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Between two visions of empires: Japanese immigrants’ theatergoing and aesthetics of landscape on the West Coast from 1907 to 1942

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Between two visions of empires: Japanese immigrants’ theatergoing and aesthetics of landscape on the West Coast from 1907 to 1942

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Content Between Two Visions of Empires:
Japanese Immigrants’ Theatergoing and Aesthetics of Landscape on the West
Coast from 1907 to 1942
Kohki Watabe
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements of the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMATIC ARTS (CINEMA STUDIES))
August 2018
Abstract
Between Two Visions of Empires: Japanese Immigrants’ Theatergoing and Aesthetics of
Landscape on the West Coast from 1907 to 1942
Kohki Watabe
This study demonstrates the way in which Issei (first generation) Japanese American
expressed their subjective worldview in quotidian amateur cultural practices. Japanese
immigrants in the U. S. before WWII had a twisted attitude between the two imperial powers,
Japan and the United States: while strongly attached to Imperial Japan, Issei also tried to
assimilate themselves into mainstream U. S. society for practical purposes. This ambiguous
tension can be observed in cultural practices of Japanese immigrant communities, as they
were a contested arena where Japanese immigrants learned, demonstrated, exchanged, and
negotiated ideas about their status in the U. S. through aesthetic representations. By closely
reading a wide variety of texts published in ethnic papers, such as commercial
advertisements, amateur waka poems and criticism, and film reviews, this study articulates
the realm of cultural sensibility specific to Issei and its interpretative universe.
The potential and limit of realism are the leitmotif of Issei cultural production and
reception in-between the two empires from the 1910s to the 1930s. Japanese immigrant
patrons were exposed to the reality of racial discrimination in ethnically-heterogeneous
nickelodeon theaters (Chp. 1) but soon began to construct ethnically-closed Japanese halls,
where they could indulge themselves in enjoying a temporary escape to Japan with
homogenous Japanese fellows in the 1910s (Chp. 2). When the American film industry
established the star system to form loyal fans, Issei enthusiastically embraced it. However,
they were also sharply critical of the fantasies Hollywood produced. Indeed, the immigrant
communities fiercely fought against the demonized images of Japan in American movies
!i
(Chp. 3). When movie cameras became affordable for amateurs in the 1920s, Japanese
immigrants began to shoot their middle-class urban lifestyle, countering such stereotypes in
U. S. media discourse. However, since the communities problematized Nisei (second
generation) who had never been to Japan, thus they also utilized film as a pedagogical device
to implement Japanese spirit and praise for Issei pioneer farmers into Nisei (Chp 6).
In order to foreground the sensible and subjective aspect of the Issei cultural history,
this study focuses on the logic and dynamism of the aesthetics of landscape, analyzing the
ways in which Issei’s cultural production and reception were guided beyond medium-
boundaries. Ordinary immigrants were connected to the traditional Japanese sensibility
through writing and reading waka poems, because this daily practice required
institutionalized conventions and tropes associated with romanticized natural landscape
beauty of Japan (Chp. 4). However, this sensibility was not limited to literary arts. By
comparing Hayakawa’s movies with the aesthetics of landscape, this study offers alternative
interpretations of his movies, which only those who were familiar with landscape aesthetics
could decode. (Chp. 5). This study also argues that this aesthetics stifled the realist potential
of film and waka poems. Inspired by Shiki Masaoka’s idea of shasei (sketch) borrowed from
the Western visual art, waka poets tried to capture the societal reality in the U. S. However, in
the 1930s, the realistic depiction of the war in China in state-sponsored Japanese war films
excited amateur immigrant poets, which resulted in stopping the development of realist waka
poems (Chp. 6).
In short, film and waka poems served as a symbolic buffer zone for Issei to reconcile
their worldview and the reality on the foreign soil. Their function cannot be reduced to a single role like escape, nostalgia, assimilation, or invasion. Both art forms provided Issei immigrants multiple chances to critically consider what was real and to creatively reconfigure
their relationship to the U. S. society as well as to their own ethnic communities. !ii
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Movie-going as Escapism? 15
TheT ransitionalErafrom1905to1915 16
HeterogeneityinNickelodeonTheaters 20
EscapeandAssimilation 27
SemioticLibertyinReception 32
Chapter 2: Ethnically Homogenous Japanese Halls 38
S tageCultures 38
RespectfulEntertainmentforP ermanentSettlement 43
EthnicallyHomogenousJapaneseHalls 47
AgriculturalCommunities 52
Audience-P erformerInteraction 56
JapaneseHallsandNickelodeonTheaters 61
Chapter 3: Controlling Japanese Images in American Movies 65
F anCultureandCriticism 66
Anti-JapaneseMovies 71
GettingRidofSinisterImagesofJapanese 77
InterpretativeAppropriation 87
Chapter 4: Waka Poems and Everyday Life 97
EverydayPracticeofAmateurLiterature 97
T ropesinW akaP oems 103
A estheticEmpire 107
BeingBoundinthe5-7Rhythm 114
ReevaluationofOkubo ʼsReception 121
!iii
Chapter 5: Landscape in Hayakawa Movies 125
Hayakawa ʼsS tardomandJapaneseImmigrantCommunities 125
Civilizationvs.Wilderness 128
RealandRomanticizedLandscape 130
Landscape-OrientedInterpretation 136
TheDragonP ainterinLightofMasculinityandLandscape 141
Chapter 6: Failure of Realist Potential 156
RealistIntervention 157
RealistP otentialandLimit 162
PraiseoftheDailyLife 166
FilmCultureasaP edagogicalDevice 174
JapaneseImmigrantMovieProduction 178
JapaneseImperialismandMilitarism 193
Conclusion 200
Bibliography 205
!iv
List of Tables
List of Images
Table 1: The Rafu Shimpo's Coverage of Cultural Events in July 1914 40
Table 2: Construction of Japanese Halls in the 1910s 49
Figure 1: The Areas Fresno Japanese Hall Served 56
Figure 2: Advertisement of the Progress Theater in San Francisco 67
Figure 3: Images of White Settlers (Wells Fargo) 90
Figure 4: Poems Mourning Meiji Emperor by Japanese Immigrants 108
Figure 5: Baron Yamaki's Conversion 138
Figure 6: A Cross Tom Gave Toya-san 138
Figure 7: An Advertisement of Japanese Tea 141
Figure 8: Umeko Appears from behind the Fusuma Screen (The Dragon Painter) 147
Figure 9: The Opening Scene (The Dragon Painter) 148
Figure 10: Indara in His House (The Dragon Painter) 148
Figure 12: Tatsu Jumps into the Water (The Dragon Painter) 150
Figure 13: The Ending Scene (The Dragon Painter) 150
Figure 14: Tatsu Shows His Art to Indara (The Dragon Painter) 152
Figure 15: A Dragon Sleeping in a Lake (The Dragon Painter) 153
Figure 16: A Woodprint Image in Shukaku 171
Figure 17: Aratani Family in Yosemite 1 (JANM Home Movie Collection) 184
Figure 18: Aratani Family in Yosemite 2 (JANM Home Movie Collection) 185
!v
Acknowledgments
My foremost thanks are due to Akira Mizuta Lippit, my advisor, who encouraged me
to tackle difficult questions all through the seven years at School of Cinematic Arts, University
of Southern California. From the very beginning of the long journey, when I could hardly
express my thoughts and ideas in English, he believed my future potential and patiently
supported me. His continuous trust in me enabled me to turn my academic interests and ideas,
which seemed random at the beginning, into a workable project and the project into a dissertation
manuscript.I also owe to and am incredibly thankful to the other members of my dissertation
defense committee, Laura Isabel Serna, Vanessa Ruth Schwartz, and Lon Kurashige, for their
invaluable insights and warm encouragement. Without their guidance and expertise in various
fields of study, I could not have completed this interdisciplinary project.
Assistance, guidance, and suggestions from many other professors were equally
indispensable for the completion of this project. I am especially grateful to Jon Wagner, Kara
Keeling, Priya Jaikumar, Aniko Imre, Youngmin Che, Satoko Shimazaki, Karim Yasar for their
support at various moments during my years at the University of Southern California. Yoshiaki
Sato, Yujin Yaguchi, and Tadashi Uchino fostered my personal and academic interest in the
United States during my undergraduate and graduate study at the University of Tokyo before
starting Ph. D. study. Other professors I met in Japan, especially Masako Notoji, Yasunari
Takada, China Kinoshita, Yuko Itatsu, Fumiaki Itakura, Go Kobayashi, and Muneaki
Hatakeyama showed me various approaches to examine cultural phenomena.
!vi
Financial support from numerous institutions and organizations allowed me to start and
finish this project. The scholarship from Rotary International enabled me to start my graduate
work at the University of Southern California. Subsequently, University of Southern California
kindly provided various funding through the Cinema and Media Studies Department, Annenberg
Fellowship, Graduate Student Government, the ACE/Nikaido Fellowship from the Asian Studies
Center, and East Asian Languages and Cultures program at the College of Arts and Sciences.
Librarians and archivists at the following institutions offered me very kind and helpful
assistance; the Japanese American National Museum, University of Southern California libraries,
UCLA East Asian Library, the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, the Margaret Herrick
Library of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the University of Tokyo Center for the
Pacific and American Studies. I had the privilege of presenting portions of this dissertation at the
annual meetings of Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the Japanese Studies Graduate
Conference at UCLA.
I would like to thank the members of the dissertations group, Clifford Galiher,
Christopher McGeorge, Jonathan Dentler, Joshua Mitchell, and Amanda Kennel, for their
insights and encouragement. Classmates at the University of Southern California are
irreplaceable friends who embarked on the long voyage and shared the hardship. I would like to
thank Lorien Hunter, Luci Marzola, Roxane Samer, Jinhee Park, Anirban Baisha, Darshana
Sreedhar Mini, Debjani Dutta, LiPing Chen, Rio Katayama, Yu Tokunaga, and Yasuhito Abe.
The warm support from friends in and outside academia and from both sides of Pacific Ocean
was also indispensable to the completion of this dissertation. Special thanks go to Masako
Hattori, Sarah Walsh, Hanako Murakami, Kohei Obara, Kanehira Mitani, Takashi Uchida,
!vii
Mitsuyasu Sakai, Sae Kitamura, Drew Byrd-Smith, James Polk, Yuko Itatsu, Fumito Shirai, Yuko
Nishio, Naoko Iida, Masato Eguchi, Christine Shaw, Toru Oda, Anni Nanba, Dong Hoon Kim,
and Lindsay Rebecca Nelson-Santos.
When I decided to study at the University of Southern California, I could not imagine
that would be blessed with such wonderful people in Los Angeles. In addition to the people
mentioned so far, I would like to show my gratitude to the members of Gardena Kendo Club,
Southern California Naginata Federation, Shin Gyo To School of Swordsmanship, filmmakers
and actors in Hollywood, and local Japanese Americans who stood in front of my camera and
inspired me academically and personally.
!viii
Introduction
On November 27, 2016, the TCL Chinese Theater in Hollywood screened a movie
titled Superkabuki 2: One Piece, for the first time outside of Japan. Although kabuki is theatrical
entertainment originated in the Edo period (1603-1868), the film was a video record of
Superkabuki, a modern adaptation started in the 1980s. Superkabuki 2: One Piece does not deal
with traditional subjects but is made after an episode in world-famous manga series, One Piece.
So, Superkabuki 2: One Piece is a product of media convergence strategy of Shochiku, one of
the oldest film studios in Japan, targeting broader audience demographics, which are not
regarded as kabuki fans, such as younger generation, manga and anime fans, and foreigners. The
success of Shochiku’s venture was visible through the diverse audiences in the theater: there
were Japanese expat family, Asian American youth and adults, Caucasian, African American, and
Latino patrons, and even Muslim women wearing the scarves. The theater filled with the diverse
audience must have satisfied the Japan Foundation which hosted the event, a semi-governmental
organization of Japan whose mission is to disseminate Japanese culture worldwide. In short, the
film exhibition was an arena where various interests and expectation of different parties were
presented, crisscrossed, and negotiated.
Such communication over Japanese culture in the United States dates back to the first
decade of the twentieth century. Japanese temporal workers on the West Coast began to settle
down at that time and started to have family and establish communities. By the time of forced
relocation in 1942, the number of Japanese and Japanese Americans on the West Coast exceeded
120,000. Their cultural practices in the ethnic communities were diverse: they kept practicing
!1
their familiar cultural activities such as amateur stage and poems; they imported Japanese movies
and invited entertainers from Japan; they also went out to white-owned theaters to enjoy
vaudeville and silent movies. Cultural practice is not a site where a single meaning or
interpretation reproduces itself but a place where negotiation and transformation happen. The
diverse audience body of Superkabuki 2: One Piece was not always subject to the commercial
interest of Shochiku and cultural diplomacy of the Japanese government. The Japan Foundation
considered that Superkabuki 2: One Piece could be an entry point to traditional Japanese cultures
for fans of Japanese manga and anime. Some of the audience would become interested in kabuki
and other authentic Japanese cultures as the governmental organization expected, but this does
not guarantee that they become loyal to the official forms of Japanese culture. The cosplay
contest hosted by the Japan Foundation in front of the theater showed a localized mode of
Japanese culture in Los Angeles and a possibility that the audience can go beyond the
expectation of the authorities. There are always dynamic processes of negotiation and discord of
intentions between the promoters of a culture and the recipients. Thus, the cultural history of
Japanese immigrants requires close examinations. Otherwise, we will fail to catch the cultural
dynamism. What was the reality of Japanese immigrants’ cultural activities before WWII? Then,
what did the practices mean for the Japanese people living in the United States? These two
questions penetrate this dissertation project.
As the Superkabuki 2: One Piece screening held in Hollywood exemplifies the conflict
between Japanese government’s cultural diplomacy and the dominance of American film
industry, the transnational framework is useful in understanding the cultural history of Japanese
immigrants. In his Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese
!2
America, Eiichiro Azuma revealed the complex transnational formation of Japanese American
identity between the two imperial powers.

Although they constantly traversed, often blurred, and frequently disrupted the varied
definitions of race, nation, and culture, Issei were able neither to act as free-floating
cosmopolitans nor to enjoy a postmodern condition above and beyond the hegemonic
structures of state control. Their strategies of assimilation, adaptation, and ethnic survival
took shape through the (re)interpretation, but not repudiation, of the bounded identity
constructs that had their origins in the ideological imperatives of each state.
1
This study follows his framework. Japanese immigrants were neither jingoists who maintain and
advocate the purity of Japanese culture nor blind admirers of Hollywood movies to get
accustomed to American culture. Japanese immigrants’ identity was more delicate, complicated,
and conditioned to various social and political parameters. Cultural practices express such
complexity in the forms of artistic products and critical reviews.
The goal of this study is to reveal the lived experience and subjective worldview of
Japanese Issei (first generation) immigrants before WWII. In order to do so, I focus on quotidian,
mass/popular cultures and entertainments, which ordinary Japanese immigrants could access or
create by themselves: cinema, stage plays, and waka poems. Japanese immigrants related
themselves with symbols and meanings through their everyday practice of these cultural
activities and, by doing so, formed their understanding of their positions in the United States.
While this study accepts a positivist approach to identify unknown historical facts of Japanese
immigrants’ cultural activities, it also emphasizes the cultural work of cinema, stage plays, and
waka poems to reach the reality of their lives.
Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (Oxford:
1
Oxford University Press, 2005), 213.
!3
Historiography
This project’s focus on the meaning of cultural activities of Issei Japanese immigrants
emerged from the intersection between two different disciplines: Japanese American history and
media and cultural studies. This study, first of all, contributes to revealing the cultural history of
Issei, which had been receiving relatively lesser academic attention compared to the history of
Nisei and later generations of Japanese Americans in the field of Japanese American studies.
Besides, this study is also driven by my interest in the agency of audience in the field of cultural
and media studies. In other words, this study is a close examination of the agency and limitation
that Issei Japanese immigrant performed and faced in their cultural activities before WWII. The cultural history of Issei Japanese Americans has received less academic attention
than that of Nisei and later generations. One of the reasons was that Japanese American studies
emerged as a part of Asian American movement in the late 1960s. Yuji Ichioka coined the term
“Asian American” under the political climate fighting against the Eurocentric history and
popularized the term through his teaching at UCLA. Thus, the history of Issei Japanese was not
necessary the primary interests for historians and scholars in the field of Asian American studies.
They tended to focus on Nisei and later generations for several reasons such as researchers’ self-
identification, their linguistic barriers, and the necessity of solidarity among Asian Americans at
that time. In addition, Issei Japanese American did not talk about their pre-war experience
because WWII and the royalty questioner that forced Japanese internees to confess their sense of
national belonging made a huge cleavage in the Japanese American society. There are many
works on the cultural history of Japanese Americans before WWII such as Lon Kurashige’s
Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival,
!4
1934-1990 and David K. Yoo’ s Growing Up Nisei: Race, Generation, and Culture among
Japanese Americans of California, 1924-49. However, they do not touch the cultural history of
2
Issei Japanese Americans.
That does not mean that scholars of Japanese American studies in the United States
totally neglected Issei Japanese American. Yuji Ichioka’s two books, The Issei: The World of the
First Generation Japanese Immigrant, 1885-1924 and Before Internment: Essays in Prewar
Japanese American History, provides a comprehensive understanding of the identity and nature
of Issei Japanese Americans. Also, Eiichiro Azuma’s Between Two Empires: Race, History, and
3
Transnationalism in Japanese America depicted a complicated formation of Issei immigrant
identity in the transnational conditions. These studies provide a general history with random
reference to cultural activities but do not discuss specificity of culture.
As for the cultural activities of Issei, Japanese academics had more research than
Americans did probably mainly because of their Japanese fluency. The publication of Nikkei
Amerika Bungaku Zasshi Shusei [Collection of Japanese American Literary Magazines], a
reprint of Japanese language literary magazines published in the United States before and during
WWII, in the late 1990s encouraged the scholarship. Mariko Mizuno’s Nikkei Amerikajin no
4
Bungaku Katsudō no rekishiteki Hensen: 1880-nendai kara 1980-nendai ni Kakete [The
Lon Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival,
2
1934-1990 (Berkley: University of California Press, 2002); David K. Yoo, Growing Up Nisei: Race,
Generation, and Culture among Japanese Americans of California, 1924-49. (Champaign: University of
Illinois Press, 1999).
Yuji Ichioka, The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885-1924 (New York: Free
3
Press, 1990); Yuji Ichioka, Before Internment: Essays in Prewar Japanese American History (Palo Alto:
Stanford University Press, 2006).
Satae Shinoda and Iwao Yamamoto eds., Nikkei Amerika Bungaku Zasshi Shusei [Collection of Japanese
4
American Literary Magazines] (Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 1997-1998).
!5
Historical Shift of Japanese American Literary Practices from the 1880s to 1980s] revealed
literature movements of the Issei generation. Yoshitaka Hib’s Japanizu Amerik: Imin Bungaku,
5
Shuppan Bunka, Shuyojo [Japanese America: Immigrant Literature, Publication Culture, and the
Internment Camps] and Norio Tamura and Shigehiko Shiramizu’s Beikoku Shoki no Nihongo
Shimbun [Early Japanese-Language Newspapers in the United States] shed light on publication
and circulation of Japanese ethnic papers and literary books.
6
What this project would like to add to these historical researches revealing unknown
facts about cultural activities of Issei Japanese immigrants is the subjective and interpretative
realm of such activities. The scholars of these works have a general tendency to regard Issei’s
cultural activities as either temporal comfort or escape from the hardship they experienced in
their daily lives in the American society. It is not entirely unreasonable to assume that cultural
actives of their homeland functioned in such manners for Issei generation. We can easily imagine
that Japanese immigrants flocked to community spaces to enjoy Japanese entertainments and
cultural activities for pleasure and recreation isolated from the mainstream American society.
However, such a simple, intuitive assumption fails to catch diversity and complexity of cultural
practices. Fumiaki Itakura’s Eiga to Imin: Zaibei Nikkei Imin no Eiga Jyuyo to Aidentiti [Cinema
and Immigration: Film Reception and Identity of Japanese Immigrants in the United States] is
the most comprehensive history of Issei’s film culture so far and an exceptional study that is
Mariko Mizuno, Nikkei Amerikajin no bungaku katsudō no rekishiteki hensen: 1880-nendai kara 1980-
5
nendai ni kakete [The Historical Shift of Japanese American Literary Practices from the 1880s to 1980s]
(Tokyo: Kazama Shobō, 2013).
Yoshitaka Hib’s Japanizu Amerik: Imin Bungaku, Shuppan Bunka, Shuyojo [Japanese America: Immigrant
6
Literature, Publication Culture, and the Internment Camps] (Tokyo: Shinyosha, 2015); Norio Tamura and
Shigehiko Shiramizu eds., Beikoku Shoki no Nihongo Shimbun [Early Japanese-Language Newspapers in the
United States] (Tokyo: Keiso Shobo, 1986).
!6
successful in capturing such a complexity in Issei cultural activities. Based on Azuma’s
7
argument about the mutual dynamism in the establishment of Issei identity in-between the
Japanese and American imperialism, Itakura offers a view that circulation, exhibition, and
reception of American and imported Japanese movies in Japanese immigrant communities
functioned as an arena ethnic tension is negotiated and expressed. Following the direction that
Itakura's study set for its cinema-oriented history, this study intends to tell a more comprehensive
cultural history of Issei Japanese people with an emphasis on the interpretative possibilities at the
site of reception.
Why does this study put such an emphasis on reception rather than historical facts and
the cultural texts? It is because the meaning and interpretation of cultural representation are, to
some extent, contingent on the dynamism happens at the site of consumption of them. Multiple
disciplines dealing with cultural representations had been discussing what happens between
cultural texts and their audience, and the understanding of audience had drastically changed from
a passive receiver of information and ideology to a more active agent. For example, in the field
of film studies, apparatus theory influenced by Althusser's discussion of ideological state
apparatus and Lacanian psychoanalysis had conceptualized film audience as a mere victim of
ideology. Also, in the field of communication studies, "injection model" of media, which
discussed that media such as radio and newspaper unilaterally "inject" the senders' thoughts into
the receiving media audience, had been dominant.
Studies on audience had been challenging such a passive view on audience since the
1970s. For example, in the field fo cultural studies, scholars began to criticize the simplicity of
Fumiaki Itakura, Eiga to Imin: Zaibei Nikkei Imin no Eiga Jyuyo to Aidentiti [Cinema and Immigration: Film
7
Reception and Identity of Japanese Immigrants in the United States] (Tokyo: Shinyosha, 2016).
!7
such models after Stuart Hall’s emphasis on the interpretative process of the audience in his
"Encoding/Decoding." One example is David Morley’s The 'Nationwide' Audience: Structure
8
and Decoding, which is an ethnographic observation of conversation among the subjects who
watched Nationwide, a BBC's current affair program. What Morley found in his observation are
9
the fact that the meaning of TV texts is not merely reduced into socio-economic parameters of
the subjects. While gender, race, class, education, and other attributes, of course, influence the
subjects' interpretation of the texts, Morley found that conversation between the subjects also
influenced the decoding process of the TV programs. Such an emphasis on audience's agency
had been brought into the United States by scholars such as John Fiske and has been spread
especially among the scholars interested in digital culture. As seen in Henry Jenkins' works, they
discuss the importance of audience's agency as a fundamental value of democracy. Similar
10
theoretical turn happened in the field of film and media studies in the 1970s. Film historians
began to challenge the teleological history of cinema from a mere display of objects to
Hollywood narrative and found diverse ethnic practices in the period of pre-Hollywood silent
cinema. Rebutting the myth that silent cinema functioned as a visual pedagogical device for
immigrants who did not speak English well, film historians revealed the ethnic diversity of film
cultures in the United States in the silent era and the interaction between film texts and audience.
The theoretical turn on the conceptualization of audience's agency in the studies of
cultural representation is very suggestive even for our historical inquiry of the cultural practices
Stuart Hall, “Encoding/decoding,” Culture, Media, Language (London: Routledge, 1980[1973]), 128-138.
8
David Morley, The 'Nationwide' Audience: Structure and Decoding (London: BFI, 1980).
9
Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: When Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University
10
Press, 2006).
!8
of Issei Japanese. From the viewpoints of the contemporary audience theories, it is too naive to
assume that Japanese cinema and other cultural practices functioned merely as either temporal
comfort and escape or an opportunity of assimilation to the American society. Cinema and other
cultural activities in Japanese immigrant communities were not limited to a single function.
Depending on the contexts of reception, cultural activities functioned in different manners: as
comfort and escape for ordinary seasonal laborers and farmers who encountered racist
discrimination; as a device for assimilation to the American society for Japanese cultural elites
who internalized the value of the middle-class American society; as a mild expression of imperial
ambition for those who had a strong psychological bond with Japanese imperialism. The goal of
this study is to reveal such complexity at the site of cultural practices of Issei Japanese
immigrants. By doing so, this study also challenges the view mythologizing Issei Japanese
immigrants exclusively as a model minority that had been victimized in the American racism
and, despite the hardship they experienced, patiently persisted it. Methodologies and Resources
The first step of this project is identifying historical facts of Japanese immigrants’
cultures from 1907 to 1942. For the purpose, this project relies mainly on Japanese-language
newspapers published in the West Coast cities with large Japanese immigrant populations.
Japanese immigrants in San Francisco started publishing varieties of ethnic papers in the 1880s.
Most of such newspapers were of amateur quality, but the Shin Sekai and the Nichi Bei Times
became the two major papers in the city. Unfortunately, many issues of the papers were lost in
the Great Earthquake in San Francisco in 1906. the Hokubei Jiji was established in 1902 in
!9
Seattle and became a major paper for Japanese immigrants not just in the city but also in the
Northwest until 1942. The earthquake encouraged some Japanese people in San Francisco to
move to Los Angeles, and the Japanese population in LA boomed after the earthquake. The Rafu
Shimpo, a paper established by Japanese students at the University of Southern California in
1903, soon became the leading paper in the area. Although there were some minor newspapers
published in other cities like Salt Lake City and Denver, these four newspapers were the major
ones, and, thus, this thesis draws on them.
This project does not intend to present the cultural history of Japanese immigrants as a
sum-up of various cultural practices. The histories of stage plays, film screenings, waka poems
and other forms of cultures are not regarded as independent practices. In other words, instead of
adopting a medium-specific approach, I explore intertextuality and interdependence between
different media. Superkabuki 2: One Piece was exemplary because it converges subjects and
styles in various media such as kabuki stage, cinema, manga, and anime. Such transmedia
intertextuality is not a new invention in the twenty-first century. Cinema studies after the
historical turn in the 1970s and 1980s revealed the interaction between vaudeville and other
styles of stage performance and film exhibition in the early silent era. Japanese people also held
kabuki plays and other forms of Japanese stage activities with the screening of silent film reels in
their communities. Although the elite segment of the communities developed a distinction
between high and low culture for assimilation, the border lines in Japanese immigrant cultural
practices were not rigid.
In addition to the inseparability of the site of performance and reception of kabuki and
cinema in Japanese immigrant communities, this project assumes an entity of cultural sensibility
!10
which cannot be attributed to any particular cultural practice. Modernist artistic approaches in the
mid-twentieth century -- poems, cinema, literature, stage, painting or whatever -- were
reactionary radicalism seeking purely medium-specific possibilities of the Arts. In other words, it
is not always reasonable to historicize cultural practices according to their media. Cultural
anthropology understands cultures in such a comprehensive way. For example, Clifford Geertz
defines culture as the following:
In any case, the culture concept to which I adhere has neither multiple referents nor, so far
as I can see, any unusual ambiguity: it denotes a historically transmitted pattern of meanings
embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by
means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and
attitudes toward life.
11
Following Geertz's definition of culture, my project assumes a realm of collective, cultural
sensibility which guided creation and reception of cultural practices among Japanese immigrants
from 1907 to 1942. Examination of waka poems made by amateur Japanese poets published in
ethnic papers, thus, plays a vital role in this project. The quotidian and collective nature of waka
poems is the key to understanding the intangible realm of sensibility. Therefore, this project does
not try to reproduce causality between events or between events and cultural representations.
This project accepts neither an inductive nor deductive approach to attribute some cultural
representations to some social, economic, or political parameters. However, this does not mean
the collective sensibility constitutes a static, unchangeable entity. Rather, the sensibility has an
internal structure and its own logic, which emerges and operates through individual poems and
any occasions when a Japanese immigrant encounters Japanese and American cultural practices.
Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays
11
(Waukegan: Fontana Press, 1993), 89.
!11
This research project illustrates how such a collective sensibility expresses itself in different
forms as a negotiation between the sensibility and the environment. In that sense, each chapter is
a variant of the same cultural negotiating process happening within the Japanese immigrants
between the two empires.
Geertz’s view regards culture as a synchronic entity rather than a diachronic process of
history. Although this does not mean that culture never changes at all over time, his definition
somehow assumes the existence of a collective cultural entity. As long as this study focuses on
Issei, the Geertz’s definition of culture above is valid. Issei Japanese immigrants were born and
raised in Japan and moved to the United States as contract workers and their picture brides. Since
the education of Japanese immigrants was not typically high, they did not leave many written
records. However, according to newspapers articles, their cultural sensibility seems consistent
from the beginning of permanent settlement in the first decade of the twentieth century to the
forced relocation in 1942. There were some moments of rapture that Issei could have changed
their worldview, such as the rise of Nisei (second generation) in the 1930s. However, as I argue
in the body of this project, Issei overcame such moment by enhancing their ethnic closeness.
Organization
The first chapter surveys the stage and cinema history of Japanese immigrants in the
transitional era in film studies, 1905 to 1915. In the transitional era, when the supply of imported
Japanese movies was limited, Japanese immigrants could enjoy American movies in an
ethnically heterogeneous setting in white-owned or Japanese-owned nickelodeon theaters. This
chapter juxtaposes two different perspectives on Japanese immigrant moviegoing in the period:
!12
one regards moviegoing as a temporal escapist practice in which Japanese immigrants enjoy
nostalgic feelings, and the other places it as a more complex response of Japanese immigrant
communities in need of assimilation with the American society. By reexamining historical
records about Japanese immigrants’ filmgoing, this chapter argues the two positions are not
necessarily exclusive to each other.
The second chapter, on the contrary to the previous one, argues ethnically homogenous
setting of film exhibition. Japanese immigrant had been practicing amateur stages before the
supply of Japanese movies started in 1911. In the 1910s, local Japanese immigrant communities
began to establish the so-called Japanese halls, where they could enjoy Japanese performances
isolated from the entire society in a safe space. Increased supply of Japanese movies was
consumed within such ethnically closed circuits with other forms of live performances even up
until the 1930s.
The third chapter illustrates Japanese immigrants’ reception of American movies. As
soon as American film industry adopt star system, Japanese immigrants started to engage in the
fan culture of Hollywood. Meanwhile, they also published sharp criticisms of the commercialism
in Hollywood on their ethnic papers. The most significant issue for Japanese immigrants
regarding American movies were anti-Japanese movies originated in the 1910s. The Japanese
communities started a campaign to get rid of sinister images of Japanese from American movies
and also pressured the Japanese actors in Hollywood so that they did not work for anti-Japanese
movies. In the end, this chapter discusses a review of a western film as an example that Japanese
immigrant exercised an interpretative agency to negotiate with the dominant ideology in
Hollywood movies.
!13
The next chapter illustrates a collective sensibility associated with landscape by
arguing the meaning of waka poem practice of Japanese immigrants on the West Coast. Amateur
poets made and published their waka poems in ethnic papers. The cultural practices were not
merely a daily joy but also a way to re-articulate themselves through the collective sensibility
institutionalized in waka poems for more than ten centuries. Thus, making waka poems on the
foreign soil became a practice of redefining their relationship with the material world
surrounding them necessarily under the influence of the Japanese empire.
The fifth chapter applies the aesthetics of landscape discussed in the previous chapter
to Sessue Hayakawa’s movies in the 1910s. Japanese people’s reaction to Hayakawa films was
inconsistent: they got mad at The Cheat, while they were silent at The Wrath of the Gods. By
applying a logic emphasizing landscape, Japanese immigrant patrons interpreted these films in a
manner that defied the dominant meanings. Close examination of The Dragon Painter, another
Hayakawa movie, also reveals the alternative layer of interpretation that reached to those who
were familiar with the aesthetics of landscape.
The last chapter discusses Japanese immigrants’ film and poem production in the
1930s as a failed attempt of realist intervention. Availability of movie cameras and Shiki
Masaoka’s reformation movement of waka poems had a potential to open Japanese immigrants’
eyes to the reality of their lives. However, Issei Japanese immigrants did not develop the
potential but used the film and literary media to enhance ethnic homogeneity and to implement
their ideals in the rising Nisei generation. The self-indulgent closed cultural circuit could not
reject militant semi-state-sponsored movies from Japan and jingoistic poems praising the justice
of Imperial Japan in the late 1930s. !14
Chapter 1: Movie-going as Escapism?
Introduction

12
the arising music
accompanied with
the movie
made me forget
loneliness for a while.
by Shizura Shimabara This is a poem published in the reader’s column in the Shin Sekai in 1915. The poem
gives us a clue to reproduce Japanese immigrant moviegoing practice at that time. The poet was
an amateur. She was probably a young woman who came to her husband on a farm in the United
States through the “picture marriage.” As she explicitly expresses in the lyric, movie was a
temporal escape for her from her tough life on the foreign soil. Thus, this poem is a historical
witness endorsing Junko Ogihara’s discussion of filmgoing as a temporal escape for Japanese
immigrants.
Was filmgoing always an escape for all the Japanese immigrants at that time? This
chapter first examines the historical realities of film exhibition on the West Coast in the first two
decades of the twentieth century. At the dawn of the new entertainment, films were screened in a
cultural heterogeneous setting called nickelodeon theaters. Then, I discuss multifaceted cultural
practices Japanese immigrants experienced in Japanese-owned and white-owned nickelodeon
The Shin Sekai, January 31, 1915.
12
!15
theaters. Filmgoing was not merely an act of temporal escape but also a contested arena where
Japanese immigrants needed to perform according to the political reality out of the theaters.
The Transitional Era from 1905 to 1915
Besides the poem cited above, there is plentiful retrospection on the moviegoing
experience by Japanese Americans in their autobiographies and yearbooks. However, such
descriptions tend to follow an archetype, which romanticizes the hardship and effort in their
youth. For example, Kazuo Ito, a Nisei who wrote two books on the Issei generation after WWII,
recalled that young immigrant day laborers who could not afford even the cheapest
accommodations slept in all-night movie theaters for 10 cents. His description is so detailed
13
that one cannot say that it is totally a made-up story. However, it is also the case that the specific
episode does not represent the typical moviegoing experience of Japanese immigrants. In this
sense, their descriptions per se cannot always be regarded as reliable representations of the
reality of their moviegoing experience in the early silent era. The “Oriental quarter,” in which
Japanese and other “colored” people were seated separate from the white audience in theaters, is
so frequently mentioned in reminiscences that Japanese immigrants might register the Oriental
quarter as their collective memory representing their experience of discrimination. These
14
recollections of ordinary Japanese immigrants as a whole as well as other fragmental
autobiographies of Japanese who worked in the American movie industry should be examined
15
in an academic manner. Sessue Hayakawa and other Hollywood film actors in the 1910s are
Kazuo Ito, Zoku Hokubei Hyakunen Zakura (Tokyo: Nichibou Shuppan, 1972), 84-85.
13
Itakura, Eiga to Imin, 72-74.
14
Kango Takamura, Hariuddo ni Ikiru [Living in Hollywood] (Tokyo: Yamashita Naokuni, 1988).
15
!16
exceptionally well-studied subjects in the history of Japanese immigrants in the U. S., though
preceding research tends to focus more on their stardom than on their reception.
16
While historical materials on Japanese immigrants’ moviegoing in the U. S. await
scholarly examination, American film scholars revealed unknown facts about the African
American, Jewish, and Italian moviegoing experience in the early silent era. Film studies have
17
emphasized the importance of studying the moviegoing experience of first generation
immigrants since the “historical turn” in the discipline from the late 1970s to the early 1980s.
Movie theaters in the early silent era had simply been regarded as a device for assimilation into
American society. Film historians had thought uneducated immigrants from Europe who did not
speak English fluently could learn the American way of life through silent cinema because of its
universal power to educate across linguistic barriers. However, after the turn, such a teleological
view that assumed a homogenous audience institutionalized by the Hollywood movie industry
was later abandoned. Instead, scholars began to examine non-standardized practices of audience
before the emergence of Hollywood. The nickelodeon theaters were the first type of theaters that
exclusively exhibited motion pictures from around 1905 to 1915 before the rise of Hollywood
and its vertical integration of production, distribution, and exhibition. In nickelodeon theaters,
audiences were not always immersed into the story of movies quietly and passively but actively
Miyao, Sessue Hayakawa.
16
Judith Thissen, “Jewish Immigrant Audience in New York City, 1905-1914,” Melvyn Stokes and Richard
17
Maltby eds., American Movie Audience: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era (London: BFI
Publishing, 1999); Giorgio Bertellini, “Italian Imageries, Historical Feature Films and the Fabrication of Italy’s
Spectators in Early 1990s New York,” Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby eds., American Movie Audiences:
From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era (London: BFI Publishing., 1999); Jacqueline Stewart,
Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2005); Gregory Waller, “Another Audience: Black Moviegoing from 1907 to 1916.” Ina Rae Hark ed.,
Exhibition: The Film Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 31-40.
!17
participated in the film program organized by local theater owners and impresarios : audiences
18
even sang songs according to the music played with an organ following the lyrics shown in
“illustrated song” slides. Incorporating the Habermasian concept of “public sphere,” Miriam
Hansen defines the silent cinema “as the site of overlapping, uneven, and competing types of
publicity.” Because of the nature of incompleteness of silent films which requited the moment
19
of live performance in theaters, film exhibition created “a margin of improvisation,
interpretation, and unpredictability that made it a public event in the emphatic sense and a
collective horizon in which industrially processed experience could be reappropriated by the
experiencing subjects.” According to Hansen, a single film text, thus, could have been
20
interpreted in various ways depending on socio-cultural parameters, in which the film was
decoded, such as the geographical location and surrounding environment of the theater, ethnicity
and racial background of the patrons, generation and gender, and the intention and goal of the
performers and impresarios. In other words, the moviegoing experience in nickelodeon theaters
was not limited to the assimilation process that accustomed immigrants to American culture by
having them watch movies: there was room for, if the terminology of cultural studies is applied,
oppositional or negotiated reading of film text in the nickelodeon movie theaters, depending on
social, cultural, ethnic and class parameters of the theater owners, impresarios and audiences
there. Film scholars and historians who became aware of the importance of such parameters in
21
Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator.” Art and Text 34
18
(1989), 114–133.
Miriam B. Hansen, “Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Transformations of the Public Sphere," Linda Williams
19
ed., Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 147.
Ibid.
20
Stuart Hall, “Encoding/decoding,” Culture, Media, Language, (London: Routledge, 1980[1973]), 128-138.
21
!18
understanding the possibility of audience interpretation began to go to local libraries and
archives, searching for historical materials to reproduce the reality of the moviegoing
experiences in early silent cinema.
Junko Ogihara’s eight-page article published in Film History in 1990 revealed the
reality of Japanese immigrants’ moviegoing experiences which had not received attention.
22
Based on news articles and ads in the Rafu Shimpo, a Japanese-language newspaper in Los
Angeles, her article studied the reality of movie exhibition at the Bankoku-za Theater
(International Theater) and the Toyo-kan Theater (Oriental Theater), both Japanese-owned movie
theaters in Los Angeles in the early silent era. Fumiaki Itakura’s doctoral dissertation submitted
to Kyoto University in 2006, which was published with a new title of Movie and Migrant (Eiga
to Imin) in 2016, adopts the same approach to reproduce the historical past. In addition to the
Rafu Shimpo, which Ogihara relied on exclusively in her article, Itakura reads other Japanese-
language newspapers such as the Nichi Bei Times and the Shin Sekai (both published in San
Francisco), as well as newspapers and fan magazines in contemporary Japan, to shed light on
Japanese immigrants’ movie experience from various angles. While these two relied on the
primary sources written in Japanese, some studies have examined English sources. Denise
Khor’s doctoral dissertation (2013) uses the Moving Picture World, a trade paper in the movie
industry published in the first two decades in the twentieth century, to describe the Japanese
immigrants’ movie business in Seattle and Hawaii. Though Itakura and Khor use primary sources
of different languages and their emphases are slightly different, both follow common frameworks
Junko Ogihara, “The Exhibition of Films for Japanese Americans in Los Angeles during the Silent Film
22
Era,” Film History 4:2 (1990), 81–87.
!19
in film studies in the English-speaking world discussed above: both try to identify the conditions
of reception by identifying social, cultural, ethnic, linguistic, class, and gender parameters.
Following the arguments of Ogihara, Itakura, and Khor yet referring to primary
materials written in English and Japanese, which they did not use, this chapter first historicizes
the movie business of Japanese immigrants and their moviegoing experience on the West Coast
in the early silent era—from the time of random display in vaudeville shows via constant
screening in nickelodeon theaters to the rise of the institutionalized Hollywood movie industry.
While doing so, this chapter argues how Itakura and Khor made counterarguments against
Ogihara’s somehow naive interpretation of Japanese immigrants’ moviegoing as an “escape from
their everyday American lives and return home for an hour or two.” Itakura and Khor’s counter
23
arguments, predicated on the framework in film studies after the “turn,” are quite reasonable, but
this chapter argues that Ogihara’s view can coexist with Itakura and Khor’s arguments by
showing the relation between moviegoing and other cultural activities such as stage plays and
literature in the Japanese immigrant communities.
Heterogeneity in Nickelodeon Theaters
Japanese immigrants entered the movie business on the West Coast quite early in
the nickelodeon era. In Seattle, Japanese immigrants entered film exhibition business in the
very early stage of the development of industry. The first theater opened and operated by
Japanese businessmen was the Electric Theater. This information is found in an article in
the Moving Picture World on December 14, 1919, which reported the new opening of the
Ibid., 81.
23
!20
Atlas Theater, another Japanese-run movie theater. Though the news article states that
Yamada, the owner of Atlas Theater, had “been an exhibitor of Seattle for the last fifteen
years,” and had “owned and operated the Electric and later the Bison.” If the article is
24
correct and the Japanese showman opened the Electric theater in 1904, fifteen years before
1919, the place was not a nickelodeon where only movies were exhibited. It was June 1905
when the nickelodeon boom started in Pittsburgh: Harry Davis, a local vaudeville manager
there, opened the first nickelodeon theater and popularized the term. There is no decisive
25
evidence about whether the Bison showed movies exclusively or both movies and other
forms of entertainment at around 1905, but it seems certain that Japanese immigrants were
in the movie business in Seattle before the nickelodeon boom started in 1905. The Electric
and the Bison were not the only Japanese-owned theaters in the area. In Seattle, the
Nippon-kan in 1909 and the Arctic Theatre in 1912 were opened by other Japanese business
men. However, the number of Japanese-owned nickelodeon theaters was not huge in the
26
era. According to Nichi Bei Nenkan (Japan-U.S. Year Book) vol. 9 (1913) and vol. 12
(1918), the number of nickelodeon theaters on the West Coast was only 11 at most in 1914.
The number drops to 7 in 1917.
27
The Moving Picture World, December 14, 1919.
24
Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
25
University of California Press, 1990), 418.
Denise Khor, “Asian Americans at the Movies: Race, Labor, and Migration in the Transpacific West,
26
1900-1945” (Ph. D. diss. University of California, San Diego, 2008), 22.
Nichi Bei Nenkan Dai 9 Kan [Japan-the U. S. Year Book, Vol. 9] (San Francisco: the Nichi Bei Times Press,
27
1913); Nichi Bei Nenkan, Vol 12 [Japan-the U. S. Year Book, Vol. 12] (San Francisco: the Nichi Bei Times
Press, 1918).
!21
Japanese-owned nickelodeon theaters did not specialize in imported movies from
Japan or in movies featuring Japan. Japanese impresarios purchased American movies and
showed them for ethnically diverse audiences. For example, as Ogihara argued, the major
audience of the Bankoku-za (open in Los Angeles in 1907) was not Japanese immigrants.
28
Itakura cites Takuma Washizu’s recollection, a journalist for the newspaper at that time who
reported that the audience in the Bankoku-za predominantly consisted of whites and
Mexicans. Japanese moviegoers experienced heterogeneity in white-owned theaters as
29
well. For instance, an article on crime scenes in movies in Los Angeles in The Moving
Picture World from October 5, 1907, refers to the Japanese and Mexican audiences.
(Referring to a crime scene in a movie.) This is only a short portion of the particular
picture. The rest is all of the same plane. Others show other crimes and all of them
are intensely realistic. That is what makes them so great a menace to society. The
commission of the crime is portrayed so faithfully that it is as if one were to witness
it in real life. Japanese and Cholos are among the principal patrons of these place.
They watch every picture eagerly.
30
These facts support Ogihara’s argument and emphasize the ethnic heterogeneity of
Japanese-owned and white-owned nickelodeon theaters. Itakura concluded that the
Japanese-owned nickelodeon, as argued in Hansen, was a heterogeneous space which was
open to different ethnic groups as other ethnic theaters in the United States were.
31
Ogihara, “The Exhibition of Films for Japanese Americans,” 82.
28
Itakura, Eiga to Imin, 66.
29
The Moving Picture World, October 5, 1907.
30
Itakura, Eiga to Imin, 80-83.
31
!22
However, the heterogeneous nickelodeon theaters of white owners were not a
euphoric space where there was no racial tension. There are many testimonies and
newspaper articles reporting discrimination Japanese immigrant experienced in filmgoing.
In addition to Mexican specters mentioned in Washizu’s recollection and The Moving
Picture World article above, non-Japanese Asiana received similar treatment in theaters. An
American-born Chinese circulated information about the discriminatory treatment of Asians
at the Hippodrome Theater (320 S. Main St., open as the Adolphus Theater in 1911 and
renamed in 1913) and the Republic Theater (629 1/2 S. Main St., open in 1915) on April
25, 1915. Both theaters were located on Main Street in downtown Los Angeles and spread
within Chinese communities. The protester invited Japanese immigrants to join the protest
movement, and they accepted the offer. It is true that Japanese moviegoers experienced
32
interracial spectatorship to some extent both in white-owned and Japanese-owned movie
theaters in the transitional era. However, the heterogeneity was fragile.
What is more important about The Moving Picture World article is its performative
aspect. The way the article associates Japanese and Mexican patrons with the movie
screened in the venue exemplifies not only the racial tension Japanese immigrants would
have experienced in nickelodeon theaters but also the discursive formation at that time.
After emphasizing the realistic depiction of crime in the movies as a potential threat to
society, the author points out that “Japanese and Cholos are among the principal patrons of
these place.” By stating that “[t]hey watch every picture eagerly,” the article associates
Japanese and Mexican with the real crimes in the society. It is not clear from the article if
Nanka Nikkeijin Shōgyō Kaigisho, Minami Kashū Nihonjinshi [The History of Japanese in Southern
32
California] (Los Angeles: Nanka Nikkeijin Shōgyō Kaigisho, 1956), 303.
!23
the Japanese and Mexican patrons were seated in the Oriental quarter separated from white
patrons or not. However, a lesson which can be extracted from the article is that discourse
segregates people even when racial segregation is not explicit at the site of movie
exhibition. In this sense, the citation testifies both the potential possibility of interracial
heterogeneity in white-owned theaters in Los Angeles and the limitation that discourse
oppresses the possibility. Regarding our argument about spectatorship so far, what the
newspaper article suggests is the duality of practice and discourse. Thus, the article shows
the potential heterogeneity of spectatorship at the moviegoing venues, while also revealing
the social conditions that discursively limited the heterogeneity.
Japanese movies were not officially and substantially imported to the United States
until 1911 because not enough movies in Japan were produced before that year. By 1910,
each production company established its own production line, and constant filmmaking
became possible: Yoshizawa Company in 1908; M Pathe Company in 1909; Fukuhoudo in
1910; and Yokota Shokai in 1910. Also, in 1911, the four film companies began to build so
many movie theaters in major Japanese cities that the competition became fierce. As a
result, the following year the four companies established Nikkatsu, a trust company.
33
Placed in such a situation, Yokota Shokai, which had over 30 film theaters and ten traveling
troupes for screening in Japan at that time, tried to export their film reels to foreign
markets. By 1912, they had two of three foreign agents in North America: one in Victoria in
Canada and one in San Francisco. Since the last one was in Germany, Yokota Shokai was
Tadao Sato, Nihon Eiga Shi, vol. 1 [The Japnaese Film History, vol. 1] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995);
33
Kikuo Yamamoto, Nihon Eiga ni Okeru Gaikoku Eiga no Eikyo [Influence of Foreign Cinema on Japanese
Cinema] (Tokyo: Waseda University Press, 1988).
!24
not seeking business opportunities exclusively in the North American market. However,
North America was the company’ main target: Einosuke Yokota, the president of Yokota
Shokai, studied as a school boy in San Francisco in 1889 and was aware of the potential
needs of Japanese movies in Japanese immigrant communities.
34
it was late 1910 when a salesperson named Nakamura from Yokota Shokai first
crossed the Pacific Ocean with the company’s reels. This was presumably the first
opportunity that films made by Japanese people crossed the ocean to the United States.
Itakura uses local Japanese-language newspapers to reveal the activity of Yokota Shokai
during their first visit on the West Coast. Nakamura first entered Victoria, Canada, via
35
Hawaii, and then went south to Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, and finally San Francisco on
January 11, 1911. On his way to San Francisco, the sales agent had already negotiated with
white movie businessmen and lent their reels to them to have screenings, which were
welcomed in many places. In San Francisco, the agent stayed at Du Pont Inn to find places
for screening of his company’s films and found The Fillmore Theater, a white-owned movie
theater on Fillmore street, where Japanese immigrant tended to live after the Great San
Francisco earthquake in 1906. The screening was held from 11 am to 11 pm on January
36
16 and 17. Varieties of subjects were shown such as fictional stories of samurai, geisha and
sumo performances, records of contemporary events in Japan like flood in Tokyo and a
festival in Kyoto, and historical reenactment of Russo-Japanese War in 1906. Majority of
37
Itakura, Eiga to Imin, 76-78.
34
Ibid.
35
“Nihon katsudo shashin eiga no shokai” The Shin Sekai, January 12, 1911.
36
The Shinsekai, January 17, 1911.
37
!25
the patrons were Japanese immigrants, but there were white audience in the theater.
38
Nakamura held another two-day screening at The Central Theater, a white-owned theater in
Oakland, on January 19 and 20. About one third of the spectators was white and the others
were Japanese. After the screenings in Oakland, Nakamura left for San Jose, Fresno, Los
39
Angeles, Bakersfield, and then the East Coast. Yokota Shokai might have used the Japanese
business network formed by Japanese immigrants, but the target audience was not limited
to them. Yokota Shokai proactively approached non-Japanese venues for screening and
their agent Nakamura successfully held screening events for the mixture of Japanese and
white audience in white-owned theaters in San Francisco and Oakland.
As shown above, film reels from Japan began to be constantly imported into the
West Coast after 1911. However, this did not make a fundamental change to Japanese
immigrants’ film business in the United States and their moviegoing experience. From the
viewpoint of Japanese theater owners, the number of imported Japanese movies was not
sufficient to form a program specialized for Japanese films. American film exchange
companies emerged in the 1910s and supplied reels to local theater owners a few times a
week. Theater owners screened combined programs of short films, serials, comedies, and
newsreels. No Japanese production companies could form a transpacific network to
40
supply such a variety of film reels regularly from Japan to the West Coast. Japanese theater
owners could not exclude American films: for example, the Bankoku-za started to show an
“Hiyaase no deru katsudo shashi: tsutanasa kagen hanashini naranu” The Shin Sekai, January 21, 1911.
38
“Nihon katsudo shashin eiga no shokai” The Shin Sekai, January 12, 1911.
39
Max Joseph Alvarez, “The Origin of the Film Exchange” Film History: An International Journal, 17: 4
40
(2005), 431-465.
!26
imported Japanese film on the Russo-Japanese War and the first episode of The Perils of
Pauline , an American serial melodrama, at the same time on July 3. That’s why theater
41 42
owners kept their doors open to various ethnic groups. As for spectatorship, Japanese
moviegoers kept enjoying the heterogeneous publicness in theaters. Japanese theaters such
sometimes operated a special program featuring imported Japanese reels and visiting
performers: the Bankoku-za hosted Cherry Blossom Dance Girls from Japan in 1915. Since
the performance charged at least 75 cents for 3
rd
class seat admission, such a Japan-themed
live performance was an exceptional opportunity even at the Bankoku-za. Therefore, the
43
increasing supply of Japanese movies on the West Coast in 1911 did not cause drastic
changes in terms of both Japanese film business and Japanese moviegoers’ experiences.
Escape and Assimilation
Ogihara argues that the Fuji-kan invited many benshi from Japan and functioned
as a place where Japanese immigrants could immerse themselves in contemporary Japanese
culture. In such special occasions, Japanese-owned theaters, which were usually
heterogeneous spaces, turned into safer homogenous venue allow Japanese immigrants “to
escape from their everyday American lives and return home for an hour or two. Japanese
films became vehicles that momentarily transported their audiences to the homeland.”
44
Considering that the majority of Japanese immigrants from the late 1910s to the 1920s were
The Perils of Pauline, directed by Louis J. Gasnier and Donald MacKenzie, 1914.
41
“Bankoku-za no katsudo shashin” The Rafu Shimpo, July 4, 1914.
42
“Sakura odori no ko ninki” The Rafu Shimpo, October 15, 1915.
43
Ogihara, “The Exhibition of Films for Japanese Americans,” 81.
44
!27
still Issei, the first generation, who were born and raised in Japan and spoke Japanese as
their first language, it is natural to assume that Japanese movies functioned as a “vehicle to
the homeland” whether in Japanese-owned theaters, in Japanese halls, or at community
screenings.
Nevertheless, preceding research on the immigrants’ moviegoing experience
revealed that watching movies produced in the homeland did not simply always evoke
nostalgia or an escapist sentiment. For example, in his “Italian Imageries, Historical Feature
Films and the Fabrication of Italy’s Spectators in Early 1900s New York,” Giorgio
Bertellini criticizes that Italianness is mistakenly imagined as a ready-made status in
understanding Italian immigrants’ reception of movies in the nickelodeon era. The country
we think of through the word Italy today was behind France in terms of uniting the
common people in the country through a sense of nationhood. Until they left the country,
southern masses did not recognize themselves as members of the national entity. However,
once they went to watch Italian movies in theaters in New York, the romanticized and
intense images of Italy caused a sense of belonging to Italian nation. According to Bertolini,
the immigrant groups from Southern Italy needed to adopt the national identity to join in
the American multinational society. Thus, Italian movies did not function as a “vehicle to
45
the homeland” for the Italian immigrants because the idealized Italianness in the Italian
movies was new to the immigrants. An Italian immigrant could find a nostalgic feeling in
the movies, but his/her hometown nostalgia is reshaped by a national framework.
Bertellini’s research on the reception of Italian movies among Italian immigrants and other
Bertellini, “Italian Imageries,” 37.
45
!28
scholarly works on spectatorship in early cinema have negated a simple view that
immigrants were assimilated into American society by watching movies in nickelodeon
theaters. In this sense, Ogihara’s view of Japanese cinema as an escapist device for
Japanese immigrants had the same problem of such an assimilation-device theory because
both assume an ethnic entity a priori and ignore ethnic dynamism in spectatorship.
Compared to Ogihara’s argument of Japanese cinema as a “vehicle to the
homeland,” Khor and Itakura pay more attention to the ethnic politics and dynamism on the
West Coast active at that time and, in this sense, can be said to have adopted the results of
cinema studies after the 1980s. Khor, for example, argues that the struggle of the Japanese
owners of Atlas Theater in the context of social reformation was associated with anti-Asian
sentiment at that time. Cheap amusement places such as nickelodeons had been criticized
for their bad influence on the youth by the social reformers who internalized white middle-
class morality. In response to the criticism in the late 1910s, people in the film industry
began to open places called “picture palaces,” whose architecture, service, interior, and
program fit middle-class audience taste, to avert the criticism leveled by social reformers
and possibly transform the critics into future patrons. Following other competitors, the
Japanese Atlas Theater tried to appeal to the “respectable class” by prohibiting smoking to
eliminate odors associated with the working class and by segregating the audience
according to gender to make the theater suitable for single women. Khor regards such
46
strategies as a “mindful masquerade,” practice to soft-land on an American society in an
anti-Asian mood.
Khor, “Asian Americans at the Movies,” 39-43.
46
!29
Following the same disciplinary tradition of film studies after the turn, Itakura
also points out such cross-dressing practices in Japanese-owned movie theaters focusing on
ethnic conflicts. Citing articles in Japanese-language newspapers, Itakura shows criticism
of Japanese immigrants’ behavior in both Japanese and American theaters. In white-owned
theaters the Japanese immigrants behaved as they would have in theaters in Japan: they left
trash and leftover food on the floor and heckled during performances. Japanese-language
newspapers argued that white society problematized such behaviors in the mood of social
reformation and that self-reformation was necessary for Japanese immigrants to fit into
American society. Thus, such an inter-racial situation where Japanese immigrants watched
cinema in the 1910s did not enable “a safe trip to their home country” unlike Ogihara’s
claim. While Khor uses the Atlas Theater as an example of Japanese immigrants’
assimilation into American society by the strategy of “mindful masquerade,” Itakura thinks
such ethnic and cultural conflicts between the Japanese immigrant communities and
American mainstream culture was a reason that Japanese immigrants limited exhibitions of
Japanese movies to within their own communities, such as at Buddhist churches and
language schools. Although the focuses of their arguments are different — assimilation and
separation — both scholars reveal potential racial and cultural conflicts in theaters and the
Japanese immigrants’ awareness of them.
However, Itakura and Khor’s arguments do not necessarily exclude Ogihara’s
argument that Japanese films were a temporal-escapist device. Even if, as Itakura and Khor
shown, business owners and newspaper writers wanted the Japanese immigrant society to
soft-land on American society, the ordinary Japanese immigrant audience could have
!30
expected to "return home for an hour or two" at the movie theaters. Successful business
owners, educated newspaper writers, laborers in restaurants and other merchandise in city,
and farmers living in rural agricultural community should have had different mindset when
they visited theatres. In other words, a dominant discourse in newspaper articles represents
only one aspect of the complexity of Japanese immigrant lives: a lot of articles entreated
Japanese immigrants to abandon their uneducated behavior at theaters shows that, on the
contrary to the elites’ expectation, a majority of the Japanese immigrant audience did not
care what the American public thought of them. Thus, we need to study different
parameters or resources that represent the inner consciousness of the ordinary Japanese
immigrants at the theater rather than the socio-ethnic conditions in the United States at that
time (Khor) or the discursive formation on newspaper (Itakura).
Itakura problematizes Ogihara’s assumption of singularity on the part of Japanese
immigrants. “What Ogihara assumes here in her argument is that ‘all Japanese immigrants
had nostalgia for Japan. Ogihara’s paper lacks an eye for the distinctive identity of
‘Japanese in the United States,’ whose identity was constructed in a conflict between
American and Japanese cultures. Also, Ogihara ignores the existence of Nisei, the second
generation, although she analyses the Japanese community in the United States from the
1920s to the 1930s.” As Itakura argues here, the Japanese immigrant communities were
47
not unified: Some portions of Issei immigrants regarded themselves as pilot colonizers for
the expansion of Imperial Japan; Nisei, who were born and raised in the United States and
spoke English, must have had less sympathy with Japan. Also, Kibei-Nisei, who were born
Itakura, Eiga to Imin, 39.
47
!31
in the United States to Issei parents but then sent to Japan for education and sent back to the
United States after becoming adults, had another kind of complicated identity and
sometimes became quite patriotic. Considering these facts, Ogihara’s argument naively
assumes the unity of Japan-ness as Itakura criticizes.
Articulating different receptions in different social groups such as Issei, Nisei,
and Kibei-Nisei must contribute to more reliable historicization. This is what Itakura did in
his works. Nevertheless, reception is, ultimately, a personal sphere of cultural practice.
Interpretation of text occurs in the individual human mind. As film studies have argued, we
cannot fully reproduce reception itself. What film historians can reveal is just “conditions
of reception,” which roughly limited or guided the personal experience of watching a film.
Although this is a very sincere attitude on the part of historians, at the same time, it lacks an
appreciation of cultural dynamism, the process in which meanings are processed in the
human mind.
Semiotic Liberty in Reception
How can we reproduce the possibility of reception in a historic past without
attributing it to social, cultural, ethnic, or gender parameters? The fruits in the field of
audience study in cultural studies and film studies can provide some clues to identify the
cultural realm of reception which cannot be reduced to social parameters. For example, in
his The 'Nationwide' Audience: Structure and Decoding, David Morley examined the
audience’s decoding process of a TV program named by Nationwide. The media groups of
the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham led by
!32
Morley observed how groups of different background differently respond to clips of
Nationwide and decode the text. The group found that the decoding process cannot be
48
solely reduced to socioeconomic positions because informants belonging to the same class
could make different meanings from the same text. Of course, this does not mean that
reception is totally free from sociocultural parameters. However, the study groups’
qualitative ethnographic approach revealed a multilayered intrinsic process in which
decoding is practiced in negotiation with power. Opposing the prior “injection model,”
which assumes a powerful sender of information and a passive receiver, cultural studies
recognize the “semiotic liberty” of the audience as the very basis of its theory.
From the perspective of cultural studies recognizing the "semiotic liberty" of the
audience, Japanese immigrants’ theatergoing experience can be understood as a dynamic
momentum, in which meanings are created beyond socio-political parameters. In other
words, Japanese immigrant audiences could exercise their semiotic liberty to interpret the
movies they watched somehow beyond the socio-cultural parameters. This does not mean
that Japanese immigrant patrons were free from any kinds of ideological standpoints.
However, in addition to the socio-economic and ethnic parameters which bounded Japanese
movie-goers’ reception, this study focuses on the common basis of Japanese immigrants’
sensibility, where the dynamism of cultural interpretation happened. By doing so, this study
examines the operation of cultural logic. For this purpose, the history of moviegoing among
Japanese immigrants should not be seen as a medium-bound history specialized for cinema.
However, it should be considered in relation to other cultural practices such as amateur
David Morley, The 'Nationwide' Audience: Structure and Decoding, (London: BFI, 1980).
48
!33
literary practices among Japanese immigrants to shed light on a generative and creative
aspect of film reception. Why is literary practice important? Ordinary Japanese immigrants
published their amateur literature works such as novels and poems in Japanese-language
newspapers published in the West Coast cities with dense Japanese immigrant populations,
such as Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles in the early twentieth century. Some of the
amateur works of literature provide clues to understand the reality of moviegoing, while
others suggest a discursive horizon which roughly conditioned Japanese immigrants’
interpretation of their everyday life beyond medium boundaries.
A series of tanka poems titled “Watching a Revolutionary Film,” published in the July
3, 1930, issue of the Rafu Shimpo, demonstrates that literature and reception of movies were
neighboring cultural practices and that understanding literary activity can help to undress the
audience’s reception of movies. The series of tanka poems highlights a Japanese woman’s
viewing experience of a Soviet film among a Russian audience in Los Angeles. This series of
poems consists of 6 independent tanka, a poem of 5 units of 5-7-5-7-7 mora.
49

the majority of
spectators are
Russians I suppose
the seats tonight are
filled with

“Kakumei eiga wo mite,” the Rafu Shimpo, July 3, 1930.
49
!34

clapping their hands
the audience is pleased by
the dreadful scene
of pulling down the statue
in the palace

after disarming themselves
freshening up their makeup
the women are
I saw
their tired faces

What a pity!
the statue of the Tzar was
torn apart!
at the very moment
I closed my eyes

the warriors
during the combats
enjoy Cossack dancing
what a tranquil time
when they are dancing

As soon as
the subtitle of “Lenin”
appeared
a shout of pleasure occurred
and applause had echoed
Although the title of the film is not mentioned in the tanka poems, the film the poet watched was
definitely October, a Soviet revolutionary film directed by film theorist and filmmaker Sergei
!35
Eisenstein, who invented the theory of dialectic montage. The Fuji-kan Theater in Los Angeles
had constant screenings of imported Japanese films in the year 1930 when the poem was written.
Itakura made a long list of screened Japanese films and visiting rōkyoku performers and benshi
from Japan. In terms of “condition of reception,” which film historians emphasize, the plentiful
supply of Japanese films and the Fuji-kan Theater’s constant exhibits signify that Japanese
immigrants were supposed to watch these films in the culturally safe space. If this is the case,
why did this poet visit a local Russian film theater and, especially, why did the Rafu Shimpo
accept this post? Amateur literature enthusiasts on the West Coast at that time might have been
influenced by the socialist literature movement. This series of tanka poems is not great literature
per se. However, its straightforward, realistic description of the film screening is successful in
expressing a sympathetic feeling with the socialist sentiment. The last line “[a]s soon as the
subtitle of ‘Lenin’ appeared, a shout of pleasure occurred, and then applause had echoed in the
theater,” embraces a possibility of going against the institutionalized Hollywood movies at that
time.
Conclusion
This chapter revealed that Japanese immigrants filmgoing experience was
accompanied with ethnic tensions out of theaters regardless of nickelodeon theaters or other
picture palaces. The mixed-race film-viewing did not basically change even after import of
Japanese movies started in 1911. Yet, if theaters were always filled with the ethnic confrontation,
what in theaters attracted Japanese immigrant patrons and made the amateur poet of the poem
shown in the begging of this chapter “forget loneliness for a while?” Why could the poet feel the
!36
excitement of watching October in a theater filled with Russian patron and express it in a series
of poems? While this chapter does not negate the validity of the positivist approach based on
close examination of historical records of Itakura and Khor, these poems exemplify that Japanese
immigrant patrons could extract pleasure even in the confrontational and uncomfortable
conditions of viewing. Thus, as discussed in the following chapter, Ogihara’s argument of
escapist moviegoing, which Khor and Itakura rebutted as a naïve understanding, can be
revitalized when film history is placed in a wider context.
!37
Chapter 2: Ethnically Homogenous Japanese Halls
Introduction
While the previous chapter discussed the ethnic heterogeneity Japanese immigrant
could have experienced in nickelodeon theaters, this chapter focuses on the homogeneity they
created in closed cultural spaces. Japanese immigrant started to enjoy amateur stage
performances in their communities in the nineteenth century and formed theater companies in the
first decade of the twentieth century. The amateur stage performance had been important
community events before the emergence of nickelodeon theaters. In the 1910s, Japanese
immigrant communities began to establish Japanese halls, community gathering spaces they
could use exclusively, in order to avoid political and social tension they had with the mainstream
American society. This chapter discusses the process that the ethnically homogenous cultural
spaces in Japanese halls incorporated film exhibition. Although Ogihara focuses on nickelodeon
theaters to develop her idea of film as “temporal escape to the home country,” the Japanese halls
were where the idea is realized: Japanese immigrant patrons enjoyed not only live theatrical
performances by talented fellows but also imported Japanese movies with oral explanation in
their native language by benshi or rōkyoku performers in Japanese halls.
Stage Cultures
Live stage performances tied with traditional Japanese cultures played more
significance than film exhibitions in nickelodeon theatres in Japanese immigrant
communities. The amount of space spared for stage performances, film exhibitions, and
!38
readers’ posts expressing their impressions on newspapers, clearly shows the popularity of
live stages. The table below summarizes the theatrical events held in Los Angeles in July,
1914 and the Rafu Shinpo’s coverage of the events. A newspaper article on the Bankoku-za
Theater in the July 4 issue which Ogihara cites in her article, was placed next to another
bigger article announcing the performance of the Futaba-kai, a local theatrical company in
Los Angeles. While there is no follow-up report for the Bankoku-za and its shows for the
50
rest of the month, the newspaper published a significant review of the Futaba-kai stage play
in its August 1 issue. Also, an anonymous reader published praise for the quality of their
51
performance to the reader’s columns in the July 28 issue. A sumo (Japanese wrestling)
52
performance gathered much attention of anonymous readers in the readers’ columns in the
newspapers in July. A sumo match held on Independence Day occupied the readers’ column
for about one week after the day of the competition, while no one referred to the Japanese
films shown in the Bankoku-za starting on July 3.
53
The Rafu Shimpo, July 4, 1914.
50
The Rafu Shimpo, August 1, 1914.
51
The Rafu Shimpo, July 28, 1914.
52
The Rafu Shimpo, July 3, 1914.
53
!39
Table 1: The Rafu Shimpo's Coverage of Cultural Events in July 1914
Moviegoing had much less importance compared to other cultural activities in the
Japanese immigrant community in the early 1910s. The coverage of The Wrath of the
Gods on The Rafu Shimpo exemplifies the smaller interest in films. Although the film was
54
Date Event The Rafu Shimpo Coverage
June 7
Release of The Wrath of the Gods on
the East Coast.
July 3
The Bankoku-za Theater’s first day of
an imported Japanese movie on the
Russo- Japanese War and the first
episode of The Peril of Pauline.
July 4 Sumo performance
The Bankoku-za Theater’s first
day.
July 4
A bigger article announcing the
live stage performance of the
Futaba-kai.
July 8
Reference to the sumo
performance
July 16
Brief reference to The Wrath of the
Gods. Announces that the film will
be screened for the general public
at the Temple Auditorium on July
20.
July 17
Japanese and American journalists
were invited to the preview screening
of The Wrath of the Gods.
July 20
The first day of The Wrath of the
Gods.
July 28
An anonymous reader published
praise for the quality of Futaba-
kai’s performance in the reader’s
column.
August 1
A significant review of the Futaba-
kai stage play.
Thomas H. Ince, The Wrath of the Gods, directed by Reginald Barker, 1914.
54
!40
released for general public first on the East Coast in June, it was on July 20 that it was
premiered in front of Los Angeles patrons. Prior to the premier screening for paying
audience, Japanese and American journalists were invited to a screening of the film held on
July 17. The July 16 issue of the Rafu Shimpo briefly refers to these screening events of The
Wrath of the Gods, but there are no follow-ups about the film. If there had been substantial
interest in moviegoing in the Japanese community in Los Angeles at this time, the
newspaper should have reported the exclusive screening for journalist on July 17 and the
public screening starting on July 20. The film was the first feature-length film for Sessue
Hayakawa and the very first film that he and Tsuru Aoki, another Japanese movie star in
Hollywood at that time, appeared in together. Although the film was warmly welcomed by
critics among mainstream Americans, an article in the Rafu Shimpo on July 16 did not
mention the name of the starring actors but only emphasized the fact that the film used
footage of the explosion of the Sakurajima volcano in Japan. In short, these articles on the
55
Rafu Shimpo exemplifies that Japanese immigrants in Los Angeles regarded The Wrath of
the Gods as a rare opportunity to watch a natural disaster in Japan and did not have any
strong interests in the story or the actors. Although some anti-Japanese films such as The
Cheat caused a huge controversy among Japanese immigrant communities in the 1910s,
newspapers at that time show that newly rising nickelodeon theaters in general did not
threaten the dominant popularity of stage plays in the Japanese immigrant communities all
through the 1910s.
The Rafu Shimpo, July 16, 1914.
55
!41
Japanese immigrants began to organize amateur theatrical companies in the 1900s
at the latest. One of the oldest theater performances with a record of specific date and
location was Chushingura play at the Elk’s Hall (231 South Spring Street) in Los Angeles
on March 12 and 13, 1903. This is considered to be the origin of Japanese immigrants’
theatrical performance in Los Angeles. Isamu Nishijima ( ), who moved from San
56
Francisco to Los Angeles in 1902, played a leading role in the production. Nishijima
created a local stage play club and trained young Japanese immigrants in Los Angeles. His
club had been active in the first decade of the twentieth century and performed kabuki
stages. Nishijima’s club was not the only company performing stage plays in Los
57
Angeles. The Omu-kai ( ), formed by intellectuals such as journalists at that time,
held performances at the Elk’s Hall on February 16 and 17, 1908. In the same month, a
rōkyoku (a traditional Japanese narrative singing) performer came from Japan to LA for the
first time and performed for three days at the Unity Hall. There are no written records of
58
Japanese immigrants’ reception of these theatrical performances held in Los Angeles. Their
reaction should not have been monolithic: the performances of Nishijima’s club and the
rōkyoku performer would have appealed wider audience rather than the intellectual Omu-
kai.
However, it is certain that the popularity of stage performances in general had
increased through the 1910s. The opening performances of the Yamato Hall, the first
Nanka Nikkeijin Shōgyō Kaigisho, Minami Kashū Nihonjinshi, 55.
56
Ibid., 108.
57
Ibid., 139.
58
!42
Japanese-owned community hall in Los Angeles, exemplifies the high popularity of stage
plays in the mid-1910s. On November 2, 1915, The Rafu Shimpo reported on the first day
of three-day opening performances at the Yamato Hall, which were all stage plays.
59
Another article reporting the second day of the performances was placed next to one about
a white-owned movie theater, which operated all night, probably for the first time in the
United States. Thus, the Yamato Hall did not accommodate any kinds of movie showings.
Otherwise, the newspaper would have referred to them. In short, the increasing
opportunities of theatergoing in Japanese immigrant community in the first decade paved a
way to its popularity and the more diverse performances such as sumo and Futaba-kai in
Los Angeles in the 1910s.
Respectful Entertainment for Permanent Settlement
The formation of theater companies and rising popularity of live stage in the first
decade of the twentieth century coincides with the history of Japanese immigration to the United
States. Japanese people living in the United States in the nineteenth century were mostly
temporal laborers and students. They did not plan to live in the United States for long and, thus,
did not have an incentive to invest their time and money on forming amateur theater groups.
Their mindset had changed in the first decade of the twentieth century.
The official history of immigration from Japan to the United States can be traced
back to the 1860s. Substantial numbers of Japanese workers traveled to Hawaii and the West
Coast. About 150 Japanese sent by Eugene Miller Van Reed, an American merchant, to Hawaii in
The Rafu Shimpo, November 2, 1915.
59
!43
1868 were contract laborers at sugar cane fields on three-year contracts. Meanwhile,
60
Wakamatsu Colony founded by about 40 Japanese from former Aizu Domain led by John Henry
Schnell, another American merchant of weapons, in Gold Hill, California, in 1869, soon
collapsed. In 1884, the Meiji government in Japan officially approved of its citizens traveling
61
abroad for the first time, and official collective immigration started the following year. The first
Japanese immigrants were a group of 944 laborers bound for farms in Hawaii.
62
Immigration to the mainland United States increased in the 1890s, when demand for
construction workers for railways was high. Japanese immigrants worked as construction
laborers for railway companies mainly on the West Coast, while some railways such as the
Union Pacific Railway used them in inland states such as Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, and
Nebraska. However, the Japanese population was larger in the coastal states of Oregon,
63
Washington, and California. Japanese people who landed at the U.S. ports of Portland, Seattle, or
San Francisco, moved to cheap lodging houses run by Japanese in the cities to find a job.
64
Former Japanese students, who moved to the United States in the 1880s and could communicate
with Americans in English, supplied the newcomers with information on work sites: at first
railway construction, then later sugar beet fields and mines. This worker dispatching system was
called the "boss system" and guaranteed a source of income for Japanese people who were not
John E. Van Sant, Pacific Pioneers: Japanese Journeys to America and Hawaii, 1850-80 (Urbana and
60
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 97-98.
Paul R. Spickard, Japanese American: The Formation and Transformations of an Ethnic Group (New York:
61
Twayne Pubblishers, 1996), 10.
Brian Niiya eds, Japanese American History: An A-to-Z Reference from 1868 to the Present (Los Angeles:
62
Japanese American National Museum, 1993), 27-28.
Ichioka, The Issei, 57-62.
63
Ibid, 62-69.
64
!44
familiar with the new country. Some Japanese established an immigration company to supply
laborers to the West Coast consistently. After the United States annexed Hawaii in 1898 and
Japan limited the number of emigrants in 1900, the immigration companies began to induce
Japanese workers from Hawaii to the mainland with promises of a higher salary. However, the
influx of Japanese to the West Coast basically stopped in 1907 when the United States
government regulated the move from Hawaii to the mainland.
65
Yuji Ichioka argues that dekasegi, which means "working away for home," was a common
mindset of Japanese immigrants from 1885 to 1907. These immigrants planned to return to Japan
with the money they earned in the United States. The majority of Japanese immigrants in this
66
period were young single men who could stand the seasonal nature and tough working conditions
they faced. They traveled from one farm to another or from one construction to another
according to the seasons and the progress of construction. They were required to live together in
camps or, in better cases, in boarding houses because of the seasonal nature of their jobs.
67
Having a family in the United States was totally out of the question. Thus, entertainment they
had in the period was far from family-oriented leisure. When they had a chance to stop at a town
from one workplace to another, with the money they earnt, young Japanese workers did not miss
the chance to visit Chinese gambling houses, brothels, and Japanese restaurant where women
served to them. There was no room for theaters costing a decent amount of time, money and
effort of multiple participants.
Spickard, Japanese American, 21-23.
65
Ichioka, The Issei, 3.
66
Nanka Nikkeijin Shōgyō Kaigisho, Minami Kashū Nihonjinshi.
67
!45
However, the characteristics of Japanese immigrants gradually changed. From around
1907, they began to abandon the dekasegi mindset and started to settle permanently in the United
States. Leading intellectuals in Japanese immigrant communities, who were aware of and
worried about the anti-Japanese sentiment in mainstream American society, argued for the
importance of settlements for Japanese workers. The Japanese immigrants were just foreign
outsiders as long as they thought their stay in the United States was a temporary dekasegi.
Besides racism, that was one of the reasons that the American society regarded Japanese people
as a threat. The leaders thought that anti-Japanese sentiment would be softened if the immigrants
had family in the United States, interacted with whites, and contributed to the local economy.
Therefore, Japanese intellectuals encouraged farming: if Japanese seasonal workers decided to
own a land to farm rather than travelling from one place to another, they would have a chance to
form family in the United States. In the 1910s, Japanese communities established a picture bride
system. The Japanese workers in the United States did not always have the time and money to
find wives in Japan. However, rather than valuing individual chemistry between a man and a
woman, an agreement between their families was essential in traditional marriage. Single
Japanese men in the United States sent their pictures to their relatives in Japan and asked them to
find brides for them. The picture brides could see their husbands in person for the first time in the
immigration offices in the United States. Thanks to the picture bride system, many Japanese
immigrant workers began to establish families and the number of Japanese in the United States
rapidly increased in the 1910s because of social and natural growth.
The increasing number of such cultural activities described above resonates with the
societal changes in Japanese immigrant communities around 1907, when immigrant
!46
workers began to settle in the United Sates. At the turn of the centuries, Japanese seasonal
workers had very limited leisure opportunities such as gambling, hanging out in bars, and
prostitution. Immigrant workers who had been having rough lives in rural camps had no
reason to avoid spending money on such entertainments when they had a chance to stay in
cities. The elitist segment of the Japanese immigrant communities problematized such
68
working class behavior in the 1910s because it was an obstacle for the Japanese people to
be accepted in the United States. Stage plays, which did not involve potential risks, such
69
as losing a bet or getting infected with gonorrhea and syphilis, were welcomed especially
by the growing female population who came to the U. S. through picture marriages. In
addition, the popularity of amateur stage plays among Japanese immigrants exemplifies
their financial success at that time. In this period, some Japanese seasonal laborers become
owners of their own farms, while others become successful in laundry and restaurant
industries in cities. Now Japanese workers could afford leisure and spare time for cultural
activities.
Ethnically Homogenous Japanese Halls
As a result of these societal shifts, in the 1910s, Japanese immigrant communities
began to construct ethnically homogenous gathering places called Japanese halls, which
were far different from the heterogeneous potential of nickelodeon theaters.
Ichioka, The Issei, 82-90: Yuko Itatsu, “Beyond Nationalism: A History of Leisure Discourse in and between
68
the United States and Japan, 1910-1940,” Ph. D. dissertation at University of Southern California (2009),
20-27.
Ichioka, The Issei, 176-182.
69
!47
In the first decade of the twentieth century, Japanese immigrant communities rented
white-owned theaters for their communal cultural events. Responding to the rising demand
for entertainment, some Japanese people established entertainment companies to bring
Japanese performers from their home country. When Japanese performers visited the
United States, the entertainment companies made travel plans to provide shows to Japanese
immigrants. Usually, successful Japanese businesspeople played the role of counterpart to
the entertainment company to host the traveling troupes. In the first decade of the twentieth
century, local Japanese communities rented white-owned theaters for visiting performers.
For example, the local Japanese community in San Francisco began to use the white-owned
National Theater (Post and Steiner Streets, open in 1908) at least once or twice a month
after the great earthquake in 1906. The demand for the theater from the Japanese
70
community increased in around 1910 and the theater offered a leasing contract in 1915. In
71
Los Angeles, the Elk’s Hall functioned as an ethnically-closed community space for
Japanese immigrants before the establishment of the Yamato Hall in November in 1915.
72
However, when the Hongwanji Temple purchased the Yamato Hall in 1917, the Japanese
community began to temporarily use the Elk’s Hall again while discussing the construction
of another Japanese hall in the city.
73
The high demand for public space in the Japanese community was not limited to
urban areas. Rather, historical records imply that rural Japanese communities were more
“Onajimi no Nashonaru-za ga Kondo Giri de Kowasareru,” The Shin Sekai, October 20, 1919.
70
“Nashonaru-za no Kariire,” The Shin Sekai, March 15, 1916.
71
“Sakuya mo ohiri,” The Rafu Shimpo, November 27, 1915.
72
“Horu Kenchiku no Gi,” The Shin Sekai, May 14, 1918.
73
!48
eager for Japanese halls than city dwellers were. The table below shows the record of the
construction of Japanese halls mainly in California in the 1910s.
Table 2: Construction of Japanese Halls in the 1910s
Place Detail
Fresno The Toyo-za Theater was lost in a fire in 1912. Another Japanese hall was
74
built, partially financed by Americans, in 1918.
75
Lodi There was a movement to establish a Japanese hall in 1914.
76
Los Angeles The Yamato Hall was built in 1915. The Hongwanji Temple purchased it in
1917. A committee for construction of a Japanese Hall was formed in
77
1921.
78
Marysville There was a movement to establish a Japanese hall in 1917.
79
Oakland A Japanese hall existed in 1912. Another plan appeared in 1917.
80 81
Portland A Japanese hall existed in 1915.
82
Pasadena Japanese community plan to construct a Japanese Hall in 1922.
83
Pauls? A Japanese Hall was constructed in 1921.
84
Sacramento The Teikoku Hall was established in October 1911 and collapsed in 1919.
85
Yokohama Specie Bank, Ltd., San Francisco branch, financed it. The hall
“Nihon Gekijyo Shoshitu,” The Shin Sekai, July 14, 1912.
74
“Horu rakusei shiki no seikyo,” The Shin Sekai, February 4, 1918.
75
“Nihon Horu Kenchiku Soudan-kai,” The Shin Sekai, June 17, 1914.
76
“Hongwanji Kifu Shibai,” The Shin Sekai, October 28, 1917.
77
“Nihonjin horu kensetsu no shimo sodan,” The Shin Sekai, March 21, 1921.
78
“Nihonjin Horu Secchi,” The Shin Sekai, November 23, 1917.
79
“Shin Gekijo no Sekkei,” The Shin Sekai, June 6, 1912.
80
“Horu kensetsu yushi kai,” The Shin Sekai, November 20, 1917.
81
“Ooshibai Kougyo Kijitsu,” The Shin Sekai, October 11, 1915.
82
“Nihonjin-kai horu kenchiku monddai,” The Shin Sekai, September 22, 1922.
83
“Horu rakusei shiki,” The Shin Sekai, October 30, 1921.
84
“Gekijyo taoru,” The Shin Sekai, February 27, 1919.
85
!49
collapsed in 1919. Also, there was the Nihon-za Theater on L street in
86
1914. The Nihon-za Theater was lost in a fire in 1915 and was rebuilt
87
with a new movie projector in 1917. Local Japanese started a plant to re-
88
establish the Teikoku Hall in 1920.
89
Salinas A Japanese hall existed in 1912.
90
San Francisco The Kyowa Hall existed in 1917. When the white-owned National
91
Theater, where Japanese immigrants had live performances since the
earthquake in 1906, was decided to close, a paper reports that there was no
concrete plan of a Japanese Hall for local Japanese people despite of the
high demand.
92
San Jose A Japanese hall was established in 1917.
93
Stockton The Asahi-za Theater (Japanese Hall) was built in 1917.
94
Visalia A moving picture theater was run on Main Street by Gishiro Yamauchi ( ), an owner of Panama Grocery Store in 1914.
95
Walnut Grove A Japanese hall was established in 1917.
96
Watsonville The Toyo Hall existed in 1917.
97
According to the table, it is obvious that Japanese communities in California intensively
built Japanese halls in the 1910s. Interestingly, somehow urban areas such as San
“Teikoku Horu Kabushiki Boshu,” The Shin Sekai, July 8, 1912.
86
”Kakushin-dan Kuru,” The Shin Sekai, January 25, 1914.
87
“Nihon-za no Kairyo,” The Shin Sekai, February 11, 1917.
88
“Horu no keikaku,” The Shin Sekai, May 4, 1920.
89
Mezurashii Shibai,” The Shin Sekai, July 6, 1912.
90
“Kyowa Horu,” The Shin Sekai, February 14, 1917.
91
“Onajimi no Nashonaru-za ga Kondo Giri de Kowasareru,” The Shin Sekai, October 20, 1919.
92
“Horu Biraki ni tsuite,” The Shin Sekai, January 9, 1917.
93
“Asahi-Nichi-za Horu Kensetsu ni tsuite,” The Shin Sekai, January 1, 1917.
94
“Katsudo Shashin Kaigyo,” The Shin Sekai, April 5, 1914.
95
“Kawashimo Nikkai-kan Rakuseishiki,” The Shin Sekai, July 9, 1917.
96
“Ooshibai,” The Shin Sekai, April 10, 1917.
97
!50
Francisco, Los Angeles, and Sacramento did not always go ahead of rural communities in
the construction of Japanese halls. This is probably because urban communities had more
options than rural ones did. As already discussed, Elke’s hall had been a popular gathering
place for Japanese immigrants in Los Angeles before establishment of Yamato Hall. Among
various reasons that Japanese people needed Japanese-owned theaters, the most
fundamental was a demographic reason: the population of Japanese immigrants increased
so rapidly both in cities and rural areas in the first two decades of the twentieth century that
they needed larger community spaces. However, the leasing rates for white-owned
98
theaters were high, and there were no guaranty that Japanese communities could lent white-
owned theaters whenever they wanted. It was economically reasonable to collect money
99
from the fellow Japanese people to establish a theater. In addition, the Japanese immigrants
wanted to minimize the conflicts with white Americans caused by the differences in
expected cultural behavior in theaters. While Japanese urban communities could find
100
appropriate white-owned theaters among many in terms of price, capacity, and flexibility,
rural communities did not have such options and needed to consider building their own
theaters in the very early stage of their community building.
Spickard, Japanese American, 21.
98
“Nashonaru-za no kari ire,” The Shin Sekai, March 15, 1916.
99
Itakura, Eiga to Imin, 74-76.
100
!51
Agricultural Communities
Rather than the broader options and larger availability in city areas, demographics of
Japanese immigrants explains the rapid construction of Japanese halls in rural areas. Japanese
immigrants consolidated their position in agricultural industries on the West Coast. Japanese
immigrants worked with Chinese in the labor-intensive fruit growing industry in California as
seasonal contractors sent there through the boss system in the 1880s and 1890s. Gradually,
Japanese people became leading farmers of white-owned farms and, then, land owners. In 1900,
the number of Japanese farmers in California was only 39, but 1,816 Japanese managed 4,698
acres of land in the 1910. The ratio of Japanese workers to the workers in the agricultural
101
industry was consistently more than 50 per cent through the 1910s to 1930s. According to the
census in 1940, just before WWII, the population of the first-generation Japanese (Issei) and
second-generation Japanese Americans (Nisei) in the United States was 126,947. Among them,
93,713, or three-quarters of the entire Japanese/Japanese-American population lived in
California. In addition, 41,465 of the Californian Japanese residents lived in rural areas, and the
majority were farmers. This shows that farming was predominantly the most common way of
earning over other occupations for Japanese people before WWII. As is well known, even in
102
the internment camps during WWII, some Japanese internees were allowed and encouraged to
farm in nearby areas to cover wartime shortages of production.
103
Nanka Nikkeijin Shōgyō Kaigisho, Minami Kashū Nihonjinshi, 185.
101
Kozo Ikemoto, “Amerika-shi ni okeru Nihonjin Imin to sono Nogyo Komyuniti [Japanaese Immigrants and
102
Their Agricultural Communites in the American History],” Sōken Togami eds., Japanīzu Amerikan [Japanese
American] (Tokyo: Mineruva Shobo, 1986), 171-3.
Spickard, Japanese American, 112.
103
!52
What was life like in the Japanese farming communities in rural areas on the West Coast
after the societal change of them around 1907? Let’s take Yamato Colony as an example of
everyday life for Japanese immigrants in rural areas. Although it also had some specific
characteristics, Yamato Colony can be described as a typical Japanese farming community: First,
most Japanese immigrants worked for agricultural businesses; second, they lived in rural areas,
not in cities, but were still economically and culturally connected to cities via railway; third, they
began to form families through the picture bride system in the 1910s and their children’s
generation became active in the 1930s; finally, they condensed their Japanese cultural ties within
their immigrant community away from the mainstream American society.
Yamato Colony was located next to the town of Livingstone 200km southeast of San
Francisco. Before Japanese settlement, Germans and Italians tried fruit cultivation, but their
ventures were not successful. The Japanese American Industrial Corporation (Nichi Bei Kangyo
Sha), a worker-dispatching company based in San Francisco, took a leading role in purchasing
the land, and 38 Japanese workers began to cultivate it from 1906 to 1908. While they planted
sweet potatoes, asparagus, tomatoes, and cantaloupes in order to secure cash income in the early
stages of their settlement, they ventured their future on fruits, especially grapes. These products
were shipped to urban areas, such as Sacramento and San Francisco, connected by the Southern
Pacific railway with the neighboring town of Livingstone. When Japanese settlers established a
marketing cooperative in 1913 to regulate the supply of their products to the market and prevent
a drop in prices caused by oversupply, the business of Yamato Colony was finally on track. The
economic boom thanks to WWI boosted land values, the prices of agricultural products, and the
cost of labor, thereby enriching Yamato Colony. The population of the colony reached 200 during
!53
WWI. Compared to other Japanese agricultural communities in California, the population of 200
was relatively small. Therefore, Yamato Colony kept using a Christian church for their
community gathering. However, the development of the colony in the first two decades of the
twentieth century represents a typical process of other communities listed in the table above.
The Japanese halls were built to serve not only to single town or village like
Yamato Colony but also to the residents in the nearby areas. This is proved by that fact that
the size of such halls built was bigger than we might expect from the number of Japanese
residents in the towns. For instance, the Japanese hall in Fresno established in 1918 is
evidence of the standard expectations that existed for these facilities in rural communities.
Before the establishment of a Japanese hall in Fresno, the local Japanese people had some
places for community gatherings: one was the Buddhist Church which accommodated 300
people, the other was the Iwata Theater accommodating 900 patrons. The hall of the
Buddhist Church was not spacious enough in terms of capacity. The size of the Iwata
Theater met the expectation of the community, but the leasing rate was too high. 150
dollars was paid to the theater for two-day stage performances. One interesting thing
104
about the construction of the Japanese hall in Fresno in the 1910s was that the community
needed a hall with a capacity of 800 to 900 even though they had at least two theaters
accommodating hundreds of people. The city of Fresno had only 1,008 Japanese people at
most in its heyday in 1940. The construction plan thus seems extravagant for the
105
Japanese population there.
“Nihon Horu Kensetsu Mondai,” The Shin Sekai, December 2, 1914.
104
Ikemoto, “Amerika-shi ni okeru,” 177.
105
!54
However, the hall was also expected to host patrons from rural farming communities.
Japanese would frequent Fresno from the surrounding villages of Selma, Fowler, Reedley,
Clovis, Parlier, Sanger, Kingsburg, and Madera, and from Kings and Tulare counties (Figure
2). For example, Shunsuke Uchiyama, a Japanese immigrant farmer living in Sanger, recalls
106
his theatergoing experience in Fresno: “Every time I heard Fresno hosted amateur plays, moving
pictures, or stage plays and rōkyoku performances from Japan, I brought my wife there to watch
them. Since we could not afford an automobile, we rode on a buggy to Sanger station, left my
horse and coach in a nearby stable, and got into a train to Fresno to watch the performances. We
stayed in a hotel and left home in the following day because there was no return train after the
performances.” The Japanese population in Fresno County was 2,233 in 1910 and doubled in
107
size by 1920 to 5,732. Japanese people throughout Fresno County gathered in the city of Fresno
when they had visiting performers from Japan. Thus, the capacity of 800 to 900 for a new
Japanese hall represented the growing population of Japanese in the whole of Fresno County, not
just in the town. Even in Los Angeles, an unignorable portion of patrons consisted of farmers.
When Naramaru, a rōkyoku performer, had five performances starting on May 25 in 1917, he had
an audience of about 6,000 in total, 4,000 among whom were from rural areas.
108
Yoshiaki Takemura, Issei Paionia Uchiyama Shunsuke [Uchiyama Shunsuke, the Issei Pioneer], (Fowler:
106
Toshi Uchiyama, 1975), 44-45.
Ibid.
107
Nanka Nikkeijin Shōgyō Kaigisho, Minami Kashū Nihonjinshi, 351.
108
!55
Figure 1: The Areas Fresno Japanese Hall Served
!
Audience-Performer Interaction
The theater experiences of Japanese immigrants were totally different from the
ways in which American audiences experienced cinema in the early twentieth century. The
Hollywood movie industry contrived to sophisticate visual techniques from the late 1910s
to 1920s, which would succeed in bringing preferable middle-class behavior into the
!56
theatres by narrating complicated stories. This immersion into film narrative was made
possible by giving up audience/performance interaction which was still alive in the
nickelodeon era. However, it is to this outmoded, nickelodeon practice that we should
109
turn in order to understand the moviegoers who flocked to those town halls in the first few
decades of the twentieth century. While mainstream American audiences were getting
accustomed to the Classical Hollywood cinema in the 1920s and 1930s, Japanese
immigrants were still enjoying such a belated interaction with projectionists in racially-
closed theaters.
In fact, what the Japanese entertainment companies provided are live performances,
in which players attempted to actively engage themselves with audiences, whether they
were acting on the stage or showing film reels. What is of special interest in this regard is
“moving-picture rokyoku chain plays ( )” in the late 1910s which
incorporated film screening into the oral narrative performance. “Chain play (rensa geki)"
refers to a form of a stage play, part of which is replaced with movie footage. The footage,
played by the same actors on the stage, depicts scenes which cannot be performed on stage
such as swordplay on location. “Chain play” was popular in Japan in the first two decades
of the twentieth century because of its novelty, attraction to the new technology of cinema,
and appearance of actresses instead of onnagata, male actors playing female roles in kabuki
plays. “Moving-picture rōkyoku chain plays” is a local adaptation of such “chain play” in
110
Kristin Thompson, “Part Three: The Formulation of the Classical Style, 1909-28,” David Bordwell, Janet
109
Staiger, and Kristin Thompson eds., The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to
1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 155-240.
Tadao Sato, Nihon Eiga Shi, 122-126; Atsuko Ooya, “Rensageki ni okeru Eiga Bamen no Hihyo wo
110
megutte [On Reviews about Film Parts of Chain Plays],” Art Research 10 (2010), 51–60.
!57
the United States. While “chain play” requires a group of actors to be performed, “moving-
picture rōkyoku chain play” needed only one talented rōkyoku performer who could
reinterpret the film text so that he could perform his rōkyoku techniques in conjunction with
the films. The geographical and economic situation of Japanese immigrants at that time
explains the popularity of “moving-picture rōkyoku chain play” over “chain play”.
Nonetheless to say, it was impossible for the Japanese entertainment companies to send a
group of actors to each Japanese hall for “chain play” because the transportation of all the
actors over the Pacific Ocean cost the company so much. However, sending a rōkyoku
performer with film reels was a natural, economical choice for the companies. Responding
to the audience expectation, visiting rōkyoku performers to the United States, where the
supply of Japanese movies was limited, created a way of maximizing audience’s excitement
utilizing “chain play” format, which was popular until around 1920 and persisted even in
the 1920s and 1930s.
Tochuken Nami’emon ( ), born in Japan in 1887, is one of the most
famous rōkyoku performers in the United States. After training in Japan, he began to
frequently travel across the Pacific Ocean with film reels in 1922. A record shows that he
performed “moving-picture rōkyoku chain plays” at the Atlas Theater in Seattle, which was
the first picture palace owned by Japanese there. Nami’emon had four stages in 4 days from
January 29 to February 1 in 1929. In the first two days, he screened Kunisada Chuji, and
Kanojyo no Unmei (Her Fate) for the last two days. Although the titles of the movies are
111
Kazuo Ito, Zoku Hokubei Hyakunen Zakura [North American Hundred Years Cherries, vol. 2] (Tokyo:
111
Nichibou Shuppan, 1972), 282.
!58
mentioned in his diary, it is impossible to identify the exact movies he screened in his
performances. By 1929, Japanese studios were making plenty of silent films with the title
of Kunisada Chuji. As for Kanojyo no Unmei, the four leading studios in Japan at that
112
time — Makino Eiga Seisakusho (dir. Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1924, 14 reels), Nikkatsu (dir.
Kensaku Suzuki, 1924, 6 reels), Shochiku (dir. Hotei Nomura and Yoshinobu Ikeda, 1924,
8 reels), and Teikoku Kinema (dir. Osamu Wakayama, 1924, 10 reels), competed in making
movies based on the same novel, Kanojyo no Unmei. In all cases, according to the number
of reels for each version, film screenings seemed to occupy the majority of his performance
in terms of length. However, that does not mean that Nami’emon’s oral performance was
supplemental to the visual pleasure of the movies. As a rōkyoku performer of the
prestigious Tochuken school, which was proud of its sonorous performance style, he did not
describe himself as a benshi. Although he tried to fit immigrants’ tastes on foreign soil and
created a chonmage, a samurai hair style, on his head, his oral performance was an
indispensable part of the show. In fact, when the Fuji-kan in Los Angeles had difficulty
attracting Japanese audiences to its ten-cent American cinema shows, Nami’emon could
attract Japanese patrons to the theater with a higher admission charge of 50 cents.
113
Kunisada Chuji (M Pate, 1911); Kunisada Chuji (Fukuhodo, 1912); Kunisada Chuji (dir Shozo Makino,
112
Nikkatsu, 1914); Kunisada Chuji (Kobayashi Shokai, 1917, 5 reels); Kunisada Chuji (Nikkatsu, 1918, 3 reels);
Kunisada Chuji Zenpen (dir Shiro Nakagawa, Teikoku Kinema, 1921, 4 reels); Kunisada Chuji Kohen (dir
Shiro Nakagawa, Teikoku Kinema, 1921, 5 reels); Kunisada Chuji (Nikkatsu, 1921, 5 reels); Kunisada Chuji
(dir Kaname Mori, Shochiku Kinema, 1922, 1923); Kunisada Chuji (dir Shozo Makino, Makino Kyoiku Eiga
Seisakujyo, 1922, 6 reels); Kunisada Chuji Daiippen (dir Kaname Mori, Teikoku Kinema, 1925); Kunisada
Chuji Dainihen (dir Kaname Mori, Teikoku Kinema, 1925); Kunisada Chuji (dir Seiji Makino, Toua Kinema,
1925); Kunisada Chuli Tonegawa no Maki (dir Jiro Yoshino, Shochiku, 1925); Kunisada Chuji Edoiri (dir
Shuichi Yamashita, Teikoku Kinema, 1926, 6 reels); Kunisada Chuji (dir Tomiyasu Ikeda, Nikkatsu Onoue
Production, 1925, 10 reels); Kunisada Chuli Kyoketuhen (dir Ureo Egawa, Takamatsu Azuma Production,
1926, 1927); Kunisada Chuli Ochiyuku Oshuji (dir Seika Shiba, Bando Tsumasaburo Production, 1926, 10
reels); Kunisada Chuji no Iji (dir Buntaro Futagawa, Makino Production, 1929, 9 reels).
Ito, Zoku Hokubei Hyakunen Zakura, 276.
113
!59
Nami’emon’s case exemplifies that the theatergoing experience was not
immersion into narrative expressed through film text for Japanese immigrants. Nami’emon
came to the United States in 1922 for the first time and actively traveled on the West Coast
from the 1920s to the 1930s. His performances in Japanese-owned movie-only theaters
such as the Atlas Theater in Seattle and the Fuji-kan in Los Angeles were actually “moving-
picture rōkyoku chain plays” combining his live stage performance with cinema. In his
performance, Japanese audiences actively participated. Tamotsu Murayama ( ), a
Nisei born in Seattle, recalled the interaction between patrons and Nami’emon, who often
used the English phrase of “that’s right” with a Japanese accent in his Japanese-language
performance.
Patrons frequently jeered at Nami’emon. “Hey, chonmage! Do ‘that’s right’ more!”
Nami’emon responded to the jeer and shouted out “that’s right.” He was quite
popular. One night was not enough for one movie. He spent three nights on one
movie. Turning the crank of a projector, Nami’emon inserted “that’s right” according
to the movement on the screen. Patrons were so starved for Japanese entertainment
and something Japanese that Nami’emon’s appearance on stage excited them. When
we felt that we had little "that's right," we shouted, "You said only one ‘that's right'
today."
114
Nami’emon was not the only rōkyoku performer who traveled on the West Coast with film
reels, but other rōkyoku performers such as Matao Koga ( ) and Suimin Matsui ( ) toured both urban and rural areas, even camps for railway construction workers, to
provide Japanese entertainment. Nami’emon’s “moving-picture rōkyoku chain play” was
Ito, Zoku Hokubei Hyakunen Zakura, 283-284.
114
!60
not the first one to generate this kind of pleasure from the audience-performer interaction.
As mentioned above, moviegoers could enjoy this pleasure in nickelodeon theaters before
the emergence of standardized Hollywood cinema. However, the interesting thing about the
“moving-picture rōkyoku chain play” is that Japanese immigrants maintained such an
audience-performer interaction in their ethnically-closed Japanese halls even in the 1930s.
Japanese Halls and Nickelodeon Theaters
Such an intimate audience-performer interaction between rōkyoku performers and
Japanese immigrants must have created a safe cultural sphere, which was not possible in
ethnically-diverse heterogeneous nickelodeons. As discussed above, Japanese patrons in
white-owned theaters were exposed not only to ethnically diverse audiences, but also to the
eyes of fellow Japanese elites who were obsessed with how white Americans saw them.
The elites censored and educated Japanese immigrants not to bring uneducated manners
such as spitting and jeering into the contested arena. Japanese patrons’ jeering at Namiemon
exemplifies that the closed performance space was safe at least to the extent that such
behavior was tolerated. Such a safe environment in which Japanese immigrant patrons
could maintain their behavior in their home country without worrying about the censoring
eyes of white Americans and fellow elites echoes Ogihara’s understanding of Japanese
movies as a temporary escape. Although Ogihara did not mention the ethnically-closed
community screenings of Japanese movies out of Japanese-owned theaters,
While Japanese halls mushroomed in each Japanese immigrant community,
Japanese-owned nickelodeon theaters were not successful in the 1910s. As Ogihara argues
!61
in her article, the Bankoku-za was closed in the middle of the 1910s. Considering the
115
dominant popularity of stage plays in the Japanese immigrant community, the Bankoku-za
and other Japanese-owned nickelodeon theaters presumably competed with all the
nickelodeon theaters without any special interest from the Japanese community and, thus,
some might have financial problems to continue. According to Itakura, it was in the late
1910s when moving pictures began to play an important role in the Japanese immigrant
community. When the mainstream movie exhibition became standardized by the
Hollywood movie industry, and the number of imported Japanese movies increased,
Japanese immigrants began to screen reels from Japan at ethnically-closed places such as
Buddhist churches and community halls. Itakura cites both cultural and economic reasons
for this change. First, the movie theater was a place where cultural conflict with different
ethnic groups became visible. The Oriental quarter confirmed that Japanese immigrants
were discriminated against in the United States. Also, Japanese immigrants tended to bring
their cultural behavior (spitting, eating during performances, heckling, and even leaving
children at theaters) into white-owned movie theaters and the white population criticized
such behavioral patterns. Operating movies within an ethnically-closed space enabled
Japanese immigrants to enjoy Japanese movies without such cultural conflicts. The other
reason Itakura cites was economic in nature. By holding events within the Japanese
community, patrons’ money could be circulated within the community. For these reasons,
the screening of Japanese movies shifted from white owners' movie theaters to Buddhist
churches and community halls in Japanese language schools after the late 1910s. Thus, the
Ogihara, “The Exhibition of Films for Japanese Americans,” 82.
115
!62
audience of Japanese movies became limited to Japanese, who form “a homogenous
audience interpreting film text in a stable way.” That means that screening of Japanese
movies in the United States was “sealed into an ethnic space, a marginal realm"
116
Itakura shows various examples of ethnically-closed screening of Japanese movies
and it is undeniable that Japanese movies were enjoyed in the ethnic group in the 1920s.
However, historicizing the shift from the heterogeneous space of the nickelodeons to the
homogenous space within the community is questionable. As argued above, the dominant
popularity of stage plays starting in the first decade of the twentieth century at latest was
clear and the Japanese movie business did not seem to be able to cut into the share. As
exemplified through the opening performance at the Yamato Hall, these stage plays were
performed exclusively in front of Japanese audiences because of the language barriers.
Japanese immigrants could enjoy stage plays in culturally-safe Japanese halls built in the
1910s and did not pay much attention to heterogeneous space. Also, these Japanese halls
established in the 1910s functioned as a closed financial circuit for Japanese
communities. One of the main reasons these communities required Japanese halls was
117
the high leasing rates of white-owned theaters. In many cases, business leaders in local
118
Japanese communities incorporated a stock company to finance their venture. The
119
Itakura, Eiga to Imin, 76-78.
116
Ibid., 105-107.
117
“Kamimachi horu kensetu,” The Shin Sekai, February 25, 1913.
118
“Horu kabunushi sokai,” The Shin Sekai, February 26, 1918: “Shingekijo no sekkei,” The Shin Sekai, June
119
12, 1912: “Teikoku horu no kabushiki boshu,” The Shin Sekai, July 8, 1912: “Nihonjin horu kensetsu sodan
kai,” The Shin Sekai, June 17, 1914: “Asahiza horu kensetsu ni tsuite,” The Shin Sekai, January 1, 1917.
!63
Japanese hall in Fresno, partially financed by white Americans, was an exception. Most
120
Japanese halls were financed by local Japanese people and Japanese banks such as
Yokohama Specie Bank, Ltd., whose branch was located in San Francisco. It is thus more
accurate to say that the ethnically-closed cultural sphere practiced in Japanese halls and
Japanese-owned theaters expanded to include movies in the late 1910s rather than to argue
on the basis of Itakura’s medium-bound narrative.
Conclusion
The history of Japanese immigrants’ movie going requires our attention to the setting of an
exhibition: it is the question if the viewing was held within or out of the ethnic community. The
issue of respectful behavior in theaters was problematic only in the white-own theaters, where
the elite segment of Japanese communities needed to care how Japanese fellows looked to the
mainstream Americans. In such a public sphere, Japanese immigrant spectators were exposed not
only to the eyes of the Japanese immigrant elites but also to discriminatory and hostile treatments
by the White society. The audience-performer communication was not possible in such a
heterogeneous space. On the contrary, Japanese immigrant communities had created closed
cultural space where they could indulge themselves in Japanese amateur theatrical performances
at around the turn of the century, before the nickelodeon boom starting at around 1905. The
ethnically closed cultural spaces were materialized in the form of Japanese halls in the 1910s and
began to include film exhibition in the late 1910s. “Horu rakusei shiki no seikyo,” The Shin Sekai, February 4, 1918.
120
!64
Chapter 3: Controlling Japanese Images in American Movies
Introduction
The importance of Japanese halls does not negate that Japanese immigrant went to
white-owned theaters to watch American movies. As the waka poems about watching October in
a theater filled with Russian mentioned in the first chapter exemplifies, Japanese immigrants
sometimes enjoyed even foreign movies. This chapter argues that they had the multifaceted
relationship with American movies: the star system and fan culture of Hollywood movie industry
attracted them, while Japanese immigrants fought against demonized images of Japanese in
Hollywood movies. Under the anti-Japanese sentiment at that time, the sinister depiction of
Japanese risked the security of Japanese people living in the United States. Therefore, Japanese
immigrant communities exercised diplomatic means, moral discourse in the American society,
and political pressure over Japanese actors in the industry to get rid of evil images of Japanese in
Hollywood movies. While being confrontational with anti-Japanese movies, Japanese immigrant
communities also positively received some Hollywood movies and utilized them to claim that
Japanese were able to mix in the mainstream American society. Hollywood movies were not
merely commercial entertainment for Japanese immigrants. Japanese immigrants fought over the
representation of themselves in movies and took advantage of mythology in them to justify their
residency.
!65
Fan Culture and Criticism
Generally speaking, reception of Japanese patrons at movie theaters on the West Coast
was not so different to that of white audience with an exceptional phenomenon of Japanese
society’s opposition against anti-Japanese movies. Japanese newspapers began to publish the
titles of movies exhibited in local white-owned theaters along with live stage performances.
Since movie exhibitions at that time were just a series of short movies, such ads informed
Japanese readers only about the names of theaters and the genres of performance exhibited there.
The ads in Japanese-language newspapers gradually became more informational but still had
synopses of movies of only a few sentences at best. Critical commentary based on the inner
structure of movies, of course, did not appear in Japanese-language newspapers at the time of
WWI. References to movies in Japanese-language newspapers were limited to the societal and
cultural impact of technological invention: business and technological interests in film;
patriotism in American movies; desirable manners in white-owned movie theaters; and bad
pedagogical influence of crime films such as Zigomar (1911, dir. Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset,
121
France) on children and women.
122
The ethnic newspapers published ads of white-owned movie theaters proving the
popularity of American movies among Japanese people. The Shin Sekai and The Hokubei Jiji
started showing photos of movie stars, which were provided by the industry. In the case of San
Francisco, the Progress Theater and the Republic Theater were the most constant in advertising
in The Shin Sekai among many white-owned theaters. The picture below is an advertisement
123
Zigomar, directed Victorian-Hippolyte Jasset, Fracnce, 1911 (USA).
121
“Fujin Ran Katsudō Shashin,” The Shin Sekai, February 20, 1921. 1921
122
“Konsyū no Yobimono,” The Shin Sekai, July 9, 1916; The Shin Sekai, August 6, 1916;
123
!66
of the Progress Theater, showing that the theater screened different American films every day.
The picture in the middle is from The Man from Bitter Roots (dir. Oscar Apfel, 1916). The other
movies listed were unidentifiable because the film titles shown in the advertisements are
somehow free translation from the original English ones. Since these two theaters published
advertisements in the Shin Sekai regularly through the 1910s, Japanese patrons in San Francisco
were marketing-worthy demographic for them. Japanese movie-goers were engaging in fan
practices of Hollywood stars, such as writing to an American star requesting her photo, although
Japanese papers reported as shameful behavior Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie
Chaplin were popular among other film actors. Mary Pickford’s visiting Seattle to advertise
liberty bonds in 1918 was a big news for the local Japanese community. Thus, regardless of
124
the moral discourse on Japanese ethnic papers, Japanese immigrants, at least those who have
access to American movies in urban areas, were able to enjoy American movies in the 1910s.
Figure 2: Advertisement of the Progress Theater in San Francisco
!
“Pikuhōdo-jyou ga Shiatoru ni Kuru Darou,” The Hokubei Jiji, March 14, 1918
124
!67
As the influx of picture brides is increasing, Japanese women’s presence in White-own
theaters became greater. The series of articles written by Hirai Sakurakawa on the Nichi Bei
Times in 1912 testifies that the number of Japanese female patrons were rapidly increasing.
125
Following his observation, the author foresees that the Japanese female theater-goers would have
a crucial influence on Japanese theater entertainment. There is no statistical data showing the
exact number or percentage of female patrons in White-owned theaters, but there are some
articles exemplifying that newly-coming picture brides from Japan flocked to watch American
movies. For example, the Hokubei Jiji reported about a female Japanese movie-translator who
accompanied her female Japanese friends who did not understand English and explained the
story for them in Portland in 1918. The female friends who needed a translator to watch films
126
suggests two possibilities besides the level of their education: first they were new to the United
States; second they had been living in Japanese communities in rural areas lacking
communication with English-speaking communities. In either cases, what the article exemplifies
is that American movies functioned as a venue of socialization for Japanese women. These
episodes, articles, and advertisements found in Japanese-language newspapers show that, besides
Japanese immigrants’ ethnic cultural practices, American movies also developed a consistent
popularity among them regardless of gender after WWI at latest.
While many Japanese immigrants enjoys the new modern form of entertainment, some
intellectuals saw Hollywood movies with a cynical perspective. Japanese critics began to discuss
The Nichi Bei Times, November 10, 1912; Itatsu, “Beyond Nationalism,” 45-48
125
”Katsudō Shashin no Tsūyaku,” The Hokubei Jiji, February 15, 1918.
126
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Hollywood movie actors after WWI. On August 9 in 1918, Tsurunoko, a journalist for The
Hokubei Jiji, wrote a review on Bound in Morocco (1918) starring Douglas Fairbanks, saying
127
“of course, watching a Fairbanks movie means enjoying not a story but his movement and facial
expression.” His review clearly shows that the author recognizes the star as an indispensable
component of the film’s attraction. In the following two months, the author extensively published
his reviews of film stars such as Theda Bara, Lillian Gish, Franklyn Farnum, Dorothy Dalton,
William Hart, and Sessue Hayakawa. Tsurunoko’s reviews look at films with analytic eyes and
128
are far beyond amateur appreciation of film stars’ performance.
His review of Bound in Morocco exemplifies his intelligence. The plot is a typical
captivity narrative set in a Moroccan harem. An American youth played by Fairbanks rescues an
American lady played by Pauline Curley, who is seized by a local governor. Tsurunoko argues
that “(Fairbanks’) movie always requires a foreign setting to highlight the American personality.
He plays a role of American traveler abroad to compare the American personality with the
foreign one and to make the audience feel familiar with Fairbanks.” Based on this understanding,
Tsurunoko continues his sharp criticism. He points out that Fairbanks’ position in the film world
was the same as that of Mark Twain in the literary world and that Bound in Morocco was the
equivalent to Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. The novel is a satire Si-Fi
depicting sixth-century England through the eyes of a Yankee and, by doing so, blaming the
romanticized chivalric mind on the Southern states. Juxtaposition of these two works clearly
129
Bound in Morocco, directed Allan Dwan, 1918.
127
“Katsudō Haiyū Hihyō: Dagurasu Fyeabankusu,” The Hokubei Jiji, August 9, 1918; “Sedabara-jyou no
128
Sarome wo Miru,”The Hokubei Jiji, August 12, 1918; “Katsudō Haiyū Hihyō: Ririan Gisshu,” The Hokubei
Jiji, Augusts 13, 1918.
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (New York: Dover Publication, 2001).
129
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shows the reviewer’s awareness of the imperialistic/colonial setup in Bound in Morocco: a
civilized American man rescues a woman from an uncivilized country in the film. The majority
of Japanese patrons would have not seen the film and other Hollywood movies with such critical
eyes. However, the elite portion kept publishing this sort of criticism on Hollywood movies.
One interesting thing about his film reviews is that he even utilized the film review
format, which he started in the paper, to criticize intellectual people with non-immigrant visas in
Japanese communities. By saying “movie picture is not limited to what is projected on a screen.
But the world is a big screen, and everyone active on it is a movie actor,” the author introduced
readers into his social criticism on arrogant and conspicuous intellectual people who had non-
immigrant visa status. At that time, nonimmigrant Japanese who came to the United States
looked down on Japanese with immigrant visas who came there for money. The review
summarizes the imaginary story of such an intellectual and ends the story when an American
man talks to the intellectual Japanese, who is proud of a brand-new car he managed to purchase,
and says “Hello, Charlie (a typical name used for Japanese house laborers because Japanese
names were difficult to pronounce)! Whose car are you driving?” The Japanese intellectual
cannot say anything to the American man partly because he recognizes that he is regarded as the
kind of immigrant worker whom he looked down on. These reviews by Tsurunoko in The
130
Hokubei Jiji shows that moviegoing became a common cultural practice to the extent that
journalists could rhetorically play with the film review format to caricaturize the Japanese
immigrant communities. Such critical reviews randomly appeared in Japanese-language
“Katsudō Haiyū Hihyō: Hi-Imin-Sensei,” The Hokubei Jiji, September 6, 1918.
130
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newspapers even in the 1930s when moviegoing in Japanese immigrant communities became an
ethnically-closed cultural practice.
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Anti-Japanese Movies
Besides the consistent popularity of American movies from the 1910s to the 1930s,
Japanese immigrants were also obsessed with anti-Japanese descriptions in the period. Their
concern with the anti-Japanese movies dates back to 1915 when Sessue Hayakawa’s The Cheat
became popular in the mainstream white society. To be shocked by the sinister Japanese
character in the film, Japanese immigrants in Los Angeles began to bash Hayakawa in
newspapers. The ethnic newspapers carried on a campaign to ban anti-Japanese movies from
theaters, and reference to movies increased in number in the papers in the following year.
However, they focused almost exclusively on the anti-Japanese aspect of the film and the
damage on the reputation of Japanese people caused by it. Japanese immigrant communities as
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a whole were not interested in the aesthetic aspect of movies but needed to check the
representation of Japanese people in movies, which was a barometer of their status in the United
States.
The Cheat starring Sessue Hayakawa was not the only film that the Japanese immigrant
133
community problematized. There were many movies in the 1910s featuring Japanese motifs,
“Ginmaku wo Nozoite: Kigeki no Onjin Sennetto,” The Hokubei Jiji, November 23, 1935; “Ginmaku wo
131
Nozoite: Beikoku Eiga to Oushū Eiga,”The Hokubei Jiji, November 9, 1935; “Ginmaku wo Nozoite: Pate,”
The Hokubei Jiji, November 16, 1935.
“Chīto ni tsuite,” The Shin Sekai, January 28, 1916; “Hainichi Sendō Katsudō Shashin wo miru,” The Shin
132
Sekai, February 10, 1916.
Cecil B. DeMille and Jesse L. Lasky, The Cheat, directed Cecil B. Demille, 1915.
133
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regardless of the use of Japanese actors, when Japonism and anti-Japanese sentiment coexisted:
while William Hearst's yellow journalism attacked Japan as yellow peril, American cultural elites
and movies welcomed Japanese architecture, gardens, decorations, and clothes. As a result, many
American silent films made from the latter half of the 1910s to the 1920s accommodated both
superficial references to Japanese elements and demonized the representation of the same
country. Local Japanese immigrant communities attacked and problematized such anti-Japanese
movies in their ethnic newspapers. For example, The Curse of Iku , A Woman in the Web ,
134 135
Shadows of the West , Who Is Your Servant? , and The Pride of Palomar received frequent
136 137 138
reference and criticism in Japanese-language newspapers.
The images of Japanese people in these films are demonized. The villains both in The
Pride of Palomar and Shadows of the West use illegal violence and even kidnap a female
character to acquire the land of white owners and colonize it for the Japanese empire. Although
the use of violence is a fictional exaggeration, which Japanese-language newspapers criticized as
an unrealistic and non-factual representation, the issue of land purchase was actual. As discussed
in the previous chapter, Japanese immigrants abandoned dekasegi mindset, a temporal working
in the United States only to return to Japan with big money, and began to settle in the country
around 1907. They immigrants moved into the rural wasteland and built farming communities.
Even after California enacted the Alien Land Law prohibiting “aliens ineligible for citizenship”
The Curse of Iku, directed Frank Borzage, 1917.
134
A Woman in the Web, directed Paul Hurst and David Smith, 1918.
135
Shadows of the West, directer Paul Hurst, 1921.
136
Who Is Your Servant?, 1920.
137
The Pride of Palomar, directer Frank Borzage, 1922.
138
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from purchasing and leasing land in 1913, Japanese immigrants had land under the names of
their American-born children. Therefore, the demonized images of greedy Japanese robbing
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white lands in The Pride of Palomar and Shadows of the West represent the fear of the White
American society.
The fear of the mainstream American society was not totally baseless. In the 1890s and
1900s, or the late Meiji era according to the Japanese era-naming system, “expansionism (Bocho
Shiso)" flourished in Japan. At the turn of the twentieth century, Japan regarded itself as a
successfully modernized country and fostered a sense of rivalry against the world powers.
Promoters of “Expansionism” believed that Japan should have an equal position with the great
world powers regarding territorial expansion and colonial policy. The belief was advertised in
magazines such as Kokumin no Tomo (Nation’ s Friend) by Soho Tokutomi ( ), a
renowned nationalist. The thought was common even among non-nationalistic people. For
140
example, Isoo Abe ( ), a Christian socialist, criticized the exclusion of Japanese based
on racism in California:
The Pacific coast of North America has a huge land capable of accommodating 20 to 30
million people. Not just this. If the density of mainland Japan can be realized there, the
land can hold 80 to 90 million people. Thus, there is no problem if Japan sends just 6
million of our people there. It is not difficult to establish new Japan on the other side of
the Pacific Ocean if this is our government’s determination and our people’s
understanding.
141
Lon Kurashige, Two Faces of Exclusion: The Untold History of Anti-Asian Racism in the United States,
139
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 101.
Akira Iriye, Pacific estrangement; Japanese and American expansion, 1897-1911 (Waterloo: Imprint
140
Publications, 1994).
Isoo Abe, Hokubei no Shin Nihon (Tokyo: Hakubunkan, 1905), 119.
141
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Interestingly, even a Christian socialist thought of creating new Japan in California. However, in
the eyes of those who lived in Japan at the turn of the centuries, California looked similar to
other neighboring territories such as the Korean peninsula annexed in 1910, Manchuria, for
which Japan fought against Russia from 1904 to 1905, and China and Taiwan, where Japan
territorialized later. Immigration to North and South America was interpreted as a part of the
expansionist project of Imperial Japan.
The expansionist ideology of Imperial Japan resonated among Japanese immigrants on
the West Coast. Yamato Colony discussed in the previous chapter was actually a materialization
of the expansionism in California. Kyutaro Abiko, a Japanese business person based in San
Francisco, played a leading role in the physical and ideological building of the colony.
142
Kyutaro Abiko was born in Niigata prefecture in 1865 and moved to San Francisco in 1885. A
Gospel Society (Fukuinkai) organized by Japanese students in San Francisco was a gateway for
him to the United States. After enrolling in courses at the University of California, Berkeley,
Kyutaro began to work for restaurants and in the laundry business. Using the capital he made, he
purchased a local Japanese-language newspaper publisher in financial problem in San Francisco
Steve Fugita “Abiko Kyutaro” Distinguished Asian Americans: A Biographical Dictionary, Hyung-chan
142
Kim eds. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999), 1-4.
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and started publishing The Nichi Bei Times in 1898. He also founded the Japanese American
Industrial Corporation (Nichi Bei Kangyo Sha), a worker-dispatching company, and Nichi Bei
Bank, both of which financed the establishment of Yamato Colony.
Abiko published his own thoughts on the “permanent settlement (Dochaku Eijyu Ron)”
in the Nichi Bei Times to encourage Japanese seasonal wage laborers to join his Yamato Colony
project. Abiko’s ideal of permanent settlement was not necessarily his invention but paralleled
143
the imperialistic mood of Japan at that time. Following his thought, Yamato Colony had two
144
distinctive characteristics: first, all the Japanese farmers in Yamato Colony were land owners;
second, Japanese settlers in the colony never started a business which might threaten American
merchants in neighboring Livingstone. Both of these two characteristics were ideal because
Abiko wanted Japanese immigrants to fit into the mainstream of American society smoothly and
to become good citizens of the United States. Cultivating wasteland, which white Americans left
Ichioka, The Issei, 146-150.
143
Kozo Ikemoto mentioned that a fictional character in Wadatsumi, Yasushi Inoue’s novel published in the
144
1970s, might be modeled after Kyutaro Abiko. The character is Jyuro Soejima who runs a Japanese-language
newspaper named Shintairiku (The New Continent) in the United States set in August in 1908. In the novel,
another character tells Soejima “Your story of Yamato colony has long past. It has been more than ten years
since the first time you told me that.” Responding to this, Soejima says;
Colony, colony, Japanese colony. I would like to make an ideal colony even if it is tiny. This country
(the United States) is indeed a foreign country for us but is so tolerant that I can have the dream. Also,
it has lands. I believe that there are white people who would support my project of making a colony.
Some whites are very praiseworthy to the level that Japanese can never be. The word of colony never
comes with any negative implications. We are not immigrants but colonizers. I clearly name the land
Japanese colony. Yamato colony sounds fine. Because it is a Japanese colony, Yamato colony is
connected to Japan steadily. Because it is colonization, it is not a question whether we return to Japan
before dying or not. Everybody is going to die in the colony.
As Ikemoto argued, it is not sure if the thought expressed through the mouth of Jyuro Soejima is identical to
that of Kyutaro Abiko. However, it is reasonable to assume that Inoue modeled Jyuro Soejima after Kyutaro
Abiko because all of The New Continent, the time set in the novel, and Yamato colony seem to be derived from
Kyutaro’s personal history.
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abandoned, and purchasing commodities at American-owned stores, contributed to the American
economy. Abiko thought, by such an effort of assimilation in Japanese communities, anti-
Japanese sentiment would eventually subside, and Japanese could acquire full membership in
society. In short, Abiko’s “permanent settlement” was influenced by the expansionism of
Imperial Japan but a softened version of it without direct territorial ambition of acquiring the U.
S. land, at least, at its face value. Although all the Japanese immigrants did not internalize the
expansionist ideology of Imperial Japan, some, especially Issei, had a strong psychological
connection with Japan and regarded their land in the United States as colony. In that sense, the
depiction of land war against Japanese is not a total false accusation, though it is unnecessarily
exaggerated.
Regardless of Abiko’s and Japanese communities’ intentions, the American society
viewed Japanese people as potential threat. Imperial Japan's potential power and territorial
ambition became apparent after the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 and the annexation of the
Korean peninsula in 1910. Japan and the United States' interests in China and the Pacific Ocean
were confrontational. In addition to such an international political context, Japanese immigrant
workers, who replaced Chinese cheap labor force, were actual threats to working class whites on
the West Coast. The American Federation of Labor played a leading role in the anti-immigration
movement from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries.
145
Under the very sensitive situation, Japanese immigrant communities became obsessed with
their images in American movies. The reputation of Japanese people was not just a matter of
pride for them. It was what Japanese immigrants needed to pay attention to for their daily safety
Ichioka, The Issei, 91-92.
145
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in the United States. Japanese immigrants cared how they looked to the mainstream society
because they were concerned with minimizing the risk of lynching and discriminatory treatment.
For the elite segment of Japanese society, who reiterated in Japanese-language newspapers that
Japanese immigrants should behave themselves, Hayakawa’s character was problematic
precisely because it risked their established reputation.
Getting Rid of Sinister Images of Japanese
Japanese immigrant communities on the West Coast tried their best to minimize the
exposure of such anti-Japanese movies to the general public in the United States. The first
channel they used to remove the films from the theaters was administrative authorities. The
consulates of Japan in California often complained about the anti-Japanese films to local police
and public prosecutors’ offices under the pressure of Japanese immigrant societies. For instance,
Consul General Ota in San Francisco told the Strand Theater exhibiting Who Is Your Servant?
through police and public prosecutors that the film fed into an anti-Japanese atmosphere and
warned the theater that the consulate would sue the theater if they kept exhibiting the film. In
146
addition to the public sector of Japanese government, Japanese immigrants took advantage of
their Christian network in the United States. In the case of Shadows of the West in 1920, Japanese
immigrants even sent a telegraph to the United States Department of State via Reverend Paul B.
Waterhouse, a representative of the American Missionary Association who spent seven years in
Japan. Local Japanophiles with middle-class morals like Waterhouse were points of contact for
147
“Ota soryoji, hainichi katsukga kougi” The Shin Sekai, May 1, 1920.
146
The Shin Sekai, October 8, 1920: Noriko Asato, Teaching Mikadoism: The Attack on Japanese Language
147
Schools in Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 58.
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Japanese immigrants to the mainstream American society. A well-known sympathizer for Japan
in San Francisco referred to as Mrs. Barnett in the Shin Sekai played a bridging role when a local
theater in Sacramento screened The Curse of Iku in 1917. Upon the request of Japanese
immigrants, Mrs. Barnett explained the disadvantage the film might cause Japanese people to a
California State Senator in Sacramento and even met the theater owner. As a result of her
activity, the theater stopped the screening of the film in two days.
148
There is, however, no evidence that such governmental or political pressure worked
out in general. It is reasonable to assume that such political pressure from Japanese communities
could not get rid of all the anti-Japanese movies from theaters because there was no reason to
ban commercial activities as long as they met moral standards of middle-class Protestantism.
Since 1907, when Chicago enacted the first film censorship law in the United States, cities and
states made a local censorship board with various rules and standards. These censor boards
usually represented the mainstream Protestant moral norms and banned some anti-Japanese
movies regardless of Japanese interests. However, Japanese-language newspapers repeatedly
149
reported that some anti-Japanese films were banned as if that was an outcome of Japanese
people’s effort.
150
Being aware of the uselessness of their approaches, Japanese communities changed their
strategy and began a minor and local negotiations. They negotiated with censor boards and local
theater owners for more minor manipulation of film texts. In case of The Curse of Iku, Kyuin
“Hainichiga kinshi,” The Shin Sekai, September 16, 1917.
148
Robert Fisher, “Film censorship and progressive reform: the National Board of Censorship of Motion
149
Pictures, 1909-1922,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 4: 2 (1975), 143-156.
“Hainichi ga bosshu,” The Shin Sekai, June 17, 1918.
150
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Okina, a Japanese novelist and poet known for his “literature theory on migrated land,” with
Thomas Kurihara, a Japanese actor who appeared in the film, went to a local theater in Oakland
requesting that two scenes in the film be deleted. One of the two scenes Okina and Kurihara
requested to remove was an inflammatory speech by a senator stirring up anger and fear against
Japanese people. The newspaper article reports that the theater agreed with removing the two
scenes and that the owner would pay more attention to prevent this kind of issue in future. Their
effort can be regarded as a success because such a generous treatment by the owner, probably
thanks to the visit of the actor himself, was very rare. Many theaters did not make such a
preferable decision for Japanese immigrants. When a local theater in Fresno exhibited The Cheat,
Japanese people there first requested the theater to get rid of the scene in which Sessue
Hayakawa brands the white woman on her back with the heated seal. The theater refused the
request but decided to “flash” the scene. According to a newspaper which reports the theater’s
decision as a sympathetic treatment, “flash” is a silent-era technique used to speed up the reel.
By speeding up the film reel, audiences could hardly see what exactly was going in the flashed
scenes. There is no evidence about whether the theater kept “flashing” the sensational scene,
151
which must have been a great dreadful attraction for an audience seeking sinister Orientals. The
board of censorship in Chicago did not censor the senator’s aggressive speech scene, while it
ordered cuts to many other scenes in the film. Since the intense expression of antiforeignism in
152
the scene was an approved by the authority, there was no reason for the theater to keep the
promise. Thus, Japanese communities’ negotiation with local theaters to minimize American
“Chiito ni tsuite,” The Shin Sekai, January 28, 1916.
151
“Iku no noroi,” The Shin Sekai, September 10, 1917.
152
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people’s exposure to negative images of Japanese people in film resulted to minor successes in
areas where Japanese people lived but did not influenced the American discourse in general.
For the Japanese immigrant communities, the most certain and reliable means to fight
against anti-Japanese movies was controlling Japanese actors in the American movie industry.
Among these anti-Japanese movies, The Curse of Iku is the prime example that provoked as
much anger and criticism among Japanese local elites as The Cheat did and that embodies the
desperate effort of Japanese immigrant communities. The Curse of Iku, in which the madness and
curse of a Japanese prince named Iku drives the narrative, depicts Japanese people as fanatic and
crazy. Carroll, an American sailor rescued on the coast of Japan (Frank Borzage), becomes a
friend of Iku, a Japanese prince (Thomas Kurihara). Since Americans are forbidden to enter the
county, the sailor is sentenced to torture. However, he manages to escape from the country with
Omi-san, Iku’s sister (Tsuru Aoki). Bearing Carroll’s blame, Iku is sentenced to death. He dies
cursing Carroll, who he thinks betrayed their friendship and kidnapped his younger sister. Half a
century later, Iku the Third (Thomas Kurihara) goes to the United States to study and falls in love
with a woman who is the fiancé of the Carroll’s descendant. Remembering the bond between
their ancestors, Iku the Third kidnaps the woman, brings her to Japan, and forces her to become
his slave. The descendant of Carroll (Borzage) comes to Japan to rescue his fiancé. Iku the Third
is killed in the struggle between them, and the curse of Iku finally disappears. As seen in the plot,
the film is full of racist views on Japanese people and their society: they are depicted as illogical
people who are entrapped to superstition in a self-enclosed feudalistic order.
The Curse of Iku was released in Los Angeles in August 1917 before its national release in
1918. The Japanese community in Los Angeles reacted to the film just after its release and began
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to criticize Thomas Kurihara, who played the role of Iku. The bashing of Kurihara in the Rafu
Shimpo was as harsh as that of Hayakawa. Some articles even defined Kurihara as a hikokumin,
or a national traitor, and insisted that he be punished. As Hayakawa did, Kurihara also
153
apologized and showed his regret on being in part of the movie on ethnic newspapers. The attack
on Kurihara was solved in a pretty interesting manner. In the following month, September 1917,
Japanese-language newspapers announced the establishment of the Japanese Movie Actors' Club
in Los Angeles. The club was for Japanese actors to share business information so that they
154
would not work for anti-Japanese movies in the future without knowing that at its face value.
However, the establishment of the club was not simply an outcome of the Japanese actors'
voluntary effort. Local Japanese business persons, journalists for the Rafu Shimpo, and
government officials of the Japanese Consulate of Los Angeles played central roles in
establishing the club rather than actors. The solution was a result of such elites’ struggle to
control the images of Japan through Japanese actors in the American film industry. At that time,
expanding Japanese communities, not just in Los Angeles but many on the West Coast, were in
high demand of Japanese halls where local Japanese could have theatrical performances and
community events. According to newspaper articles, Japanese immigrants in Los Angeles had
been using either Elk’s Hall or Yamato Hall (established in 1915) for their ethnic events.
However, both of them became unavailable to Japanese people, as they were purchased in the
mid 1910s. This situation encouraged Japanese immigrants in the LA region to construct their
own hall. The newly established Japanese Movie Actors' Club was forced to promise to rent a
The Shin Sekai, August 24, 1917; The Shin Sekai, August 27, 1917; The Shin Sekai, August 30, 1917.
153
The Shin Sekai, September 11, 1917; The Shin Sekai, September 13, 1917.
154
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room in the new Japanese hall when it was realized. The forced commitment shows Japanese
societies' desire to put Japanese actors in Hollywood under their control. The Japanese Consulate
of Los Angeles attended the meeting, in which the agreement was made, and his speech
appreciating the actors' voluntary effort of solving the problem was printed in the article. Most of
the Japanese actors active in the American film industry attended the meeting. However, Thomas
Kurihara, the cause of the bash of The Curse of Iku, did not seem to be at the meeting. Instead,
Frank Tokunaga, another Japanese actor in Hollywood at that time, made a speech in which he
emphasized the importance of working for the Japanese nation. In short, the Japanese Movie
Actors' Club was not a voluntary organization for the actors initiated by themselves. Rather, it
was a controlling mechanism so that local Japanese immigrant elites could regulate the image of
Japan by pressuring Japanese actors in American movies.
In 1918, the following year, the Japanese Movie Actors’ Club ordered the 27 members of
the club (including non-actors) not to work for anti-Japanese movies. Even after the
155
establishment of the Japanese Movie Actors' Club, Japanese immigrant communities could not
prevent Japanese movie actors entirely from appearing in what Japanese immigrant society
defined as anti-Japanese films. For example, Yukio Aoyama appeared in Who Is Your Servant?
describing the espionage of Japanese officers. Since the movie is lost, the plot is available only
through a review in a film magazine. According to it, the film is a love story between Clifford
Bruce, a lieutenant of the U. S. Navy, and Madeline Bancroft, a daughter of his commanding
officer. While the Navy accuses Clifford of the theft of a plan of a new weapon, Madeline finds
that her Japanese servant is guilty of the theft. Meanwhile, a Japanese battleship is visiting the
The Shin Sekai, July 6, 1918.
155
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harbor and they form a conspiracy against the U. S. Navy. Madeline successfully returns the plan
to her father Admiral Bancroft proving Clifford’s innocence. Released from the Navy, Clifford
marries Madeline at the end of the film. The Japanese society criticized Aoyama for appearing
156
in Who Is Your Servant? so harshly that he told his excuse to a local Japanese-language
newspaper and a national paper in Japan.
157
However, generally speaking, Japanese society's bashing of Japanese actors paid off.
Japanese people in the American film industry learned from the previous bashings to be more
cautious of the plots and began to avoid potentially dangerous roles. Among Japanese actors who
were active in Hollywood movie industry in the 1910s and 1920s, Hayakawa was the one who
could control his professional career to his will the most. He established his production company
and could choose the roles he played on screen in 1919. Half of his roles were non-Japanese to
avoid criticism. When he played Japanese characters, he often used intentionally-wrong names
for his characters to keep a chance to insist that the movie didn't represent the real Japan. Also,
some movies were re-edited not to hurt Japanese movie-goers. In the re-edited version of The
Cheat released in 1918, Hayakawa's role was changed to a Burmese merchant, although all the
visual elements remained Japanese. When The Curse of Iku was re-released in 1920, setting was
switched to Malaysia by altering the caption. Other Japanese actors were more cautious. The
filmography of Sojin Kamiyama, a Japanese actor who was active in Hollywood all through the
1920s, is exemplary. After Sessue Hayakawa left Hollywood in 1922, Kamiyama became one of
the most visible Japanese figure in the American film industry. His most famous Mongolian
“Reviews: Who’s Your Servant?,” Exhibitors Herald, February 28, 1920.
156
The Shin Sekai, May 5, 1920; The Shin Sekai, October 11, 1920.
157
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prince role in The Thief of Bagdad (1924) started Kamiyama’s fertile career. He worked for 47
Hollywood movies from 1922 to 1929, but there is no single Japanese character.
158
American film industry continued to make movies with an anti-Japanese taste with Korean,
Chinese or yellow-faced American actors playing Japanese roles for the general public.
Continuing productions of anti-Japanese films is understandable considering the international
situation at that time and the conflict between Japan and the United States over interests in China
and Pacific Ocean. Japanese immigrant communities kept fighting against such movies like
Shadows of the West (1921), Patria (1917), and William Hearst's The Pride of Palomar
159
(1922). However, the production of movies with sinister Japanese characters continued to the
WWII. The representative examples are ruthless and coldblooded Japanese detective (Peter
Lorre) in Mr. Moto movie series from 1937 to 1939 and American-born spy (Harold Huber) in
160
Little Tokyo, U.S.A. in 1942.
161 162
The Japanese immigrants’ control over Japanese actors did not help Japanese people with
their fighting back against Hearst’s propaganda. Fraser Sherman argues that the Hearst’s media
spread anti-Japanese rumors which were not true. Hearst newspapers repeatedly reported Japan’s
Nihon eiga haiyu zenshu: haiyu hen [Dictionary of Japanese Film Actors: Male Actors] (Tokyo: Kinema
158
Junpo, 1979), 165-166.
Leopold Wharton, Theodore Wharton, William Randolph Hearst, Patria, directed Leopold Wharton,
159
Theodore Wharton, William Randolph Hearst, 1917.
Sol M. Wurtzel, Think Fast, Mr. Moto, director Norman Foster, 1937; Sol M. Wurtzel, Thank You, Mr.
160
Moto, director Norman Foster, 1937; John Stone and Sol M. Wurtzel, Mr. Moto's Gamble, directed James
Tinling, 1938; Sol M. Wurtzel, Mr. Moto Takes a Chance, director Norman Foster, 1938; Sol M. Wurtzel,
Mysterious Mr. Moto, director Norman Foster, 1938; Sol M. Wurtzel, Mr. Moto's Last Warning, director
Norman Foster, 1939; John Stone, Mr. Moto in Danger Island, Herbert I. Leeds, 1939; Sol M. Wurtzel, Mr.
Moto Takes a Vacation, director Norman Foster,1939.
Bryan Fory, Little Tokyo, U.S.A., directed Otto Brower, 1942.
161
Alan Gevinson eds., American Film Institute Catalog, Whithing Our Gates: Ethnicity in American Feature
162
Films, 1911-1960 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 672-675.
!84
territorial and economic invasions in North America. For example, in 1912, they reported that
“the Japanese were establishing a colony in Magdalena Bay” and “had 75,000 soldiers stationed
in Baja,” and in 1915, that “the Japanese ship Asama, on a mission against German ships in the
Pacific, ran aground in Turtle Bay.” The rumor evolved to the point that “the Japanese [were]
mining Turtle Bay, establishing a radio station, landing 4,000 Japanese troops and even crossing
the border from Mexico to invade.” In this context, he argues, the comical story of Patria was
163
believable at that time. Patria is a fifteen-chapter serial in 1917, produced by Cosmopolitan
Production, Hearst’s film company, in which Japanese settlers and Mexicans across the border to
invade the United States. As the story reveals, although Japanese people’s purchase of land was
prohibited by the law, the fear of Japanese people’s economic invasion was real, at least, to the
extent that it burns wide when Hearst’s yellow journalism put fuel on the fire. The malevolent
reference to Japan in the film was problematized by President Wilson himself, who happened to
watch some episodes. From June to October 1917, the Wilson administration had been
proactively discussing with the Hearst’s film company to remove the references to Japan in the
film.

As mentioned above, Japan and the United States were on the same side during WWI.
164
Thus, the Wilson administration needed to care the image of its alley and requested the Hearst’s
company to cut the film several times. The literal reference to Japan was removed from the film,
but audiences could easily associate visual representations in the film with Japan because the
villain wore Japanese kimono and committed hara-kiri.
165
Fraser A. Sherman, Screen Enemies of the American Way: Political Paranoia About Nazis, Communists,
163
Saboteurs, Terrorists and Body Snatching Aliens in Film and Television (Jefferson: McFarland, 2011), 29.
Louis Pizzitola, Hearst Over Hollywood: Power, Passion, and Propaganda in the Movies (New York:
164
Columbia University Press, 2002),153 -161.
Ibid., 159.
165
!85
The Pride of Palomar also depicts white Americans’ concern regarding land in the United
States. Mike Farrell, the protagonist of the film, is a war veteran back from Siberia. He is a son
of a Spanish don who owns a ranch, Palomar, but finds the ranch belongs to John Parker’s when
he returns. Parker is trying to sell Palomar to Okada, “a Japanese potato baron who desires the
land for a colonization scheme.” While Mike falls in love with Parker's daughter, Okada
166
attacks Mike. The daughter nurses Mike, and the couple finally regains the ranch. Compared to
the grandiose story in Patria, The Pride of Palomar depicts a more realistic plan that Japanese
immigrants would carry out to enhance their power in the United States.
Warner Orland, a Swedish American film actor who started his career in the early
1910s and became a star as Chinese detective Charlie Chan in the 1930s, played a Japanese
villain both in Patria and The Pride of Palomar. In case of Shadows of the West, another anti-
Japanese propaganda western film , Koreans play Japanese roles. Obviously, Japanese
167 168
immigrant communities could not force the actors in the films who were not associated with the
ethnic communities to apologize or pledge not to appear in such films. Beside the middle-class
moral discourse which was offended by depiction of excess violence and brutality, the only way
left for Japanese people was to attack the film text. Japanese ethnic papers emphasized that the
film was far from flawless even for the mainstream American audience. According to the papers,
the propagandistic intention in Shadows of the West was so obvious that Americans
problematized the film, and the box office of the film was poor. Japanese newspapers mockingly
Alan Gevinson eds., American Film Institute Catalog, Within Our Gates: Ethnicity in American Feature
166
Films, 1911-1960 (Berkeley & Los Angeles:, University of California Press, 1997), 792.
Gevinson eds., Within Our Gates, 907.
167
“Hainichi sanmon shosetsu: seibu no anei,” The Shin Sekai, November 24, 1920.
168
!86
reported the unpopularity of such anti-Japanese films and marked them as down-market
pleasures which educated middle-class Americans never enjoy.
169
Interpretative Appropriation
The Japanese immigrants' constant objection against the anti-Japanese movies invokes
another question: could Japanese people enjoy American movies without anti-Japanese
elements? Although ethnically closed screening of imported Japanese movies became the
majority of film culture in the 1920s, this does not mean that access to American movies was
fully shut out. Japanese immigrants continued to go to white-owned theaters, enjoy fan practices,
and sometimes write critical reviews as Americans did. The campaign against anti-Japanese
movies is the most visible in ethnic papers because it directly influenced their security.
However, the social, political, and economic conditions, in which Japanese immigrant was
placed, could affect their reception of American movies in general. For example, Tsurunoko's
review comparing Bound in Morocco and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court can be
understood as a criticism of the racism associated with American Imperialism: by referring to
Twain's satirical unilateral gaze on the contemporary South/ sixth-century England, the critic
might have strategically highlighted the American colonial view looking down on Morocco in
the film. This interpretation might be a little too speculative, but, it is reasonable to understand
Japanese immigrants' reception of American movies in the same context that this chapter so far
“Hainichi katsudo ouzon,” The Shin Sekai, November 20, 1920; “Hainichi eiga seibu no anei ha beikoku no
169
chijyoku,” The Shin Sekai, November 29, 1920: “Rei no Hasuto no hainichi eiga,” The Shin Sekai, December
3, 1922; “Haibniuchi eiga wo dai kougeki,” The Shin Sekai, January 28, 1923; “Daitan kiwamaru hainichi
katsuga,” The Shin Sekai, Feburuary 15, 1923.
!87
used to understand the campaign against anti-Japanese movies. The rest of this chapter discusses
an interpretative discourse, which was distinctive to Japanese immigrant communities.
An article written by Chuei Okubo, a Japanese farmer in California, published in a
literary magazine, Shukaku, which means Harvest in Japanese, is one of the most typical
examples showing a characteristic peculiar to Japanese immigrants. In his article, he mentions
Wells Fargo , an American western film by Frank Lloyd in 1937. The film depicts Ramsey
170
MacKay, an employee of the Wells Fargo company, who travels between the East and West
Coast for the company’s business and tracks his contributions to the Union in the American Civil
War. Okubo watched the film probably in San Francisco and wrote down his impression of the
movie. what is remarkable about Okubo’s review is his complete indifference to the main
attractions of this big budget western film, such as Wells Fargo. Instead, he focuses on the lives
of the pioneers, relating them to those of Japanese immigrants. His article reads:
Images of pioneer(s) who disappeared bleeding and sweating strongly struck me when I
watched a film, Wells Fargo, the other day. The souls of tremendous numbers of pioneers
whose names and being were forgotten are sunk under the earth of great San Francisco,
which we are proud of to the world today. The pioneers in California are rarely alive, but
many pioneers in the Japanese community are still alive. We should record the fighting
history of such pioneers in the first page of immigrant literature.
171
Wells Fargo, director Frank Lloyd, 1937.
170
Chūei Okubo, "Notebook," Harvest 4 (Los Angeles: Bungei Renmei, 1938), 18-20.
171
!88

This is indeed a strange observation, given that there are only a few scenes depicting anonymous
construction. Moreover, they are nothing but transitions between eye-catching spectacular
scenes, ones which have almost nothing to do with the main plot, the protagonist’s romance and
family issues. Instead, Okubo acknowledges “the souls of tremendous numbers of pioneers
whose names and being were forgotten” and emphasizes them as the most impressive things in
the film. In fact, “tremendous numbers of pioneers whose names and being were forgotten” are
not so much foregrounded in the film. There are some scenes depicting anonymous construction
workers who dig the ground to establish a telegraph station and wire networks. However, these
are merely inserted between the scenes that are part of the main plot. The stagecoach that the
protagonist is aboard rapidly passes by the anonymous workers whose importance is not
dramatically emphasized. The workers are part of a background landscape which is supposed to
highlight the protagonist. However, Okubo shed light on such anonymous characters and, on
behalf of Japanese immigrant farmers, even tries to inherit the history of white settlers by saying
“[t]he pioneers in California are rarely alive, but many pioneers in the Japanese community are
still alive.”
!89
Figure 3: Images of White Settlers (Wells Fargo)
! !
! !
Okubo’s response goes beyond mere nostalgia or assimilation. It is obvious that he did
not indulge in a nostalgic longing for Japan. To some extent, his statement looks like an act of
assimilation into the mainstream American history because he places his ethnic community in the
history of white pioneers. However, his behavior is much more complex than simply placing
himself within the mainstream American history. Otherwise, he would simply allow himself to
be seduced into enjoying the main plot of the film rather than paying attention to the background
extras. In other words, there are two characteristics which make Okubo’s impression distinctive
!90
and peculiar: first, he associates the Japanese community with white pioneers in the film; second,
despite the first characteristic, he ignores the narrative foregrounding of the white pioneer
protagonist and focuses on trivial elements in the background landscape.
The socio-economic nature of Japanese immigrant communities and the venues for
film screenings before WWII, to some extent, explains the first characteristic of Okubo’s peculiar
reading. As discussed in the previous chapters, the majority of Japanese immigrants worked in
the agricultural industry and lived in rural areas. Distributors supplied movies to these rural
communities so that Japanese immigrants could enjoy in their work and living places. There are
many recollections indicating that Japanese immigrant workers watched movies when they were
actually on farms. One Japanese man in Seattle recalls that “rōkyoku, kodan (another form of
oral performance telling stories less musical than rōkyoku), and Japanese movies were the
amusement after hard piecework” at a sugar beet field in Ogden, California, from 1915 to
1916. Another Japanese man who worked at Japanese-owned hop fields in Independence and
172
Salem, Oregon, in the 1910s and 1920s, witnessed farm workers enjoying movies overnight in
large farms of 500 to 600 acres or more in addition to gambling and prostitution. Watching
173
movies was not always associated with urban experience for Japanese communities. Thus,
Okubo’s sympathy with white laborers in the film can be understood as a collective response of
the Japanese immigrant farmers, although Okubo himself was an educated figure who frequently
published on ethnic papers.
Ito, Zoku Hokubei Hyakunen Zakura, 566−567.
172
Ibid., 610.
173
!91
The Okubo’s focus on the white laborers in the film was consistent with the general
discourse of Issei Japanese immigrants. Japanese immigrants tried to “whiten” themselves by
connecting their ethnic identities with the prototype of Anglo-American settlers. For example,
174
a newspaper article likened Yamato Colony, a Christian Japanese farming community established
by Kyutaro Abiko, to the construction of the Plymouth by the Pilgrim Fathers. While such a
175
racial discourse fashioning Japanese immigrants’ whiteness had been consistent from the 1910s,
the Back-to-the-farm movement originated in 1935 also shapes Okubo’s reception. The Back-to-
the-farm movement aimed to have young Nisei generation return from the cities to the
agricultural communities that Issei generation created with great burden. Issei community leaders
thought agricultural business was the life-line for Japanese communities and began to educate
Nisei generation of the importance. Thus, Okubo’s peculiar sympathy with the white laborers
176
in Wells Fargo was a product of the Issei Japanese community’s collective anxiety and intention
to reserve a safe room as farmers in the United States.
The Japanese immigrant communities’ assimilating discourse to the mainstream White-
dominant society of the United States with white settlers, to some extent, justifies Okubo’s focus
on background extras: he and his fellow farmers were workers “whose names and being were
forgotten” as the anonymous workers were. However, Okubo could have been more sympathetic
with Ramsey MacKay, the protagonist of the film. MacKay leaves his wife in the east and travels
to California, which was a wasteland in the mid nineteenth century, for business with the Wells
Fargo company. Okubo could have identified himself with MacKay whose situation was similar
Azuma, Between Two Empires, 100.
174
“Kaitakusha no huntouni,” The Shin Sekai, October 29, 1922.
175
Azuma, Between Two Empires, 114-118.
176
!92
to his though MacKay’s success and adventure are exaggerated. The audience’s self-
identification with the protagonists is the key in Hollywood movies. Hollywood westerns were
made for ordinary people to trace the adventures of great protagonists for pleasure. If so, did the
anti-Japanese sentiment in society prevent Okubo from enjoying the narrative pleasure featuring
the white protagonist? Although this sounds reasonable, it cannot explain why Okubo focused on
the anonymous white construction workers.
Class consciousness of Japanese immigrants in general explains Okubo’s intentional
ignorance of the main plot. Ramsey MacKay, the protagonist, exercises mobility and economic
power: he works for Wells Fargo and travels across the continent for the interest of the bank.
Even with the Hollywood movies’ continuity editing which makes spectators identify themselves
with the protagonists, the depiction of wealthy urban lifestyle in the film might have attracted
audience in rural areas but, at the same time, could cause a twisted response like Okubo’s. Issei
Japanese farmers who settled in rural communities in the 1930s used to be seasonal physical
laborers when they first entered the United States. Seasonal muscle-labor jobs required workers
to live in rural camps where amusement was scarce and to move from one place to another
seasonally. Started by former Japanese students in the 1880s, businesses that deployed Japanese
workers sent newly arriving Japanese immigrants to rural areas regardless of whether the jobs
involved construction labor or seasonal work on farms. After Japanese immigrant communities
began to switch their goal from dekasegi to settling in the United States and emphasizing the
importance of agriculture for their permanent residence and contribution to the local economy at
around 1907, as the testimonies above show, Japanese immigrants began to leave temporary
construction jobs. However, this did not mean that they entirely disappeared from muscle labor
!93
such as construction, farming, forestry, cannery factories, and fishery. Thus, considering the
working conditions of Japanese immigrant workers before WWII, Okubo, as a representative of
Japanese communities, dared to identify his communities with white pioneers doing muscle labor
in the film, ignoring wealthy Ramsey MacKay.
Ramsey MacKay is not the only character that Okubo neglects in his review. He
ignores marginalized characters like Chinese workers and a native American character who
accompanied MacKay on their journey between the West and East Coast. He could have been
sympathetic with these characters, whose socio-political situations were similar to Okubo's. His
impression could have been sorrowful and sympathetic toward these characters who were
oppressed in the white-dominant society. The apparatus theories in film studies explains the
orientation in Okubo’s reception. Film theorists apply Plato’s cave allegory to cinema and
discuss that spectators identifies them with a specific ideological stand point provide through the
identification with camera lens and protagonists. According to the apparatus theories, specters
177
of Wells Fargo are structurally alienated from a standpoint sympathetic with the marginalized
characters such as the Chinese workers and the native American in the film. However, we
already know that Okubo focused on the marginalized white construction workers. The apparatus
theories cannot fully explain Okubo’s reception. The Issei racial discourse is the key to
understand Okubo’s inconsistent interests in marginalized characters. Insisting Japanese
immigrants’ “whiteness” required “the scapegoating of non-Europeans as America’s racial/
National Others.” While appealing the potential of Japanese people’s assimilation to the
178
Jean-Louis Baudry and Alan Williams, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus” Film
177
Quarterly, V ol. 28, No. 2 (University of California Press, Winter, 1974-1975), pp. 39-47
Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (Oxford:
178
Oxford University Press, 2005), 100.
!94
mainstream American society, Japanese immigrants distanced themselves from minor ethnic
groups such as Chinese. Thus, Okubo’s focus on white laborers and ignorance of ethnic
minorities in the film, again, represent a standard collective response of Japanese immigrant
communities.
Okubo’s impression of Wells Fargo was formed as a node of various social, economic,
and cultural parameters: to some extent, the agricultural characteristics of the Japanese
immigrant community explain his identification with construction laborers; anti-Japanese
sentiment justifies his avoiding full commitment to the narrative pleasure of the white
protagonist; the ideological formation of audience subjectivity of Hollywood movies might
explain Okubo’s excitement in general. However, even all of these arguments so far do not fully
explain the uniqueness of Okubo’s text, especially his emphasis on the landscape and the
marginalized background characters in Wells Fargo. His words, “[t]he souls of tremendous
numbers of pioneers whose names and being were forgotten are sunk under the earth of great San
Francisco, which we are proud of to the world today,” shows his strong and peculiar
psychological attachment to the land of San Francisco and anonymous white settlers. Anti-
Japanese sentiment might explain his ignorance of the main plot in the film, but it does not
explain why Okubo had this peculiar way of reception of the movie. Why did he pay attention to
the extras, which were supposed to support the leading characters? In order to answer this
question, this chapter introduces Japanese immigrants’ amateur literature practice as a discursive
condition of sensibility, which led Okubo to have such an impression.
Conclusion
!95
Commercial advertisements of white-owned movie theaters, positive reviews of
Hollywood movies, and enthusiasm for stars found in readers’ columns exemplify that
Hollywood movies were primarily entertainment for Japanese immigrants. While being attracted
Hollywood stars, Japanese immigrants also attacked Hollywood films. The social and political
conditions, in which Japanese immigrants were placed, explain most of the various responses of
the ethnic group to the Hollywood films. Under the anti-Japanese sentiment in the 1910s, the
elite segment of the immigrant communities made great effort to get rid of the sinister images of
Japanese for their security. Even Okubo’s strange interpretation of Wells Fargo can be
understood through the same lens. In order to assimilate into the mainstream American society,
Japanese immigrants “whitened” themselves distancing themselves from other minority groups.
Therefore, Okubo overlapped the history of Japanese pioneers with the marginal white-settler
characters in the film, while other marginal Chinese and Native American characters. What is
especially interesting about Okubo’s reception is the interpretative subjectivity he expressed in
his review. This does not mean that Okubo was free from any ideologies: his argument is, in fact,
conditioned to the collective interests of Japanese immigrant communities at that time. However,
Okubo successfully appropriated the American mythology embedded in the western film beyond
the binary of escapism and assimilation. !96
Chapter 4: Waka Poems and Everyday Life
Introduction
The previous chapters examined the meaning of moviegoing for Japanese immigrants
and what conditioned their reception of movies. On one side, Japanese immigrants flocked to
white-owned nickelodeon theaters, which were open to ethnic and/or cultural heterogeneity. On
the other hand, Japanese immigrant communities circulated and exhibited imported reels from
Japan within their ethnically-closed places. This does not mean that there was a clear border line
between American movies in heterogeneous setting and Japanese cultural practices for nostalgic
pleasure. Okubo’s review of Wells Fargo goes beyond the line. His reception can be understood
as an expression of Japanese communities’ attempt to “whiten” the ethnic group. However, his
obsession with landscape seems distinctive and not reducible to social parameters. This chapter
examines an intangible realm of cultural dynamism by focusing on amateur waka poems
Japanese immigrant published on ethnic papers. As film texts have intertextuality with other
cultural practices such as theater and literature, movie-goers are also a node of various cultural
practices he/she has experienced. Thus, exploring Japanese immigrants’ subjective worldview
and sensibility must help us understand how cultures guided the peculiar orientation in Okubo’s
review.
Everyday Practice of Amateur Literature
Preceding research shows that various Japanese literature practices on the West Coast
started from the very beginning of Japanese immigration to the United States. The immigrants
!97
established multiple newspapers in Seattle and San Francisco as early as the 1880s. Many such
Japanese-language newspapers in the early stage were immature and merely propagandistic
expressions of their political opinions. Besides such opinions, various forms of amateur poems
such as kanshi (classic Chinese poems), waka (Japanese traditional short-verse poems featuring
expressions of seasons), dodoitsu (rhythmic phrases) were published. According to Yoshitaka
Hibi and Mariko Mizuno, among many Japanese-language newspapers started in the 19th
century, The Shinonome Zasshi ( ), The Soko Shimpo ( ), The Kinmon Nippo
( ), The Soko Jiji ( ), The Japan Herald ( ), and The Shin
Sekai ( ) had columns for amateur people to publish their literary works.
179
Amateur literature circles were not formed until the first decade of the twentieth
century. Yone Noguchi, a Japanese poet who lived with Joaquin Miller in the mountainside of
Oakland, California, published several collections of poetry in English in the last decade of the
19th century. Isen Kanno, another poet who also lived at “the Heights” that Miller made for
himself, established his career as a poet and playwright following Noguchi’s success.
180
However, these Japanese poets, who were recognized and gained reputation in the English-
speaking world, were separated from amateur literature practices in the Japanese immigrant
communities. Frankly speaking, most Japanese immigrants including many intellectuals were not
good at speaking English. Newspapers encouraged amateur posts to know and criticize each
other and they began to form amateur literature circles in the twentieth century.
Mizuno, Nikkei Amerikajin no bungaku katsudō, 33.
179
“Nikkei Amerikajin no Bungaku Katsudō,” Zaibei Nihonjin shi (San Francisco: Zaibei Nihonjinkai, 1940),
180
54.
!98
In San Francisco, after the rise and fall of small newspapers in the last two decades of
the nineteenth century, the Shin Sekai and the Nichi Bei Times, started in 1894 and 1899
respectively, became two major papers in the city. Poets who published in the Nichi Bei Times
established a circle for poets named as Kinmon Shikai ( ) around 1905 and it is said that
after Kinmon Shikai, San Francisco literary people began to form various literature
organizations. It was Kyuin Okina that played a central role in forming literature groups in the
Northwest. Okina led amateur poets in Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon, and British Colombia, who
published their works in local newspapers such as the Hokubei Jiji, the Daihoku Nippou, and the
Asahi Shinbun to form Shako-Kai ( ) for tanka poems in 1906, Bungaku Kai ( ) for
novels in 1909, and Kōsuto Kai for tanka in 1910.
181
Among various forms of literatures, waka, or Japanese short-verse poetry, was the most
popular among ordinary immigrant workers. Kanshi, or classic Chinese poems, was popular only
among elite immigrants in the very early stage of Japanese immigration because the art form
requires knowledge of classic Chinese language. Also, shintaishi gained limited popularity
among Japanese immigrants. Shintaishi was a new form of poetry started in the last quarter in the
19th century in Japan when Japanese diligently translated Western poems into Japanese.
Traditional Japanese poetry had a set of strict phonetic rules, but Japanese needed a freer form of
poems for such translated Western poems, which were based on totally different phonetic
rules. Shintaishi, which was first prepared just for translated poems, became popular among
182
Ito, Zoku Hokubei Hyakunen Zakura, 86-88.
181
Dean A. Brink, “The Formation of Allusive Resilience in Waka and Its Relevance to Meiji Shintaishi”
182
Japanese Poeticity and Narrativity Revisited 4, (the Midwest Association for Japanese Literary Studies, 2003),
166-83.
!99
Japanese poets in the 19th century. It was popular on the West Coast in the first few decades but
soon faded out.
183
Why did waka, or Japanese traditional short-verse poems, became most popular among
Japanese immigrants? Scholars points out that they are a quotidian practice of expressing
people’s feelings through representation of landscape. The numbers of syllables that can be
184
used in a single poem is limited to 17 or 31, which are quite short. So, poem-making was not
limited to artists, but ordinary people frequently made poems in daily occasions. In addition,
Japanese short-verse poems require expressing seasonal motifs. Thus, Japanese short-verse poets
necessarily associate their feelings with seasonal landscape. Below are two classic examples.

because the stream is fast
a rock breaks
it into two
the split streams finally
come together, I hope

for you
I go out into spring field
to pick up some young leaves
on my sleeves
snow is falling
Yoshitaka Hibi, “Nikkei amerika imin issei no shinbun to bungaku [Newspapers and Literature of Issei
183
Japanese American Immigrants],” Nihon Bungaku (November, 2004), 23-34.
Ibid., 23-34: Teruko Kumei, “Transformation of Japanese Immigrants in Senryu Poems,” The Japanese
184
Journal of American Studies 16 (2005), 86.
!100
The artistic quality of these poems might be lost in translation because of the language-bound
nature of the art form. But, what I would like to emphasize here is the way the poet expresses his
romantic feelings through a representation of landscape. Although it is not explicit, the two
streams in the first example are a metaphor of the fate of separated lovers. The poet, who might
be one of the couple, hopes that they finally meet together. The word, stream, invokes an image
of summer, which emphasizes the intensity of love between the two. The sentiment expressed in
the later one is also a young couple’s romance, but the taste is totally different. While the former
example shows the intensity of longing in separation, this one shows a more moderate and
comforting feeling. To emphasize this, the poet used the transitional season from winter to
spring. The landscape of nature has been a screen for Japanese short-verse poets, on which they
project their feelings. And, because short-verse poetry was an everyday practice, ordinary
185
Japanese were accustomed to this aesthetics.
In addition to the quotidian nature of the art form, there was another reason that waka
became most popular among Japanese immigrants. They could seduce themselves with a
nostalgic feeling invoked by waka. For example, both Yoshitaka Hibi and Mariko Mizuno argue
that Japanese poets in San Francisco dreamed of an imaginary Japan through their poem-making.
Hibi cites the following two Japanese waka published in the Shin Sekai and insists that Japanese
poets used typical institutionalized phrases and did not see the reality of their living situation.
Steven D. Carter, “Introduction,” Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford: Stanford
185
University Press, 1991), 8-9.
!101

186
spring rain!
while dawn-breaking
cherry blossom falls
By Hibutsu Murai

187
I open all the fusuma doors!
comes in the tatami room
the scent of clothes dried by
midsummer sunshine
By Buken
Both poems refer to things which did not exist in San Francisco. Japan is much more humid than
San Francisco, and the Japanese language has varieties of words and phrases referring to various
types of rain. “Spring rain” in the poem actually does not mean general rain in the spring season,
but, in contrast to other expressions for other types of rains in spring, it signifies misty temporary
rain in April. In conjunction with the expression “cherry blossom falls,” the poem assures readers
that it definitely represents a landscape of early to mid-April. Also, the second poem depicts
cultural artifacts, fusuma and tatami, which Japanese immigrants could hardly acquire on
American soil. Although Hibi argues that Japanese poets gradually shifted to expressing the
reality in the United States from using typical phrases to represent imaginary Japanese
aesthetic , the number of waka depicting the beauty of the Japanese landscape did not decrease
188
The Shin Sekai, April 3, 1900.
186
The Shin Sekai, September 8, 1900.
187
Hibi picks up the following two poems published on the Shin Sekai on November 3, 1906, as examples:
188
lightning/ in the great plains/ of Texas, by Semimaru ( / / ), and why that
much / I feel lonely / at a temporal home/ fall sunset/ in California, by Nakamura in San Francisco / / / / .
!102
in Japanese-language newspapers. Regardless of the invention of other forms of poems such as
shintaishi and proletarian poetry, traditional Japanese short-verse poems enjoyed constant and
decent popularity in Japanese immigrant communities.
Tropes in Waka Poems
The series of conventional usage of specific phrases and institutionalized aesthetics,
which associates the specific signifier with the specific signified, necessarily includes poets in a
universe that conditions poets’ way of thinking. For the quotidian nature of Japanese short-verse
poems which are embedded in everyday practices, poets are not expected to exercise their artistic
freedom. Rather, they are expected to create variations of expression within the established
convention.
Aby Warburg’s pathosformel help us understand the pathetic expression through tropes
in waka poems. Pathosformel is an idea which Warburg tried to visualize in his uncompleted
Mnemosyne Atlas project. Mnemosyne Atlas is a series of wooden panels on which hundreds of
common images – past and contemporary pictures and illustrations from books, magazines, and
newspapers – are arranged and pinned. Each panel tries to materialize a pathosformel, an
emotionally charged visual trope in Western history. The audience of Mnemosyne Atlas can trace
the transmedia and transtemporal linkage of them between the varieties of images on the panel.
According to Giorgio Agamben, it is wrong to understand the intention of Warburg as a
showcase of varieties of iconography in European visual history. Regarding each plate as an
iconographic repertoire mistakenly reduces Warburg’s original ambition into a simple question of
its origin and historical variations. Agamben refuses such a chronological question and
!103
emphasizes the paradigmatic spread of image and knowledge “that is neither inductive nor
deductive but analogical.” A paradigm is neither an origin nor an archetype, which exist before
189
variants a priori. Each entry of a paradigm is not presupposed. Rather, “[t]he paradigmatic case
becomes such by suspending and, at the same time, exposing its belonging to the group, so that it
is never possible to separate its exemplarity from its singularity.”
190
This study assumes such a pathosformel where, as Agamben argues, images have
paradigmatic linkage and operate by themselves, as a methodological tool to analyze Japanese
immigrant reception of cinema. A pathosformel appears in waka poems, which Japanese people
practiced since the eighth century at the latest. There is no single origin of waka poems, but
individual poems created by various poets for more than a millennium constitutes a paradigm, in
which expressions are consistently institutionalized and appropriated. By surveying the common
practice of waka poems among Japanese and examining its local version in the West Coast in the
first half of the twentieth century, this chapter reveals the agency of such dynamism in the
pathosformel of waka poems and its influence on Japanese immigrant reception of American
movies.
One episode published in the Hokubei Jiji, a Seattle-based Japanese language
newspaper, exemplifies the limited range of artistic creativity allowed for amateur poets. A group
of Japanese immigrants boarded the Chicago-maru ship for their trip to Japan at the port of
Tacoma on January 8th, 1913. It took 20 days for Chicago-maru to travel over the Pacific to
Japan. Retsu Kiyosawa, a chief journalist with The Hokubei Jiji, accompanied the group on the
Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things: On Method (New York: Zone Books, 2009), 31.
189
Ibid.
190
!104
ship and reported their everyday life to the newspaper. On January 26th, one day before their
arrival in Japan, they had a farewell party to show their gratitude to the captain and all the other
staff on board and had a banquet with sushi, rice cake, whiskey, wine, sake and distilled water
provided by Japanese chefs. Some participants in the banquet competed to make short-verse
poems to express their excitement. Below are the poems made in the banquet and published in
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the Hokubei Jiji.

I’m proud that
I’m from where
one could see Mt. Fuji
by Mitsuko Yoneyama

from a cup of sake
A scent of Japan
is coming out
by Mitsuko Yoneyama

with Mt. Fuji
in my mind.
I see Mt. Rainier on the New Year’s
Day
by Yurika Fukuda

I’m longing for
Mt. Fuji, cherry blossom,
and red autumn leaves.
by Kyutaro Kido

Kazuo Ito, Zoku Hokubei Hyakunen Zakura, 48-49.
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I live any single day
without resisting
the divine will.
by Kyutaro Kido

I’m looking forward to seeing
my homeland
where Mt. Fuji of my longing exists.
by Midori Fujii

in my first dream this year
the sea of my hometown and
Mt. Fuji appeared
by Hisako Suzuki

on the first day of the year
the spiritual dignity of Mt. Fuji
appears in my eyes
by Teiko Higuchi

for my eyes.
the homeland looks
very foreign
by Koyo Sato

I cannot imagine the day
when I naturalize to the United
States
and raise a flag.
by Koyo Sato
I do not discuss the artistic quality in the 10 poems made by 7 Japanese amateur poets. The
question is how each poem shares a pathosformel associated with the trope of Mt. Fuji. The
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occasion on which these poems were made was a farewell banquet on the night before their
arrival in Japan. Thus, it was expected in the setting to show their gratitude to the effort of staff
on board and to share their climactic excitement. Many of the poems are not skillful pieces of art,
but rather simple straightforward expressions of their feelings. Mt. Fuji plays a central role in
their poem-making as a currency of sentiment. Mt. Fuji, which is a symbolic icon of Japan
among the immigrants, is an appropriate and efficient signifier for the poets to express their
sentiment on the night before their return to their homeland in the limited number of mora they
can use in a single poem. The trope of Mt. Fuji automatically invoked some nostalgic emotion
among the audience; thus, the word is used in 6 among 10 poems above. As Hibi argued about
Japanese poets in San Francisco, the amateur poets on board play with typical conventional
images of Japan rather than verbalizing what they actually saw. According to Kiyosawa’s report
in the Hokubei Jiji, it was on January 27th, the day after the farewell banquet, when the
passengers could see Mt. Fuji for the first time on their journey. Therefore, they did not have to
see Mt. Fuji to write poems about it. By practicing waka, an art form which has strict phonetic
rules and demands a certain linguistic efficiency, amateur poets are necessarily embedded in a
common aesthetic horizon of expectation of Japanese beauty. The subject of traditional Japanese
short-verse poems is subject to the aesthetic tradition of Japan.
Aesthetic Empire
The aesthetic discursive universe of Japanese short-verse poems is not politically
neutral. The Japanese emperor system has occupied the central position in the history of the art
form. The Japanese emperor, who became the symbol of the modern Japanese empire, was
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expected to play the role of shaman to hold annual ceremonies and rituals throughout Japanese
history. From the early middle ages, one of the most important roles of the Emperor, a spiritual
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authority in the country, was to reconcile unforeseeable nature. Nature is, nonetheless to say,
uncontrollable, but people tried every possible means of taming it to feed the themselves. Thus,
making Japanese short-verse poems was an indispensable part of the Emperor’s job, because
being a good poet proves his ability to successfully communicate with nature symbolically.
193
Furthermore, poems made by Emperors were collected and circulated among the Japanese
people. Actually, the two examples of classic waka shown above were made by two Emperors
during the Heian era.
Figure 4: Poems Mourning Meiji Emperor by Japanese
Immigrants
194
!
Tomoko Tani, Tenno Tachi no Waka [Waka Poems of Japanese Emperors] (Tokyo: Kadokawa Gakugei
192
Shuppan, 2008), 17-21.
Ibid., 7-9.
193
“Meiji taitei wo shinobi tatematsurite,” The Shin Sekai, November 3, 1912.
194
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Being an amateur poet of traditional Japanese poetry is not just an individual cultural
practice. Dispending on the situation of creation and reception of waka poems, a personal
pleasure of waka poems can transform into a political action of aesthetic empire of Japan. In the
first half of the twentieth century, Japan displayed its territorial ambitions in Korea, Manchuria,
and China. Even Japanese immigrants in North and South America were embedded in the
expansionist ideology, and the aesthetics of Japanese short-verse poems were utilized as a
symbolic justification of the Japanese invasion. An article in the Shin Sekai, a Japanese language
newspaper in San Francisco, published on November 3rd, 1912, exemplifies how short-verse
poetry contributed to the Japanese empire. The picture in the middle is a wagon bringing the
195
Meiji Emperor’s coffin. Sent from all over the United States, the texts surrounding the picture are
short-verse poems morning the emperor’s death. Benedict Anderson argued that the novel and
the newspaper were key media that enabled people in Europe in the eighteenth century to
imagine nation. A nation is not a material existence, thus its implementation into people’s mind
requires mediation. According to Anderson, “homogenous, empty time” readers began to
imagine through novels and newspapers was the basis for them to enter an imaginary
community. Mitsuhiro Sakaguchi points out that waka poems in Japanese immigrant
196
communities functioned in the same manner: waka poems made the practitioners imagine the
romanticized beauty of Japan in distance and, by doing so, fostered a nationalism among them.
197
This newspaper article example not only endorses Anderson’s argument but also shows the
Ibid.
195
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London:
196
Verso, 1983 [1991]), 24-26.
Mitsuhiro Sakaguchi, Nihonjin Amerika Iminshi [The History of Japanese Immigration to the United States]
197
(Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 2001), 13, 79-81.
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importance of short-verse poetry for the Japanese empire. The novel, in Anderson’s argument,
provides an image of flow of homogenous and continuous time, in which the entire society is
embedded. The Meiji Japanese government utilized waka poems as such a medium to make a
fantasy of national unity by fashioning Meiji Emperor into a generous poet and by
institutionalizing the Utakai Hajime, an annual gathering of poem reading in which selected
amateur poets can show their poems in front of the Emperor. Each single waka poem does not
198
function as an image of “homogenous, empty time” but, as I argued, Japanese short-verse poems
collectively create an aesthetic universe through the conventional tropes.
199
For the Japanese immigrants in the United States, the ideological influence of the
Japanese empire mediated by short-verse poetry was ignorable. According to other newspaper
articles in the 1910s, there were discussions among Japanese immigrant poets weather their
literature practice was “immigrant literature” or “colonial literature.” For us who know the
history between Japan and the United States, the word “colonial literature” sounds quite
awkward. However, some Japanese immigrants in the United States regarded themselves as a
vanguard of Imperial expansion of Japan.

Some novelists and poets went along with the
200
movement. This does not mean that all the Japanese poets in the United States consciously and
strongly associated themselves with the Imperialism. However, a discursive network of such a
cultural sensitivity was prepared in the form of amateur cultural activities as early as in the
Yoshio Kato, Tenno Sei no Genzai [Today’ s Japanese Imperial System] (Tokyo: Nihon Hyoron Sha, 1986),
198
115-116.
Masao Ymashiro confesses his inferiority complex as “a Kibei Nisei who is not fluent in English.” He
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testifies that the complex drove him to study Japanese literature and made him “a patriot:” Masao Yamashiro,
Tooi taigan: aru nisei no kaiso [A Distant Coast: A Memoir by a Kibei Nisei] (Tokyo: Gurobyu, 1984), 74.
Azuma, Between Two Empires, 80-82.
200
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1910s. As discussed in the last chapter, in the late 1930s when Japan entered the war against
China and the totalitarianism rose in Japan, the imagination of nature and landscape
institutionalized in the tradition of Japanese poems were mobilized to justify their political
ideology.
The connection between the ideology of the Japanese empire and short-verse poems can be
observed in various literatures. A book published in 1940 to celebrate the 2600th year of the
Japanese empire’s rule is one such example. Sumiko Miura, a junior student at Compton
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Saturday School, published an essay in which she cites several poems made by the Meiji
emperor to explain Japan’s political situation at that time. Her essay reads:
Japan cannot exist without the Imperial Family. As long as the sun exists for the earth,
the imperial family does for Japan. Meiji emperor made a poem, “Although I believe (the
countries) in the surrounding ocean are friends of mine, why does the ocean storm? ( )” hoping not just a
domestic peace but also a world peace. “The world friendship,” that is the huge ideal of
Japan.
202
The poem of the Meiji emperor cited by Sumiko was made in 1904, the year Japan went to war
against the Russian Empire. The poem was made just before the war and was believed a true
expression of the Meiji Emperor, who lamented the coming war. According to Donald Keen, the
Meiji Emperor himself personally disliked war and the poem expresses his pacifist concern.
203
Kigen Nisen-Roppyakunen Hōshuku Kinen Taikan [Celebration of the 2,600 Years of the Rule of Japanese
201
Emperor] (Los Angeles: Rafu Shinpōsha, 1940).
Ibid., 54.
202
Donald Keene, Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852-1912, (New York: Columbia University
203
Press, 2005), 619-621.
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However, the interpretation of the poem gradually changed from an objective observation of the
surrounding political situation around Japan to criticism of Russia and justification of Japan’s
expansionism. In other words, as Japan became militaristic, the poem was used to criticize
204
other countries who caused the storm over the surrounding ocean. Sumiko’s essay, which cites
several poems written by the Meiji emperor, was under the strong ideological influence that
changed interpretation of the poem and exemplifies how Japanese short-verse poems functioned
in forming the Japanese immigrants’ worldview and how they were utilized to spread ideology
among ordinary people.
So far, I have argued that Japanese short-verse poems were everyday expressions of
feeling through representation of nature and landscape and that the poems necessarily include the
poets in the aesthetic community of the Japanese empire. Considering these facts, making waka
poems in the United States does not mean that Japanese immigrants simply continued their
cultural practice in the homeland. According to Lefebvre’s idea of “production of space,” space
is not just a material extension without any artificial or humane approaches. Thanks to
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quotidian practice of interpretation and reproduction, space reproduces itself, space maintains its
status. Based on Lefebvre’s discussion, W. J. T. Mitchel also points out that landscape
“naturalizes” the imperial and political power structure that produced itself. The conventional
206
representations in wake poems served as a second nature for Japanese immigrants because they
Mitsunori Honma, “Gyosei-ka Yomo no Umi wo Meguru Kōsatsu [On the Meiji Emperor’s Poem, Yomo no
204
Umi],” ICU Comparative Culture 46 (2014-3), 162.
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Donald Nicholson-Smith trans., (Malden: Blackwell Publishing,
205
1991), 26-30.
W.J.T. Mitchell, ”Imperial Landscape.” W.J.T. Mitchell ed., Landscape and Power (Chicago: The
206
University of Chicago Press, 1994), 5-34.
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were deeply embedded in their daily lives and watched the surrounding world through the
cultural lens. However, as Mitchel discusses, the landscape that they recognized was a product of
the convention and the power structure behind it. Japanese immigrants’ daily practice of making
poetry was that of reproducing spaces around them in a way that fit their ideological standpoint.
The poem, “with Mt. Fuji / in my mind / I see Mt. Rainier on the New Year’s Day,”
made by Yurika Fukuda on her way to Japan, is a very typical example of cultural practice that
reshapes and reinterprets the reality of the world. Japanese immigrants in the United States called
Mt. Rainer in Washington, Takoma-Fuji, which means “Mt. Fuji in Tacoma,” because the shape
of the mountains was similar. Mt. Fuji, which had been featured in Japanese short-verse poems
many times in history, had a significant cultural and spiritual value for Japanese, and amateur
poets expressed their nostalgic feelings invoked by Takoma-Fuji. By the act of renaming the
mountain, Japanese people symbolically reshaped or even unintentionally colonized the Western
landscape into a form fitting their political ideological position.
Therefore, making Japanese short-verse poems was not just about nostalgia. To some
extent, any kinds of cultural activities of Japanese immigrants in the United States had an
escapist nature as Ogihara argued about Japanese movies and Hibi and Mizuno did about
amateur literature. As they argued, Japanese immigrants flocked to Japanese-owned
nickelodeons and meetings of amateur literature lovers for the escapist purpose of indulging in a
safe cultural sphere. However, at least in the case of Japanese immigrants on the West Coast,
making amateur literature was not just escapism. Japanese immigrants might have never thought
of their reinterpreting the surrounding space by making poems. Yet, when waka, a highly
aestheticized and politicized art form, is practiced on the foreign soil of another cultural and
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political empire, a symbolic not political confrontation happens. In other words, praising the
idealized beauty of the Japanese landscape and the rule of the Japanese emperor invokes a
potential confrontation with the dominant society’s cultural practices in the United State, if the
confrontation is not actualized soon.
Being Bound in the 5-7 Rhythm
Writing waka poems on the immigrant land was an act of dealing with the Others in a
form of cultural expression. W. J. T. Mitchell regards ekphrasis, or verbal representation of visual
representation, as a momentum, in which fears of communicating with others are expressed
through various contradictory dichotomies. According to his view, ekphrasis always holds three
contradictory aspects: ekphrastic indifference, an understanding that language cannot fully
represent visual images; ekphrastic hope, a desire to represent visual images in verbal
expression; ekphrastic fear, “the moment of resistance or counterdesire that occurs when we
sense that the difference between the verbal and visual representation might collapse and the
figurative, imaginary desire of ekphrasis might be realized literally and actually.” In
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ekphrastic poetry, these three inter-contradictory moments appear and operate to express hope
and fear in relating with Others.
This argument applies to Yurika Fukuda’s short poem, “with Mt. Fuji / in my mind / I
see Mt. Rainier on the New Year’s Day,” and Japanese immigrants’ calling Mt. Rainier Takoma-
Fuji. In the landscape of the West Coast, which was foreign to Japanese immigrants, Mt. Rainier
W. J. Thomas Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University
207
of Chicago Press, 1994), 154.
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looked similar to Mt. Fuji and invoked a contradictory feeling among them: it looked familiar to
them but was not what they were familiar with. The poet was moved by the scenery including
Mt. Rainier on the first day of the year, but she could not express it in a straightforward manner
because it was Other to her. Thus, as Mitchell argues that the ultimate goal of ekphrastic hope is
"the overcoming of others,” the poet’s fear of the foreign Other could be hijacked by an imperial
ideology trying to overcome the United States.
Okubo’s impression of Wells Fargo was published in an amateur literature magazine,
orchestrated with such a confrontation between ekphrastic hope and fear. Okubo, on behalf of
Japanese immigrant workers, might be able to represent or take the place of the imagery of
anonymous white construction workers, but the entire movie does not allow Okubo a full
identification. Thus, Okubo’s interpretative act of having Japanese immigrants inherit “the souls
of tremendous numbers of pioneers whose names and being were forgotten” is a reactionary
response to modify the surroundings as Okubo feels comfortable. As waka-making was a
quotidian practice of reproducing space through representation of landscape and nature, his essay
was another version of such cultural practices. Was Okubo’s essay a cultural resistance to white
dominance in the society at that time? It was, to some extent, a resistance, which was fueled by
Japanese imperialism confronted with the social pressure of Americanization at that time. But,
reducing Okubo’s statement simply into such a mere political framework loses the multiple
layers of contradiction existing in Okubo’s impression. Japanese immigrant society had been
working on assimilating themselves into mainstream society to minimize the criticism they
received. In Okubo’s text, his praising anonymous workers and placing the Japanese community
as a successor to them is primarily a behavior of assimilation.
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Kojin Karatani’s views on the discovery of landscape help us to understand the discourse
conditioning Okubo’s text. Karatani, a literature and art critic in Japan, in his Origins of Modern
Japanese Literature, inspired by Foucault’s study of epistemology, pointed out a “perspective
inversion” in which discursive formation and de facto standards had changed drastically in
modern Japanese literature and visual art. According to Karatani, landscape in modern Japanese
literature and visual art did not simply exist. As realism had required of artists, regardless of
whether literary or visual, a great amount of conscious effort to fit the new style, Japanese artists
needed to totally change their ways of reception of nature. Citing examples from European art
history, Karatani argues:
[M]edieval European painting and (Japanese) landscape painting (before the perspective
inversion) share something in common that differentiates them from modern landscape
painting. In both, place is conceived of in transcendental terms. For a brush painter to
depict a pine grove meant to depict the concept (that which is signified by) “pine grove,”
not an existing pine grove. This transcendental vision of space had to be overturned
before painters could see existing pine groves as their subjects. This is when modern
perspective appears. Or more accurately, what we call modern perspective had already
emerged at some point before this in the form of a perspectival inversion.
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What Karatani argues about the ontological nature of “pine tree” in Japanese visual art is
applicable to representation of landscape in traditional short-verse Japanese poems. In both
cases, artists see idealized and conventionalized concepts rather than existing material landscape.
Since Karatani’s “perspective inversion” problematizes the institutionalized way of viewing and
illustrates the drastic and fundamental shift from that of the medieval era to that of the modern
era, medium specificity, verbal or visual, is not an issue here. Rather, he parallels “perspective
Kojin Karatani, Origins of modern Japanese literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 27.
208
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conversion” in Japanese visual art with a wider national movement of genbun itchi, which means
“coordinating the written with the spoken.” Written and conversational Japanese had been
different in history until the mid-nineteenth century and Meiji Japan uniformed them for
efficiency. The Ministry of Education played a leading role in spreading a new set of rules for the
Japanese writing system and, after that, Japanese began to be written in its colloquial form.
Novelists at that time also struggled with creating a new style of novel to replace the old written
style conditioned by 5 and 7 mora meter (5-7 rhythm). However, it was difficult attempt for
many Meiji novelists who were born and raised in the old traditional style of novel. Karatani,
citing Kyoshi Takahama’s evaluation of contemporary novelists who tried to create a new style,
argues Futabatei Shimei as a novelist who had been “fettered by 5-7 rhythm” and “clinging to
old forms,” although he had tried to revolutionize the modern novel.
The reason a lively rhythm predominates in that (Futabatei Shimei’s) novel is because it
has none of the visual quality cultivated by the sketching techniques. Conversely, genbun
itchi had to negate a certain notion of rhythm as transcendental in order to come into
being. As Kyoshi suggests, the same was true of no and kabuki (theaters). This is the
basis for my earlier assertion that the movements to reform poetry and drama were
simultaneously a part of the large genbun itchi movement and that it is only by
considering it in this broad context that we can understand the nature of this
movement.
209
Genbun itchi, which is supposed to refer to a new movement in prose, is actually a good term to
include a “perspective inversion” in varieties of cultural practices. According to Karatani, what
was going on in the Japanese general public’s mind in the late nineteenth century was such a
Ibid, 57.
209
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fundamental shift of worldview. The situation Japanese people faced was similar to that Walter
Benjamin illustrated in his The Arcades Project. Benjamin randomly lists new technological and
cultural artifacts that Parisians encountered in an arcade and implies a new mode of people’s
cognition. Compared to Benjamin’s argument, what is distinctive about Karatani is his focus
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on modes of writing as an expression of the shift of cognitive constellation. Modes of writing
represent and condition people’s cognitive universes. Thus, genbun itchi was not just a literary
movement, but one side of the entire shift in people’s mind. In other words, genbun itchi
movement was an ambitious attempt to liberate people from the linguistic universe of tropes and
the pathosformel. However, as Karatani argued in reference to Futabatei, language bounds the
human mind. Even Futabatei, a novelist who dreamed of revolution in literature, was “fettered by
5-7 rhythm.”
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Amateur Japanese immigrant poets on the West Coast were bound to the cognitive universe
of 5-7 mora meter as Futabatei was. The constant and strong popularity of Japanese short-verse
poems over other revolutionary forms of literature on the West Coast supports that. Language is
a political realm. However, people cannot easily shift from one to the other as if they were
changing clothes. The modern cognitive universe does not spread as fast as material
accomplishment of modernity does. Thus, Japanese immigrants who were familiar with 5-7 mora
meter were in an imaginary idealized landscape.
A travelogue written by Seiji Tokieda and published on The Shin Sekai exemplifies how the
cultural universe of 5-7 mora meter gravitated Japanese immigrants rather than the modernity
Walter Benjamin, The Arcade Project, Howard Eiland and Kevin Laughlin eds., (Cambridge: Harvard
210
University Press, 2002).
Karatani, Origins of modern Japanese literature, 57.
211
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experience in the United States. Seiji Tokieda was a branch manager of Yokohama Specie Bank
at San Francisco. The bank was established by the National Bank Act in 1879 to facilitate
international trade by providing a reliable and fair currency exchange service. Tokieda, the
manager of the bank’s San Francisco branch, was not just an ordinary Japanese immigrant
worker. He traveled in North California and published his diaries on the newspaper in 1917. The
report combines prose and verse following the tradition of a travelogue in Japan from the Heian
Period. Following is his impression when he saw Mt. Shasta:
Although it is hot here, I see snow on the top of Mt. Shasta in front of me. I feel like
Empress Jitō and Yamabe Akahito came to see me.

It seems that spring has gone
and summer has not come yet to
Mt. Shasta
where pure white clothes are hung up
to dry
the snow is falling
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These sentences are highly contextualized and need breakdown. Empress Jito and Yamabe
Akahito whom Tokieda referred in the prose part are two ancient waka poets: Empress Jito is an
empress regnant in the late seventh century; Yamabe Akahito is a government worker and poet in
the early eighth century, who is known for his excellency in depicting landscape. By referring to
these historic poets in the prose part, Tokieda implies that his work in the following part is an
homage to them. The poems of the two poets on which Tokieda made his own are below: The Shin Sekai, June 20, 1917.
212
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from Tagonoura bay
I am leaving out
what white it is!
on the high peak of Mt. Fuji the snow is falling
By Yamabe Akahito

It seems that spring has gone
and summer has come to
divine Mt. Kagu,
where pure white clothes are
hung up to dry.
By Empress Jito
Tokieda’s poem is not his creation. It simply combines the first half of Empress Jito’s poem and
the latter half of Yamabe Akahito’s with the difference of the mountains depicted. Tokieda’s
highly contextualized style does not mean that he was a cultural elite. Even many Japanese
immigrant workers could understand the two references from Tokieda’s prose because both of
the two poems were included in a card game named Hyakunin Issyu, which literally means “one
hundred poems by one hundred poets.” Hyakunin Issyu consists of a hundred pairs of cards on
which part of waka poems are written. The first 3 unites (17 mora) of each waka poem are
written in a card and the latter 2 unites (14 mora) are in another. In preparation for the game, the
cards with the latter 2 unites of poems on them are spread on the floor, while the cards with the
first 3 unites on them are kept by a judge. As soon as the judge pronounces the poems on the
cards, players of the game rush to the cards with the latter 2 unites by the same author. The
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players compete based on the number of cards they catch. In order to be competitive in the game,
players need to memorize all the 100 poems in Hyakunin Isshu.
Although Tokieda was presumably an economic and political elite at that time, his cultural
sophistication shown in the article was not so different from other Japanese immigrants. From
the poem he made by combining the two classic poems, we are not able to tell if he was a
talented poet or not. However, it is obvious that he dared to kill the beauty of the two original
poems by combining them to entertain the wide range of readers who would read the paper. The
dynamic shift of landscape from Tagonoura bay to Mt. Fuji is the essence of Yamabe Akahito’s
poem, while the “pure white clothes” hung in to dry under the summer sunshine vividly illustrate
the change of seasons from spring to summer in Empress Jito’s poem. Splitting and
patchworking these poems show Tokieda’s performative attitude targeting a specific audience
body familiar with a set of conventional expressions. His cultural practice exemplifies how
ordinary Japanese were, according to Karatani’s terminology, “fettered by 5-7 rhythm.” It was
familiar, memorized phrases with 5-7 rhythm that came up to Tokieda’s mind when he saw Mt.
Shasta for the first time. As I argued so far, seeing is always ideological: Tokieda could not see
the nature per se. However, it is not true that political, economic, or social parameters explain the
reception. Tokieda’s case reveals the aesthetic and cultural foundation through which Japanese
immigrants perceived the United States.
Reevaluation of Okubo’s Reception
This chapter so far discussed characteristics of amateur waka poem-writing on the West
Coast: the quotidian nature for ordinary people; series of tropes associated with landscape; the
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communal aspect tied with Japanese Empire; 5-7 rhythm bounding people’s thoughts. These
characteristics resonate with Okubo’s review of Wells Fargo and shed light on internal
complexity of his text.
First, by juxtaposing with waka examples in this chapter, Okubo’s text shows ambiguity
regarding the author’s and reader’s expected political positions. Okubo is placed in-between two
different political ideological powers: Japan and the United States. His attraction to the movie, to
some extent, seems to be a behavior of assimilation to the mainstream American society at that
time. However, at the same time, what was behind his appreciation of Western ideology was a
self-consciousness as a pioneering farmer of the Japanese empire. Okubo’s interpretation is not
simply an outcome of the frontier myth, but should be placed in conjunction with the literature
movement in the Japanese immigrant community. By comparing the text with the ideological
aspect of making Japanese short-verse poems, Okubo’s self-recognition as a colonizer becomes
clear. Okubo identified himself with the white settlers, who were not foregrounded in the main
plot of Wells Fargo, not just because the ideology of the frontier myth in the film influenced him,
but, in addition, because another political discourse of Japanese imperial expansion conditioned
his way of thinking. That’s why he tried to replace the white settlers’ position by saying “[t]he
pioneers in California are rarely alive, but many pioneers in the Japanese community are still
alive.” Thus, the text represents both Japanese immigrants’ diplomatic behavior of “whitening”
themselves for assimilation and expansionist ideology of Japanese Empire.
Second, the Okubo’s text utilizes reference to landscape in order to bypass straightforward
argument as if writing a waka poem. Probably, this was not intentional. As I argued based on
Karatani’s concept of “perspective inversion,” the Japanese immigrants gravitated to the universe
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of 5-7 mora meter before the modern revolution in art in Japan. The cognitive constellation in the
universe expressed itself through varieties of visual and verbal media. An encounter with an
artwork of a different discursive universe, Wells Fargo in our case, necessarily caused a discord.
Okubo's strange focus on the extras in the background landscape is the result of this. Landscape,
which was a static image of Japanese beauty, was more important than the narrative in
expressing the feelings of Japanese immigrants. For Japanese farming immigrants in the United
States, the landscape of the American West was not merely a representation of the American
Frontier Myth. Japanese immigrants were placed in-between two aesthetic empires of Japan and
the United States, when they faced the America landscape. Out of movie theaters, Japanese
immigrants participated in the everyday cultural practice of making Japanese short-verse poems,
and, by doing so, they intervened in the symbolic tie between the landscape in the material world
and the frontier myth in Hollywood cinema.
Conclusion
Movie-going cannot be reduced into a bipolar perspective of moviegoing as nostalgia or as
assimilation. I would not intend that such approaches are useless. As traced in the previous
chapters, such arguments explain many aspects in Japanese immigrants’ movie-going. However,
that does not negate the cultural dynamism and its own logic operating in the site of reception.
Such a perspective helps us fully explain the complexity in Okubo’s text. Watching Wells Fargo,
a western movie in which racial and social politics are aesthetically condensed, was not just a
simple act of repainting the ideology with longing for far-away Japan nor accepting the ideology
in it. Being bound to the familiar aesthetic (verbal and visual) universe, Okubo’s text expresses a
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discord between the two aesthetic empires. The ekphrastic hope of overcoming others by
conciliating the visual and verbal images dives Okubo to push his verbal interpretation on the
visual images in Wells Fargo, while concealing the ekphrastic fear, a sense that visual and verbal
images do not reconcile each other.
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Chapter 5: Landscape in Hayakawa Movies
Introduction
The previous chapter discussed the aesthetics of landscape as a cultural parameter of the
history of Japanese immigrants’ theatrical practices. By applying the argument to film texts
Japanese immigrates encountered, this chapter reveals that the site of reception and interpretation
was as significant as social and political parameters in understanding Japanese immigrants’
cultural history. Hayakawa’s movies in the late 1910s, The Wrath of the Gods (1914), The Cheat
(1915), and The Dragon Painter (1919), were put on the table for our examination. By
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focusing on the landscape instead of the characters and the plot in these films, Japanese
spectators could interpret the anti-Japanese motifs in a preferable or less hostile manner defying
the dominant interpretation.
Hayakawa’s Stardom and Japanese Immigrant Communities
Sessue Hayakawa, a Japanese movie star in Hollywood in the silent era, achieved stardom
as an exotic icon at the cost of his reputation in Japanese immigrant communities. Born as
Kintaro Hayakawa into a wealthy family in a fishing village in Chiba prefecture, young
Hayakawa dreamed of becoming a navy officer. However, a rupture in his eardrum he suffered
while swimming caused him to fail the physical exam. Broken hearted, Hayakawa found another
dream of going to the United States and finally landed in Seattle in 1907. After attending
University of Chicago for a while, he moved to Los Angeles, where he found his passion in stage
The Dragong Painter, director William Worthington, 1919.
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play. While working for a living during the day, he practiced acting and appeared in theatrical
dramas organized by Japanese immigrants in Little Tokyo. Thomas H. Ince, a filmmaker and
producer who was looking for various talents, watched one of Hayakawa’s plays and hired
him.
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Hayakawa first appeared in short films, The Typhoon, and The Wrath of the Gods and
become a popular actor. Famous Players-Lasky (now Paramount Pictures) released The Cheat on
December 13, 1915. This movie made Sessue Hayakawa a romantic icon to female moviegoers
in the white society in the United States. However, the reaction that the film invoked among
Japanese immigrants was different. The Rafu Shimpo, a local Japanese-language newspaper
based in Los Angeles, started a campaign criticizing the star starting on December 23. The titles
of the articles in the paper were quite aggressive: "A Movie Spreading the Seeds of Anti-
Japanese Movement," “Is He Crazy or Idiot? Anti-Japanese Actor, Sessue Hayakawa,” and
215 216
“Review of the Evil Anti-Japanese Movie.” In response to such a harsh attack on him,
217
Hayakawa finally published an apology in the newspaper on December 29.
Why did The Rafu Shimpo criticize Hayakawa so vehemently? The incredible brutality of
Hishitsuru Tori, a Japanese merchant Hayakawa played in the film, was the trigger of such harsh
criticism. In the film, Tori offered a respectable white woman a loan to cover the loss her
stockbroker husband made in exchange of her virtue. The woman accepted the offer, but on the
same day, her husband's gamble paid off. The wife visited Tori with the money to cancel the deal,
Orie Nagkagawa, Sesshu! Sekai wo Miryo shita Nihonjin Suta: Hayakawa Sesshu (Tokyo: Kodansha,
214
2012), 67-90; Toshio Oba, Hayakawa Sesshu: Boso ga Unda Kokusai Haiyu (Chiba: Ronshobo, 2012), 33.
The Rafu Shimpo, 23 December 1915
215
The Rafu Shimpo, 24 December 1915
216
The Rafu Shimpo, 25 December 1915
217
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but Tori refused the cancellation and demanded the advance. Tori grabbed the resisting woman
and branded her on the back of the shoulder with the seal he uses for his property. All the Rafu
Shimpo articles picked up and problematized this single scene as damaging to the reputation of
Japanese people in the United States.
Chapter three has already overviewed the history of Japanese immigrants’ reaction against
anti-Japanese movies starting with The Cheat, exploring their political and interpretive struggles
from the 1910s to the1930s. In the 1910s, the American film industry made many silent films
featuring Japanese elements, but not all of them were welcomed by local Japanese immigrant
communities in Los Angeles. In fact, some of these films received negative responses, because,
as in the case of Hayakwa’s The Cheat, they appeared to insult the national pride of Japanese
immigrants. In addition, the representation of Japan as evil in Hollywood movies was a direct
risk factor for Japanese immigrants because it might worsen the general public’s racism and
discrimination. Therefore, Japanese immigrants started an effort to minimize such a risk. While
Japanese immigrants negotiated with local authorities and appealed to the middle-class moral
discourse in order to get rid of the movies from the theaters, they also attacked the actors
contributing to the unfavorable images of Japan.
In contrast to the practical and concrete effort of Japanese immigrants discussed in the first
half of this chapter, the latter half focuses on the intangible emotional impact that the anti-
Japanese images caused in Japanese immigrants’ discourse. Since the effort to censor anti-
Japanese representations in American movies was not successful, Japanese immigrants needed a
coping mechanism to deal with the gap between the biased images of Japanese in movies and
their own romanticized self-images. Japanese people’s favorable response to The Wrath of the
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Gods exemplifies such a psychological process distinctive to Japanese immigrants. Given such
fierce reactions against The Cheat among Japanese immigrant communities, it is surprising that
The Wrath of the Gods did not trigger a similar dispute. This is even more surprising, because the
movie appears to promote no less stereotypical, disrespectful images of Japan than The Cheat.
Here, I explain this peculiarly favorable reception of The Wrath of the Gods by providing an
alternative interpretation of the film text. Following the sensibility to landscape discussed in the
previous chapter, this chapter explores the possible alternative ways in which Japanese
immigrants interpreted the racist movie. I demonstrate how Japanese immigrant spectators could
apply their familiar aesthetic convention of focusing on landscape to their understanding of The
Wrath of the Gods and interpret the film as an expression of sacrificial masculinity in feminized
nature.

Civilization vs. Wilderness
Japanese immigrant societies tried to maintain their reputation both for national pride and
for their safe life in the United States under the anti-Japanese sentiment at that time. They even
punished Japanese actors as traitors, insisting on ethnic solidarity. However, it is also worth
asking why the bashing was not formed before The Cheat. The brutality of Tori in The Cheat
might explain why it caused such a hysterical reaction and anxiety among Japanese people.
However, some films Hayakawa appeared in before The Cheat had similar disrespectful
representations of Japanese. This section focuses on The Wrath of the Gods, one example of such
films, and figures out another cultural context in which Japanese interpreted representations of
Japan.
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The Wrath of the Gods has a similar plot to The Curse of Iku: in both films, an American
man comes to Japan, struggles with premodern local Japanese people, and then gets a Japanese
woman. Tom Wilson (Frank Borzage), an American sailor, is shipwrecked and escapes to a
Buddhist village in Japan. Wilson meets Toya-san (Tsuru Aoki), a daughter of Baron Yamaki
(Hayakawa) at the village, and falls in love with her. Toya-san had difficulty in forming a
relationship with local boys because Takeo (Thomas Kurihara), a Buddhist prophet, spread a
rumor that Toya-san was cursed and, thus, she decides to convert to Christianity. Surprisingly,
Baron Yamaki, Toya-san's father, also decides to convert for his daughter. The local villagers led
by Prophet Takeo go on a rampage against the family. Though the couple manages to escape,
Baron Yamaki, who threw a Buddha statue toward the crowd, is beaten to death. Eventually, the
volcano suddenly erupts, and the avalanche swallows the entire village.
As Daisuke Miyao argues, a melodramatic dichotomy of the good civilized religion vs. the
bad savage religion penetrates the entire film. In the plot line, the protagonist American sailor is
"an enlightening force that paternalistically helps a Japanese girl to change her religious belief
and to free her from the primitive village." Baron Yamaki is feminized and does not have any
218
power to make his daughter happy. Another Japanese role, Takeo, is depicted as an uncivilized
fanatic who faces the enlightening force of the American sailor representing the United States.
“In this melodramatic moralistic dichotomy, Japan is not regarded as a modern nation. It is not an
independent existence, but a place somewhere in a totalized primitive region.”
219
Miyao, Sessue Hayakawa, 63.
218
Ibid., 64.
219
!129
Such a representation of Japan in The Wrath of the Gods could have provoked anger among
Japanese immigrant communities because of its ethnocentric view of Japanese culture. However,
any kinds of offense against the film never happened in the United States. There are some
hypotheses about why The Cheat triggered censure on Hayakawa while The Wrath of the Gods
did not. For example, the visual intensity of the scene in which Hayakawa branded a white
woman might have too obviously signified Japan's brutality and its future ambition to invade the
United States. Another possibility is the United States’ stepping into WWI in April, 1914.
Japanese immigrant purchased the U. S. war bonds to show their loyalty to the country, and the
anti-Japanese sentiment was softened during the WWI.

It was in August that Japan declared
220
war against Germany and became an alley of the United States. Thus, the friendly feeling
between the two countries was not established to the extent that the elite segment of Japanese
immigrant communities problematized the discriminatory images in the film in June, 1914, when
The Wrath of the Gods was released. However, it is also the case that the film shown
discriminatory depiction of Japanese people to Japanese immigrant patrons. How could Japanese
immigrants on the West Coast have enjoyed such demonized images of Japan? The question is
the mechanism of interpretation Japanese immigrants adopted to negotiate with the distorted
images.
Real and Romanticized Landscape
Newspaper articles provide some clues to answer the question. When The Wrath of the
Gods was screened on the West Coast in July 1914, Japanese-language newspapers reported how
Kurashige, Two Faces of Exclusion, 104-105.
220
!130
much praise the film received on the East Coast before its arrival to the West. The names of
221
the Japanese actors in the film were hardly mentioned in any articles because they were stepping
on the ladder to stardom. Instead, the articles emphasized the fact that the movie used the footage
of the eruption of Sakurajima volcano in the same year. For the journalists of Japanese-language
newspapers, the spectacle of the real event that happened in Japan had the largest news value for
Japanese readers over the appearance of Japanese actors and the quality of the film per se.
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The interest in reality was common in visual media in the early twentieth century. Film's
indexical tie to reality was one of the greatest attractions for filmgoers at that time. While early
filmmakers were working on creating a new film language to tell complex stories, moviegoers
flocked to movie theaters to watch documentary footage, travelogues, and newsreels to know
what was going on in the real world. Japanese immigrants living on the foreign soil of the
223
United States were eager for information about Japan. They gathered at screening events of
documentary footage shot in Japan when American companies imported them. Film was not
224
the only medium to represent Japan. For example, the Japanese pavilion had a moving panorama
in a statue of Buddha at the Panama-Pacific Exposition held in San Francisco in 1915. The
panorama painting depicted a voyage from San Francisco via Yokohama to Nagasaki and
The Rafu Shimpo, July 6, 1914; The Shin Sekai, July 22, 1914.
221
Miayao argues that Thomas Ince, the producer of the film utilized Tsuru Aoki as the part of the marketing of
222
the film. Although she was not from the area of Sakurajima volcano, Ince emphasized that Aoki was an
eyewitness of the event: Miyao, Sessue Hayakawa, 58.
Charles Musser, “The Travel Genre in 1903-1904: Moving Towards Fictional Narrative.” Iris 2 (1984), 47–
223
60.
“10 man doru no nihon hukei katsudo shashin,” The Hokubei Jiji, March 7, 1918: “Hajimete kita nihon no
224
fukei,” The Shin Sekai, January 31, 1918: “Eiga no Tokyo kenbutsu beikoku he,” The Shin Sekai, Feburuary
26, 1922: “Katsuga nihon no genjyo,” The Shin Sekai, February 26, 1922: “Nyuyoku de mondai to natta
katsuga nihon no shinso,” The Shin Sekai, March 14, 1922: “Sutorando no nihon no shinso wo mite,” The Shin
Sekai, February 28, 1922.
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landscapes along with the coast of Japan. The moving panorama itself was a technological
attraction for the patrons: motors were installed in the viewing platform imitating a ship so that
the seats shook when a storm hit the ship in the moving panorama. The article briefly mentions
the technological amusement in the beginning and rather spends larger space on the detailed
depiction of scenery.
The verisimilitude of realistic images of far-away places guaranteed the pleasure of
watching them. In other words, inaccuracy of images could destroy the spectators' pleasure of
observing something that actually existed in the world as they were. Thus, authenticity of images
was always an issue. One review on the Shin Sekai criticized the inaccuracy of the landscape and
pointed out that the shape of the mountains and trees were more American. There was a high
225
demand for the realistic and authentic images of Japan in Japanese immigrant communities, and
The Wrath of the Gods and, especially, the footage of the eruption of Sakurajima volcano were
welcomed in this context despite the distorted image of Japan made by American film industry.
However, on the other hand, Japanese immigrants’ conception of realistic images of Japan
was biased as well. Reproduction of visual or verbal images can always be an arena for political
conflict. Waka poems, which amateur immigrant poets published in their ethnic papers,
exemplifies how the discourse of Japan's natural beauty is naturalized and utilized to the
country's expansionism. The waka poems that originated in court culture in the premodern period
have made up a series of institutionalized expressions of Japanese landscape beauty. Then, the
Meiji government incorporated waka poems into its official culture when they praised the Meiji
Emperor not just as the chief of command but also as a genius waka poet. Thus, making amateur
The Shin Sekai, May 9, 1915.
225
!132
waka poems on the foreign soil comes with some political effects. For instance, Japanese
amateur waka poets in Seattle area referred to Mt. Rainier as "Takoma-Fuji," or Mt. Fuji at
Takoma in their poems. This cultural practice is not just nostalgia but also a representation of
Japan's expansionism considering the international situation at that time.
Anti-Japanese films, regardless of the appearance of Japanese actors, were the arena over
the authenticity of Japan. From the advent of film media in the last decade of the nineteenth
century, film had served as an eye of objectification. Americans made many movies about
226
Japan, but local Japanese immigrant communities repeatedly complained about the authenticity
of the films. The Japanese government was also irritated with the ways international society
looks at Japan. Knowing the power of the visual recording medium, the Japanese government
financially supported some travelogue films showing the reality of Japan against American-made
images. For example, in 1919, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Education
endowed, respectively, 2,000 yen and 3,000 yen to an educational travelogue film. The images
227
of Japan in the film were the opposite of those in The Wrath of the Gods, which represented
Japan as a premodern fanatic country. While the film depicts beautiful scenery of Nikko and
other scenic areas in Japan, it also captures modern aspects: urbanized city areas of Tokyo, Keijo
(Seoul), and Yokohama and factories of tea, silk, and paper industries. As an imperial power that
sought interest in China and the Pacific Ocean, Japan needed to demonstrate their progress and
development for the sake of their national pride.
Charles Musser, “At the Beginnin: Motion Picture Production, Representation and Ideology at the Edison
226
and Lumiere Companies,” Lee Grieveson and Peter Kramer eds, The Silent Cinema Reader (New York:
Routledge, 2003), 24-25.
The Shin Sekai, August 30, 1919.
227
!133
However, the educational travelogue does not mean that Japanese government and people
wanted to present their country exclusively as a modern industrialized country. Rather, the more
the county developed, the more the discourse of beautiful Japanese landscape became necessary
to legitimize the country. In the case of anti-Japanese movies in the West Coast, the aesthetics of
landscape helped Japanese communities to cure the wounds made by Japanese actors and anti-
Japanese movies. Some traits in Japanese-language newspapers show that the Japanese
immigrant communities mobilized the logic of Japanese landscape beauty. For example, when
Sessue Hayakawa and his wife Tsuru Aoki both appeared in The Wrath of the Gods and traveled
to Japan in spring 1920, a newspaper reported their visit, emphasizing that it was cherry blossom
season in Japan. The header of the article reads “Seeing my old mother and younger sister is a
much bigger pleasure than seeing cherry blossoms for the first time in 20 years.” This
228
sentence, speaking for Tsuru Aoki, might seem simple at first glance, but is highly stylized.
Cherry blossoms represent Japanese natural beauty in the tradition of waka poems and is utilized
in the same manner in prose. Putting her joy of seeing her relatives over that of seeing cherry
blossoms is the writer's rhetorical technique to beautify the couple's visit to Japan. The writer’s
choice of this sentence, regardless of whether she really said that or not, functions to make
Americanized Tsuru subject to the beauty of the Japanese landscape. By doing so, the Japanese
communities in the United States paternalistically tolerated her and her husband's inappropriate
behavior of working for anti-Japanese movies.
This logic was applied to even white Americans. One article reporting the rising demand
for hotels for foreign travelers in Japan insisted that Japanese-style hotels and services be more
The Shin Sekai March 31, 1920.
228
!134
desired than Western-style hotels. The article reads: “Japanese hotels need to satisfy them
(foreign travelers) by adding Japanese taste to the facilities, showing Japanese women's neat and
clean hospitality, and having them enjoy Japanese ways of kind and gracious caring." This
229
sentence shows the Japanese belief that foreign travelers will understand and like the country if
they encounter the core of authentic Japan. Another example also demonstrates the same belief.
Ethel Clayton, a Paramount actress in the silent era, traveled to Japan in 1919. She was supposed
to go back to the United States by June 1
st
but was lost in Japan after June 10
th
. The header of the
article, reporting her missing in a somehow gossip-like manner, reads "Was she charmed by
beautiful Japan?" The truth of her disappearing in Japan is unknown. However, the self-
230
indulgent national pride of the writer behind the sentence is obvious. This example shows how
the discourse of the landscape beauty of Japan functioned among Japanese people regardless of
media. According to the logic, the beauty of Japanese nature not only cures the damage caused
by misleading American representations of Japan but also attracts and educates Americans who
misunderstood the country.
In short, the various episodes mentioned in this section exemplify that the cultural logic of
landscape aesthetics operated across various media among Japanese immigrants. Although still
and movie cameras are usually associated with their medium-specific nature of capturing the
material reality of the world, that did not exclude other media from the pleasure of watching
what spectators thought was the reality. In other words, watching landscape regardless of its
reality was an attraction, which interested Japanese audience and provoked a specific language-
“Hakujin no nihon houmon kyaku niha jyun nihon shumi wo ajiwashime,” The Shin Sekai, June 22 1920.
229
“Utsukushii nihon ni yotteka: yukue shirenu meijyoyu,” The Shin Sekai, July 3, 1919.
230
!135
and-culture-bound response among them. The distinctive layer of interpretation was the basis for
an alternative reading of The Wrath of the Gods.
Landscape-Oriented Interpretation
In the transitional period of American silent film from random demonstration to feature
length film, landscape was a still attraction for Americna audience. As Kirihara discusses, while
Hayakawa films tend to foreground his characters, they also utilized mise-en-scene to satisfy
patrons’ eyes. This applies to The Wrath of the Gods. Miyao analyzed the symbolism in The
231
Wrath of the Gods and argued that the narrative placed Christianity over Buddhism. The eruption
of the Sakurajima volcano, which swallowed converted Barron Yamaki and all the other fanatic
villagers except Toya-san and Tom, should be understood, according to Miyao, as an expression
of the fury and punishment of the Buddhist God. However, the last remark made by Tom on a
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safe American vessel, “Your God is powerful, but our god proved to be omnipotent,” transforms
the meaning of the eruption in the narrative. Miyao argues “[t]he volcano used to be the symbol
of Toya-san’s superstition, but eventually it turns into the embodiment of the omnipotent power
of the Christine God, who destroys the superstitious and punished primitive people.”
233
Considering the frequent use of the iconography of Christian motifs in the film to depict the
conversion of the Yamaki family, Miyao’s interpretation is entirely right. If Japanese immigrant
spectators had interpreted the film narrative as superiority of the Christian God over the Buddhist
Donald Kirihara, “The Accepted idea displaced: stereotype and Sessue Hayakawa,” Daniel Bernardi ed.,
231
The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
1996), 81-99.
Miyao, Sessue Hayakawa, 64.
232
Ibid., 65.
233
!136
God as Miyao argues, they could have problematized the films as an anti-Japanese movie.
However, they did not.
According to the reviews on ethnic papers, the Japanese immigrants seemed to enjoy the
film. There are some practical hypothesis explaining the Japanese audience’s reaction. First, they
could not understand the Christian iconography in the film. The Wrath of the Gods has a complex
narrative structure and cinematic techniques compared to the standard at that time. In order to
conclude that the eruption of the Sakurajima volcano as the superiority of Christiana God over
Buddhist God as Miyao argues, the audience needs to follow the Christian iconographies
embedded in the film (Figure 5 and 6). Some immigrants such as those established Yamato
Colony were Christian, but they were not the majority. Presumably, majority of Japanese
immigrant patrons were not able to the Christianity-centric message after the tale of Sodom and
Gomorrah.
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Figure 5: Baron Yamaki's Conversion
!
Figure 6: A Cross Tom Gave Toya-san
!
!138
Second, there was no one to explain the film narrative in the screening of the film. The
Wrath of the Gods was premiered in a white-owned theater in Los Angeles. (See the table 1 in
Chapter 1.) It was not likely that a Japanese benshi was in the theater for Japanese audience.
These two hypothesis sounds down-to-earth and reasonable. Japanese patrons simply did not
fully catch the complexity of the film text, and that’s why they interpreted the eruption as an
expression of Buddha's anger on the contrary to Miyao’s text-based interpretation.
However, I would like to point out that the limited comprehension of the narrative could
allowed a room of the aesthetics of landscape. This chapter is not trying to insist that Japanese
had a general tendency to rely more on the representation of landscape rather than the narrative
structure. Yet, probably as a result of misunderstanding, Japanese patrons were attracted to the
“Japanese” landscape in the film, and articles advocating the film for Japanese readers of the
ethnic papers emphasized the eruption of the Sakurajima volcano the most. In other words,
234
there was a condition of reception that enabled Japanese audience to receive the film as a series
of sceneries ending with the real eruption of the Sakurajima volcano representing Buddha's fury,
and not as a melodrama of the Christian superiority. This explains the lack of bashing of the
Japanese actors in the film well.
Although the aesthetic of landscape might be secondary to other direct and decisive
parameters such as the setting of screening and political situations, it suggests an alternative
readings of The Wrath of the Gods in a way, which deepens Miyao’s discussion of feminization
of the characters. The two movies and the three discursive examples I mentioned so far all deal
with landscape and female characters. Those who are moved by the beauty of Japanese landscape
The Rafu Shimpo, July 16, 1914.
234
!139
are, in many cases, women rather than men: Tsuru Aoki and Ethel Clayton. As a Japanese tea
advertisement (Figure 7) published in a Japanese-language newspaper visually exemplifies,
nature and women were identified as the same thing. Both are objects controlled by men or
civilization to make a profit: thus, "Japanese women's neat and clean hospitality" is provided to
supposedly male foreign travelers. In the aesthetics of Japanese waka poems, at least after Meiji
era, men had a privileged position of writing poems to describe nature and move women. Miyao
argued that Hayakawa's character, Baron Yamaki, the father of Toya-san, in The Wrath of the
Gods is feminized: Baron Yamaki is not able to make his daughter happy while the American
protagonist can. This analysis is, again, valid based on the narrative structure of the film.
However, in terms of aesthetics of landscape, all the characters are equally impotent before the
fury of nature. As long as the eruption is understood as Buddha's anger that swallows Buddhist
villagers and converts Baron Yamaki, the film does not provoke any problems for Japanese
viewers who internalized the discourse of landscape, regardless of their religion.
!140
Figure 7: An Advertisement of Japanese Tea
235
!
The Dragon Painter in Light of Masculinity and Landscape
The operation of aesthetics of landscape in The Wrath of the Gods was definitely a product
of chance. The Japanese communities’ preferable response to the film was enabled by the
synthesis of various conditions of reception: the too-complex narrative and Christian
iconography which were difficult for Japanese movie-goes to understand; lack of benshi at the
The Shin Sekai, February 16, 1920.
235
!141
site of screening; waka tradition emphasizing expression through landscape beauty. It would be
too bold to claim that Japanese reception of movies always prioritized landscape over narrative.
However, there is at least one Hayakawa movie in which the expression of masculinity and
femininity through the representation of landscape can be found. The film is The Dragon
Painter. In the rest of this chapter, I discuss the film through the same lens I applied to The
Wrath of the Gods and, by doing so, reveal Hayakawa’s effort to express a multilayered message
through the narrative and use of landscape.
The Dragon Painter is the first of the “Hayakawa Superior Pictures” produced by Haworth
studio after its partnership with Robertson-Cole, a film distribution company. Miyao describes
236
Hayakawa’s effort at his Haworth sudio as “triple consciousness.” Hayakawa needed to be aware
of various preferences and interests in order to appeal all the three different categories of
spectators: Japanese in Japan, Americans, and Japanese immigrants in the United States.
According to Miyao, after establishment of his own production company, Hayakawa had been
trying to create a new ambiguous category of Oriental character rather than specifically Japanese
ones. Facing strong basing from the local Japanese immigrant communities in the United States,
he began to pay attention to avoiding unnecessary controversies which might damage his star
image. His behind-camera contribution to Liberty Bonds during WWI and Japanese amateur
stage performances in Los Angeles helped him to foster a reputation against the sensational
image of "national traitor." At his own production company, Hayakawa also carefully created his
characters in front of the camera. He played Asian characters of various national backgrounds
and registered himself to an ambiguous exotic category of Oriental. Even when playing a
Miyao, Sessue Hayakawa, 176.
236
!142
Japanese character, he included non-Japanese elements so that he could excuse the character as
an inauthentic Japanese. Hayakawa's Oriental characters were designed to look exotic to the
American audience without hurting Japanese people's national pride. Thanks to his effort, he
237
received preferable reputation among Japanese immigrants in the late 1910s.

238
The Dragon Painter, released in 1919, emerged in this context. Robertson-Cole publicized
the film as if it showed authentic Japanese landscapes and characters. Motion Picture World
reported that the film was praised for successfully reproducing an authentic Japanese
atmosphere, while Japanese critics attacked it for its unrealistic representation of Japan.
239
Japanese immigrants basically showed preferable reception although it was not enthusiastic. As
long as Hayakawa did not receive any strong bashing for it, his strategies were successful. This
success is due not only to his behind-the-camera diplomacy in Japanese immigrant communities
but also to the multi-layered structure of the film per se.
The plot of The Dragon Painter depicts the struggles and successes of a Japanese noble-
savage. Tatsu (Sessue Hayakawa) is a self-taught painter who lives in the rural mountains in
Japan. He believes that his fiancée, an ancient princess who turned into a dragon, will appear
when he completes a great painting of the dragon. One day, a surveyor (Toyo Fujita) finds
Tatsu’s unusual behavior and his genius painting skill. Amazed by him, the surveyor brings him
to Tokyo and introduces him to a famous painter, Kano Indara (Edward Peil, Sr.). Indara has
Ibid., 168-195.
237
“Kurasan no tamashii wo miru,” The Shin Sekai, November 23, 1916; “Hainichi katsudo wo yameta
238
hayakawa sesshu geki,” The Shin Sekai, August 22, 1918.
Margaret I. MacDonald “Review of The Dragon Painter,” Motion Picture World, October 4, 1919; “The
239
Dragon Painter Is a New Hayakawa Picture,” Motion Picture World, Septermber 27, 1919; Kinema Junpo 59,
(April 1, 1922), 12.
!143
been seeking for a skilled artist to inherit the lineage of the family’s bloodline because he has no
sons. In the first meeting at Indara’s house in Tokyo, Tatsu’s uncivilized behavior surprises
Indara, and the meeting seems unsuccessful. However, as soon as he sees Umeko (Tsuru Aoki),
Indara’s daughter, Tatsu begins to believe that she is the lost princess he has longed for and falls
in love with her. Indara allows Tatsu to marry his daughter on the condition that Tatsu becomes
an apprentice to carry on the Indara name. Although Tatsu and Umeko have a happy life, he
becomes unable to paint anymore because the desire for the lost gave him his inspiration. Umeko
realizes that her death can recover his talent and commits suicide for Tatsu. The following
morning, Tatsu finds a letter from Umeko expressing her hope of his painting a masterpiece.
After spending days in sorrow, Tatsu meets the ghost of Umeko and finally becomes revitalized
to paint. Tatsu’s latest work receives great recognition throughout international society. However,
after the success, Tatsu begins to feel sorrow again. Umeko, who has been hiding from him,
reveals herself to Tatsu. The film ends with Tatsu painting in the mountains, accompanied by
Umeko next to him.
The film is full of “triple conscious” considerate choices in order not to provoke any
controversies in both white American and Japanese immigrant communities, although the plot is
a typical melodrama, which was common in the 1910s. Interracial romance is deliberately not
depicted in the film in spite of Hayakawa’s established image as a sexual icon. Under the anti-
Japanese sentiment in the 1910s, when miscegenation was banned, representation of the
consummation of a Japanese man's desire for a white woman -- as Hayakawa’s character in The
Cheat -- must have been problematic. It can stimulate Americans' fear of the economic power of
Japanese immigrants in the United States and signify Imperial Japan’s territorial ambition. While
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Japanese immigrant groups tried to censor such expression to ease the discrimination, anti-
Japanese movies repeatedly depicted Japanese villains who tried to satisfy their lust for white
women with unethical means such as violence and money. Those who rescue the women from
the villains were always white male protagonists. Meanwhile, The Dragon Painter deals with a
romance between Tatsu and Umeko, both Japanese characters. Considering the fact that Sessue
Hayakawa and Tsuru Aoki playing the characters are a married couple in real life, the love affair
in The Dragon Painter was a quite safe expression for both Japanese immigrants and the
mainstream white American audience.
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However, Hayakawa's star image and sexual attraction came with his agony in a quirk of
fate. In his past films, Hayakawa's romance or sexual desire for white women could not be
consummated regardless of whether his actions are ethical and legitimate or not. The way
Hayakawa suffers for love in this film is twisted. Tatsu and Umeko marry without any major
obstacles but soon find that the marriage is a problem for Tatsu's artistic career. Umeko's
disguised suicide is the root of Tatsu's agony, to which the narrative guarantees to give a happy
resolution. Contrary to the tragic destruction of Hayakawa's characters in other films, the deus ex
machina rescues Hayakawa from bottomless suffering in The Dragon Painter. In addition, the
way he gets a woman is different from other Hayakawa characters. There is not even a single act
of violence or abuse of financial power shown in The Cheat. Hayakawa's masculine appeal is
quite limited in the film: he does not desire a white woman; he does not use unethical means to
Miyao argues that Hayakwa utilized “self-sacrifice” to make his sinister characters acceptable to middle-
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class female white audience. Hayakawa achieved a stardom by the dangerous sexual exotic image. However,
the direct express of it was a threat to the moral discourse at that time. By make his characters “self-sacrifice”
in the films, Hayakawa softened his images while maintain the romantic appeal: Miyao, Sessue Hayakawa,
107.
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acquire a woman; he does not suffer from the unsalvageable trick of fate and destruction. These
are deliberate choices in a climate of anti-Japanese sentiment, in which representation of
Japanese people was demonized. However, there is another layer of meaning in the film in
addition to the superficial layer of the expression of gentle masculinity in the film.
After his success in The Cheat, Hayakawa became a romantic icon among American
female audiences and was typecasted in leading roles in romantic dramas. At first glance, it
seems that The Dragon Painter appears to be desexualized. However, Hayakawa's sexuality
expresses itself in a very metaphorical way. What is evident about the plot is that it parallels the
acquisition of a woman and a completion of a great landscape painting. Tatsu needs to be a great
artist who can capture the beauty of the Japanese landscape to inherit the name of Indara and
fully acquire Umeko, the realization of his ideal dragon princess. As this chapter argued above,
Japanese discourse equally objectified nature and women for men’s control and possession. It is
evident that painting a great landscape picture is an allegorical act of acquiring women in the
film because Tatsu definitively states that he paints to realize the ideal dragon princess to make
her his wife. In Tatsu and Umeko’s first meeting, she appears from behind the husuma screens,
on which landscape is painted, to Tatsu’s gaze (Figure 8). Considering the particular context of
the film that Tatsu trains his painting skill to materialize his ideal dragon princess, this scene
should not be understood as a mere presentation of Japanese women’s entertainment. This scene
is an analogy of fulfillment of Tatsu’s masculine desire. Hayakawa's masculinity penetrates the
entire plot of The Dragon Painter. In this sense, Tatsu's desire for a woman is as cruel as that of
Tori in The Cheat, who branded a white woman with the heated iron seal he uses for his property.
Both tried to possess women although the extent of how they look violent are quite different.
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Figure 8: Umeko Appears from behind the Fusuma Screen (The Dragon Painter)
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The visual expression in the film endorses the notion of feminized landscape. As Miyao
argued that “The Dragon Painter displayed the imaginary, exotic, and picturesque Japan that
many American audiences had been accustomed to seeing in films and travelogues about Japan
since the late nineteenth century,” the film is full of various Japanese elements such as clothes,
crafts, decorations, gardens, and so on. However, the narrative divides them into two major
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categories: the interior and exterior. Tatsu, the protagonist, is always associated with the exterior
or nature (Figure 9). He lives in the wilderness of rural Japan and trains himself to be a great
artist. The story depicts him as a kind of noble savage who maintains the virtue that urban
Miyao, Sessue Hayakawa, 177.
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dwellers have lost. On the contrary, Indara is surrounded by various Japanese artifacts in his
gorgeous house in urban Tokyo (Figure 10).
Figure 9: The Opening Scene (The Dragon Painter)
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Figure 10: Indara in His House (The Dragon Painter)
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Tatsu’s first visit is received as a kind of surprise caused by a non-educated man. This
scene represents the obvious tension between the interior and exterior, and, thus, the Japanese
elements in the film do not make a single unified registry of Japaneseness. When Tatsu knows
that his wife committed suicide, he dives into the river (Figure 12). This is the climactic moment,
in which his association with nature is highlighted. Tastu's marriage life with Umeko signifies his
symbolic negotiation with modernized urban life, but Umeko's fake suicide means the failure of
the process. By jumping into the water, he retains his original tie with the nature and his genius
at painting. Thus, this film should not be regarded as a process of taming his wilderness. Rather,
this film celebrates the triumph of nature (exterior) over civilization (interior). That’s why Tatsu
has his wife back in nature when he is drawing in the final scene (Figure 13). The ending scene
echoes with the opening of the film and even with Karatani’s argument in the previous chapter.
In the beginning, a surveyor, a metaphor of scientific and mechanical gaze of modernity, finds
Tatsu and brings him to the urban Tokyo. The troubles that we watch all through the narrative
exemplify that the modernity cannot tame Tatsu’s wilderness. Thus, the film ends praising
Tatsu’s exerting his natural artistic talent, which attracts the daughter of city-dwelling Indara. As
the ending of The Wrath of the Gods displayed the ruthless power of nature, The Dragon Painter
shows the triumph of nature. This is a narrativised and visualized expression of being “fettered
by 5-7 rhythm” and “clinging to old forms.”
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Figure 12: Tatsu Jumps into the Water (The Dragon Painter)
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Figure 13: The Ending Scene (The Dragon Painter)
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Then, the dichotomy of exterior wilderness vs. interior civilization in the film operates to
enhance the connotative meanings regarding the feminized landscape in the film. The dichotomy
is visually associated with the tension between Japan and the United States through the
characters of Tatsu and Indara. Although the narrative defines Indara, the father artist of Umeko,
as an authentic established Japanese artist, and American audiences might have taken him as
much his character is a mixture of international elements: his name is a mash-up of the Kano
school of Japanese painting influential since the fifteenth century and Indara, a Chinese ink wash
painter, in the Sung dynasty; Edward Peil, Sr., a white American actor, plays the character. In
short, Indara does not look like an authentic Japanese for the Japanese immigrant audience at all.
Rather, the character looks similar to Tori, Hayakawa’s character in The Cheat. While both
Indara and Tori appear with many Japanese artifacts that they possess in interior scenes,
Hayakawa's Tatsu enjoys the unlimited openness of Japanese nature. In this sense, the character
of Tatsu is a deliberate choice by Hayakawa to update his old image of a greedy and brutal art
dealer, which shocked the sensitive Japanese immigrant communities, with a new one by
contrasting to Indara, an epigone of Tori.
The contrast is utilized to emphasize a biased view that Japanese immigrants preferred: The
Japanese artifacts Americans enjoy and praise are just coarse imitation. As per the discourse of
Japanese-language newspaper articles mentioned earlier in this chapter, Japanese immigrants had
an ideological belief that only Japanese people could understand the true value of Japanese
landscape beauty. The first meeting of Tatsu and Indara expresses this wish. When Indara sees
Tatsu’s artwork for the first time, he does not find a dragon in it, although Tatsu insists he drew a
dragon. (Figure 14) The artwork shown to the film audience is just a landscape painting, in
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which no one can identify a dragon. (Figure 15) Tatsu answers that the dragon is sleeping in the
bottom of the lake in his work. At its face value, this scene highlights Tatsu’s almost crazy
passion and madness for painting a dragon. However, once placed in the contrast between
Japanese who can appreciate the true beauty of Japanese nature and Americans who cannot, this
scene appears different. Only Tatsu, a Japanese noble savage artist, can see the dragon, a
transformation of his ideal wife, in the landscape, while an American enthusiast of Japanese art
cannot. In contrast to the impotence of all the male characters in front of the volcanic eruption of
Mt. Sakurajima in The Wrath of Gods, The Dragon Painter depicts a hierarchy of masculinity:
Tatsu shows his masculinity through his ability to capture the natural beauty of the Japanese
landscape.
Figure 14: Tatsu Shows His Art to Indara (The Dragon Painter)
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Figure 15: A Dragon Sleeping in a Lake (The Dragon Painter)
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As discussed in the third chapter, Japanese immigrant communities fought back against
such anti-Japanese movies with demonized representation of Japanese people in the American
film industry. Japanese cultural elites on the West Coast used the political power they had to ban
the films and also appealed to the mainstream middle-class morals to get rid of the sensational
expressions of Japanese from the films. Since such practices showed very limited success, they
began to pressure Japanese actors not to work for unfavorable movies. Hayakawa’s The Dragon
Painter is a reactionary product in the socio-political climate. While maintaining his star image
and Oriental exotics to appeal the American general public, he slid an allegorical subtext of the
aesthetics of landscape into the film text. As the subtext of The Wrath of Gods did not invoke
strong bash among Japanese immigrant communities, that of The Dragon Painter flattered
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Japanese immigrants in such a difficult political situation between the two imperial powers. For
example, near the end of the film, Tatsu’s artwork receives global recognition in an exhibition, to
which white ladies and gentlemen flock. This scene is a symptom of Japanese immigrant desire:
only Japanese people can fully understand the beauty of the Japanese landscape, and, once
represented by Japanese, the landscape beauty attracts Americans. The Dragon Painter is a
multilayered text which can accommodate different audience desires toward Americans and
Japanese immigrants. As this chapter has argued, Hayakawa’s production of the film heavily
relies on the aesthetics of landscape to smuggle a subcontext for Japanese immigrant spectators
into the film while exhibiting the exotic taste of Japan on its surface.
Conclusion
This chapter resonates with the development of the argument in the previous two
chapters. The third chapter started with the historical facts about the Japanese communities’
political and diplomatic effort to get rid of harmful Japanese images from American movies and
moved on to Okubo’s symbolic and interpretative action in his review of Wells Fargo
conditioned to the communities’ interests. The fourth chapter provided a different perspective on
Okubo’s reception by shedding light on a spontaneous aesthetic logic of landscape. Similarly,
this chapter first focused on the inconsistent reaction of Japanese immigrant communities to the
anti-Japanese elements in Hayakawa films and, then, discussed the alternative layer of symbolic
interpretation that was existent only for the Issei generation familiar with Japanese aesthetics of
landscape. This chapter would not insist that the realm of the reception and interpretation played
the more significant role than other directly decisive elements such as the political relation
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between Japan and the United States and racism based on the conflict of economic interests.
However, it is unignorable that reception and interpretation are the last resort for those who
cannot exercise effective direct powers. Therefore, in tandem with the arguments and examples
in the previous two chapters, this chapter illustrated a possible subjective worldview Japanese
immigrant could have engaged with through the Hayakawa movies while deepening our
understanding of Hayakawa films.
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Chapter 6: Failure of Realist Potential
Introduction
Cultural practices of the first generation Japanese immigrants were required to shift
their focus as Nisei or second generation Japanese immigrants outnumbered first generation
immigrants. Certainly, Kibei Nisei, the Japanese Americans who were born in the US but raised
in Japan while being away from their parents earning money in the US, were quite similar to the
first generation: English did not become their mother tongue and they sometimes internalized
Japanese nationalist values even more thoroughly than the first generation. However, there were
other groups of the second generation who were educated in the US: these people had no direct
experience of Japan and their Japanese fluency was limited. How to educate this latter Nisei
generation became a serious issue, not only for such educational sectors as language schools, but
also for cultural practitioners who were involved with the production of film and literature. As I
discussed in the previous chapters, it is only through pedagogy that one could appreciate stylized
expressions of Japanese natural beauty in short-verse poems, because such expressions were not
natural but socially and culturally constructed. Put differently, the Japanese immigrant
community thought that it could imparted such aesthetic sensitivity to the Nisei generation
through pedagogy even on the foreign soil of the United States: theoretically speaking, this
cultural discipline could have been accomplished without any first-hand familiarity with Japan,
where mere exposure to and internalization of canonical Japanese texts could have sufficed.
However, it was extremely difficult to do so in reality, given that the immigrant community had
only a limited access to Japanese materials and the linguistic skills of the Nisei generation were
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limited. How did the first generation negotiate with these conditions of scarcity and
unpreparedness? Central to the Japanese immigrant cultural practices was, thus, the topic of
reality and realism. Under this challenging circumstance, the Issei generation keenly sensed that
their cultural practices had to change in order to properly educate the English-speaking Nisei
generation: they considered that literature and movies would remain useful for this purpose, but
their usage should change in accordance with their medium specificity.
Realist Intervention
It was in the late 1920s that Japanese-language newspapers began to seriously reach
out to the English-speaking Nisei generation: the papers started a few pages of a permanent
English-language section in each issue mainly for the Nisei generation. The Rafu Shimpo started
its English section in 1926, the Shin Sekai in 1929, and the the Nichi Bei Times in 1925. At
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least one of eight total pages of daily copies were reserved regularly for English. The writers of
the English pages might have expected white American readers, but the major target audience
was the Nisei generation. Many articles written in English were explicitly addressed to Nisei
readers, and there were many posts sent from Nisei subscribers. The emergence of the English
sections shows the increasingly high demand for information in English and the Nisei
generation's linguistic limitation. However, the main body of the papers remained largely
Japanese even after the late 1920s up until they were forced to stop publication in 1941.
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Yoo, Growing Up Nisei, 68-91; Tamura and Shiramizu eds., Beikoku Shoki no Nihongo Shimbun; Mizuno,
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Nikkei Amerikajin no bungaku katsud, 189-190.
Shigehiko Shiramizu, “Hokubei shoki nikkei shinbun kankei nenpyo [The Time Table of the Early
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Japanese-Language Newspapers in North America],” Beikoku Shoki no Nihongo shinbun, 453.
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The literature section in the Japanese language did not change drastically. The growth
of the Nisei influenced various discourses even in the Japanese-language section such as
pedagogy of children, identity as Japanese in the United States, and anxiety about the Japanese
military's behavior in China. Although these new topics can be found in amateur poems in the
literature sections in Japanese, such commentary poems on contemporary issues were found
from the very beginning of the ethnic papers in the nineteenth century. These reactionary poetic
responses did not occupy the most visible part of the discussion in the papers. Instead, in the
field of short-verse poems, amateur poets and critics intensively discussed poems' relation to real
life and which forms of poems were desirable to express reality. These topics did not pop up in
either the late 1920s or the early 1930s but are rooted in the reformation movement of traditional
short-verse poems in Japan in 1890s. The influence of the movement can be seen in the literature
sections of Japanese-language papers in the United States as early as in the 1910s.
The reformation movement in haiku and tanka, which had caused many followers and
objectors in Meiji and Taisho Japan and whose influence reached to the West Coast, was initiated
by a poet named by Shiki Masaoka, who is now regarded as the most important reformer in the
modern history of Japanese traditional short-verse poems. He published various reviews of tanka
and haiku in the 1890s and influenced many Japanese poets even after his death in 1905. He is
known for his severe criticism of Kokin Wakashu, the first imperial anthology of waka poems
conceived by Emperor Uda and published by his son Emperor Daigo around 905. Since then, the
collection has been the most influential among the twenty-one collections commissioned by
Emperors. The collection soon became an authority that court nobles of taste should follow.
Techniques of interpreting poems full of paronomasia and metaphor in Kokin Wakashu were
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systematized and handed over from generation to generation within schools secretly. However, in
the modern period, when the Tokugawa Shogunate was overthrown under the pressure of the
foreign powers' intervention and societal and cultural values had drastically changed, such a
court elegance began to be questioned. Shiki Masaoka criticized Kokin Wakashu and instead
praised Manyoshu, the existing oldest collection of Japanese short-verse poems, which was
established in the eighth century, more than a century before Kokin Wakashu. Under the strong
influence of Nineteenth-century European naturalist literature, Masaoka praised the
straightforwardness of Manyoshu, which is not contaminated by the sophistication of Heian court
culture.
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What is central to Masaoka’s reformation movement is the concept of shasei. Although
it is a translation of “sketch” in Western visual art, shasei originated in Chinese visual art of the
Tang dynasty. Put differently, in Japanese visual art, shasei meant such multiple values and
practices as objective accuracy, livery description, detailed description, and on-site painting.
However, it is in 1895, a few years after Masaoka started the reformation movement, that the
poet first encountered the idea of “sketch.” Learning from Fusetsu Nakamura, a young artist of
Western oil painting, that Western painters would draw while observing the objects, Masaoka
quickly began to bring a pencil and a note to make poems on site, confirming the validity of the
new approach. This does not mean that no equivalent practices existed in Eastern visual
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cultures. Some poets in the Edo era seriously attempted to observe the world and capture a
moment of beauty. However, Masaoka was the first to import the concept of sketch in visual art
Donald Keene, The Winter Sun Shines In: A Life of Masaoka Shiki (New York: Columbia University Press,
244
2013), 3-4, 102.
Ibid., 2-3.
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into poetry writing and to explicitly emphasize the significance of simultaneity of observation
and creation in short-verse poems. In this sense, it may be claimed that Masaoka’s literary
movement to reform haiku and tanka poems had a camera-eye realist basis, while naturalist
literature in Europe in general is not limited to the vison. For example, Emile Zola, a French
novelist for his invention of the term naturalism, mobilized scientific or even anatomical
approach and observation to reveal the structure and the mechanism of the society. On the
contrary to Zola, Masaoka’s application of the idea of shasei to his literary works reminds of the
snapshot in photography.
Based on the camera-eye realist approach, Shiki Masaoka began to cause a
“perspective inversion” in the field of waka poems “fettered by 5-7 rhythm” and “clinging to old
forms.” Since Kokin Wakashu, the poetic tradition in Japanese literature pursued stylistic
sophistication to such an extent that one could make elegant love poems by combining
conventional expressions of seasons and landscape, which enabled inexperienced noble women
to become renowned poets. It is this highly sophisticated representation that Masaoka attacked,
accusing of its lack of reality and emotion. Put differently, Masaoka criticized the
institutionalized dimension of the court culture and favored rough and straightforward
representation the realist doctrine of the reformation movement dictated. What he aimed at was
the unification of the real world and real emotion, which, he claimed, should be put at the
starting point of sort-verse poems.
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After Shiki Masaoka's death in 1902, such a camera-eye realist orientation was
developed by his followers, especially Kawahigashi Hekigoto and Kyoshi Takahama, his two
Ibid., 123-139.
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leading disciples. In around 1905, Kawahigashi Hekigoto began to make haiku poems which did
not follow the traditional metric pattern of 5-7-5 and conventional use of season words and
became the most central figure of free-verse haiku poems. Under the influence of naturalism, he
insisted on the importance of associating with society rather than staying within the
institutionalized realm of beauty and explored the potential of deviating from the conventions of
the haiku medium; he even made haiku poems consisting of 4 components such as 5-5-3-5 or
5-5-5-3. On the contrary, Kyoshi Takahama, another disciple of Masaoka, reintroduced
Masaoka's impact into the traditional world. Takahama developed Masaoka's idea of shasei into
kyakkan shasei (objective sketch). According to him, kyakkan shasei is avoiding the expression
of subjective feeling and instead trying to capture the moment when the observation of the outer
world merges with the subject. Although Takahama later held up an idea of kacho huei, that the
central philosophies of haiku should be natural beauty and the harmonious interaction between
nature and man, which is thought to be a conservative turn of him, his version of adaptation of
Masaoka's ideal did not neglect the realist aspect. Also, in the field of tanka poems, followers of
Shiki Masaoka formed a group named Araragia and began to make naturalist works. Araragi
group developed free-verse tanka poems in the 1920s. These branches in the reformation
moment reached to the West Coast as early as 1909 and fostered active amateur practitioners like
Soitsu Shimoyama and Hatsue Iseda.
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What was common in these new movements in Japanese short-verse poems in the first
few decades of the twentieth century was the influence of naturalism/realism from the Western
Fumiko Nakago, “Self-expression of Japanese Issei: Short-verse Poems by Soitsu SHimoyama and Hatsue
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Iseda,” Ajia-kei Amerika Bungaku Kenkyu-kai ed., Ajia-kei Amerika Bungaku: Kioku to Souzou [Asian
American Literature: Memory and Imagination] (Osaka: Osaka Kyoiku Tosho, 2001).
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visual and literary arts. Masaoka incorporated not only the naturalist novel such as Emile Zola's
works, but also the concept of the sketch into his works. This demonstrates that one of the central
issues among poets was how to represent the societies to which they belonged. The arguments on
the validity of some techniques, such as deviation from the stylized conventional expressions and
traditional sound patterns of 5-7-5 in haiku and 5-7-5-7-7 in tanka, were not merely for the sake
of aestheticism. The poets tried these new methodologies to express their feelings, which had not
been captured in the conventional ways, in a drastically changing society.
Realist Potential and Limit
The reformers’ side had been active and spawned proletariat poets, which was the
necessary result of the realist tendencies of pre-WWII Japan, but that did not mean that their
movement was predominant in Japanese short-verse literature. There was some backlash in favor
of old-school sophistication. Even Kyoshi Takahama, one of Shiki's disciples, later turned toward
the old school and insisted upon kacho huei, an idea emphasizing natural landscape in writing
waka poems, worrying the excess radicalism of the reformers. Thus, the conservative old school
which liked court-style sophistication and the realist-oriented radicals who preferred more direct
observative expression were the two most important tendencies in short-verse poetry at that time.
Japanese immigrant amateur poets on the West Coast mirrored these two tendencies.
Discussion between two poets, Shungetsu Nakamura and Benito Tabara, in the Shin Sekai from
November to December in 1926, is exemplary. Nakamura, on the conservative side, questions
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the necessity of deviation from the 5-7-5 sound pattern and insists that the spirit of the poets can
“Kudo ichi kosatsu,” The Shin Sekai, October 26, 1926; “Kudo ichi kosatsu wo yomu,” The Shin Sekai,
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November 11, 1926; “Jita enbo,” The Shin Sekai, November 19, 1926.
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be expressed within the mora structure. On the other hand, Tabara, in defense of the reformation
movement, says that there are some fresh feelings that the standard sound format cannot deliver.
Here is the poem which they discuss the value of:

A shirt
On weeds
Kept hanged
The poem was made by Issekiro Kuribayashi, who was a leading figure later in the proletariat
haiku movement. The sound pattern of the poem is 2-5-7, which definitely deviates from the
standard 5-7-5 one. Tabara selected it as an example of a free-verse poem capturing wild and
fresh excitement. For Tabara, the poem expresses an inner rhythm which should not be
imprisoned in the traditional sound pattern that presumes any sorts of sophistication rather than
unpolished excitement. On the other side, Nakamura insists that the scenery depicted in the poem
is "merely a random act of rakugo (Japanese oral comedy performance) characters or a boorish
Mexican which is not worth being depicted," and denies the inner rhythm which Tabara praises.
In response to Nakamura's criticism, Tabata cites a statement by Yone Noguchi, a Japanese poet
whose works in English were recognized in the English-speaking world:
The goal of haiku poets is to give the impression of the poetic atmosphere in which they
live to the readers. Thus, the readers should live in the poetic atmosphere equal to that of the
poets. Only such readers can respond to the carefully expressed poetic spirit of the poets.
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“Kudo ichi kosatsu wo yomu,” The Shin Sekai, November 11, 1926.
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Applying Yone Noguchi's statement to Nakamura, Tabara says that Nakamura is not such "a
reader who can respond to the carefully expressed poetic spirit of the poets."
Although the way Tabara applies Noguchi's statement to Nakamura is almost an arbitrary
denigration, here we can observe the shift of the discussion. While the starting point of the
reformation movement in Japanese waka poems was observing the reality per se away from
conventional tropes and 5-7 sound pattern, Tabara began to problematize the mutual
understanding between poets and readers. European naturalist poets and novelists would have
not put the topic on the table because their goal was grasping the society in a scientific and
objective manner. However, the Japanese poets in under the influence of the reformation
movement inspired by European naturalism sometimes problematized the issue.
This is not their imperfection of understanding the theory, but even the most radical camera-
eye realist poems cannot exclude such a subjective expression of feeling. Otherwise, poems
become just a series of words journalistically reporting what happened in the material world.
Strictly speaking, the fact that Masaoka utilized an idea of sketch for his waka reformation
necessarily caused the issue. Since the idea of shasei has a camera-eye nature, realist waka
poems under Masaoka’s influence has a snapshot-lite tendency as seen in the poem above. Thus,
the poet is unavoidably the center of the waka expression. What is common about Tabara and
Nakamura’s claims is that, regardless of their evaluation of the poem, they both agree that the
expression of the true feeling of the poet is vital in poems: while radical Tabara explores a fresh
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and new expression of feeling, Nakamura thinks that the poet's personality could be expressed
through conventional sound patterns. The new methodologies, inspired by the idea of shasei
sketching, served the authorial subjectivity of the poets by providing them a camera-eye.
The focus on the subjective impressions of the poets was quite common in the amateur
literature circles on the West Coast. Nobara Sekiguchi, an amateur poet and a theologist active in
California, argued the importance of mutual understanding between poets and readers, without
sophisticating theoretical potential of shasei realist approach in waka poems.
I think readers need to understand our lives more deeply. Both creation and appreciation of
poems become shallow and superficial without understanding of and sympathy toward
many aspects of society and people’s lives. I think it is important to look around society, see
other people's lives, consider yourselves, read more, appreciate more, feel deeply, and keep
the feeling longer with your mind eyes wide open.

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In conjunction with the way Tabara cited Yone Noguchi's words, Sekiguchi’s words here show
the gap between the original radical will of the reformation movement in Japan and its followers
in the United States. At the surface, Noguchi and Sekiguchi’s statements both seem to emphasize
the realist eyes on real life and society, as the reformers insisted on a few decades before them.
Sekiguchi insists both poets and readers should "look around society, see other people's lives,
“Otagai no seikatsu ni taisuru rikai to dojyo,” The Shin Sekai, August 14, 1927.
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consider yourselves, read more, appreciate more, feel deeply, and keep the feeling longer with
your mind eyes wide open." However, the metaphor of the "mind eyes" is not an unbiased eye to
the material world. Both of Noguchi and Sekiguchi’s statements assume a communal mutual
understanding between poets and readers. The "poetic atmosphere" in Noguchi is reserved to
understand "the carefully expressed poetic spirit of the poets." Such a metaphysical realm is
reserved before sketching the material reality of the world among the amateur poets in the United
States.
Praise of the Daily Life
Such a discursive shift can be found in some reviews of amateur poems. For example, Ijyo Inoue
evaluates some poems according to the standard of communal mutual understanding. He praises
these two poems by amateur poets:

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In a deep mountain
Appearing on the way
A baby bear
The photos of it
Are well-taken

Thirty people
Of my fellows
Working here
Many of them are
Older than fifty Inoue found the first poem distinctive in comparison with other amateur poems expressing the
sublimity of American nature such as Yosemite and the Grand Canyon. As discussed in the
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Ijyo Inouse, “Kadan zakkan,” The Shine Sekai, July 15, 1928
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Ibid.
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former chapters, natural landscape was a site where the observers' ideological standpoints were
projected. The Japanese amateur poets symbolically transformed the natural sublimity of
American landscape into something familiar by applying established conventions of Japanese
beauty on it. On the contrary to such poems, this expresses a quotidian and ordinary quality of
joy of encountering a baby bear on a mountain track. There are no season words that
predetermine the interpretation of the poem. Instead, the poem embraces a self-referential
moment in which the poet and the readers remember the scene through the photography. The
embedded structure of the poem freezes a vivid impression of the accidental moment through the
modern device of technological reproducibility.
Inoue also discusses that he picked the second poem because it describes the social
reality of Japanese people in the United States. Inoue recognizes that the poet is running a risk of
making a boring poem by using descriptive technique: the poem uses too-specific numbers to
give itself a detail. However, Inoue argues that the descriptive details gave the poem a realistic
eye on the social situation of Japanese immigrants at that time and even that the descriptive
approach is not sufficient. He suggests the poet replaces "my fellows (harakara)" and "fifty
(Isoji, an quaint expression of fifty years old)" with "Japanese (nihonjin)" and "fifty (gojyu, a
colloquial expression of fifty)" respectively to attain the maximum effect of the descriptive
approach.
The way Inoue defends the value of these poems, whose sound-patterns remain in the
traditional structures, resonates with the Nakamura-Tabara debate and Noguchi's statement cited
in the debate. Stylistic choices -- traditional sound patterns and seasonal words, or deviation from
the pattern and a realistic approach -- might be secondary issues for all the poets. A strong
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interest in describing the surrounding daily reality was the fundamental discursive force for the
amateur poets on the West Coast. However, this initial driving force in the amateur literature
world did not allow the poets to jump the borderlines in the society to the other side. Rather, they
stayed in their familiar aesthetic universe. Inoue's suggestion endorses that. The word "Japanese"
might have been a more neutral choice compared to "my fellow," which emphasizes the poet's
sympathetic ethnic tie to the poor old Japanese workers. However, his suggestion limits the
potential of the poem to within the Japanese people's ethnic experience, although the original
word choice of "my fellow" potentially had a wider connotation to be applied to other ethnic
groups. Their realistic eyes were their Japanese eyes.
Such a discursive configuration can be said to be a revival version of Kyuin Okina's
"Literature in the Immigrant Land ( )." Kyuuin Okina stayed on the West Coast
from 1907 and 1924 and led the amateur literature world as a journalist for the Hokubei Jiji and
the Nichi Bei Times. He insisted that Japanese immigrants should establish a distinctively local
253
literature which expresses the situation of Japanese people on American soil. By establishing a
distinctive literature, Japanese immigrants as pioneers for the Japanese empire's expansion can
construct strong local bridgeheads in the United States. Although Okina's specialty was
254
novels, local amateur creators of literature, whether prose or verse, were strongly influenced by
his thesis.
One example of Japanese immigrant poets under the strong influence of Okina was
Shurin Tanaka, a poet and antique collecter living in Hollywood. He was a proactive advocate of
Mariko Mizuno, “The idea of Iminchi Bungei by Okina Kyuin: Focusing on His Changing Identity,”
253
Ningen Kankyogaku 16, (2007), 77-93.
Kyuin Okina, Ishokujyu [Transplanted Tree], Tokyo: Daikusha, [1923] 2007.
254
!168
transplant of "the old culture of our Japanese race" in the United States. (p174) His statement
255
in 1938 shows that Japanese immigrant communities maintained Okina's ideal:
We Issei living on the North American continent will be disappearing soon as the Nisei
generation emerges. Then, after that, the more perfect society of Japanese race will be
constructed. When that happens, someone will write the history of Japanese race in
North America.
256

However, the amateur poets' activity in the 1930s could not have been reduced to such
a totalitarian framework. One example is an article titled "Make rice field! Write poems!" In
257
this article, a writer argues that Japanese immigrants should make poems and rice fields at the
same time from a proletarian artist standpoint. According to him, if Japanese farmers take the
“there-is-no-leisure-for-the-poor” situation for granted and stop making poems, they need to live
"without any progress, as slaves forever, as mechanized men, and as living dead." Making
258
poems is the first step toward being a human. The writer discusses the importance of organizing
reading groups and study groups to self-educate and not to be fooled by the rulers. This article
shows that the realist tendency bore the fruit of proletarian literature in the 1930s and that the
amateur literature world was not occupied by a single party: while there were Okina's devotees
Eizaburo Okuizumi and Shuichi Sasaki, Hariuddo no kijin Tanaka Shurin [Shurin Tanaka, the Eccentric in
255
Hollywood] (Tokyo: Bunsei Shoin, 2003), 174.
Ibid., 6.
256
“Ta wo tsukuri, shi wo tsukure,” The Shin Sekai, June 15, 1936.
257
Ibid.
258
!169
that believe the imperial expansion as a fate of their country, other poets questioned such a view
with a realist proletarian lens.
Such diversity can be seen in the first nation-wide literature magazine published in
1936. The title of the journal was Shukaku, which means harvest in Japanese. As the title of
Okina's first book publication was Ishokujyu (Transplanted Tree), which explicitly shows an idea
that he would transplant Japanese population and values on American soil, the title Shukaku
[Harvest] has a somehow invasive implication considering Okina's thesis and the fact that
Japanese people were establishing agricultural communities. Actually, there were many articles
that, directly and indirectly, expressed their hope of flourishing in the United States. In
259
addition to such an expansionist implication, the name of Shukaku could also signify the realist
and proletarian tendency in literature. For example, the wood-print picture chosen for the cover
of the first issue contrasts Japanese farmers in front and an urban city area in the back. (Figure
16) A male, whose facial expression and age are not clear, is drawn in the front, implying that he,
who is probably in an agricultural industry, belongs to the farm. The juxtaposition clearly aligns
the magazine's sympathy with the farmers rather than the city. As Bonshiro argued in his article,
Shukaku also expressed an ideal of observing and aestheticizing their daily lives for the future
progress and the improvement of their living conditions.
260

Mizuno, Nikkei Amerikajin no bungaku katsudō, 216-222.
259
“Bungei renmei,” The Shin Sekai, January 11, 1937.
260
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Figure 16: A Woodprint Image in Shukaku
!
Although some works in the magazines show militant feeling and imperialistic
expansionist ideology, they did not occupy the majority of the magazine. However, the magazine
shows the naïve emphasis on the communal space of mutual understanding established by these
artistic practices. In short, the discursive tendency in Japanese-language newspapers and
Shukaku shows how the local Japanese communities utilized, softened, and even appropriated the
realist intervention in the field of short-verse poems. As discussed above, influenced by the
European naturalist literature movement, Shiki Masaoka introduced observatory methodology
!171
into the conventional stylized haiku and tanka. This radical will have developed into a deviation
from the standard sound pattern later. However, in practice, Japanese immigrant poets introduced
the practices but did not step outside of their Japanese perspective. The realist potential of the
reformation is tamed into a language of mutual understanding between poets and readers. In
other words, the naturalist elements in the reformation movement were utilized for the amateur
poets to justify their focus on the reality of their lives in the United States, while the potential
was not fully developed.
Film art was understood as a natural/realist device through the discursive lens of literature.
As they did with their literature, the local Japanese community utilized the realist characteristics
of film media without deepening its full potential. Film criticism in the early thirties shows such
a discursive orientation. For example, a review criticizes Footlight Parade (1933) for its lack
261
of realist attention to ordinary people. Tired of the revue musical movies at that time, the critic
attacks the dream-like nature of the film.
However, nothing but "easy comfort" can be found in the film. Probably tons of money was
spent on the production of the film. And, the failure of the film regardless of such a big
budget shows that the future course of American film industry is blocked. If the American
film industry cannot produce anything but cookie-cutter dream-like movies, which are far
apart from ordinary people's real lives, they must reach a dead end and go to ruin.
Robert Lord, Footlight Parada, directed Lloyd Bcon and Busby Berkeley, 1933.
261
!172

262
This article obviously resonates with the discourse in the poems which this chapter has argued
for so far and Ogiwara’s film-as-a-temporal-escape thesis. While cultures function as sources of
comfort and pleasure, Japanese immigrants also criticized Hollywood movies from their realist
standpoints.
Thus, suffice it to say, Japanese immigrants began to pay attention to the realist
potential of film media to depict the reality of their lives and historicize the legacy of them.
263
One such initial movement can be seen in their unfinished project of shooting the tomb of Okei.
In 1869, the Aizu clan, which lost the Boshin civil war in Japan, planned to build a colony to
produce Japanese tea and silk in California and to send a group of pioneers via San Francisco to
Gold Hill, where gold mining was flourishing. Okei is the name of a babysitter girl in the group
who worked for the Japanese wife of John Henry Schnell, a merchant who arranged the
immigration, and their child. They named their farming community Wakamatsu Colony after
their hometown. However, their venture was not successful because tea and mulberry trees
brought from Japan did not grow well and they ran out of funding. Okei passed away of disease
at the age of nineteen in 1871. Since other survivors built a tomb of her, she had was
264
remembered among Japanese immigrants in the twentieth century as one of the earliest pioneers
to the country. In 1930, some people started a project to shoot the tomb of Okei in California for
“Sensyu no eigakai sanken,” The Shin Sekai, November 20, 1933.
262
Azuma, Between Two Empires, 102-105.
263
Hiroshi Gomi, Maboroshi no Karihorunia Wakamatsu Ryo: Hatsuimin Okei no Monogatari [Wakamatsu
264
Colony in California: The Story of Okei, the First Immigrant] (Tokyo: Puraza, 1997).
!173
the sake of recording the prehistory of Japanese people's development in the United States and
bring it to Japan to publicize their history in their home country. As this example shows,
265
Japanese immigrants began to view the film medium primarily as "an art of discovery" in
comparison with other media such as literature, painting, and music.
266
As shown so far, both short-verse poems and film media began to be considered realist
media that could shed light on their daily lives, which cannot be expressed through the
conventional stylized aesthetics of traditional Japanese poems nor in the dream-like Hollywood
revue movies. As Shukaku was published in the field of literature, there was some film
production by the hand of Japanese immigrants to express the reality of their lives. However, can
these movies be said to be a realist expression of their quotidian lives? As the realist aspect of the
reformation movement in tanka and haiku was utilized by the local Japanese community, the
film media and production of movies was not merely a straightforward expression of reality. But
it was also utilized for a specific ideological and pedagogical purpose during the rise of Nisei.
Film Culture as a Pedagogical Device
Compared to poems, which require active engagement and some degree of language
skills, movies were effective tools to educate the Nisei generation who did not speak Japanese.
The realist/naturalist nature of the movie camera was used to justify the authenticity of
representation in film footage rather than to explore the subversive potential of realism. This
section discusses various ways the Issei generation of Japanese immigrants used movies --
“Okei no haka wo katsudo shashin ni toru,” The Shin Sekai, March 29, 1930.
265
“Eiga no geijyutsu: eiga no hondo ni tsuite,” The Shin Sekai, October 29, 1934.
266
!174
imported from Japan and produced locally by the Japanese immigrants -- to impress ideological
views on the Nisei generation.
As discussed in the first chapter, movies had been imported from Japan since the
1910s. Before the establishment of film narrative, the imported Japanese movies were not
feature-length movies, but a mixture of travelogues, comedies, random choices of landscapes,
excerpts of stage performances, and so on. The previous chapters revealed various cultural
functions that the imported movies performed within Japanese ethnic communities in the 1910s
and 1920s: a temporal escapist pleasure from the toughness of daily life under racism; an echo
chamber fostering an imperialistic self-consciousness of being Japanese. However, the expected
role for imported movies drastically changed in the late 1920s when the Nisei generation became
active in Japanese communities. Japanese movies were thought to be a cultural device to show
the reality of Japan. Besides feature-length movies, which were the major attraction of screening
events, short documentary movies such as Today's Japan ( ) and Nara and Kyoto ( ) were imported to show the country of their ethnic origin to the Nisei generation who
had never been to Japan. According to a newspaper article, when Today's Japan was screened in
1934, the explanation was in English rather than Japanese to encourage the attendance of the
Nisei generation.
267
In the 1930s, besides screening events targeting the Issei generation such as Tochuken
Nami’emon's movie-rokyoku combined performance, which required linguistic and cultural
knowledge among the audience, such pedagogical programs gained popularity in response to the
rise of Nisei. Thus, Ogiwara's nostalgia thesis needs further reinterpretation to apply to the
“Nihon no kyo’ raian gekijyo ni oite muryo ni jyoei su,” The Shin Sekai, September 20, 1934.
267
!175
situation in the 1930s. Considering the increasing political tension between Japan and the United
States over the interests in China and the anti-Japanese sentiment in response, the ethnically
closed screening space had a safe quality. However, it was not merely an escapist activity
because the Japanese immigrants were trying to educate their American-born children and
reproduce their cultural and political ideals.
Such a use of imported Japanese movies was significant in Takeshi Ban's Movie and
Lecture (Eiga to Kowa) movement. Ban was born in Kumamoto prefecture in 1884 and moved to
Hawaii as a congregational minister in 1910. In 1913, he moved to the mainland and started to
preach to Japanese immigrants based in Orange County, California. Cooperating with other
Japanese ministers who share the same ideal, Ban established a Japanese Independent Church in
1915 to be independent of white Christian associations. Then, he founded the Pacific Society of
Religious Education ( ) for the sake of Nisei education and mutual
understanding between Japan and the United States in 1931. It was in 1932 that Ban started the
Movie and Lecture movement.

He packaged Japanese movies imported through Nichi Bei
268
Kogyo Company with a lecture justifying the Japanese empire's behavior in international society,
demonstrating his theological knowledge for audiences. He provided his movies and lectures to
Japanese communities mainly not just in California, Washington, and Oregon but also in Utah,
Idaho, Wyoming, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Nebraska until 1941, when Japan and the United
States started a war.
269
Itakura, Eiga to Imin, 114-121.
268
Azuma, Between Two Empires, 176-177.
269
!176
His status as a Congregational minister did not assure that Takeshi Ban was free from
Japanese imperialism and belief in the Emperor. Instead of being dependent on the American
Christian communities, Japanese Christian associations, in which Ban exercised leadership,
became dependent on the Japanese ethnic economy and strengthened its tie to the Japanese state-
ideology. Thus, his establishment of the Pacific Society of Religious Education is a direct
response to the rising nationalism of imperial Japan after the Manchurian Incident, a staged
bombing of a railway by the Japanese military to step into the northeast area of China in 1931.
Ban's choice of movies exemplifies such an ideological influence. For example, in his Movie and
Lecture series in 1934, he picked Katakana Chugi [Katakana Loyalty] and Nogi Shizuko Fujin
270
[Mrs. Nogi Shizuko] (, Iwaoka Shokai, 1934). Katakana Chugi is a story of a gentle youth
271 272
who is forced to leave his village thanks to a greedy fisherman and become a gangster in a city.
However, the youth regrets his delinquency and joins the Japanese army. Then, he sacrifices
himself for the nation in Manchuria. The letter sent to his grandmother from the war front shows
his sincere penitence and gratitude to her. On the other hand, there is no clue about the story of
the other film, Mrs. Nogi Shizuko. The film seems to be a propaganda film praising the rule of
the Emperor. Mrs. Shizuko Nogi is a wife of General Maresuke Nogi, who committed harakiri
suicide after the death of the Meiji Emperor in 1912. Though Maresuke assumed his wife would
be alive after his suicide, Shizuka followed him and stabbed herself in the heart. Both Maresuke
and Shizuka were mainly praised in Japan as embodiments of samurai loyalty to the emperor.
Thus, these two movies apparently exemplify self-sacrificial nationalism for the Emperor's
Katakana Chugi [Katakana Loyalty], director unknown, Takarazuka Cinema, 1934.
270
Nogi Shizuko Fujin [Mrs. Nogi Shizuko], director unknown, Iwaoka Shokai, 1934.
271
“Ban hakase no eiga to koen,” The Shin Sekai, November 22, 1934.
272
!177
nation. The title given to Ban's Movie and Lecture series was "Educational Lecture: A Warning
to the Second Generation Who Face the Crisis of Youth." It is obvious that Ban tried to
273
implement such an ideology into the Nisei generation through the combination of lectures and
movies. Imported movies were the authentic materialization of Japanese imperial ideology
274
made in Japan. By using Katakana Chugi and Mrs. Shizuko Nogi, which embody the ideas
expressed in his lectures, as object lessons, Ban's Movie and Lecture series appealed to the Nisei
generation with the realistic depiction of the ideal Japanese Empire and its moral glory.
Japanese Immigrant Movie Production
Besides Ban’s use of imported movies from Japan as a source of authority for his
pedagogical project, such a pedagogical desire had been driven by Japanese immigrants to make
movies in the United States since the 1910s. The Yamato Graph Film Company and the
Japanese-American Film Company were two of the earliest Japanese production companies
established in Portland in 1912 and in Los Angeles in 1914 respectively. These companies and
other film production companies run by Japanese immigrants in the 1910s and 1920s operated
only for several years. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the commercial production of movies
targeting mainly Japanese immigrant spectators was revitalized thanks to the rise of the Nisei
problems. As the Issei generation needed Ban’s Movie and Lecture series to educate the Nisei
generation, the rising Nisei generation was the major driving force of the rapid increase of
locally-produced movies on Nisei generation.
“Ban hakase no koen to eiga,” The Shin Sekai, November 24, 1934.
273
Nihon seishin ron kouen,” The Shin Sekai, February 5, 1934.
274
!178
The Yamato Graph Film Company was established in Portland in 1912. Since the
president of the company was Toyoji Abe, the president of the Oshu Nippo, also known as the
Oregon News, the only Japanese-language daily paper in Oregon at that time, Yamato Graph
should have been a film department of the paper. Reisen Narusawa, also known as Kinbei
Narusawa, was in charge of filmmaking. Narusawa was a journalist and businessman who was
later known for his contribution as a founding editor to Asahi Graph (1923-2000) and Asahi
Camera (1926-), photographic and photojournalistic magazines. Films made by Narusawa
275
were documentaries capturing the life of Japanese Americans in the United States. He traveled in
California to shoot “cities on the coasts, scenery in the countryside, public facilities run by
fellow Japanese men such as schools, churches, and newspaper publishers, leisure of Japanese in
the United States, life of school boys, varieties of business by Japanese people” and screened
276
his film for Japanese immigrants. These films were sent to Japan after local screenings in the
United States. In his articles published on the Nichi Bei Times, Narusawa discussed the huge
influence that film had on the society and insisted on using the power of film for pedagogy. He
suggested shooting scenes in which people, culture, and products of Japan and the United States
were welcomed by each other in order to enlighten not just Japanese immigrants but also
Japanese people in the home country and Americans. His filmmaking was not just a business but
a “campaign of education” to teach Japanese immigrants how to get used to and fit into
Itakura, Eiga to Imin, 165.
275
The Nichi Bei Times, June 7, 1913.
276
!179
American culture and to create a desirable environment for the smooth assimilation of Japanese
people in the United States.
277
The Japanese-American Film Company, established in Los Angeles in 1914, was
another example of Japanese immigrants’ film production in its dawn. The company sent
technicians to San Francisco to record Japanese people in the city and the constructions for
Panama-Pacific International Exposition held in 1915. In contrast to Yamato Graph’s focus on
278
the pedagogical power of documentary filmmaking, the Japanese-American Film Company was
business-oriented. Forty Japanese investors sank $200,000 into the stock company before it
started business. The company had Sawyer Inc. market their products to the American market.
279
Since the company was eager for commercial success in the United States, their films were not
limited to documentaries of fellow Japanese people. They produced narrative films such as The
Oath of the Sword, the first production of the company. Although the details of the film as
unknown, an article on the company in Moving Picture World points out that “all the customs of
the old country will be treated with absolute fidelity in the film:” there are no kiss or any other
demonstration of affection, which Americans are accustomed to; when the protagonist leaves
Japan for the United States, his fiancé does not see him off because it is not appropriate in
Japanese culture.
280
The Nichi Bei Times, July 15, 1913; The Nichi Bei Times, July 19, 1913; The Nichi Bei Times, July 20,
277
1913; The Nichi Bei Times, July 22, 1913; The Nichi Bei Times, July 26, 1913; The Nichi Bei Times, July 29,
1913.
The Shin Sekai, February 13, 1914; “Nihon gakuen no katsudou” The Shin Sekai, March 3, 1914.
278
“Japanese-American Film Company” Moving Picture World, October 17, 1914, 314.
279
“Japanese-American Film Company” Moving Picture World, October 17, 1914, p314.
280
!180
While the Japanese-American Film Company sold authentic images of Japan, it also
produced movies on Japanese immigrants. However, their approach was of commercial interest.
They illustrated a Japanese boss in a comical manner in Shashin Kekkon [Picture Marriage] (),
281
which depicted the customs of picture marriages, trans-Pacific arranged marriages for Japanese
workers in the United States. This movie does not exist today, but a newspaper article which
mentioned this film as the funniest one in a screening event roughly traced the plot. A Japanese
boss in a rural area is waiting for a picture bride. He is checking the train schedule in a camp. A
wireless telegraphy arrives at the camp, and the boss, being taken by surprise, leaves for the city
to welcome the bride. The film, then, moves on to the scenes at the pier as the ship arrives and to
the immigration office. The story touches on the troubles around the couple and finally ends at
the wedding ceremony. The fact that the author of the article wrote that he could not help
282
laughing when watching the film requires attention because it raises questions about the target
audience of the film. Emphasizing the comical touch and the focus on the Japanese boss rather
than the bride in the film, Itakura describes how Picture Marriage objectifies a daily experience
of Japanese immigrant workers and, then, turns it into humor. Shashin Kekkon e is, thus, the very
first film exemplifying the Japanese immigrants’ subjective reaction to the surrounding
environment. This analysis assumes that the film was made for the Japanese immigrant audience.
However, as the company had Sawyer Inc. market its films to the American market, it is not
likely that Shashin Kekkon was made exclusively for Japanese immigrant audiences. From the
standpoint of white American spectators, the comical expression of the boss’s troubles might
Shashin Kekkon [Picture Marriage], director unknown, 1914.
281
“Benshi tsuki katsudou shashin” The Shin Sekai, March 28, 1914.
282
!181
have lost a room for a profound interpretation of the film as self-referential humor for Japanese
immigrants. Thus, as we discussed the multiple layers of meanings of Hayakawa films for
different demographics in the previous chapter, Shashin Kekkon must have had such dualities:
the self-referential comical irony for Japanese immigrant workers and the simple fatuity targeting
the White audience for profit.
What is common in Yamato Graph and Japanese American Film Company is that they
were run by an elite segment in the Japanese immigrant communities: Narusawa in Yamato
Graph was obviously motivated by a cultural elitist passion for pedagogy, while the Japanese
American Film Company, a stock company financed by forty investors, was driven by economic
interest. These two companies operated at least a few years in the 1910s but did not seem to be
active in the 1920s because there are no newspaper articles reporting their films. Other Japanese-
own film production companies such as Hokubei Katsudo Shashin Kaisha in Denver and
283
Shirobato Film in Los Angeles could not consistently operate.
284
In the 1920s, amateurs began to enter filmmaking thanks to the supply of movie
cameras targeting the consumer market such as the Cine-Kodak in 1923. Amateur filmmakers
started using 8mm and 16 mm films and formed groups to share and exhibit them. Six
285
members of California Cinema Study Group (Nanka Shinema Kenkyukai) recorded the Los
Angeles Olympic Games in 1932, and the footage was screened for the Japanese audience with
their other amateur work titled Kashu no Omoide [Memories of California] . According to
286
The Shin Sekai, July 6, 1913.
283
“Rensageki Yamiyo no Yado,” The Shin Sekai, February 23, 1922.
284
“16 miri eiga kanshokai,” The Shin Sekai, February 10, 1933.
285
Kashu no Omoide [Memories of California], directed six members of California Cinema Study Group,
286
1932.
!182
newspaper articles, their amateur works got prizes in international competitions. In addition to
287
these amateurs, benshi also committed film production. Namiemon Tochuken, with technicians,
recorded footage of Japanese immigrants. It is not sure how Namiemon used the footage in his
288
usual performance, but considering that Japanese immigrants were longing for the images of
themselves and the flexible nature of his performance, it is likely that he could have included
some of the footage into his performance.
Besides these amateur works reported on newspaper articles, there is some footage of
home movies dating back as early as 1926. They are mostly black and white 8mm or 16 mm
footages. These home movies have some distinctive characteristics which cannot be found in
other amateur works made for circulation. These home movies, donated by six families and
individuals to the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, show Japanese
immigrants' experience with modernity in urban areas, probably because of their wealth, which
could allow the families to afford expensive film cameras. The frequent subjects in the home
289
movies are: 1) their family business in a city rather than agriculture in rural areas; 2) their family
events such as wedding ceremonies; 3) modern city life such as cars and trains; 4) The American
way of leisure such as hiking, sport, and picnics.
These home movie collections are significantly important because they captured
Japanese immigrants' real life in a city area, which was not foregrounded in public discourses in
newspapers. Since half of the Japanese population was in agricultural industries in rural areas,
cultural sectors of the immigrant society mobilized the images of natural beauty for their
“Konkodo no eigakai,” The Shin Sekai, January 23, 1933.
287
“Matsuoka kantai no shishakai,” The Shin Sekai, April 19, 1933.
288
Home Movie Collection, Japanese American National Museum.
289
!183
comfort, indulgence, or self-esteem. The Japanese-language newspapers were full of such
tendencies. However, nature is not the major subject in the home movie collections. One
exception is the collection featuring the Aratani family's trip to Yosemite National Park. The
nature of Yosemite is captured in the home movie, but the beauty is not the focus. The
cameraman, instead, shoots the joy of the Aratani family, all in Western clothes. Nature is not
imagined as a source of transcendent value or dignity but used as a source of entertainment.
These expressions are quite different from any other sorts of representations of Japanese beauty
that Japanese immigrants created: for instance, Sessue Hayakawa's Dragon Painter, which
symbolically used the natural landscape as a source of Japanese beauty; the idealized landscape
of Japan in short-verse poems.
Figure 17: Aratani Family in Yosemite 1 (JANM Home Movie Collection)
!
!184
Figure 18: Aratani Family in Yosemite 2 (JANM Home Movie Collection)
!
These "non-censored" home footages might have captured the wealthiest group of
Japanese people, which shows a stark contrast to the mainstream discourse in ethnic newspapers.
Then, what were the major subjects and topics of the movie productions by Japanese people in
the United States? Were they conditioned to the ideological discourses that framed amateur poets
and cultural critics? Did the movies by local Japanese people have no realist potential to capture
their lives in the 1930s?
Besides these family footages, there was some professional filmmaking targeting the
commercial market. Taiheiyo no Musume [The Daughter of the Pacific Ocean] is one such
290
movie made by a film production company owned by Japanese people named Oriental Cinema
(Orientaru Shinema Satsuei Gaisha) in 1927. The film was directed by Keido Ideguchi ( 291
Taiheiyo no Musume [The Daughter of the Pacific Ocean], Oriental Cinema, 1927.
290
“Iyoiyo taiheiyo no musume,” The Shin Sekai, April 30, 1927; “Rensageki taiheiyo no musume iyoiyo
291
mikka kara jyoen,” The Shin Sekai, July 4, 1927.
!185
). The actors were a mixture of Japanese and Americans to further friendship between
Japan and the United States. Tsuyuko Maeda, Mary Jonson, and Merber Yonemura played the
main roles in the production. The plot of the production is not clear, but, from the title, it might
have been like The Wrath of the Gods argued in the previous chapter. This production was a
"chain play," which meant a part of a stage performance was replaced with film footage with the
same actors on the stage. There are no clues about why Oriental Cinema chose a "chain play"
format rather than a feature film. They might have been inspired by the popularity of the benshi’ s
performance among Japanese communities, or the studio may not have had enough expertise to
produce a feature-length film, since this was their first production. According to newspaper
articles, not just Japanese viewers but also white American viewers, including those who were in
the movie industry, applauded the stage production. However, the spreadability of the
292
production should have been limited because of the nature of the "chain play."
Iminchi no Haha [Mother in the Immigrant Land] (1935)
Iminchi no Haha [Mother in the Immigrant Land] is a film directed by Yushin
293
Takamatsu of Hollywood Film Study Group (Hariuddo Eiga Kenkyukai). The book was
294
written by Kusumoto, a local Japanese pediatrician in Los Angeles. The film was first released in
1935 among Japanese people. Because of the educational value recognized by the leaders in
Japanese communities, United Churches were sometimes chosen for the screening venues. The
“Rensageki taiheiyo no musume beijin daigekijyo de,” The Shin Sekai, May 16, 1927; “Mesaki no kawatta
292
rensageki ga daigekijyo to jyouen keiyaku,” The Shin Sekai, June 6, 1927
Iminchi no Haha [Mother in the Immigrant Land], directed Yushin Takamatsu, Hariuddo Eiga Kenkyukai
293
[Hollywood Film Study Group], 1935.
“Jidai no kessaku iminchi no haha,” The Shin Sekai, October 7, 1935.
294
!186
story is about a woman's life until her death. A young woman who moves to the United States
through a picture marriage with a hope of a new happy life finds that her husband is merely a
poor farmer. While working hard on a farm, she gives birth to six children. Although her life on
the farm was different from a sophisticated urban life she dreamed of in Japan, they live happily
together in the United States. However, the economic panic brings the family to a financial crisis,
and the mother gets sick. She was in peril of losing her life. A pediatrician happens to visit the
family and brings the mother and children to his hospital to save their lives. The mother passes
away at the hospital peacefully because the children do not need to know what happens to their
mother thanks to the pediatrician's arrangement.
As the synopsis shows, the mother is obviously the lead protagonist in the film. The
focus on the mother who devotes herself to the farm and the next generation parallels the
movement of memorizing and praising the effort of the Issei generation such as filming Okei's
tomb. The pediatrician character, onto whom the writer Kusumoto narcissistically projected
himself, is an exceptional element in Japanese movie productions. Such an elite character is not
common in movies made by Japanese immigrants because the primary focus is the suffering of
the Japanese immigrants and, thus, working-class lives, especially farmers', are depicted, while
Japanese elite characters appear only occasionally in American movies such as Tori, a wealthy
antique art dealer in The Cheat. Iminchi no Haha exemplifies a rare case that an interest of
economic elite in Japanese communities penetrated into a "censored" ideal representation of
Japanese immigrants in the 1930s.
Nobiyuki Nisei [The Growing Nisei] (1936)
!187
Nobiyuki Nisei [The Growing Nisei] is another film which resonates with the
295
Japanese farmers’ collective memory more directly. The footage of the film does not exist today,
and the synopsis and newspaper articles reporting the film are the only sources of information
about the film. The story is about a prodigal son who was born to and raised by Issei parents in
296
a rural farming community. Falling in love with a young white girl, he confronts his Issei father
who embodies Issei values and is against the interracial marriage. He asks the white girl to elope,
but the girl turns it down. Desperate, he runs away to Los Angeles and finds a job at a Japanese
vegetable market. Believing that he severely hurt a man in a gambling house, he returns to his
home village and fights with the father again. However, when his father has a heart attack and
passes away, the son finds that his life relies on the sacrificial efforts of the Issei generation. In
the end, the son marries a Nisei fiancée and devotes himself to establish a cooperative.
As Eiichiro Azuma discusses, although the young actors in the film were mainly Nisei,
the film is full of Issei teleology. First, the filmmakers wanted to praise the heritage and ideas
297
of the first generation of Japanese people. Although recognizing some tension from the Nisei
generation against the first generation, the film tries to have Japanese community’s existing
values absolve the generational tension and, by doing, the film signifies that common beliefs of
the first generation are correct: moral supremacy of agricultural communities away from
contaminated cities; mono-racial marriage for the development of Japanese immigrants; the
virtue of hard work over pleasure and gambling. Compared with the home movie collections
showing modern lifestyle and urban pleasure in the city area, these distinctive characters of The
Nobiyuki Nisei [The Growing Nisei], Hariuddo Eiga Kenkyukai [Hollywood Film Study Group], 1936.
295
“Hariuddo kenkyukai eiga ‘nobiyuku nisei,’” The Shin Sekai, November 16, 1936.
296
Azuma, Between Two Empires, 116-117.
297
!188
Growing Nisei are very apparent. Second, the narrative tries to keep the Nisei generation in the
value system of the Issei by depicting the delinquency of a Nisei man. Unlike other film
productions whose lead characters were Issei figures, The Growing Nisei shed light on a young
Nisei character played by a Nisei actor. However, the narrative defines all of his decisions as
juvenile delinquency and turns the character into an ideal communal figure in the end. Most
likely, the "growing" of the lead Nisei character eased the Issei parents who encountered similar
disobedience from their children at home and, thus, the film presented an ideal trajectory of "the
growing Nisei" for the Issei generation. Both Mother on the Immigrant Land and The Growing
Nisei do not depict the reality of their living conditions and problems, but were romanticized
versions of them.
Chijiku wo Mawasu Chikara [Turning the Earth’s Axis] (1930)
Such a failure of realist momentum in these film productions is most clearly observed
in the movie Chijiku wo Mawasu Chikara [Turning the Earth’ s Axis]. Hollywood Japan Talkie
298
Company (Hariuddo Nihon Hassei Eiga Gaisha) started production of the talkie film in 1929.
299
However, many non-Japanese crew members joined and played key roles in the team. The
director was James Wong Howe, a Chinese immigrant filmmaker who started his career at Tomas
Ince Studio. He also paid a portion of the production cost. The sound was by Tom White, who
owned Monrovia Studio where the film was shot.
300
Chijiku wo Mawasu Chikara [Turning the Earth’ s Axis], Hollywood Japan Talkie Company (Hariuddo
298
Nihon Hassei Eiga Gaisha), 1930.
The Rafu Shimpo, April 28, 1930; The Rafu Shimpo, September 22, 1930.
299
Itakura, Eiga to Imin, 177-178.
300
!189
Chijiku wo Mawasu Chikara is a story about a father who passes away seeing his son's
success. Coming back from his study in Germany, the father discovers that his wife and friend
have betrayed him and becomes desperate despite his promised success as a surgeon. The father
becomes addicted to alcohol. However, his hopeless life changes when his son's life is in crisis in
a car accident. The father decides to devote himself to his son’s future success. Later his son
graduates from a medical school in Kyushu with great grades and returns to a town, where the
father serves as a guard without letting the son know who he is. The father secretly watches over
his son and sees that he has found success and romance. Although he is suffering from a deadly
disease, the father is very satisfied with what his son achieves.
301
Although the story is set in Germany and Japan, there are some elements common with
other movies made by Japanese immigrants in the United States: parents' sacrifice for their
children; moving internationally for future success; moral deviation and penance. These features,
which must have appealed to Japanese immigrant audiences, however, are not necessarily very
distinctive only to a Japanese sensibility because the writer, Wakaba Matsumoto, seemed to
plagiarize the story from Warwick Deeping's 1925 novel Sorrell and Son, which was made into a
film in Hollywood in 1927. What is most significant about the film was the Japanese ethnic
302
community's response to the language spoken in the film. The Japanese actors in the film were
mostly Nisei Japanese Americans: the father, Mitsuru Yoshii, was played by Jack Wakaba
Matsumoto, the writer; the son, Kazuo Yoshii, was by Henry Ohkawa; the son's girlfriend, Kaoru
Sakai, by Ruth Washizu. The ads on The Rafu Shimpo emphasized the leadership of the Nisei
Ibid., 178-179; Gevinson eds., Whithing Our Gates, 197.
301
Itakura, Eiga to Imin, 180.
302
!190
cast and crew with the tagline "Japanese-language all-talkie produced with the toils and efforts of
local Nisei! A movie on paternal love! Turning the Earth’ s Axis! 12,000 feet in total!"
303
However, the criticism published in papers was harsh. The papers pointed out that their
Japanese pronunciation was very funny. Itakura discusses the reaction of the Japanese
community in the context of a hierarchy of Japanese language in imperial Japan. In the interwar
period when imperial Japan proactively expanded its territory to East Asia, there was a hierarchy
of Japanese language, in which standard Japanese spoken in the mainland was placed at the top
and accented Japanese spoken by indigenous people in the colonies such as Korea, Manchukuo,
and Taiwan at the bottom. The first generation of Japanese immigrants showed their
dissatisfaction in newspapers because they recognized the accented Japanese language spoken by
Nisei actors as one placed at the bottom of the hierarchy. The film project was initially welcomed
by the Issei generation, not just because it united the first and second generation of Japanese
immigrants, but also because the film could have become a triumphant example of the
authenticity of Japanese culture they maintained in the American "colony." Unfortunately,
according to Itakura, the Issei audience could not tolerate the accent of the Japanese language
spoken in the film. A critique expressed his disappointment in an ironical poem:
304

305
a baby raven
even to the extent that people dislike the
song
cannot yet sing
The Rafu Shimpo, June 25, 1930.
303
Itakura, Eiga to Imin, 177-178.
304
“Rajio KSY ,” The Rafu Shimpo, July 1, 1930.
305
!191
The significance of Chijiku wo Mawasu Chikara is not limited to the ethnic hierarchy
in the Japanese empire, which Itakura discussed. Regarding the realist potential of the literature
and visual arts of Japanese immigrants, the film exemplifies a double standard that cultural
critics adopted. As discussed above, realist tendencies in the literature reformation movement
awakened local poets and novelists in the United States to the communal effort of exploring
artistic expressions distinctive to their conditions of living on foreign soil and establishing a
movement of immigrant literature. Thus, breaking the traditional sound pattern could be regarded
as a path to such new expressions. The mechanically recorded funny Japanese in Chijiku wo
Mawasu Chikara was far more real than the deviation from the 5-7-5 sound pattern in the
literature reformation. The funny Japanese language should have been a realistic sonic landscape
Japanese immigrants experienced. Thus, the amateur poets who praised the artistic challenge of
the deviated sound pattern as a fresh expression should have theoretically praised the movie as a
film example of their artistic project of establishing a literature distinctive to the immigrant
society. However, there is no surviving evidence of preferable reviews of the film and the
Japanese language spoken in it. Rather, as discussed in the previous chapters, many newspaper
articles show that the Japanese communities enjoyed the stylized form of traditional oral
performance such as rokyoku accompanying film screenings, in which 5-7 sound rhythm appears
multiple times.
The double standard reveals that the public discourses dictated what was real for
Japanese immigrants and what was not. The Issei's stories of survival in the racist climate, their
effort of making a fortune in youth, their hardship to create farming communities were registered
!192
to the category of the real, while the linguistic struggles of the Nisei generation were not. Like
many examples in this chapter show, the cultural production of amateur poems and movies
shows the potential of realist intervention into Japanese immigrants' daily lives. Amateur
literature critics argued the importance of expressing their daily lives and recording their history
of survival so far. However, these critics and journalists did not pay the same amount of attention
to the lives of the Nisei generation and excluded them from their register of reality. Amateur
home movie collections show such a realm of Nisei's life, but they are not foregrounded in the
public discourse, while Ban Takeshi's ideological Movie and Lecture series got much more
attention. This is the limitation of the realist influence on the cultural activities of Japanese
immigrants in the United States in the 1930s.
Japanese Imperialism and Militarism
The rising militarism in the latter half of the 1930s rapidly wiped out the remaining
potential of the realist movement. As Yuji Ichioka discusses in his Before Internment, Japanese-
language newspapers intensively published nationalistic poems justifying the Japanese empire's
behavior in mainland China and praising the Emperor's rule after the beginning of the Second
Sino-Japanese War in 1937. The amateur poets living on the West Coast, of course, did not
306
witness the events. Instead, they watched the news and fictional footages of the military conflicts
in the faraway places and listened to the lectures of war correspondents. The depiction of the
Japanese army's actions recited in their poems were not representations of what they actually
observed. The enthusiasm of militant expansionism of the Japanese empire replaced the

Ichioka, Before Internment, 186.
306
!193
institutionalized idyllic tropes of waka poems: the realist project of “perspective inversion” that
Karatani argued failed.
Michael Baker point out that Japan had been aware of the necessity of media strategy
to maintain its colonies in East Asia from the Meiji period and that the number of cultural
products targeting the colonies in East and South-East Asia rose through the 1930s. Japanese
307
military forces became an important supplier of Japanese culture on the West Coast in the 1930s.
When training squadrons or special fleets visited cities on the West Coast for supplies, exercise,
and interchange, they often offered film footages to local Japanese people for free. Local
308
Japanese societies organized the screening of the movies, and ethnic papers publicized them. For
example, a training fleet of the Japanese Imperial Navy stayed at San Francisco in April 1933 to
escort Yosuke Matsuoka, a Japanese diplomat who had condemned the League of Nations and
announced its withdrawal in Genève a few months ago, to Japan. The fleet provided a military
309
music night and film screening events in San Francisco. Since the officers’ and men's schedule
was tight, San Francisco was the only place where the fleet held the performance and screening,
while six other local Japanese societies in the East Bay hosted welcome parties. The Japanese
society of Stockton requested the movies from the fleet through the Japanese consulate in San
Francisco, but it was turned down for logistical reasons. The fleet provided the following six
Michael Baskett, The Attractive Empire: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan (Honolulu:
307
University of Hawai’i Press, 2008), 41-71.
For example, a film on the Siege of Port Arthur in the Russo-Japanese war was screened in Fresno for free.
308
The film was donated by Colonel Sakurai to the Nichi Bei Times compnay: “Eiga no yu,” The Nichi Bei
Times, January 15, 1930.
“Jissen eiga to naku eiga,” The Shin Sekai, June 3, 1933; “Tokumukan no teikyo: koen to eigakai,” The Shin
309
Sekai, December 8, 1940.
!194
movies: Shanghai, Manshu Jihen [Manchuria Incident], Tekken Seisai [Iron Fist Discipline] ,
310
Hijyou Keikai [Special Guard] , Tokkan Kozo [Charging Boy] , Samezaya [Shark Skin
311 312
Scabbard] . Shanghai and Manchuria Incident must have been news or documentary footages
313
on the contemporary issues in mainland China, although the details are not clear. However, the
following three movies, Tekken Seisai, Hijyoukeikai, and Tokkankozo, are modern dramas which
do not refer to contemporary political issues. Samezaya was a costume play (jidaigeki) about the
samurai. At this time, the Japanese military force did not intend to propagate their justice among
local Japanese immigrants in the United States. Rather, they seemed to respond to local Japanese
people's need for information and entertainment by providing a mixture of news, feature films,
and musical performances from their band.
The key players in the implementation of jingoism in the late 1930s were local
newspaper publishers. The newspaper publishers were no longer just reporting the film-related
events but proactively contributed to maintain and expand the affective network created by
Japanese movies. Newspaper companies established "movie units" specialized for sending
projectionists and facilities to local communities and entered contracts with Nichi Bei Kogyo, the
San Francisco based distributor importing movies from Japan. As Ban Takeshi combined the
314
screening of Japanese movies with his lectures on contemporary political and international
incidents, newspaper companies supplied news films and feature movies to local Japanese
Tekken Seisai [Iron Fist Discipline], directed Hiromasa Nomura, Shochiku Cinema, 1930.
310
Hijyou Keikai [Special Guard], directed Yutaka Abe, Nikkatsu, 1929.
311
Tokkan Kozo [Charging Boy], Yasujiro Ozu, Shochiku Cinema, 1929.
312
Samezaya [Shark Skin Scabbard], Kataoka Chiezo Production, 1929.
313
“Honsha teikyou 16 miri eiga,” The Shin Sekai, December 10, 1937; “Ninkiwaku honsha eiga kai,” The
314
Shin Sekai, September 6, 1941; “Honsha eiga kai,” The Shin Sekai, September 10, 1941.
!195
audiences eager for such information. Ban's style was not necessarily distinctive to him. For
example, The Shin Sekai hosted screening events in which either benshi or some sort of authority
explained the contexts of the movies depicting the justice and power of Japanese military forces
multiple times after the Second Sino-Japanese War. Namiji Itabashi, a lecturer of Pacific Society
of Religious Education, delivered a lecture introducing Japanese culture to Nisei audiences with
travelogue movies ; Kamenosuke Suzuki, a war correspondent of The Shin Sekai, recounted his
315
experience in the war with the footage shot by other correspondents. At around this time, state-
316
sponsored war propaganda movies began to be imported through Nichi Bei Kogyo and occupied
the newspaper ads.
317
The local practice was now totally highjacked by this militarism. The tension between the
realist challenge of expressing a fresh reality out of stylized sound patterns and the conservative
aestheticism of romanticized Japanese landscape disappeared. A series of poems titled "Watching
the War Movie Preview (Senjo Eiga Shisha wo Miru)" shows such a shift of discourse in the
local literature world.

318

At the mouth of the port
The Japanese concession
is broken
Broken down into
A cloud of dust

“Nihon seishin ron kouen yokyo niha ‘hi izuru kuni’ to ‘shirayuri no hana’ eisha,” The Shin Sekai, February
315
5, 1934.
“Suzuki jyugun kisha no kouen to eiga kai,” The Shin Sekai, December 21, 1937.
316
Toyo Miyataka, a photographer known for his works in Manzanar relocation center, testifies the increase of
317
Japanese movies “several years before the war:” Takaro Kitamura, Issei to shite Amerika ni ikite [Lived in the
United States as an Issei](Tokyo, Soshisha, 1992), 153-154.
“Bungei ran,” The Shin Sekai, October 9, 1939.
318
!196

In the picture
Of the verge of danger
In the very moment
My fellow soldiers
Are just running

Any more
Of coming back alive
Even a spoilt mind cannot be found
Of the landing force
The eyes of the soldiers

□

□
The suicidal unit
Showing their backs
XXX
The war front
Their sincerity!

Their confident
Postures of waiting
Are reliable
Dressed
In flight equipment

□

For a bombardment operation
Pilots are leaving
An officer
Carefully greeted
To them one by one
□□
!197

With a roaring sound
They have
Left
Heavy bombers
All returned in a formation

Of the cannons
Aim is never
Wrong
Behind the big river.
Smoke has rose What can be found in the poems are the mere repetition of what the poet saw in the film.
Compared to the series of poems on the Russian movie, it has a distant view of the poet and his/
her relation to the viewing condition. The poet who watched October expressed his/her situation
among the Russian immigrant audience and through the excitement of the film, the sense of
distance and unification are depicted. On the contrary, this series of poems does not show such a
distance between the poet, the surrounding environment, and the representation. An act of
writing poems became a mere reproduction of ready-made images without any realist will and
consideration. The interpretative potential of reception is merely subordinate to the
representation of the film.
Conclusion
The 1930s can be understood as a time when camera-eye realism failed both in film
production and poem-making in Issei Japanese immigrant communities. The shasei practice
originated by Shiki Masaoka landed in the United States in the 1910s and merged with the
movement of amateur poets who tried to establish a local distinctive literary art expressing their
!198
realities. However, the discourse of mutual understanding between poets and readers could not
fully develop the realist potential of shasei. Similarly, narrative films spawned from the Issei
ideology killed the potential of films expressing Nisei realities. In other words, in the field of
both film and poem production, Issei Japanese immigrants shut themselves in a safe space, where
they could maintain their cultural practices without worrying about the censoring eyes of the
mainstream Americans, where they could indulge themselves in the pleasure of imagining
Japanese landscape beauty conditioned to the 5-7 rhythm, where they could overlap their
trajectory with that of White pioneers, and where they could ride on the escapist “vehicle to their
homeland.” Therefore, there is no question that Issei Japanese welcomed state-sponsored war
film from Japan and published many jingoistic poems on the ethnic papers. Fantasy trumped the
camera-eye realism.
!199
Conclusion
This dissertation project sheds light on both tangible historical facts and intangible
subjective meanings in the cultural practices of the Issei Japanese immigrants before WWII. Not
only theatrical activities such as film exhibitions and live stage plays but also literary practices,
especially traditional short-verse poems, play key roles because they exemplify the collective
and subjective sensibility of ordinary people rather than distinctive worldviews of geniuses. A
detailed reading of Japanese-language ethnic papers published on the West Coast revealed
diverse functions of Japanese immigrants' cultural practices in the socio-political situations
between Japan and the United States.
In the first decade of the twentieth century when the leading figures in Japanese
immigrant communities began to change their status from dekasegi temporal stay to permanent
residency, Japanese immigrants were open to the ethnic diversity and heterogeneity in
nickelodeon theaters popular at that time. Many Japanese moviegoers were not always
comfortable with the openness to the diversity and heterogeneity: they were exposed to
discriminatory treatment by the White society and the censoring eyes of elite fellows who were
obsessed with the smooth assimilation of Japanese into American society. Thus, in the 1910s,
when promoters in cities began to supply imported Japanese movies to the West Coast, Japanese
communities started to construct ethnically-closed Japanese halls to exhibit live stage plays and
movies. Japanese halls provided the local immigrant communities with safe spaces in which they
could avoid racial tensions with other ethnic groups. Japanese halls mushroomed in towns, to
which Japanese farmers in the surrounding areas could travel, and Japanese communities on the
!200
West Coast formed a cultural network in which films, local theatrical companies, performers
from Japan, and educators circulated.
The closed cultural circuit was not merely a temporal escape for Japanese immigrants
to forget the harshness of their daily lives. By publishing Japanese poems in newspapers and
exhibiting traditional stage plays and Japanese movies, these immigrants projected their familiar
aesthetic conventions on their surrounding environment and symbolically transformed the
American landscape where they lived. From such a viewpoint emphasizing the audience's
interpretative agency, Hayakawa's movies show a different layer of interpretation, which cannot
be foregrounded through a narrative-focused lens. Some Hayakawa films had a room for non-
dominant alternative reading, which was acceptable for Japanese immigrants and sensible only to
those who were familiar with Japanese aesthetic conventions. This does not mean that Japanese
immigrants was strongly motivated to invade or colonize the American soil. Rather, as Karatani
argues about the Japanese modern novelists' struggle of liberating the Japanese literature from
the premodern traditional sound pattern, Japanese immigrants were bound to the linguistic and
musical "5-7 rhythm" that they were familiar with.
The cultural practices of Issei Japanese immigrants in the 1930s exemplify how
strongly the tradition captured them. They utilized the cultural network in their communities and
all the cultural capital they had to educate the growing Nisei generation, which became active in
the ethnic communities in the late 1920s. Many narrative films made by Japanese immigrants
were preoccupied with the "Issei teleology" to keep the Nisei generation under the influence of
the Issei. There were potentially some other ways to go. Shiki Masaoka, a poet who was inspired
by the idea of the sketch in Western paintings, introduced the camera-eye realism into waka
!201
poems in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Under the influence of Shiki's realism,
amateur poets on the West Coast wrote experimental poems that deviated from the traditional
sound pattern and aesthetic convention and tried to establish a literary movement distinctive to
the colonies. However, these practices resulted in a discourse that emphasized mutual
understanding among Japanese immigrants. Although some poems expressed the unique feeling
and sentiment of Japanese immigrants in the specific living conditions, the jingoistic poems
increased after the second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 dominated the ethnic papers. The Imperial
Japanese military supplied state-sponsored propaganda movies to the local cultural network of
Japanese communities. Thus, in both visual and literary cultural practices, the realist potential
was not actualized.
The situation drastically changed in 1941 when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. In the
following year, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which allowed the
forced relocation of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans on the West Coast. About
120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated in ten internment camps built in rural
areas. The Japanese immigrants maintained some cultural activities: they formed teams and clubs
to engage in sports such as baseball and martial arts; festivals like Obon were practiced; boy
scouts activities were encouraged because it was thought that these would help youth to
assimilate into the American society. Depending on the demographics of the camps, internees
published newspapers and magazines in English and Japanese and circulated them among the
camps. The characteristics of their publications varied so much depending on the camps because
internees were assigned to different locales depending on their answers to a "loyalty
questionnaire." Those who showed loyalty to the United States were sent to Topaz relocation
!202
center (UT) and published the Topaz Times and two literary magazines, Trek and All Aboard. As
the names of the magazines suggest, the internees regarded their fate as one step in a long
journey and believed that they would be fully accepted by American society. On the other hand,
people who did not show their full loyalty to the U. S. were sent to Tule Lake (CA) and
published a magazine titled Tessaku (Iron Fence), which explicitly showed their understanding of
the situation.
The aesthetics of landscape, which is a leitmotif and a theoretical framework of this
dissertation project, should help us understand the diverse cultural practices and publications in
the internment camps during WWII. All the internment camps were constructed in rural areas far
away from cities because the segregation of people of Japanese ancestry was the goal. The
Internees were allowed to cultivate in the camps or go out to nearby farms to help local farmers
because of the scarcity of food during the war. However, their agricultural activities could not be
regarded as a stepping stone to full assimilation nor as the first step for the Japanese Empire's
economic expansion into North America.
How did Japanese internees see the American wilderness? Some kept projecting their
familiar aesthetic conventions on the surrounding wasteland and might have created a symbolic
comfort zone. The fact that the internees in all ten internment camps created Japanese gardens
seems to be a materialization of such desire. In contrast, facing nature without a tie to nationality
might have been a moment in which camera-eye realism was revitalized. For example, one
article discusses in detail the history of a Native American tribe living near the internment camp
and shows sympathy with them.
!203
In addition, the discourse of the mainstream American society that objectified Japanese
Americans cannot be ignored. For example, a propaganda newsreel titled “Build Model Town for
Interned Japs” in 1943 connects the camp to the history of Western expansion. Following the
image of the statue of Buffalo Bill Cody, an iconic cowboy figure, the film speaks “[n]ear in the
land of Buffalo Bill, the government is erecting model camp towns [...] in which they live un-
arrested not as prisoners but free to work paid by the United States government.” The
319
rhetorical effect of this scene is to justify the event of forced-relocation of Japanese immigrants
by placing it in the history of America’s expansion to the west. The rhetoric in the propaganda
film reminds us of Okubo's reception of Wells Fargo, a Hollywood western: Okubo connected
the history of Japanese immigrants to the Western mythology to “whiten” their ethnic identity.
During the time of the internment camps, the American government utilized Okubo’s exact logic
to objectify the body of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans.
I would not go further anymore here. But, it is clear that the cultural practices during
the internment period were as diverse and multifaceted as those in pre-WWII period had been.
This dissertation project has revealed the diverse cultural practices of Issei Japanese immigrants
and the complexity of the aesthetic and interpretative logic based on the articles, reviews, and
amateur artworks published in ethnic papers. The findings of this study must provide a good
foundation in order to deepen our understanding of the Issei generation's cultural practices as a
reaction to their experience of losing ties to both Japan and the United States during WWII.
Build Model Town for Interned Japs, United Newsreel Corporation, 1942.
319
!204
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Newspapers
The Hokubei Jiji (Seattle)
The Kashu Mainichi (Los Angeles)
The Nichi Bei Times (San Francisco)
The Rafu Shimpo (Los Angeles)
The Shin Sekai (San Francisco)
Magazines and Trade Papers
The Exhibitors Herald
Kinema Junpo
The Moving Picture World
Shukaku (Harvest)
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(Tokyo: Puraza, 1997).
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Kitamura, Takaro. Issei to shite Amerika ni ikite [Lived in the United States as an Issei]. Tokyo,
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!205
Kyuin Okina, Ishokujyu [Transplanted Tree], Tokyo: Daikusha, [1923] 2007.
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (New York: Dover Publication,
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The Perils of Pauline. Directed by Louis J. Gasnier and Donald MacKenzie. 1914.
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Creator Watabe, Kohki (author)

Core Title Between two visions of empires: Japanese immigrants’ theatergoing and aesthetics of landscape on the West Coast from 1907 to 1942

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinematic Arts (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 08/04/2020

Defense Date 05/08/2018

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag audience,film,film exhibition,history,Japanese American,OAI-PMH Harvest

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee chair), Kurashige, Lon (committee member), Schwartz, Vanessa Ruth (committee member), Serna, Laura Isabel (committee member)

Creator Email watabe.kohki@gmail.com,watabe.kohki@mac.com

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