Did U.S. Racism Pave Way for Pearl Harbor?
Coolidge asked for $10 million in donations, and by December the American people had given $12 million - an unprecedented amount, equivalent to more than $150 million today. Some in government had even considered giving Japan control of the Philippines, but Coolidge dismissed the idea. It was far better for the American people to help the Japanese people. But while the American people helped the Japanese, their congressional representatives worked to undo years of diplomatic work.
Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes insisted that the Japanese-exclusion clause of the 1924 Immigration Act violated the terms of the “Gentleman’s Agreement” of 1907 and would lead to a diplomatic row between Japan and America, the two powers set to dominate the Pacific. The informal arrangement, negotiated at the behest of President Theodore Roosevelt in response to the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco that led to the segregation of Japanese schoolchildren, provided that Japan would reduce emigration to America if Japanese children already in the U.S. were integrated in the schools.
The Japanese government agreed to the deal out of fear that it would otherwise be subjected to a humiliating law akin to the Chinese Exclusion Act. The Osaka newspaper Asahi Shimbun argued that the act would be unacceptable to the Japanese precisely because the Japanese people were superior to all other Asian peoples. The Japanese people resented being “lump[ed] together with the Chinese or Hindus as undesirable aliens,” wrote journalist - and future Japanese prime minister - Tanzan Ishibashiwrote.
The 1924 Immigration Act threatened to undo important diplomatic work, as Coolidge lamented on May 26, when he told Congress:
"I regret the impossibility of severing from it the exclusion provision, which, in light of existing law, affects especially the Japanese. I gladly recognize that the enactment of this provision does not imply any change in our sentiment of admiration and cordial friendship for the Japanese people, a sentiment which has had and will continue to have abundant manifestation. The bill rather expresses the determination of the Congress to exercise its prerogatives in defining by legislation the control of immigration instead of leaving it to international arrangements."
While Coolidge was clear that he supported restrictions on Japanese immigrants - and indeed all immigrants - as far as their numbers were concerned, he opposed actual exclusion. He worried that Congress had embarrassed his government in its relations with Japan. He found “this method of securing [exclusion] ... unnecessary and deplorable at this time. ... If the exclusion principle stood alone, I should disapprove it without hesitation, if sought in this way, at this time.”
Coolidge consistently stressed that the decision to exclude all Japanese was particularly bad at “this time” and that he did not want to “wound the sensibilities of a friendly nation.” What remains unknown is whether Coolidge thought it a wise policy at any time. Because he supported the bill’s other provisions limiting immigration, he signed it. It was, as a historian has put it, “another step on the road to war” – something Coolidge could not have known.
On April 21, 1924, 15 major newspapers in Japan published a joint declaration condemning the law. “It is very clear that the anti-Japanese bill which was passed in both houses is unfair and immoral. ... If the bill becomes a law, there will be no recourse other than to regard it as the defined will of the American people, and, as a result, it will injure deeply the traditional friendship between the nations.”
America’s friends in Japan were stunned. Leading pro-American intellectuals Nitobe Inaz?, diplomat and author of Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900), and Uchimura Kanz?, one of Japan’s leading Christian evangelists, were isolated. “No words can express my pain and sorrow (and indignation, too) at the grave and disastrous consequences of what I cannot but characterize as the mad and thoughtless act of the American Government in its dealing with the Japanese question,” Uchimura wrote. Japan’s foreign minister, Matsui Keishir?, wrote to the British embassy that “the Japanese people ... would not submit tamely to the insolence of America.”
A Japanese man committed hara-kiri outside the American embassy in Tokyo. Two letters were found near his body. The first, written to the ambassador and the American people, read, “I request by my death the withdrawal of the Japanese exclusion clause.” The second was far more forceful, asking his nation “to rise up to avenge the insult embodied in the action of America.”
The Japanese press, seizing upon the suicide and playing to their new military masters in Tokyo, predicted a great race war.
