Canada’s treatment of the Asiatic races lawfully admitted has been marked by leniency. She has extended to the Orientals the privilege of naturalization and of securing homesteads. Even in British Columbia, the center of anti-Oriental agitation, the Japanese and Chinese are permitted to conduct business and cultivate land on an equal basis with British subjects in Canada. They may own land, both urban and rural, and in provinces other than British Columbia they are entitled to voting privileges when naturalized; only in that province the Orientals are not allowed to cast ballots, though free to become citizens. It is reported that there are 13,823 Japanese residing in Canada to-day, engaged in fishing and logging and sawmill industries, as well as in agriculture.
For some years past a number (about six thousand) of Japanese immigrants has been sent every year to Brazil in compliance with the request of the Republic. They have been mostly engaged on coffee plantations in Sao Paulo. The colonization is still in an experimental stage, and it is a little premature to forecast its future at this time. Altogether about twenty thousand Japanese immigrants have gone to the South American Republic.
The United States.
Perhaps attracted by the wonderful stories of the discovery of gold in the Sacramento Valley, or possibly cast ashore in boats on the Pacific Coast of America, there seem to have lived in the early sixties in California about a hundred Japanese. Early California papers record the story of quaint-looking Japanese settlers, who were received with great favor. Although accurate records are lacking, it would seem that the number of Japanese did not begin to increase until the late eighties, when a few hundred began to come in every year. The census of 1890 reported the number of Japanese residents as 2039. From that time on the number of immigrants steadily increased, reaching the highest mark in 1907, when about ten thousand of them entered continental America in one year.[5]
The direct incentive for Japanese emigration was furnished by a few large emigration companies,[6] which were formed with a view to supplying contract labor to Hawaii and America, where the demand for labor was insatiable. In the former case, the rapid growth of the sugar plantations demanded a large supply of cheap labor. In the latter case, the need for cheap labor was urgent, due to the enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Law in 1882, which soon began to effect a decrease in the number of Chinese laborers, resulting in a dearth of labor on the farms and in railroad work. It was in response to the urgent demand of capitalists and landowners in Hawaii and America for Japanese labor that the emigration companies sprang into existence with the object of facilitating the complex process of immigration.
The Japanese coolies so brought in were welcomed and prosperous—at least for a while. Their industry and frugality won them the confidence of their employers. In agriculture, in railroad-building, in mining and fishing, they proved useful hands. They saved money and remitted to their native country a considerable portion of it. Some of them returned home with a fortune and a degree of refinement which a superior environment could bestow upon a laborer. These incidents stimulated the desire of ambitious Japanese to leave for and work in California and Hawaii, and the number of applicants for emigration greatly multiplied.
In the meantime, between 1895 and 1900, changes had taken place in the attitude of the people of California toward the Japanese. For various reasons the friendly feeling of the Californians was gradually replaced by a more or less hostile sentiment. It so happened that just about this time California was the stage for a struggle between organized labor and capital. It was with a great deal of effort and sacrifice that the organized labor of California succeeded in excluding the Chinese coolies. But their hard-won victory was shattered to pieces by the advent of Japanese laborers, whom capital, taking advantage of their ignorance of American customs and language, wisely utilized as a powerful weapon to defeat the unions. To the union men it made no difference whether the strike-breakers were Chinese or Japanese; whether strike-breaking was voluntarily or unwittingly performed; they were enemies just the same. The cry for exclusion was a natural consequence.
Then there also seems to be some truth in the report[7] made in 1908 by W. L. Mackenzie King, the Deputy Minister of the Government of Canada, which states that it is suspected that much of the anti-Japanese agitation in California was deliberately fermented by the interests of the Planters’ Association of Honolulu, who, alarmed by the tendency of Japanese laborers engaged on the sugar plantations to seek work on the Pacific Coast of America, where wages were much better, started a campaign to check the exodus by causing ill feeling toward the Japanese along the Pacific Coast. The report states in part:
It is believed ... that the members of the Asiatic Exclusion League in San Francisco were not without contributions from the Association’s incidental expense fund, to assist them in an agitation which by excluding Japanese from the mainland would confine that class of labor to the islands, to the greater economic advantage of the members of the Association.[8]