If the argument is raised that you will find bad people everywhere, and that one cannot take the poorest type of person and set him up as the example, let us recall the case of the Doshisha University. There, because of these selfsame land and property laws, The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions placed the million dollars' worth of property in the hands of Christian Japanese directors. Presently the Government brought pressure to bear upon these directors, and they yielded to their Government. In February, 1898, they virtually ousted the foreign owners, turned the institution into a secular college, and saw nothing dishonest nor immoral in the action. Japanese have of course come to a better understanding of the rights in such cases, nor am I trying to impugn the integrity of the "better-class" of Japanese. I am merely bringing evidence to prove that not only are Japanese laws with regard to the ownership of land by foreigners as discriminatory as those of California, but their interpretation is a serious handicap to aliens in Japan.
In America the fight is not to prevent Japanese from taking hold of land for business purposes, but to prevent them from monopolizing farming-lands, which, as Mr. Walter Pitkin has shown so clearly in his book, "Must We Fight Japan?" are rapidly passing out of American hands because of our vicious shallowness in agrarian matters. I am not as yet bringing up the question of fairness, justice, generosity, or the rights of over-crowded Japan. I am merely making parallels which seem to me telling.
3
Does Japan make the naturalization of aliens easy? As far as the letter of the law goes, there appears nothing in the eyes of a layman that might stand in the way of a man, already married and with children, from becoming a Japanese subject. There is no legal discrimination against any race or color. But notwithstanding that there now are 20,000 foreigners in Japan, and that the number throughout the years must have been much greater, there are on record only nine cases of foreigners having been naturalized between 1904 and 1913; two English, two American, five French; and ten cases of adoptions by marriage into Japanese families. These, to my knowledge, do not include men previously married. They are all cases of men who have married Japanese women, or of women who have married Japanese men. There have been 158 Chinese who became naturalized. This does not indicate that naturalization is easy—except by marriage—and the general consensus of opinion is that it would take a man fully fifteen years to become naturalized in the due process of law.
Furthermore, the restrictions attached to the acquisition of Japanese nationality take all the sweetness out of the plum, for even after you have gone through the regular processes and have been permitted to sit "amongst these gods on sainted seats," there are still exalted pedestals beyond your reach. You may not become a Minister of State, President, or Vice-President, or a member of the Privy Council; an official of chokunin (imperial-appointment) rank in the Imperial Household Department; an Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary; a general officer in the army and navy; president of the Supreme Court, of the Board of Audit, or of the Court of Administrative Litigation; or member of the Imperial Diet. Nor are the professions in all cases open to you.
However, this is a minor matter compared with that of the inability on the part of any Japanese to accept another nationality without official consent. If he resides abroad after his seventeenth birthday he cannot in any circumstances become a citizen of that other country unless he has completed his military service. Women may freely relinquish their nationality through marriage; not so men. If men are born abroad, they must make a voluntary request for denaturalization between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, but such other factors are involved that only a negligible number of American-born Japanese have ever attempted to rid themselves of their ancestral connections; and there is one case on record in which the Government refused on a technicality, for the child had applied for denationalization according to Western reckoning, whereas Japanese count the child's age as from the day of conception, not birth.
In view of this, then, there seems no point whatever in the fuss made about Japanese being barred from citizenship. Again, I am not discussing the advisability of this restriction, but merely trying to brush aside many of the webs that have been spun for the netting of sympathy. The relations between Japan and America are thus involved in an infinite number of petty political regulations on each side, and nothing but a complete sweeping away of all restrictions on both sides would ever assume even the semblance of justice. But how far is Japan ready and willing to go in this denationalization of herself? The most casual study of her nationalistic aims and aspirations answers that question.
That the problem is essentially a problem for Japan to solve is self-evident. That it is political and not racial, and that this political problem is rooted in Japan's economic condition, is likewise clear. For no nation loses its nationals except when the conditions at home are worse than those abroad, worse than those of the country to which her people wish to emigrate. Australia and New Zealand find it almost impossible to lure out British laborers, while Germany's desire for room was largely for the utilization of her mechanics and scientists and others whom she had trained in such large numbers that she hadn't enough work for them at home. Two changes in the structure of world economics have accentuated a condition of racial conflict which have hitherto been virtually non-existent. Religious and political conflicts have always obtained, but the color line has been drawn only in very recent times. As long as black and yellow people have been of a lower order and have been willing to serve the white, there was never any serious disorder between them. The color line is not marked even in Europe to-day, for the same reason that it is not marked in Japan. Europe is herself too crowded to be a desirable immigration station. Whatever the causes of conflict may have been, to-day it is clear that they lie in the endeavor on the part of white labor to maintain a better standard of living than Oriental labor has yet attained. And in exactly the degree to which certain Oriental labor groups have risen above others, the conflict becomes manifest,—to wit, the objection on the part of Japanese labor to Korean and Chinese coolies. No serious conflicts take place between Fijian laborers and Indian coolies, because the Fijian maintains his standard under competition, that being lower than the Indian's.
We have therefore to study the problem of Japanese in America, the so-called race conflict, not so much as it develops here but at its source, Japan. And there, if I read Japanese conditions aright, the problem is political and psychological in the main. Japan has come very far along material modernization; she has virtually stepped up to the front rank of nations. But the most casual observation reveals that that is only so in part, that the advance is made as a government, not as a people. That government is rooted in antiquated notions, is vicious in many of its aspects, and is opposed to even the most conservative developments of Western countries. That government refuses to recognize the social forces that are at work within Japan for the leveling upward of classes. And there is the rub.