My urgent advice to you would be, not only always to think first of America, but always, also, to think first of humanity. You do not love humanity if you seek to divide humanity into jealous camps. Humanity can be welded together only by love, by sympathy, by justice, not by jealousy and hatred.
With this clarified meaning of assimilation or Americanization, let us examine the assimilability of the Japanese. First of all, we shall take up the matter of racial amalgamation. Immediately the questions arise, “Is it possible to amalgamate the Japanese? Is it desirable to do so? Is it necessary to do so?”
To the first question, paradoxical as it may seem, careful observations compel us to reply that it is, and that it is not, possible to amalgamate the Japanese blood with the American. Just as there is no national boundary in science, so there is no human barrier in marriage. Truth and love appear to transcend all natural and artificial obstacles. That love defies racial difference has been amply proven in the United States, where all races are in the process of being fused together. It has no less conclusively been proven by the number of happy marriages that have taken place between Americans and Japanese in this country and in Japan. On the other hand, it is unthinkable that the Japanese should begin wholesale intermarriages with Americans in the near future, to the extent of losing their racial distinction. This is unthinkable because of the social stigma—and Americans as well as Japanese are extremely sensitive on the question of social environment—and the legal and economic handicaps which cause thoughtful persons of both nationalities, who take into consideration the welfare of themselves as well as of their descendants, to refrain from indulging in uncustomary marriages. It is more likely, therefore, that while here and there sporadic cases of intermarriage will continue to take place, and that such cases will gradually increase as the Japanese raise the degree of Americanization, it is wholly out of the question that under the present conditions of social, economic, and political encumbrances, the practice will prevail to any large extent.
This being the case, our second query—“Is intermarriage desirable?”—appears superfluous. Indeed, had it not been for the dangerous dogmatism inculcated by some willful propagandists that the result of intermarriage between Americans and Japanese is “the germ of the mightiest problem that ever faced this State; a problem that will make the black problem in the South look white,”[43] the subject would be purely an academic one. To allow this sort of baseless assertion to go unchallenged is extremely dangerous, because it exaggerates an unimportant point to misrepresent maliciously the whole question of the Japanese in the United States.
The conclusions of able observers, such as Dr. Gulick and Professor Millis, invariably confirm the fact that, as far as the ordinary means of observation go, the offspring of a Japanese and American couple is in no respect inferior to those of either American or Japanese unmixed descent. Professor Millis states:
So far as experience shows, there is nothing inherently bad in race mixture, if it takes place under normal conditions, and neither race is generally regarded as inferior and the offspring therefore given inferior rank, as in the case of the negro.[44]
From his extensive association with Japanese, Dr. Gulick has been able to make some valuable observations on this topic. He states in his important book, The American Japanese Problem:
The offspring of mixed marriages are oftentimes practically indistinguishable from Caucasians. The color distinction is the first to break down. The Japanese hair and eye exert a stronger influence. So far as the observation of the writer goes, there is a tendency to striking beauty in Americo-Japanese. The mental ability, also, of the offspring of Japanese and white marriages is not inferior to that of children of either race.[45]
These observations are valuable in refuting the kind of vile allegations we have quoted. But because of the limited number of cases observed, and the necessarily unscientific character of the observation, the utilization of these studies must be confined to pointing out the absurdity of the opposite extreme dogmatism and not extended to the constructive argument.