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Their success in agriculture was held against them, however: White farmers viewed them as unfair competitors because entire Japanese families would work their farms and save labor costs.

passed by the California legislature in 1913. The law granted aliens eligible for U.S. citizenship plenary property ownership rights but limited “aliens ineligible to citizenship”

This legal sanction was a response to the economic success of Japanese truck farmers in California in the early twentieth century.

Despite the 1913 law, Japanese land holdings increased.

Private ownership of land occupies a central position in American law

1859 Oregon Constitution, which declared that no “Chinaman” could ever own land in Oregon.

excluded further Chinese immigration

1880s,

helped new immigrants get established

new immigrants get established in the region.

Portland

The city’s Japanese immigrants established Buddhist and Methodist churches and other associations that nurtured their cultural as well as economic life.

picture

envy and

anti-Japanese attitudes on the West Coast

Gentleman’s Agreemen

Protection against sabotage and fifth-columnism were the announced military reasons for the exclusion of those of Japanese ancestry

On April 13, 1943, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, the man who ordered the evacuation, told a House Committee: "It makes no difference whether the Japanese is theoretically a citizen. He is still a Japanese. Giving him a scrap of paper won't change him. I don't care what they do with the Japs so long as they don't send them back here. A Jap is a Jap."

"There are in the United States many persons of Japanese extraction whose loyalty to the country, even in the present emergency, is unquestioned. It would therefore be a serious mistake to take any action against these people"—San Francisco Chronicle, December 9, 1941.

Thus during the first weeks of the war the dominant tenor of news stories was for fairness and tolerance, restrictions applied equally to all enemy aliens, and there was no mention of total evacuation! If the military had sound reasons for it, they were not apparent nor put forward in the weeks immediately following Pearl Harbor.

On January 22, 1942, Congressman Leland Ford of California launched the campaign "to move all Japanese, native born and alien, to concentration camps."

Why treat the Japs well here? They take the parking positions. They get ahead of you in the stamp line at the post office. They have their share of seats on the bus and streetcar lines... I am for immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior. I don't mean a nice part of the interior, either... Let 'em be pinched, hurt, hungry, and dead up against it... Personally I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them."

The "Protection" Reason for Evacuation

"We're charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We might as well be honest. We do. It's a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown man...and we don't want them back when the war ends, either."

he Japanese-American group in California alone controlled farm acreage valued at some $72,000,000; played a part in fishing; owned and operated many hotels, laundries, and restaurants; dominated Los Angeles fresh fruit and vegetable distribution, and captured some of the best bazaar trade in San Francisco's Chinatown. Their commercial interests along the Coast were valued at from $55,000,000 to $75,000,000.

"The reason for evacuation considered most valid by many persons is that of 'protective custody'--the Japanese must be taken into camps and guarded for their own protection. But what a breakdown of the Anglo-Saxon conception of justice in a democracy such thinking betokens... The very words 'protective custody' (Schutzhaft) were 'made in Germany,' not here. How could it accord with American justice that if a man were dangerous to his neighbors they should be put into custody rather than he?" --Fellowship, July, 1942.