Yokohama to Los Angeles, 1900-1941

“When I encountered a gale off Soshu and was cast adrift, I had given myself up to becoming bait for fish, when I was by chance rescued by a ship of a foreign country and was taken to a place named San Francisco in America.”

-from the preface of Floating on the Pacific Ocean by Joseph Heco

Between the years of 1900-1940, if you were travelling between the Empire of Japan and the United States, you most likely traveled via a vessel owned by the N.Y.K. Line, departing from Yokohama, stopping at Honolulu, San Francisco, and then traveling down the West Coast to Los Angeles and beyond. Nippon Yusen Kabushiki Kaisha, whose origins go back to 1870 and the Daimyos of the Tosa clan, created their shipping company when the Empire of Japan was opening trade and diplomacy with the outside world. The Los Angeles Public Library Special Collections include items connected with the N.Y.K. Line and the Japanese-American community in Los Angeles. The items featured here represent highlights of the artistry, influence, and connection Japan has had with California and Los Angeles in particular.

Japanese immigration to California and the United States has a complicated and intriguing history. Up until 1867 during the Edo period, Japan was closed off to most of the outside world, with a strict social caste system, which kept the population segregated. It was illegal under the Shogunate, the feudal military government, for Japanese subjects to leave the country. These isolationist policies, namely the Closed Country Edict of 1635, any subject who left, were not allowed to return. The only contact with the west was through limited interactions with Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and English traders, prior to 1635. After 1635 only the Dutch, and marginally the English conducted trade in segregated portions in harbors, like the Dejima in Nagasaki. Any other Europeans who landed on Japan's shores were summarily executed without trial or recourse.

During this time contact with the United States was through Japanese shipwreck survivors. One of these survivors was Nakahama Manjiro, who was rescued by an American whaling ship, the John Howland, in 1841. After his rescue he studied English and navigation in the United States, and then sailed the south seas on whaling ships, before returning in 1850 to Japan. Upon his return he was arrested and interrogated. After his release he became interpreter for the Shogunate, during the negotiations with Commodore Matthew C. Perry, who established diplomatic and trade relations with Japan in the 1850s and created the Port of Yokohama in 1859. Another notable ship survivor was Hikozo Hamada, better known as Joseph Heco, who was the first Japanese subject to become an American citizen and the first nonofficial Japanese to be introduced to an American president, Franklin Pierce in 1854 and later Abraham Lincoln in 1862.

With the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the first Japanese subjects were allowed to leave Japan as contract laborers to the Kingdom of Hawaii, in part to bring foreign money back to the Japanese economy. In 1869 the former counsel to the daimyo of Nagaoka, John Henry Schell, along with 22 Samurai and their families, established the first Japanese settlement in the United States. This unlikely troupe established the Wakamatsu Tea and Silk Farm in El Dorado County, California, arriving with 50,000 Mulberry trees, silk worm cocoons, bamboo, and tea seeds. Unfortunately the venture failed due to the drought of 1871, and the colony dispersed, some returning to Japan, others making new lives in California. Okei Ito, who had been a nursemaid to John Schell’s children, stayed on the farm with the new owners but died after an illness in 1871, making her the first Japanese woman to be buried in the United States.

The first port of entry into California for most Japanese was San Francisco, which already had a large Chinese community. Many of the Japanese who arrived in San Francisco became unhappy with anti-Asian sentiments in the city at the time, particularly the anti-Japanese articles that filled the San Francisco Chronicle. These sentiments gave rise to the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League, which wanted Japanese and Koreans added to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Some of these Japanese families decided to head south, to the Los Angeles area, setting up fishing fleets out of Terminal Island, farms and other businesses during the boom of the 1890s.

The racial tensions in the Bay Area and the Central Valley caused immigration from Japan to be restricted after President Theodore Roosevelt intervened and made the “Gentleman’s Agreement of 1907” with the Empire of Japan. This agreement resulted in restrictions against Japanese laborers, who were no longer allowed passports from the Empire of Japan. Passports were only issued to Japanese businessmen, and the wives and children of Japanese who already resided in the United States, allowing them to travel from Japan to join their husbands. Japan continued to issue passports to Japanese laborers headed for the Territory of Hawaii, which later would allow them to move on to the continental United States. This unofficial policy between the two nations was the norm until the racist Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, prevented immigration from all Asian countries. The American Ambassador to Japan, Cyrus E. Woods and the Japanese Ambassador to the United States, Masanao Hanihara both resigned to protest to the bill’s passage. The Immigration Act of 1924 was deeply resented, causing the Empire of Japan to take a more adversarial stance against the United States, which ultimately led to war in 1941, and set the stage for a very painful episode in Japanese American History.

Many of the Japanese who immigrated during these years did so with the purpose of starting new lives and seeking opportunities in a new frontier, adopting customs and dress of their new land Some joined Christian churches, while others continued the ancient native Shinto religion as well as Buddhism, always maintaining their values, and traditions. Japanese immigration went from a high of 30,842 in 1907 to just 3,503 between 1931-1950. Rising to the adversity and challenges, with ingenuity, purpose and unstoppable determination to succeed, they embraced the United States and added to her cultural quilt. Many of these adventurers came by way of ships through the ports of Honolulu, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, adding to our collective culture and forever connecting us to the Land of the Rising Sun.