Takaki CH. 10: Pacific Crossings

Chapter 10 of Takaki discusses the migration of the Japanese to America. “The distress among the agricultureal class has reached a point never before attained” (the Japan Weekly Mail, Takaki pg. 246). Many couldn’t afford to pay their taxed and ended up having to sell their land. Migrating to the United States seemed like the way to go for many Japanese citizens. The were seeking better jobs with better pay as well as land. At first, the majority of the immigrants were men, but this eventually was altered due to the large number of women that came to the United States. The Japanese believed that “money grew on trees” in America. This was their outlook on the situation.

To the Japanese, marriage was not just an individual concern, it was a family matter. “Picture brides” was a kind of system which consisted of arranged marriages. This was very common. Takaki talks a lot about the differences between Japanese women and Chinese women. The Japanese women were more receptive to traveling overseas. Also, the picture brides were more eager to see the new world over seeing their husbands. The way it worked was, the number of women that migrated partially depended on the countries they were migrating to. If these countries were not in need to these women, then they weren’t able to come. “Planters viewed Japanese women as workers and assigned 72 percent of them to field labor (250). If planters needed workers, their main source was Japan. Korean migrants also came and wanted work, but there needed to be equality between the nationalities. There were many feuds and eventually the Koreans labor supply was cut off. “To strengthen their authority over their ethnically diverse work force, planters stratified occupations according to race: whites occupied the skilled and supervisory positions, while Asian immigrants were the unskilled field laborers” (253). This really separated races in the work force.

Because the Japanese strived so hard to come to the United States and become successful, it highlights the fact that other nationalities did not. Why is there such a dividing line between these nationalities? Why is there such a large difference between countries? This article really put the Japanese into perspective for me. I never really acknowledged them for what they accomplished here in America before. They really took pride in where they came from, but on top of that, they knew that to survive, they needed to migrate and that’s what they did.