JULY 29, 2024 – (Cont.) Ever since we invented ourselves, we humans have in the business of exploiting other humans. Every culture, nation, and people, it seems, has had a go at it. In the last decades of the 19th century, landowners in Hawai’i were breaking the backs of plantation laborers to bring in the sugar cane. A local labor shortage had led the landowners to go abroad—namely, Japan—to recruit workers for the cane fields. In Japan an exploitive system and bad economy had left large swaths in horrific poverty. This case of supply meeting demand was a match made in heaven . . . er, hell.
The labor recruiters managed to entice thousands of poor Japanese to sign “contracts” by waving the promise of a better life—or, you might say, a life compared to the utter lack of prospects in Japan. The people seeking to improve their lot crowded one transport vessel after another for the long crossing to Hawai’i. What awaited them on the sugar cane islands, however, wasn’t a better life. It certainly wasn’t a five-star beachside resort. In most cases the new life was nothing more than indentured servitude bordering on slavery. And either things back in Japan got even worse or few people wrote home, because the recruiters continued to recruit and the desperately poor continued to migrate to Hawai’I and shocking exploitation.
I doubt very much that people spooning sugar into their tea and coffee back then gave much if any thought to the blood, sweat and tears associated with the sweetener. For that matter, I doubt many people who bought cotton shirts or cloth or smoked tobacco in ante bellum America thought much about the misery of Black slaves working the Southern plantations. (I could expand—and update—the disconnect between awful working conditions and the stuff we buy/use/wear, but that’s for another post.)
In time, however, the sons and daughters of the cane harvesters—and successive generations of the Japanese immigrants—found their way to an education and improved economic circumstances both in Hawai’i and the West Coast of the United States. In the tradition of immigrants before and since, they worked their butts off and succeeded in creating and running small business enterprises. By the time Imperial Japan started its aggression in Asia (1937), Japanese migrants to the U.S. and the territory of Hawai’i and people of Japanese ancestry had become fully integrated into American life. Most were U.S. citizens. Many (proudly wearing American uniforms) had fought in World War I.
Then came Pearl Harbor, and everything changed. Overnight, Japanese-Americans became personae non gratis. Worse, they were viewed as the enemy—no exceptions, no regard for facts, no chance to prove irrefutable loyalty to America. The nation went stark raving mad in much the same way as it would 60 years later against Arab-Americans and indeed, American-Muslims after 9-11. Racial discrimination against anyone of Japanese ancestry took on an especially vicious turn when the government of the “land of the free, home of the brave” began rounding up Japanese-Americans and throwing them together in hastily constructed holding areas where living conditions were appalling. The detainees were denied access to their money and had been forced to abandon their property or sell it at huge discounts. Businesses—many built up after decades of hard work—were lost overnight. Eventually the captives were sent to concentration camps for an unspecified duration. Their homes and business properties were subsequently forfeited for non-payment of real estate taxes.
The patently unconstitutional discrimination and deprivation of property and liberty without due process—or any process except force—bore a chilling semblance to what had happened to the Jews in Germany and countries conquered by Hitler.
After December 11, 1941—the day Italy and Germany declared war against the United States—German- and Italian-Americans experienced none of the discrimination faced by Japanese Americans. It came down to a matter of race, pure and simple.
It would take nearly half a century and an intense lobbying effort to achieve legislation mandating an official government apology, education of the general public about the victims’ ordeal, and payment of partial reparations in the token amount of $20,000 per detainee. Now, even more decades later, this sordid chapter in our history goes largely unnoticed, especially by those who would “make America great . . . again.”
When it comes to matters of race, there was a lot that was not so great about America, beginning with, well, the beginning, when in a grand compromise with Southern slaveowners, the Founders deigned that a Black man counted as only three-fifths of a white man. The accommodation of the South lasted less than a century and cost over 600,000 lives in the Civil War. What the South couldn’t win on the battlefield, however, it won in the failure of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow laws. Though huge strides have been made since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s forced America to live up to the words of our national sacred text—the Declaration of Independence—reactionary forces across the land would have us think that “slavery wasn’t always that bad” and would want to restrict what educators may say and what their students may learn about our history of Black slavery specifically and racial discrimination generally. In large part we remain shackled to our history—or more precisely . . . to our ignorance and denial of our history.
It is against this backdrop of gut-wrenching racial discrimination against Japanese-Americans that their extraordinary character and example make an equally lasting impression. More about that in tomorrow’s post. More about the other side of the story too: that while all too many hateful and fearful Americans ostracized their fellow citizens purely over a matter of race, other Americans displayed the more laudable traits ascribed to our national character—good will, generosity, and concern for the common good.
From the exemplary Americans of those times we must draw the wisdom and inspiration to make America greater than it was. But only if we have the knowledge of what they said and did can such wisdom and inspiration be achieved. Facing the Mountain is a gusher for anyone who now thirsts for that knowledge. (Cont.)
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
