immigrants began gathering around Yabe’s home in Los Angeles. It was right
after Yabe had become married to Mitsue Kamito from Matsuyama, Ehime, in the
Imperial Valley in 1919, and moved to Los Angeles with a newborn daughter, Emi, in
1921. As one of the first families formed in the Okinawan community, their home,
though plainly furnished with a simple table, a few chairs, four or five army cots and one
wall decoration—Yotoku Miyagi’s oil painting titled Death’s Tune—became an intimate
place where immigrants gathered. There they eagerly quenched their thirst for knowledge
and debate.
379

377
Ibid., 12, 20–22.

378
Ibid., 28.

379
Ibid., 28–29.
351
This group of young Okinawan workers came to found Reimeikai (the “New Dawn”
Club) in Los Angeles in 1921. A hotel on Banning Street run by a fellow Okinawan,
Choshiro Tamaki, offered a space for weekly Saturday evening meetings. They also
pooled their money and started a restaurant called The Owl on Fifth Street in 1923. Their
intent to make a place for their brethren through non-exploitative management, discount
for students and laborers, and use of profits for the schooling of youth was superb, but it
did not succeed in business terms and they had to close it within a year. However, the
restaurant hosted indispensable trans-Pacific interactions between Okinawans. When
Reverend Seikan Higa, a Methodist minister from Honolulu, visited Reimeikai at The
Owl in 1923, the young Okinawans had a vigorous debate on the socio-economic
conditions of immigrants. This transformed Higa. As soon as he got back to Honolulu, he
set up an independent Reimei Church and started publishing leftist journals. After the
restaurant closed, Yabe moved to Pasadena and worked as a gardener until 1926. He went
back to Los Angeles and worked as a janitor, a milk distributor, and a fruit stand owner.
380

Scholar Teruya Hiyane’s meticulous research contextualized the Reimeikai’s
strong orientation toward artistic production within the larger art movement of the
Japanese community. Toshihei Jikihara’s Lemon Poetry Group and the Southern
California Art Study Group, led by such painters as Tokio Kamiyama and Yukie Kotoku
(nephew of Shusui Kotoku), were examples of the art movement that energized artistic
articulation of life conditions and coincided with the desire to analyze socio-economic

380
Ibid., 29–30; Nomoto, Miyagi Yotoku, 72, 75.
352
hardships through a social-scientific lens. Kenden Yabe, another leader of Reimeikai, Jun
Matayoshi contributed short stories to major newspapers of the Japanese immigrant
community, Nichibei and Rafu Shimpo in the late 1910s. Jun Matayoshi’s short novels,
Shirasu (White Sand), Sei no Ayumi (Steps of Life), Furui Gaito (An Old Jacket), and
Jakkii no Shi (Death of Jackie), and Kenden Yabe’s Kenjinkai Kanji (Secretary of
Prefectural Association) and Dokushinsha (Single Person) came out on Rafu Shimpo
between 1917 and 1918. Some of them featured the awakening of women. They
provoked the theme of the strained and troubled marriages that picture brides suffered
within the Japanese immigrant community.
381

Some contextualization is necessary here. The practice of picture brides was key to
the growth of the community mainly because the Gentlemen’s Agreement banned further
immigration of laborers and curtailed the possibility of family formation for single
workers so narrow that the only way for single male Japanese laborers to find brides was
either go back to Japan and get married or use the convention of arranged marriage with
correspondence and pictures. Many poor workers did not have the money to fund trips.
Racialized representation of picture brides and whites’ criticism of it led to a ban of the
practice in 1919. Moreover, the preservation of the white composition of the populace,
based on the notion of the heteronormative reproduction of whiteness, had led to the
miscegenation laws of California, into which Japanese was added to the list of “Negro,

381
Teruo Hiyane, “Rafu no jidai 4,” Shin Okinawa Bungaku, no. 92 (1992): 134–148; Jun Matayoshi’s
Shirasu [White Sand] came out from August 19 to 22, 1917, Sei no Ayumi [Steps of Life] from September
15 to 22, 1917, Furui Gaito [An Old Jacket] on January 1, 1918 winning the New Year Novel Award, and
Jakkii no Shi [Death of Jackie] on October 10, 1918. Kenden Yabe’s Kenjinkai Kanji [Secretary of
Prefectural Association] came out from September 12 to 14, 1917, and Dokushinsha [Single Person] from
October 9 to 17, 1917. All were in Rafu Shimpo.
353
mulatto, or Mongolian”—those who could not marry a white person in 1909. So the issue
of marriage in the Japanese community was at once a part of the larger intersection of
race, gender, and sexuality.
Matayoshi’s Sei no Ayumi (Steps of Life) was also a critical intervention into the
Japanese gender power relation, in that the heroine, Maiko, resists the then-gender norm
of a woman’s patient submission and resignation to an undesired marriage under
patriarchal pressure, and chooses a path or “steps of life” toward her independence, even
through a tragic break-apart of her family. Even though it was also painful to see
desperate urgency of Hamada (the groom) that made him forge a certificate of a grape
farm owner to obtain the consulate’s approval to receive a picture bride, Maiko’s critique
of chastity and putting “an iron hammer on the heads of men who misunderstand fury as
power and consider whining as tolerance” must have shaken the Japanese immigrant
community. Importantly, Hiyane pointed out that the feminist thought observed in
Matayoshi and Yabe’s novels had also been influenced by the then-feminist movement in
Japan, led by the “Blue Stocking” Society that had been founded by Raicho Hiratsuka
and others. In fact, many of the women who participated in the Communist movement
were picture brides who had gone through divorce or domestic troubles, and were
awakened to the notion of women’s liberation. We will discuss this more later.
382

Another leader of Reimeikai was Paul Shinsei Kochi. In his autobiographical essay
covering the first half of his life and undocumented entrance into California via Mexico,
Kochi writes of how his socio-political awareness arose out of the struggles in Okinawa

382
Hiyane, “Rafu no jidai 4,” 134–148.
354
that he brought with him to America. Kochi was born in the Nakijin Village of Kunigami
County in Okinawa in 1889, went to the prefectural agricultural school, and worked as a
primary school teacher and village clerk after graduation. He came of age when there
emerged yet another tyrannical governor, Kyugoro Omi. With Seitoku Miyasato and
others, Kochi formed a study group. They often read Daisan Teikoku, a journal of social
commentary edited by the then-liberal opinion leader, Kazan Kayahara, and supported
Kayahara’s idea to limit Satsuma and Choshu despotism by constitutionalism and party
politics. While they externally sent one of their comrades, Nakamoto, to Tokyo to meet
with Kayahara, and collected funds and donated to democratic candidates, they also
struggled locally to reform village government. They expelled a principal, Nakanishi, and
a forest ranger, Ishimi. Soon, the district authority reacted and either demoted or banished
the teachers in the study group to outlying islands.
383

This ignited a heated discussion as to whether the group should stay in the
Okinawan islands or go abroad to venture into the wider world and pursue political
freedom. Seitoku Miyasato, who was to be transferred to the remote Miyako Island,
decided to go to the United States even under immigration restrictions. Kochi joined him
out of their bond of friendship even though Kochi had a two-year old son, Rinkan, whom
he named after the American president he had learned of as the liberator of slaves,
Lincoln. They left Naha on September 2, 1918. Kochi eventually brought his enthusiasm
for social justice to California, but with many sacrifices along the way. After their

383
The Okinawa Club of America, History of the Okinwans in North America, 439; Paul Shinsei Kochi,
Imin no Aiwa [An Immigrant’s Sorrowful Tale], trans. Ben Kobashigawa (Los Angeles: Private Publishing
by Dick J. Kobashigawa, 1978), 18–19, 45. Imin no Aiwa was originally published in Ryukyu, the annual
journal of Association of Okinawans in America, in 1937 and 1938. It is also reprinted in The Okinawa
Club of America, History of the Okinwans in North America, 524–540.
355
disembarkation at Salina Cruz in Oxaca, Mexico, Kochi and Miyasato traveled to
Mazatlan, Sinaloa, and onto Guaymas on the Gulf of California in Sonora. On their boat
ride to the mouth of the Colorado River, the twenty-five Japanese, Chinese, and
Mexicans experienced a storm, which sparked an engine fire on the boat. As the boat
half-sunk, twelve of them disappeared into the water, including Miyasato. The nine
Japanese, two Chinese, and two Mexicans who survived had to walk almost barefoot in
the wintry desert, which was full of ancient spines of sagebrush and cacti.
384

Kochi explains that what enabled him to go through the desert and finally get to
Mexicali was “encounter[s] with . . .true internationalist[s].” It was anti-racist solidarity
that helped them evade life-threatening immigration officers and Mexican policemen
around the hardening U.S.-Mexico border. This included, according to him, a burgeoning
camaraderie between traveling companions of different ethnicities, and the indispensable
help of (whom Kochi thought was) a Yaqui family. They gave the exhausted and starving
party stone-ground coffee, melons, and five pounds of fish. The mother pulled the thorns
from Kochi’s feet and gave him a pair of homemade zapatos (leather sandals).
Kochi’s autobiographical essay, written in 1937 and 1938 retrospectively,
reconstructed and interpreted the colonialism in a supranational way. Kanaka
longshoremen at Honolulu during the stopover made him think of the similarity in the
colonization of Okinawa by Japan, and Hawaii by the United States, both of which
revolved around sugar interests on tropical islands. His encounter with the Yaqui family
made him realize that “Those who conquered the Indians and their lands, driving them

384
Kochi, Imin no Aiwa, 13,
356
into the mountain recesses and isolating them from civilization, were precisely the white
men who boasted of being civilized beings.” His sense of internationalism was cemented
when a Frenchman gave him a ride to a Japanese cotton farm near Mexicali, since, in his
eyes, “‘class consciousness’ cuts across race and nationality and promotes a mutual
understanding which, if preserved and extended, would make the deserts bloom.” Kochi’s
description of his journey suggests that these early encounters helped him envision what
internationalism could be, and opened a way for him to more theoretically articulate his
later involvement in communist labor organizing.
385

Jinkichi Matsuda was one of the people who Kochi first met in Los Angeles after he was
arrested and released in the Keystone vineyard near Calexico by immigration officials in
May of 1918. Kochi was released because, “There is an acute shortage of labor in
agriculture because of the war.” Matsuda, born in Hanechi Village, Okinawa in 1898,
also attended an agricultural school, but was called to Arizona by his father in 1916.
Matsuda and Kochi met in 1918, and left for the Stockton River area together to work as
farmworkers. While Kochi continued as a migratory worker in Fresno and Viola until he
came back to Los Angeles, where he became a gardener and an organizer of a gardeners’
union, Matsuda enrolled in a dentistry course at the University of Southern California.
Soon after, Matsuda revealed his talent in English-language poetry, which showed his
interest in the social problems of Reimeikai. As mentioned before, Reimeikai was feeding
off of the art movement by painters and poets in the community. The Agost Society,
which succeded the Lemon Poetry Group, foregrounded the view of haiku and tanka not

385
Ibid., 21, 33, 38.
357
as technical sophistication of traditional verbal encoding of seasonal sensation within
limited syllables, but as reflections of daily life and the mundanity of the everyday
growth of ordinary people. A young Okinawan painter, Yotoku Miyagi also became a
member of Reimeikai while he is a part of the socially conscious painters’ movement by
the Shakudosha (Burning Soil Society), led by Yukie Kotoku and Tokio Kamiyama.
Miyagi would eventually become known for the Japanese Proletarian Artist League at the
end of 1920s.
386

Figure 1: Members of the Reimeikai (1921)
387

Front row from the right: Kamenoshin Nakasone, Kozo Tamaki, Zentei Oshiro, Tokugoro Ishimine, Seijuro
Uyema, and Hiko Tamaki. Middle row from the right: ___ Ohata, Kenden Yabe, Seikyo Toguchi, ___
Taira, unknown, Seishin Toguchi, and Shosei Miyagi.
Back row from the right: Yamato Goya, Shinsei

386
Ibid., 46; History of the Okinwans in North America, 438–9.

387
This is taken from Okinawa Club of America, History of the Okinwans in North America, 29.
358
Kochi, Chusei Teruya, and ___ Yonabaru.
Karl G. Yoneda: A Kibei’s Trajectory
Karl Goso Yoneda, who would become an active Communist labor organizer, had
a complex politicization process in Japan before he went back to California in 1927.
Goso Yoneda grew up in a family that toiled.
His father, Hideo, was the third son in his family and had to leave it to work,
because in Japan at that time, the oldest male inherited the family business or property. In
1895, at the age of twenty, he went to work on the Makaweli Sugar Plantation in Kauai,
Hawaii, as part of one of the first groups brought by emigrant companies, after the end of
the government-sponsored immigration that had occurred between 1885 and 1894. With
the money he saved through eight years of hard work, he came back to Yasuno Village in
1903 to get married. Hideo and his wife, Kazu, left for Kauai shortly after. Although he
was promoted to overseer, he decided to go with Kazu, his brother, his brother’s wife,
and two fellow villagers to the West Coast, where wages for farm labor could be twice as
much as in Kauai.
In California, the family settled in Glendale in 1905, raising vegetables in a small
field. The Yoneda family consisted of four siblings. The eldest brother, George, was born
in 1904 in Hawaii. Goso was born on July 15, 1906 in Glendale, followed by two sisters,
Ami on December 13, 1907, and Hozumi on June 20, 1909. While Hideo, his brother,
and a fellow villager, Mayehara, worked on the small farmland, Kazu and her
sister-in-law worked extra hours at night, laundering and ironing for white customers. In
1913, Hideo took Goso and his cousin Hitoshi back to his native Yasuno Village to let
359
them receive a “proper Japanese education.” The rest of the family followed a year later.
Family life did not become easier, though; Hideo died of tuberculosis in 1915 and Kazu
had to raise all three children by herself, working as a farm helper. (George had passed
away in 1910. in Glendale). Goso grew up in Japan without eating meat, cow milk, or
eggs,partly because of Japanese food traditions but also because of rural poverty. They
mostly ate a mixture of barley, rice, and fish, which they occasionally caught at a nearby
river. Many Japanese in rural farming villages cooked and steamed other grains and
plants like barley, millet, barnyard grass, and chestnuts mixed with rice.
388

Goso Yoneda came of age in one of the most vibrant periods in the history of social
movement in Japan. The prevalent social upheavals were caused by uneven development
during and after World War I. War contracts—both domestic and with Allied
governments—the opening of markets in Asia, and the growth of heavy industry
inaugurated unprecedented economic expansion and business prosperity. By 1918, both
the Japanese and American empires outgrew the status of debtors and became creditors.
Shortages of consumer goods, soaring prices, inflation, and wage scale lagging behind
the increases in costs of living caused vast social unrest, including the intensified
industrial strikes, and underscored the heavy cost of economic growth. In this context, the
1918 Rice Riot, the foundation of the Socialist League in 1920, Suiheisha and the
Japanese Communist Party in 1922, the police killing of anarchist and socialist labor

388
Karl Goso Yoneda, Ganbatte: Sixty-Year Struggle of a Kibei Worker (Los Angeles: Asian American
Studies Center at UCLA, 1983), 5–8. According to the 1910 United States Federal Census, they lived in the
District 0348 of Burbank with Hideo’s brother (Jut(?) Yoneda), his wife (Yahu Yoneda), their son, Hitoshi,
two fellow villagers, Bengoro Mayahara and his wife, and their son. Interestingly, there also lived three
elders. Fifty-year old S. Okamura, forty-eight-year old Nishimura, and forty-nine year old J. Fukemga
(Fukunaga?) were all single and born in California between 1860 and 62. The number of people who
served in Confederate or Union Amy or Navy in this household is three, indicating these three elders.
360
activists in the Amakasu and Kameido incidents during the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake,
and the upsurge of autonomous movements of tenant farmers, all affected Yoneda’s
politicization.
Many socialists testified that the 1918 Rice Riot in Japan was much more
influential on their activism than the Bolshevik Revolution. Longshorewomen and many
other poor port laborers of the Toyama prefecture, who tried to prevent the transportation
of rice in July, 1918, triggered this riot. It spread to about 360 municipalities in forty-one
prefectures in the following three months, and involved more than a million people. The
context was multi-folded. World War I brought about an abrupt development of heavy
industry, an increase of urban population and factory workers, and an increase of the
centrality of rice in the diet of urban dwellers. When rice merchants’ increase in rice
purchases sent prices upward, numerous people put pressure on local retailers to lower
prices, and pressured shippers to stop transporting to monopolizing wholesalers. When
the Terauchi administration declared they would dispatch Japanese troops to join Western
powers in their counter-revolutionary Siberian Intervention to support White Russian
forces against the Bolshevik Red Army, rice merchants anticipated an increase in demand
for rice for soldiers’ provisions and further hesitated to sell rice to urban retailers—which
accelerated already soaring prices. This manipulation and the overall poverty it caused
also brought about uprisings reminiscent of the Uchikowashi and peasant rebellion that
had taken place decades before, yet the news of the rebellion spread like wildfire due to
wide coverage by newspapers—something the peasant rebellions did not have. Also,
361
ex-outcastes were involved in the rebellion in significant numbers.
389

Goso Yoneda witnessed this Rice Riot (Komesodo) in Hiroshima in 1918, when he
was twelve years old. One day during summer, he and his uncle Yoichi Kubo (his
mother’s oldest brother), took a raft on the Ota River from Yasuno to Hiroshima City.
They “saw rice warehouses burning and people dumping rice on the streets.” Goso turned
to Yoichi and asked, “Why are they burning precious rice?” Yoichi explained that
“dealers throughout Japan were hoarding rice for higher prices and the people, including
housewives and children, just got mad at the dealers and their price gouging.” Although
Goso learned the larger implications of the nation-wide protest years later, it must have
given him a sense of the swirling energy of those who protested against the social
injustice.
390

During his high school years in the city of Hiroshima, after his graduation from
elementary and junior high schools in Yasuno, Goso gradually grew interested and
involved in local movements. His days at Hiroshima High School were a gateway to
collective action. He participated in “the 1921 student strike against a dictatorial

389
Kiyoshi Inoue and Toru Watanabe, eds., Komesodo no kenkyu, vol.1 (Tokyo: Yuhikaku, 1959); Mitsuo
Imoto and Rekishi Kyoikusha Kyogikai, eds., Zusetsu: Komesodo to minshushugi no hatten (Tokyo:
Minshusha, 2004).

390
Yoneda, Ganbatte, 8; Another Kibei-Nisei, who witnessed the Rice Riot, is Ichiro Karl Akiya. Akiya
would later work as a San Francisco representative of the Doho, published by Shuji Fujii in Los Angeles.
Akiya saw the riot in Kobe and importantly saw a regiment of Japanese Army, dispatched from Himeji,
surrounding the ex-outcaste communities and searching for alleged ringleaders on the ground of a rumor.
Eight-year-old Akiya had his best friend, Shin, in the Buraku community. Worried about his friend, he ran
to the edge of the village. Then he saw more than ten male adults, bloody on their faces and bodies and tied
with a long rope, hauled out of the village by soldiers and policemen. Shin’s father was one of them. Shin
shrieked and grabbed onto the leg of a soldier. The soldier kicked the boy out to the field. Akiya did not see
Shin after that. Interestingly, he saw somebody who looked like Shin in San Francisco years later, though
he could not ascertain his identity. See Ichiro Karl Akiya, Jiyu he no michi: Taiheiyo wo koete [Road to
Freedom: Across the Pacific](Kyoto: Korosha, 1996), 16–23.
362
dormitory supervisor” of the high school and also in “a newspaper boys’ strike against
the Chugoku Shimbun” when “the newspaper owner increased our delivery routes but not
our pay.” In high school he also read the works of Rousseau, Kropotkin, and Japanese
socialists and anarchists. He was especially attracted to the work of Vasily Eroshenko, a
blind Russian anarchist and Esperantist who had been expelled from Japan for his
involvement in the 1921 May Day, and for his connection to Japanese socialists, so much
so that he left for Beijing to meet Eroshenko in late 1922. As he hitchhiked, he worked as
a coal discharge longshoreman at the port of Shimonoseki, a glass factory worker in
Pusan, and as a delivery boy for a tobacconist in Mukden, Manchuria. It took him four
months to get to Beijing and he spent two months with Eroshenko there. Yoneda’s
correspondence with his Esperantist friend in Tokyo, Shigeo Izumi, shows that they saw
the Esperanto language as a tool of communication in building an international labor
movement through international Esperanto associations, such as Sennacieca Asocio
Tutmonda (Anational and Worldwide Association) and Tutmonda Ligo de Esperantisja
Seustatano (Worldwide League of Esperantist Anarchists).
391

When Yoneda returned to Japan, he quit school and began to participate in
movements. As he visited the Osakan Headquarters of Suiheisha, an organization

391
Ibid., 8–9. Hikaru Kondo, one of the founders of Suiheisha, who had smuggled himself into the newly
established Soviet Union twice from September 1920 to February 1921 and from August 1921 to December
1921 and learned essence of communism from Sen Katayama and Unzo Taguchi in Moscow, also visited
Eroshenko in May and June 1922 in Beijing and also the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea
based in Shanghai. See Yoshihiko Miyazaki, “Kondo Hikaru: Kominterun no shisha” in Suihei
Hakubutsukan ed., Zenkoku Suiheisha o sasaeta hitobito (Osaka: Kaiho shuppansha, 2002), 25–42. Both
Kondo and Yoneda were listed in the membership of the Nihon Shakaishugi Domei (Japanese Socialist
League) founded in 1920. See Kenji Hirohata, “Yamabe Kentaro kyuzo: ‘Nihon Shakaishugi Domei
meibo,’” Ohara Shakai Mondai Kenkyujo zasshi, no. 611 and 612 (September and October, 2009), 60-66.
Shigeo Izumi to Goso Yoneda, May 29 and September 28, 1925. Karl G. Yoneda papers (Collection 1592).
Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA. (hereafter KGYP) Box 34 Folder
10.
363
founded in 1922 for liberation of the ex-Eta population in February of 1923, and
participated in the printers’ strikes in Osaka and Tokyo that same year, he started
developing his network, getting connected to many Japanese socialists, anarchists, and
Suiheisha activists. Yoneda’s name was on the membership list of the Nihon Shakaishugi
Domei (Japanese Socialist League), founded in 1920 by Hitoshi Yamakawa and others
when they tried to reestablish their movement with more than a thousand members and
organizations after the upsurge of popular protests of the Rice Riot and other numerous
labor strikes in Japan. In 1921, the Japanese government disbanded the League, but the
list continued to be used secretly as means of networking between socialists, anarchists,
communists, Suiheisha sctivists, and peasant activists.
Yoneda’s relationship with Suiheisha activists is not clear. His parents’ home
village in the Ana section (Oaza) of Yasuno had a subsection where several households
of ex-outcaste residents lived. Growing up close to the subsection, Goso was probably
highly aware of the lingering discrimination they faced. His picture, taken in 1923 in
front of the Osaka headquarters of Suiheisha, suggests his interest in their struggle.
392

Yoneda developed his relationships with Hiroshima local journalists and activists
as well. The Hiroshima Youth Progressive Club, which had been founded in 1923 as a
coalition of Bolshevist, anarchist, and Suiheisha activists, disbanded itself on March 18,
1924. Yoneda was in the anarchist group under the influence of Japanese anarchist Shuzo

392
Hirohata, “Yamabe Kentaro kyuzo, 60–66; Yoneda, Ganbatte, 1, 6; Karl G. Yoneda, Ganbatte, trans.
Michiko Tanaka and Reizo Tanaka (Tokyo: Otsuki shoten, 1984), 11, 17. This is the Japanese translation of
Yoneda’s Ganbatte. The frontispiece picture of the chapter one is captioned as “in Hiroshima, 1923” in the
original English version, but as “in front of the Osakan Headquarter of Suiheisha in February, 1923” in the
Japanese version. Hereafter if not specified with parentheses like this Ganbatte (Japanese), the citation is
from the original English version of Ganbatte.
364
Hatta. They maintained, “the improvement of work conditions and stability of life of the
working class should be achieved only through economically united actions.” For them,
“involvement in the electoral politics only leads us to internal conflicts and deception by
ambitious persons.” On September 8, 1924, Goso Yoneda, Takeshige Yamamoto, Masato
Nishikawa, and Tahito Hagino started Hiroshima Insatsuko Kumiai (the Hiroshima
Printers Union) with about 600 printers in the city of Hiroshima and adopted the policy of
having no affiliation with political parties. On March 22, 1925, the group further
established an umbrella anarchist labor union, Hiroshima Jun Rodosha Kumiai
(Hiroshima Pure Labor Union) and started publishing their organ Senko (Flash Light) in
August.
393

Yoneda had a connection to labor activists and journalists Etsuta Tan and Ryuzo
Hironaka, of the city of Kure, one of the major naval port cities in the region. Tan was a
laborer at the Ujina Shipyard and involved in labor disputes there. When he harshly
criticized the government’s use of the Japanese constitution for the benefit of the
bourgeoisie instead of the protection of the proletariat in his local newspaper Minken
Shimbun, in July 1921, he was indicted by the Newspaper Act and fined, which ended his
newspaper. Then he began his mobile anarchist bookstore, using a stroller. Like other
anarchist comrades in Hiroshima, Tan was under the influence of Shuzo Hatta, who held
a memorial service for Sakae Osugi on September 18, 1924. Tan started a monthly
journal, Kure Hyoron, with Ryuzo Hironaka and Masao Hara, in 1925. It was renamed
Chugoku Hyoron in its sixth issue and became a major leftist daily in Hiroshima starting

393
Shigeru Yamaki, Hiroshimaken shakai undoshi [History of Social Movement in Hiroshima Prefecture]
(Tokyo: Rodo jumposha, 1970), 322–325.
365
in 1928.
In his response to Yoneda’s letter, Etsuta Tan explained how the 1925 May Day
gathering in Kure led to the foundation of the anarchist labor union’s Kure branch, called
Zenkoku Rodo Kumiai Jiyu Rengokai (Nationa-wide Labor Union Free Association). He
also reported that his comrade Ryuzo Hironaka was arrested and brutally beaten by police.
With the help of Kesaya Yamazaki and Tatsuji Fuse of Jiyu Hoso Dan (Freedom
Attorney’s League), they sued the police department. Tan encouraged Yoneda to
continue his organizing efforts. Shortly after, Yoneda organized into his union fifty
employees of the Hiroshima Rubber Company in Mishino town, who had been fired
suddenly on July 30. They went to strike the next day and drew much attention of the
surrounding communities by twice holding public forums. On August 3, Yoneda visited
the executives of the company and succeeded in laying out the lines of compromise; that
is, compensation for workers injured while on duty and payment of sufficient funds to
those who were or had been fired. In this circle of Hiroshiman local activists, Yoneda
grew close to Minoru Kawato (or Kato), who led the Hiroshima’s local proletarian
literary movement. With Kawato’s help, Yoneda published a monthly for poor farmers,
titled Tsuchi (Earth). Through this publication he became connected to many people in
adjacent villages and city dwellers.
394

394
Etsuta Tan to Goso Yoneda, June 1 1925. KGYP. Box 34 Folder 10; Naoki Monna, Minshu Journalism
no rekishi (Tokyo: San’ichi shobo, 1983), chapter 7; Yoneda, Ganbatte, 9; Yamaki, Hiroshimaken shakai
undoshi, 334–336; Seiji Imahori, Masao Arimoto, and Hideo Kai eds., Hiroshima kenshi: Kindai 2
[Hiroshima Prefectural History: Modern Era 2] (Tokyo: Toppan insastu, 1981), 436, 448. Though the
monthly, Tsuchi, seems not to have been preserved, an issue of Chugoku Hyoron in December 1925 carries
an advertisement of a proletarian literary magazine, Senko (A Flash of Light), whose content lists Goso
Yoneda’s “Discontinuation of Tsuchi,” Minoru Kawato’s “Insistence in Local Struggle Literature,” and
Tetsu Nakahama’s “Letter from Prison.” Chugoku Hyoron, December 1, 1925. As a side note, Etsuta Tan
366
Yoneda’s correspondence with Tetsu Nakahama showed his interest in anarchist
groups such as the Guillotine League, which was formed by Tetsu Nakahama and Daijiro
Furuta. This group envisioned the building of a free and equal commune and critically
questioned the legitimacy of the imperial and police states and the justifiability of the
execution of laws when used to oppress people. After the then-leading anarchist, Sakae
Osugi, his common-law wife, Noe Ito, and his six-year old nephew, Soichi Tachibana,
were killed by a squad of military police led by Lieutenant Amakasu Masahiko during the
upheaval of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, Nakahama and Furuta plotted their
revenge against Amakasu and the police state at large. They were eventually arrested for
what they considered proletarian plunder of bourgeoisie companies and banks. Given
their plan to assassinate the prince regent, it is cogently surmised that they were
symbolically and politically prosecuted, and scheduled for execution. Goso Yoneda sent
his poems to Nakahama in Osaka Prison. Nakahama sent him back a farewell poem three
weeks before he was prosecuted. Furuta was put to death in 1925, and Nakahama in 1926.
Yoneda’s article, titled, “Godatsu to Seigi (Plunder and Justice)” in the Osaka-based
anarchist monthly, Sokoku to Jiyu (Homeland and Liberation), clearly shows their
influence, as he criticizes the proletariat’s hesitation to plunder the property of the rich as
a hesitation psychology imposed by the bourgeoisie.
395

Yoneda’s correspondence of this time reveals that he had friends and comrades send
most mail to his mother’s home from 1925 to 1926. He helped farm and plant rice

went to Okinawa in 1928 and helped form an anarchist youth group.
395
Tetsu Nakahama to Goso Yoneda, February 26, 1926 and March 26, 1926. KGYP, Box 34 Folder 10;
Goso Yoneda, “Godatsu to Seigi,” Sokoku to jiyu (September 1927). As for Tetsu Nakahama and the
Guillotine League, see Nihon Kindai Bungakukan ed., Nihon kindai bungakukan nenshi: Shiryo tansaku
(Tokyo: Nihon kindai bungakukan, 2005), 178–188.
367
seedlings, went to Hiroshima several times a year, and stayed at a house in semi-rural
Ushida-town in the eastern outskirt of the city. Five or six comrades and friends shared
the house, where they often discussed their politics and planned public forums. For
example, Yoshinari (last name unknown), Yoneda’s comrade living in the house, asked
him to speak on the issue of peasant life in the coming public forum on “Farm Villages,
Labor, Art, and Religion” in Gion town, Hiroshima city on October 4, 1925.
396

Yoshinari was also a contributor to Tsuchi. Yoneda gave a critique on Yoshinari’s
draft on building an autonomous farming commune. Yoshinari wrote “Let us build an
autonomous, ideal farming village. We will not send even a grain of rice to mechanical,
inorganic urbanites. We will generate electricity from local streams and build huts from
wooden boards and piers. Only urban laborers are to be hosted. Landlords are to be
expelled to the city. Capitalists are to be starved.” Yoneda’s red pen left comments that
urban dwellers tended to idealize the pastoral life of farm villages but “they realize it is
an illusion when they hear the painful cries of farmers” on the letter. Yoneda, who loved
to read Kroptkin, might have thought that revolutionaries had to figure out appropriate
scale, not small scale, of agricultural and industrial productions in tandem, as suggested
by Kroptkin’s Fields, Factories, and Workshops. As he stayed away from schools, he had
never gone into the modern discourse of scientific agriculture. Rather, he seemed to have
wandered between anarcho-syndicalism and agrarian poetry, where he tried articulating
his class-consciousness.
397

396
Yoshinari to Yoneda, July 30, 1925. KGYP, Box 34 Folder 11

397
Yoshinari to Yoneda, August 16, September 10, 1925. KGYP, Box 34 Folder 11.
368
In December, 1926, Goso Yoneda left Japan from Kobe in order to evade being
drafted into the eleventh Infantry Regiment based in the Hiroshima Prefecture. His
mother, Kazu, took a loan so he could buy a ticket to go to America.
Following two sisters, who had left six months earlier, Goso abruptly left the
community of young activists, journalists, and his loves. His comrades told him
“Ganbatte (Steadfast!)” as a farewell. He arrived in San Francisco on December 14, 1926.
While he waited for two months on Angel