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JORDAN SAND

Gentlemen’s Agreement, 1908:

Fragments for a Pacific History

Gentlemen’s Agreement

In 1908, two gentlemen agreed that the Japanese arriving on

the shores of the Pacific coast of North America were not gentlemen. One of

these gentlemen was in Tokyo and the other was in Washington, DC. On Octo-

ber 11, 1906, the San Francisco school board, claiming overcrowding due to

the destruction of buildings by the earthquake that occurred in April of that

year, had declared that Japanese and Korean students would no longer be per-

mitted to attend any of the city’s public schools except the Oriental School,

which had been built to segregate the children of “Chinese and Mongolian”

immigrants after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Japanese residents of San

Francisco cabled the news westward to Tokyo, and the Japanese press raised

protest. Word of the Japanese protest was then cabled back to Washington,

where members of the federal government learned of the school board’s deci-

sion for the first time. The possibility of war in the Pacific was discussed in

Japanese and American newspapers and in the United States Congress. Presi-

dent Roosevelt stepped in. Diplomatic notes were exchanged during 1907.

The Japanese government agreed to restrict emigration, resulting in the “Gen-

tlemen’s Agreement” between the United States and the Empire of Japan.1

Where the line between laborer and gentleman must be drawn

“It becomes a serious question to determine where the line between

laborer and gentleman must be drawn,” remarked Thomas J. O’Brien, U.S.

ambassador to Japan, at the Japan Society in New York in August 1908.2In its

ABSTRACT This experimental essay takes the form of a series of episodes related to immigration,

race, empire, radical politics, family norms, disease and health, expositions, houses, furnishings, dress,

hairstyle, and bodily comportment among Japanese, Koreans, Australians, and North Americans in the

year 1908. I have eschewed conventional methods of historical argumentation so that the connections

between seemingly disparate events and utterances may emerge elliptically, evoking a historical milieu

through their resonance with one another. Interpretive summaries appear in italics. A wiki version of

the essay and an apologia for historical montage can be found at www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/sandj/.

Japanese and Korean names appear in their original order, with family name first. / R EPRESENTATIONS

107. Summer 2009 © The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734–6018, electronic ISSN

article content to the University of California Press at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp.

DOI:10.1525/ rep.2009.107.1.91.

REP107_04 6/26/09 3:03 PM Page 91

new immigration policy, the Japanese government chose to draw the line by

separating what it called imin (migrants) from a new category of hi-imin

(nonmigrants). A November 1908 government directive sent from Tokyo to

prefectural offices elaborated on the distinction. Imin were described as

those “who have less opportunity for cultivation,” while hi-imin belonged to

“the educated classes.” Passports were to be issued only to hi-imin and to the

spouses and minor children of imin already overseas.3These restrictions,

however, did not apply to Japanese people traveling to Korea or China.

An immigration company

At the time, Hashiguchi Nobusuke, son of a lumber merchant from

Obich¯o, Miyazaki Prefecture, on the Pacific coast of Japan, was struggling to

establish an immigration company in Seattle, Washington, on the Pacific coast

of the United States (fig. 1). Arriving initially as a student, he had worked as a

houseboy in American homes, started a tailor’s shop, and gradually accumu-

lated capital until he was able to buy a plot of forestland on the Columbia

River in Oregon. He was seeking Japanese laborers to harvest the pine there.4

The imprisoned and exuberant populations of China and Japan

Eighty-five years earlier, when the territory around the Columbia River,

known to the British as the Columbia District and to the Americans as the

Oregon Country, was still in dispute, Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton

had urged that it be taken by American troops so as to bring Christianity and

democracy to the “imprisoned and exuberant populations” of China and

Japan, who might one day also find in this place “their granary.” According

to an account titled “The Romance of American Expansion” in the May 23,

1908, edition of the journal Outlook, Benton’s rationale seemed so absurd at

REPRESENTATIONS

FIGURE 1. Hashiguchi

Nobusuke poses with his wife

and child on a bench.

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the time that members of the senate “laughed heartily, and forgot all about

the really vital issue of forestalling the British in the occupation of Oregon.”

The British claimed rights based on purchase of the land from the Indians.5

By 1908, the region, together with California, had become a granary for

roughly 150,000 immigrants from Japan and 75,000 from China. Approxi-

mately 38,000 Japanese immigrants worked on American farms. In 1910,

they owned or leased 194,742 acres of farmland in the state of California and

cultivated 70 percent of the country’s strawberries.6

Mansions with spacious verandas

Most had come via Hawaii, where Japanese, Chinese, and other laborers

were brought on contract to work on sugar plantations until 1900, when the

U.S. Congress passed the Organic Act, declaring Hawaii a territory of the

United States. Thereafter, contract labor was forbidden. People continued

to make the eastward journey. In 1908, of 45,603 sugar plantation laborers

counted in Hawaii, 31,774, or roughly 70 percent, were Japanese.7They

lived in rows of barracks. According to Ronald Takaki, foremen occupied

“handsome bungalow cottages.” Plantation owners lived in “mansions with

spacious verandas” and maintained clubs exclusively for whites.8In Hawaii,

Japanese immigration brokers lured their countrymen further eastward with

promises of freedom and high wages in California. A carpenter in Japan in

1902 earned roughly two-thirds of one yen, or about 32 cents, per day. A

Japanese free laborer on a sugar plantation earned roughly 68 cents per day.

A railroad worker in California could earn a dollar a day.9Advocates of Asian

exclusion in California feared what they called the “Hawaiianization” of the

west coast.

American bungalows to Japan

Unable to start a business importing laborers from Japan to the west

coast of the United States, Hashiguchi Nobusuke decided instead to export

American bungalows to Japan. He shut down his business in Seattle in

December 1908 and boarded a ship for Yokohama the following month.

Upon returning to Japan, he opened shop in Shiba, Tokyo’s furniture dis-

trict, and hung out a sign reading Amerika-ya, “The America Store.”10

Although the bungalow house type, first developed for British colonists in

India and subsequently diffused as a simple model for vacation cottages, had

originally had one story, the Seattle houses that Hashiguchi had worked in as

a houseboy and was now seeking to introduce to Japan were year-round resi-

dences with two stories.11

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Hashiguchi had little background in architecture. In a memoir written

in 1925, he recorded that a strict upbringing in which he was forced to sit on

the floor with his legs folded under him for long periods had formed in him

a dislike of tatami mats. When he arrived in the United States and realized

that rich and poor Americans alike sat on chairs, he became convinced that

this was a practice that should be brought at once to Japan.12

Structures designed for middle-class Seattle families fit poorly with either

the preconceptions or the needs of the upper-class urbanites who were the

clientele for Western-style houses in Japan at the time. Japanese clients

wanted American-looking houses but still wanted tatami mats on the floors.

Five of Hashiguchi’s first six bungalows were purchased by a man who

rented houses to foreigners.13 Thereafter, the America Store shifted to tak-

ing commissions for residential designs and began in the business of design-

ing and custom-building houses, as well as importing furniture.

A two-seater swing

Writing in the Japanese popular press, Hashiguchi emphasized the diffi-

culty of cleaning Japanese houses and their lack of security, as well as the

inconvenience of wearing Western business suits for the office and changing

into Japanese dress at home. He also promoted sitting in chairs. He acknowl-

edged to readers of the Tokyo-based magazine Ladies’ Companion that many

people thought it was “impossible to relax” in a house where one spent the

whole day sitting off the floor, “as if riding in a train.” But the reason people

believed this, he explained, was that the Japanese had been given bad chairs.

Most of the chairs people had in their homes, he claimed, were actually

designed for office use.14 The accompanying advertisement for the America

Store featured a rocking chair and a two-seater swing, contrasting with the

office furniture and railway seats Hashiguchi expected his readers would

associate with Western living.15

The absence of suitable music

The focus of the house in Hashiguchi’s ideal was not a casual “living

room” of the kind fashionable in the contemporary American literature of

decorating at the time, but something more like a Victorian parlor.16 The

piano was a central feature. In the Ladies’ Companion, Hashiguchi observed

that, in contrast to Western houses, Japanese houses were poor “stages for

socializing and family togetherness.” He blamed the absence of suitable

music in Japan for a lack of social activities involving the whole family. In the

West, he noted, it was common to entertain company at home with piano

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music and songs. Hashiguchi claimed that this did not happen in Japan for

reasons rooted in feminine habits. Japanese women learned music to enter-

tain themselves in their maiden years, but usually gave it up after marriage.

Consequently, social gatherings tended to occur outside the home, and

wives and daughters were excluded.17

Poetry cannot feed a people

The monthly journal Success (Seik¯o), also published in Tokyo, urged

readers in 1910 to settle permanently in the United States because the “bar-

baric” Japanese family system was holding the nation back. “Family signifies

the poetry of life,” observed the writer, “but poetry cannot feed a people.”

Amerika, another Tokyo-based journal, had observed two years earlier the

unfortunate circumstance that most of the Japanese labor migrants to the

Pacific coast of America were “animal-like . . . much like the coarse and vul-

gar Chinese laborers in Japan.”18

If these groups would scatter

Returning to New York from a trip to Japan in 1911, educator and jour-

nalist Hamilton Holt told the New York Times that the Japanese maintained

good hygiene, noting that on the voyage from Japan to Korea he had looked

in steerage and found three hundred Japanese passengers there, “clean and

sweet, with no odor.” He added that the “tendency of the Japanese in this

country of segregating themselves in colonies” was acknowledged in Japan to

have caused isolation and prejudice, and that it was felt that relations would

improve “if these groups would scatter.”19

Certain ideas and material forms were flowing westward at the beginning of the

twentieth century, from the east coast of the United States to California and from there

to Japan: bungalows, garden cities, informal family intimacy, simple living, and out-

door recreation. As they traveled, they embodied both civilization (as it was then under-

stood by Anglo-Americans) and the antidotes this civilization had generated within

itself. A counter-current across the Pacific—this one of people—had reached a peak

and was now impeded.

A tour of Asia

In March 1908, David and Mary Gamble embarked from the port of Los

Angeles on a westbound ship. David Gamble was one of ten children of

James Gamble, cofounder of Proctor and Gamble. He was also the company’s

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former secretary and treasurer. Now in retirement, he and Mary decided to

build a house in Pasadena, California, seeking California’s fresh air and the

simple bungalow lifestyle. Ground was broken in March. To avoid the

upheaval of construction and moving, they took a tour of Asia. Studying

details of Japanese architecture in Bostonian Edward Morse’s book Japanese

Homes and Their Surroundings and in the Japanese pavilions at the 1904 World

Exposition in St. Louis, their architects, Charles and Henry Greene, had

designed them a bungalow “in the Japanese manner,” although the building

also showed the influences of Tyrolean and other European wood architec-

ture. For interiors, the Greenes imported hardwoods from South America,

Africa, and Asia, and also used California pine and other local softwoods.20

Upon the Gamble family’s return in August, the Greenes carved them a wall

relief of Mount Fuji in redwood.21

The way Americans treated animals

Nishimura Isaku (Isaac), whose parents had been converted to Christian-

ity by an American missionary shortly before his birth in 1884, arrived in the

United States from Japan via Europe in 1908. His two younger brothers were

in Boston and Los Angeles. Because of restrictions under the Gentlemen’s

Agreement and possibly because of Nishimura’s association with socialists,

Japanese authorities had denied him a passport to the United States. He

embarked for Europe from his native Shingu, a port town on the Pacific coast

of Wakayama Prefecture known for its high number of overseas emigrants,

traveling via Singapore, Colombo, and the Suez Canal. Once in Europe, he

claimed falsely at the Japanese embassy in The Hague that his brother was ill

and needed to be brought back to Japan. The two did later return together,

setting sail from San Francisco and arriving in Yokohama via Honolulu.

Although in ShinguNishimura had advocated an American lifestyle, he does

not appear to have been favorably impressed by his experience in the United

States. In his memoir, For My Own Benefit (Ware ni eki ari), Nishimura recalled

the admiration he had felt for the way Americans treated animals, but he also

noted that he had suffered discrimination. A plainclothes policeman search-

ing for a Chinese murder suspect harassed him on a train. Japanese people,

his brother in Los Angeles informed him, were not welcome at restaurants

and barbershops. He went to a restaurant anyway, despite his brother’s fear.22

Like the king of a little kingdom

Nishimura’s parents had dressed him in Western clothes from infancy.

He had an aversion to removing his shoes and sitting on the floor in the

customary Japanese manner. After his marriage in 1907, he sent for copies

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of American magazines such as Good Housekeeping, House and Garden, and

House Beautiful and set about instructing his wife in American cooking and

laundry methods, as well as in the English language. He ordered all of their

furniture from Montgomery Ward in Chicago. On his return from the

United States, he built a house based on plans in an American book.23 His

biographer, Kat¯o Yuri, has observed that Nishimura treated his domestic life

as a performance. The writers and artists who frequently visited the

Nishimura house in Shinguwondered at it. Painter Ishii Hakutei, who stayed

for a month in 1913, wrote that the “Western style scene” of family suppers

taken in rattan chairs at a table on the front lawn “inspired me countless

times.”24 Guests were struck by the exoticism of the setting, food, and uten-

sils. Just as married life had commenced with personal lessons for his wife in

Western domestic work, Nishimura’s family gatherings were exercises to be

enacted in accord with his vision. “He’s like the king of a little kingdom,”

commented poet Yosano Akiko.25

Civilized people needn’t take their meals

A self-trained architect, Nishimura also designed several dozen houses

for friends and relatives in the course of his career, many of them bungalows.

These designs embodied in architecture the ideal of social transparency he

advocated. The designs called for interiors that were visible from outside the

front door. Nishimura combined the living and dining rooms, thereby

putting the place where one ate within sight of guests. This might be

thought a source of inconvenience in the event visitors came when one was

eating, he admitted, but there ought to be nothing shameful about being

seen eating. Civilized people needn’t take their meals as if they were beasts

hiding their prey, he asserted.26

Escaping the smoke of civilization

In an early issue of House (Jutaku), a magazine edited by Hashiguchi

Nobusuke and women’s educator Misumi Suzuko, Nishimura informed

readers that the bungalow was the ideal house for putting Japanese life in

step with the rest of the world. The bungalow’s roof was similar to that of a

Japanese house, and the interior was composed of simple planes and right

angles, agreeing with Japanese taste. In fact, much of the bungalow’s design,

Nishimura pointed out, took hints from Japanese architecture. Designed for

“escaping the smoke of civilization and living an artistic life close to nature,”

the true American bungalow, according to Nishimura, comprised only four

or five rooms, with no entry vestibule or reception room. A large living room

(ribingu rumu) served as dining area and study. Although some bungalows

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did have a small hall (horu), this was not a house for people leading lives of

the kind that required them to “turn visitors away at the front door or have

someone answer the door to say no one [was] home.”27

A few communistic ideas

In 1908, British expatriate and self-trained architect James Peddle

rushed back to Sydney from Pasadena to contribute bungalow plans to a

housing design competition for Daceyville, Australia’s first garden city,

planned after the model Englishman Ebenezer Howard had proposed in

Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1902). Named for John Rowland Dacey, a parlia-

mentarian who for years had been advocating planned housing for workers,

Daceyville soon became a fashionable suburb. The California bungalow was

introduced in the Australian architectural press in the same year, described

as promising the blessings of “pure country air” and a “state of health [and]

happy responsibility” to the “pleasure-loving” Australian people, whose

“nomadic instinct” led them outdoors at every opportunity. In the journal

Building, Peddle praised the landscape of San Francisco’s new suburbs in

Berkeley and Oakland and urged his countrymen to adopt a “few commu-

nistic ideas” from their American neighbors by removing the fences around

their property.28

Dacey himself was a treasurer of the Australian Labor Party at the time

and a member of its protectionist faction. The party manifesto called for

“cultivation of an Australian sentiment, based on the maintenance of racial

purity.”29 “Many years ago,” political commentator A. Maurice Low wrote

in the New York–based journal Forum in October 1908, “Australians

resolved that Australia should be a white man’s country and that the immi-

gration of Asiatics should not be permitted.” Low noted that this left Aus-

tralian sugar plantations relatively undeveloped because “the white man

cannot or will not work in them.” The Japanese in particular were “more

bitterly disliked,” in Australia, he asserted, than “any place on the face of

the globe.”30

Even Englishmen, who disliked being seen at home

Architect Tanabe Junkichi published an article in the January 1908 issue

of the Journal of the Society of Japanese Architects introducing members

of the society to bungalows in western Australia. Tanabe had never traveled

to Australia. His source was a report submitted by an architect in Perth to

the Royal Institute of British Architects. The original report pointed to the

adaptations that had been made to the Australian climate and advertised the

pleasures of relaxing on the verandah—an “open-air sitting room”—noting

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that even Englishmen, who disliked being seen at home, would be converted

to Australian habits if they tried it. The author referred to the single-story

houses with broad verandahs as “bungalow-like,” which, Tanabe explained to

his Japanese colleagues, referred to a type of dwelling that was common in

India and elsewhere.31

Struck by visual similarities to “ordinary houses around Tokyo,” Tanabe

found in the Australian bungalows a model for the reform of Japanese

domestic architecture. As eating habits were Westernizing and “most peo-

ple” wore Western clothes, he wrote, architects had a responsibility to devise

a “universal dwelling reform” proposal that would “respond to the desire for

European tastes among the middle ranks.” Nothing was intrinsically wrong

with making the architectural solution “pure Western style,” but cost, climate,

and the present “national level” of the Japanese people stood in the way. The

British writer, in Tanabe’s translation, remarked that he expected his “fellow

countrymen would be astonished by the crudeness of the buildings.” In Tan-

abe’s view, these Australian houses offered the Japanese a compromise for

the time being.

Disparaged as a custom of savage origin

In the British architect’s description of taking the air on the verandah in

Australia Tanabe found confirmation that the Japanese habit of doing the

same thing need not be “disparaged as a custom of savage origin.” But he

disapproved of the fact that entrance to the houses in several of the plans

was gained directly through the verandah, since this would allow visitors to

look inside the house from the entry.

English bungalows were not the same as Seattle bungalows, which were not the

same as Pasadena bungalows or Hawaiian bungalows or western Australian bunga-

lows. Yet, as Anthony King has demonstrated, the bungalow idea of simple living and

informality was a thread connecting all of them, and connecting the experience of life in

tropical colonies of the British empire to the emergence of modern leisure and vacation

cottages, to the American Arts and Crafts movement, and to the production of suburban

mass housing in North America, Australia, and elsewhere. Hashiguchi Nobusuke’s

bungalows were drawn from a tributary to the second, commercial diffusion of the bun-

galow type, which flowed from England to the United States through pattern books and

magazines then spread throughout the Pacific Coast of North America through the sales

of prefab builders. Tanabe Junkichi’s western Australian houses belonged to the first

wave of diffusion from India through the British Empire.32 The Greene and Greene

bungalow, the Rolls Royce of rustic houses, was heavily influenced by the American

fashion for things in Japanese style that accompanied the simple life ideal promoted in

Gustav Stickley’s journal The Craftsman and other periodicals.

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Decadence and neurasthenia

Abe Isoo, one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party in Tokyo,

wrote in 1908 that the Japanese lacked healthy outdoor recreations. Anglo-

Saxons engaged in wholesome and vigorous activities that gave them “bodies

of steel and nerves of iron,” he informed readers in the June issue of Success

magazine. Japanese pastimes, in contrast, were “feminine, inactive, and retir-

ing,” and took far too much time. Sumo wrestling was the only exception, but

this was merely a spectator sport. Brothels and restaurants dominated in the

places where Japanese people gathered. Sitting on tatami mats at home hin-

dered physical movement. The result of Japanese sedentary habits was deca-

dence and neurasthenia, evident even among the immigrants to the west coast

of America.33 Abe became one of the leading promoters of baseball in Japan.

This sport, which every nationality of laborers is keen for

Hawaiian sugar production more than doubled between 1898, when the

islands became a U.S. territory, and 1908, a decade later, increasing from

229,414 tons to 521,123 tons annually. The wages of Japanese laborers on

Hawaiian sugar plantations increased little. Between 1902 and 1908, the aver-

age daily wage of a free laborer had increased by 5 cents. That earned by a

Japanese contract cultivator decreased from 99 to 91 cents.34 An organization

of Japanese workers in the islands calling themselves the “Higher Wage Associa-

tion” demanded better wages and working conditions and threatened to strike.

Pleas were published in the Nippu jiji, a Japanese newspaper in Oahu, begging

Japanese workers to remember their culture and the shame that “reckless radi-

cals” might bring upon their country. Higher Wage Association leaders spoke

of Japanese national spirit (yamato damashii) too. By the end of January 1909,

7,000 Japanese workers on Oahu had gone on strike. Although the strike ulti-

mately collapsed, most of the strikers’ demands were met. The Sugar Planters’

Association raised wages and agreed to renovate camps.35 This association also

advised plantation managers to provide recreation for workers, including

sports, music, and movies. Managers were told to lay out baseball grounds, “to

encourage this sport, which every nationality of laborers is keen for.”36

If I never get back

Jack Norworth, a blackface comedian and vaudeville songwriter, was rid-

ing a train into Manhattan one day in 1908 when he composed a song called

“Take Me Out to the Ball Game” on some scrap paper. The line “I don’t care

if I never get back,” rhymed with “buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack.”

With the rise of two professional leagues, baseball had become a pastime to

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be enjoyed sitting down. Norworth’s song became known in the United

States as the “unofficial anthem of baseball” and cemented the relationship

between this pastime and one of the country’s first mass-produced sweet

snacks, whose slogan was “the more you eat the more you want.”37

Pacific Refreshment Room

Nishimura Isaku’s uncle, Oishi Seinosuke, was one of several family

members who raised Isaku after his parents were killed when their church

collapsed in the N¯obi Earthquake of 1891. Oishi drifted to the United States,

where he worked as a houseboy and cook, then studied medicine in Oregon.

Returning to Shingu, he opened a restaurant, said to be the first establishment

in the prefecture to serve Western food. Isaku painted the sign that hung out

front, reading (in English and Japanese) “Pacific Refreshment Room” (fig. 2).

The name was chosen for the dual meaning of the word “pacific.” Oishi was

contributing at the time regularly to the socialist Commoners’ Newspaper, edited

by K¯otoku Shusui (fig. 3). This was the only newspaper in Japan to oppose

the war with Russia over dominance of Korea and Manchuria.

Gentlemen’s Agreement, 1908: Fragments for a Pacific History 101

FIGURE 2 (left). The Pacific Refreshment Room. Oishi Seinosuke stands second

from left in a top hat. Nishimura Isaku stands beside him in a bowler.

Courtesy Nishimura Isaku kinenkan.

FIGURE 3 (right). Kotoku Shusui in Japanese formal dress.

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“Unlike an ordinary Western style restaurant,” Oishi explained in announc-

ing plans for the refreshment room to Commoners’ Newspaper readers, “we

have expended every effort in the design to follow the principles of Western

simple life philosophy in each particular, from the construction of the build-

ing to the selection of furniture to the interior decoration. Inside, we are

providing a newspaper and magazine reading area and simple musical

instruments and indoor games to create a place for youth to enjoy healthy

recreation, food and drink.” The restaurant also offered free meals to the

poor on appointed days. It soon failed. According to Nishimura’s memoir,

customers didn’t like being lectured about Western manners.38 Around

1908, Oishi turned from moral reform and ministering to the poor to anar-

chism and the philosophy of direct action that K¯otoku Shusui was beginning

to espouse. At the end of a typical day in Shingu, he told readers of the mag-

azine Kumamoto Review in a personal sketch that summer, he “would often

give a speech and talk with the young about revolt.”39

Dressed like a Tokyo gentleman

Authorities shut the offices of the Commoners’ Newspaper in 1905, shortly

after publication of Kotoku’s translation of The Communist Manifesto. Kotoku

spent five months in prison, then boarded a ship in Yokohama bound for

Seattle and San Francisco. He wrote to San Francisco anarchist Albert John-

son before his departure that he was coming to the United States so that he

could “criticize the position of ‘His Majesty’ . . . from [a] foreign land where

the pernicious hand of ‘His Majesty’ cannot reach.”40 Lecturing before an

audience of more than five hundred people in Seattle’s Japanese Association

Hall, he found the podium flanked by portraits of the emperor and empress.

Portraits of naval heroes of the war with Russia and a work of calligraphy by

Marquis ItoHirobumi, then Japan’s Resident General in Korea, hung on the

other walls. Kotoku’s own appearance and manner reminded Iwasa Sakutaro,

his Japanese comrade in San Francisco, of the Meiji emperor. He dressed “like

a Tokyo gentleman,” in a morning coat and bowler hat and carried a wooden

sword. It seemed “curiously grotesque in San Francisco,” Iwasa would later

write. Conditions for the socialists in San Francisco encouraged Kotoku. “This

is a revolutionary age,” he told a Japanese audience there, “if we aspire to rev-

olution today, it will be easy to make a name for ourselves and win fame.”41

An inflowing horde

In the May 1908 International Socialist Review, Cameron H. King Jr. observed

that “our feelings of brotherhood toward the Japanese” must wait “until we

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have no longer reason to look upon them as an inflowing horde of alien

scabs.” Discussing the issue of Asian immigration at a meeting of the Socialist

Party in Oakland, writer Jack London stated, “I am first of all a white man

and only then a Socialist.”42

At the International Congress on Tuberculosis

Doctor Ishigami T¯oru traveled eastward to Washington, DC, in 1908,

probably by ship to Seattle or San Francisco, then over land (since the

Panama Canal, construction of which had been taken over by the United

States from France in 1904, would not be complete until six years later). He

made the journey to attend the International Congress on Tuberculosis and

present a serum he claimed would cure the disease. Ishigami was a student

and assistant of Kitasato Shibasabur¯o, the discoverer of the plague bacillus.

He had traveled to Hong Kong with Kitasato and helped there in isolating

the bacillus. The New York–based Harper’s magazine first trumpeted Ishigami’s

serum as the main news of the gathering but subsequently printed a skepti-

cal article by a participating doctor from New York: “The claims made at the

Congress by Dr. Ishigami of Japan as to the value of his serum [remain] still

un-substantiated and unendorsed by the medical profession at large,” the

doctor noted, “more and more stress has been laid upon hygienic measures

and modes of living for the strengthening of the patient’s own powers than

upon the use of any particular medicine.”43 Hygienic concerns included seg-

regation of the infected from others. In the understanding of some attend-

ing the congress, the problem of tuberculosis related to the undesirable

mixing of races. Ignorance of hygiene among nonwhites, they feared, threat-

ened white populations.44 Ishigami published the trial results of his serum in

the November issue of the Philippine Journal of Science.45

If, by any chance

“If, by any chance, ten thousand hungry man-eating tigers were suddenly

brought from the Far East and set free to ravage our Pacific coast,” began an

article by William Inglis in the July 4, 1908, issue of Harper’s.46 Inglis chose this

simile to emphasize the threat of fleas carrying the plague bacillus, although

some readers might also have heard echoes of Yellow Peril rhetoric in it. The

article did not address immigration, however. It noted that spread of the dis-

ease was slow in Japan and the United States because people in these coun-

tries bathed frequently. It also described the quarantine measures taken after

the disease had “obtained a foothold among the Asiatics in San Francisco,

and even among a few Caucasians.” An accompanying photograph showing a

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two-story San Francisco row house with bay windows bore the caption “In this

Japanese House were found both Human Creatures and Rats infected with

Bubonic Plague.”

Ladies’ Agreement

Following the Gentlemen’s Agreement, more women traveled from

Japan to the continental United States than men. Between 1910 and 1920,

the number of Japanese women and girls living in the United States

increased by 150 percent.47 Photographs of women were posted at immi-

gration company offices, which arranged marriages for a fee. Japanese

authorities consented to halt the emigration of picture brides in 1920,

under what was sometimes called the “Ladies’ Agreement.”48 Albert John-

son, chairman of the Congressional Committee on Immigration, reported

that Japanese picture brides were in fact coming as laborers, since they

worked in the fields with their husbands in addition to raising an average

of five children.49 In 1925, Kiyo Sue Inui, professor at Tokyo University

(formerly assistant professor at the University of California) wrote of the

problem of Japanese immigrant women working alongside their men in

the fields that “it is admitted that it is not the American standard,” but that

the “Japanese community is doing its best to discourage this practice

through their various organizations.”50 Thirty-five hours of free instruction

in American domestic management, hygiene, and etiquette were offered

by the emigration society of Yokohama to women embarking for the

United States.51

Somewhere in the uncivilized west

Misumi Suzuko moved south from Tokyo to Zushi on the Pacific coast

when she took an appointment as principle of the Kamakura Girls’ School

in 1908, probably for reasons of health (fig. 4). She had shown signs of

tuberculosis. Doctors advised that the air of Zushi, near Kamakura where

the school was located, would offer her the best chance of alleviating the

effects of the disease. “Everyone has heard of men” remarked a journalist

for Harper’s magazine in October of the same year, who “threw up their

jobs and lived in a tent somewhere in the uncivilized west” because of

tuberculosis.52

While teaching at the Kamakura Girls’ School, Misumi began to apply

what she called “movement economy” to domestic practices, influenced by

the American Frederick Taylor’s theory of scientific management. Subse-

quently, she commissioned the America Store to design a house for her in

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accordance with these principles. She preached her domestic science to

America Store president Hashiguchi. The two collaborated in founding the

Dwelling Reform Society, which published the monthly journal House and

sought public support throughout Japan to alter Japanese houses based on

an American model for greater efficiency.53

She played the organ

Misumi was thirty-six and unwed at the time she arrived in Zushi. In addi-

tion to fresh air, her doctors advised that marriage would help alleviate her

condition. While she was living on the coast, twelve boys from a nearby

school drowned in the Pacific in a boating accident. Misumi memorialized

the incident by putting lyrics to a hymn by American composer Jeremiah

Ingalls. She named the song “The Foot of White Fuji.” She played the organ

to accompany her students, who sang at the boys’ funeral. The song became

popular, adding to the incident’s renown throughout Japan.

Mr. Ishizuka, the boys’ dormitory supervisor, had been approached by a

third party who proposed that Ishizuka marry Misumi. Ishizuka was in

Kamakura negotiating the match when the boys drowned. He resigned to

take responsibility for the tragedy, drifted west to Okayama (where he

married someone else), and later north to the Japanese colony on Sakhalin.

Gentlemen’s Agreement, 1908: Fragments for a Pacific History 105

FIGURE 4. Misumi Suzuko.

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After his death, his son blamed a popular novel called Hototogisu for his

father’s misfortunes: Namiko, the romantic heroine in this novel, is con-

sumptive. She seeks the healthy air of the Pacific at Zushi, where she

sojourns with her beloved, a naval officer. Ishizuka, his son theorized, trans-

posed the romance of the novel into the context of his own life when he

encountered the consumptive Misumi. In later life, Ishizuka forbade his son

to read novels.54

Translated into English as Nami-ko: A Realistic Novel,Hototogisu received

praise from American reviewers. William Ellis Griffis called it “the only

work of fiction in English which gives a real and true picture of the home

life of contemporaneous Japan,” adding that “it may possibly do for Japan’s

slavery of woman what Mrs. Stowe’s picture of black slavery did in our

country.”55

Attitudes toward disease and health and toward family, forms of recreation and

leisure, ways of comporting the body, and casual furniture and interiors had circled

the globe with European expansion, picking up new traits in the context of European

colonial domination. Fear of contagion drove people to new territorial occupations in

the mountains and on the coasts away from population centers. In Japan as in Europe

and North America, consumptives who could afford it took the “fresh-air cure,” sleep-

ing in open-air porches and languishing in reclining chairs at sanatoria. At the same

time, the chronic character of tuberculosis called for new domestic habits and placed the

disease in the frame of the romance of conjugal domesticity that had emerged in the

nineteenth century.

A second place to colonize

Tokutomi Roka, the author of Hototogisu (Nami-ko), was rich from the

royalties on his bestselling novel when he moved in 1908 from the Aoyama

district of Tokyo to the suburban farm hamlet of Kasuya seven miles to the

west. He called the move his “flight from the capital.” As he recounted four

years later in his memoir-cum-novel An Earthworm’s Ramblings, he was seek-

ing a simple life away from civilization. Leo Tolstoy, whom he had visited at

his estate south of Moscow in 1906, had urged him to take up farming for

the moral benefits of hard work and country living. On March 11, 1908,

Roka wrote in a letter to his friend Kunikida Doppo, who was hospitalized

with tuberculosis, “The rail line between Shinjuku and Hachioji is supposed

to pass through here by the time of the Great Exposition in 1912. Now some

gentleman from Tokyo has purchased land nearby. One day a factory could

even be built in the valley below me, breathing black smoke. If that happens,

it’s over. I’ll go find a second place to colonize right away.”56

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North across the Tumen River to Manchuria

A scroll bearing the calligraphed words “Though poor, not fawning;

though rich, not proud” hangs today in the study of Tokutomi Roka’s Kasuya

house (fig. 5), which has been preserved as a museum. The brushwork

belongs to An Jung-geun (Christian name Thomas), who would become a

hero of the movement for Korean independence from Japanese colonial

rule, although he was little known at the time he wrote the words. The two

never met. Roka received the scroll from a schoolteacher in the Manchurian

city of Dalian while traveling there.57 In 1908, An had moved north from the

Korean peninsula across the Tumen River to Manchuria to lead a Korean

guerrilla force against Japanese occupation. Forced to scatter by Japanese

troops there, he and several others crossed the border to Russia and made

their way to the port of Posjet, south of Vladivostok. There, in late Novem-

ber, he cut off the tip of his left ring finger and, together with twelve com-

rades, including a farmer, a hunter, and a barber, signed a declaration in

blood vowing to give his life for the nation.58

King Kojong, who kneels on the ground

The previous July, Marquis ItoHirobumi, the Japanese Resident General,

had forced the Korean monarch to abdicate and had disbanded his military.

Gentlemen’s Agreement, 1908: Fragments for a Pacific History 107

FIGURE 5. “Mr. Kenjiro Tokutomi is leading a rural life. . . ,” Fujin

gaho(The Ladies’ Graphic), April 1914.

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A document was drawn up that gave all authority to appoint and remove offi-

cials in the peninsula to the Resident General. Japanese political cartoonist

Kitazawa Rakuten depicted the signing ceremony in the magazine Tokyo

Puck (fig. 6). In the drawing, Itoand Foreign Minister Hayashi Tadasu sit on

chairs wearing military uniforms on the Prussian model, their legs apart and

their hands resting on their thighs. They look down on the bowed head of

King Kojong, who kneels on the ground of a foreshortened Korean penin-

sula as he applies his seal to the document laid out before him.59 After the

agreement, throughout the peninsula and in areas farther north dominated

by the Japanese, Korean resisters gathered to fight. This was when An bade

farewell to his family and headed north.60

A better class of colonists

The report on Korea in the April 2, 1908 issue of The Independent of New

York related that Durham White Stevens, foreign advisor to the Japanese

Resident General in Korea, had been shot and killed by an undetermined

number of Koreans at the ferry station in San Francisco. It also mentioned a

bill passed by the Japanese parliament for colonization of people in Korea,

which the Independent stated was aimed at diverting the flow of emigration

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108

FIGURE 6. Kitazawa Rakuten’s

depiction of the signing of an

agreement between Japan and

Korea. Tokyo Puck 3, no. 21

(August 1907). Courtesy Tokyo

University Graduate School of

Interdisciplinary Information

Studies Library.

REP107_04 6/26/09 3:04 PM Page 108

away from the United States and at ensuring that a “better class of colonists”

would go to Korea than the “adventurers who followed the army” there.61 At

the end of the year, the government of Prime Minister Katsura Taro(formed

in July) created the Oriental Development Company to assist Japanese

colonists in starting farms on the peninsula. Sixty thousand were projected

to emigrate in the first three years of the program, but two years later, no

one had signed up. The Japanese who emigrated voluntarily to the conti-

nent preferred to live in the cities. The Oriental Development Company

subsequently shifted to providing loans for Japanese to purchase land to be

farmed by Korean tenants.62 Since the establishment of the protectorate in

1905, the Resident General had forbidden Korean emigration to Hawaii and

the United States in order to reduce the competition for Japanese laborers

there and to control Korean independence activists.63

Expelled or encysted

“The Panama Canal will people California with assimilable men and

women,” wrote James D. Phelan, Ph.D., former mayor of San Francisco, in

1913, the year before the canal’s completion. The Japanese, Phelan asserted,

was “a perfect human machine, given to ceaseless and unremitting toil,”

without regard for “the higher aspirations exprest in a happy home.” He

continued: “We have created a race question, against which all history has

warned us: where two races are endeavoring to live side by side, one must

take the inferior place, or an irrepressible conflict is precipitated. Just as a

foreign substance will derange the human system unless it is expelled or

encysted, even so it is with the body-politic.”64 With completion of the canal

four years away, competition had begun in 1908 between San Francisco, New

Orleans, and San Diego to become the primary site for the Panama Pacific

International Exposition. San Francisco would be chosen.

Like the Koropokkuru chased out by the Ainu

In the autumn of 1908, socialist-turned-anarchist Kotoku Shusui was

moving westward in the Tokyo region. Like the novelist Tokutomi Roka, he

was in search of living space. His fellow anarchists had been arrested on June

22 while Kotoku was at home in Kochi Prefecture. He set off toward Tokyo in

August to reconstitute the party. Stopping in Shingu, he received a physical

examination from Dr. Oishi, who found him weak and suspected that he had

tuberculosis. Kotoku also asked Oishi whether he knew how to construct a

bomb. Oishi replied that he did not. In October, he settled in the village of

Sugamo, near Otsuka station in the suburbs of Tokyo. The Economic Newspa-

per (Keizai shinbun) published a November 3 letter from Kotoku describing

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Sugamo’s clear streams and sleeping cows. Kotoku did not mention the poli-

tics of his move, portraying himself as a man of slender means forced out by

the growth of the city. Using English loanwords with a note of sarcasm, he

wrote of the vogue for having one’s “reshiidensu” separate from one’s “ofiisu,”

describing this as the sine qua non for the civilized “bijinesuman.” He had

hoped to reside in Omori, in the south of the city, but it was dominated by

wealthy gentlemen, Kotoku reported. Thus he was driven to “seek a quieter

place” in Sugamo by more powerful colonists expanding the periphery of

civilization, “like the Koropokkuru people chased out by the Ainu, or the

Ainu chased by the Yamato people” of Japan. When the electric tram line

extended from Otowa to Otsuka, this area too would change—“then where

shall people like me who have failed in the fight for survival go?”65

A hierarchy of twelve races

Members of the Japanese Society of Ethnology were engaged in a debate at

the time about the existence of the Koropokkuru. Ainu people indigenous to

Hokkaido, an island claimed by Japan with the establishment of the Hokkaido

Colonization Office forty-nine years earlier, preserved legends of a tribe of

diminutive humans who lived under the leaves of butterbur plants. Tsuboi

Shogoro, the president of the Society of Ethnology, believed that these legends

told of an earlier race that had been displaced or destroyed by the Ainu.

Through Tsuboi’s auspices, a group of nine Ainu people had been brought to

the St. Louis International Exposition in 1904 as live exhibits. The frontispiece

of an official publication from the exposition depicted a global hierarchy of

twelve races, with the Japanese (represented by the figure of a woman) in the

third position, beneath the Russian and the “Americo-European,” and seven

places above the Ainu (represented by a man), who was third from the bot-

tom.66 This illustration did not include a Koropokkuru person.

The Mikado’s fighting-men drilling

Viscount Kaneko Kentaroreceived a visit from U.S. Exposition Commis-

sioner Loomis in Tokyo in the summer of 1908. Tokyo’s World Exposition,

planned for 1912, was intended to display Japan’s peaceful intentions to the

United States and the world. A cartoon in the newspaper Yorozu choho

showed Loomis in Tokyo appearing shocked to find “the Mikado’s fighting-

men drilling on the peaceful exposition grounds.” Harper’s magazine

reprinted the cartoon together with an article in which the writer remarked

that the Japanese cartoonist had the mistaken impression that Americans

were alarmed, when in fact, “little matters like this awaken no interest in

Americans when the presidency and the national baseball championship are

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in dispute.” The international exposition was later cancelled for financial

reasons, and a smaller domestic one held in its place.67

Because the latter is a republic

The following year, Viscount Kaneko addressed American readers on the

virtues of study in America for Japanese students. The question had once

arisen in Japan, he explained, of “whether Japanese youths should not

rather be sent to monarchial countries in Europe than to the United States,

because the latter is a republic,” where they “might imbibe radical ideas.”

“But the result of work by Japanese who returned from America showed that

they were far more conservative than those educated in Europe.”68

The only form of intercourse which you may permit

Earlier, when Kaneko was Secretary of Japan’s House of Peers, Herbert

Spencer had written to him warning against the mixing of races. “Intermar-

riage of foreigners and Japanese,” Spencer advised, “should be positively for-

bidden. . . . There is abundant proof, alike furnished by the inter-marriages

of human races and by the inter-breeding of animals that when the varieties

mingled diverge beyond a certain slight degree the result is invariably a bad one

in the long run.” Spencer added that he had confirmed this “within the last

half hour” by speaking with a “gentleman who is well-known as an authority

on horses, cattle and sheep.” “I have for the reasons indicated,” he contin-

ued, “entirely approved of the regulations which have been established in

America for restraining the Chinese immigration, and had I the power

would restrict them to the smallest possible amount, my reasons for this deci-

sion being that one of two things must happen. If the Chinese are allowed to

settle extensively in America, they must either, if they remain unmixed, form

a subject race in the position, if not of slaves, yet of a class approaching to

slaves; or if they mix they must form a bad hybrid. In either case, supposing

the immigration to be large, immense social mischief must arise, and even-

tually social disorganization. The same thing will happen if there should

be any considerable mixture of the European or American races with the

Japanese.” The “only form of intercourse which you may with advantage per-

mit,” he asserted, was “importation and exportation of physical and mental

products.” He concluded the letter with a flourish: “I end by saying as I

began—keep other races at arm’s length as much as possible.”69

At the time that Viscount Kaneko received the American Exposition

Commissioner in Tokyo, the Ladies’ Graphic magazine, published in Tokyo,

had recently featured Kaneko’s house as a model of hybrid Japanese-Western

style interior decorating. Photos in the magazine showed a miniature

Gentlemen’s Agreement, 1908: Fragments for a Pacific History 111

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reproduction of the Venus de Milo in the decorative alcove, carpets, animal

hides and leather chairs on the tatami mats, and ink paintings of large birds

of prey on the sliding doors.70

That their basic stock was white

Spencer’s letter to Kaneko was quoted by the London Times in 1904. The

Times quotation in turn was quoted by Harper’s on September 26, 1908, with

the editorial note that “agitation for exclusion of Japanese from America—

and Americans from Japan—is not to be condemned until a certain bio-

logical objection to intermingling is conclusively disproved.”71 Yet some

disputed that Japanese and American people were racially distant. Reviewing

William Elliott Griffis’s recent work The Japanese Nation In Evolution: Steps in

the Progress of a Great People, the journal Outlook noted that Dr. Griffis offered

“many evidences of descent of Iranian, Caucasian, or Aryan ancestry,” as well

as Malay, and that “the early Japanese belonged to the Semitic race.” Griffis

claimed “that their basic stock was white—an Aryan or Ainu stock.” Unlike

the Chinese and Koreans, they were not Mongolian.72

A third story to accommodate her trapeze

In 1908, actress Blanche Sloan had just completed construction of a sum-

mer bungalow east of Manhattan in Jamaica, New York. Sloan, who was known

as the “Queen of the Air,” had the builders include a third story to accommo-

date her trapeze. She had debuted in New York seven years earlier when the

Bon-ton Burlesquers performed “Americans in Japan.”73 The second story of

her summer house was a single open living room with a platform for her piano

and an open-air sleeping porch with a “disappearing bed.” Bungalow magazine

incorrectly described the house as a “torri” (referring to the torii gates at the

entries to Shinto shrines). The magazine praised the design, observing: “It not

only provides all of the requirements of occidental life, but also embodies

much of the refinement that is invariably present in the architecture of the

land of the Mikado.” The building’s exterior resembled a Buddhist temple

hall. A similar structure built in Florida was known as the “Bungoda.”74

Japanese-made parasol

Nagai Kafu, a Japanese writer who modeled himself on Baudelaire and

enjoyed the company of actresses and prostitutes, had lived in New York for

most of his sojourn in the United States (fig. 7). He had started out in Seattle,

then traveled eastward to St. Louis, Kalamazoo, and Washington, DC, before

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settling in New York. In 1908, by which time Kafuhad moved further east-

ward to Paris, his collected sketches of the United States were published in

book form in Tokyo as Amerika monogatari (American Stories). In one of

these stories, he described the madam’s chambers at a brothel in Manhat-

tan, where a “Japanese-made parasol and round red lantern” hung from the

ceiling. The room also displayed “a double screen with a golden pheasant

embroidered on black fabric, which is apparently also made in Japan.” “All

these shades of Oriental colors create an amazing incongruity,” wrote Kafu.75

Another of Kafu’s American sketches describes James and Stella, a young

couple in Chicago, performing Traumerei together at the piano in her family

home, then ending their song in a passionate embrace accompanied by the

rapturous applause of her parents. At home in Japan, young writer Tanizaki

Jun’ichirowished to emulate Kafu’s decadence and cosmopolitanism but,

unlike Kafu, he had not been born into wealth and had never traveled over-

seas. He read Kafu’s American stories while staying on the Pacific coast to

convalesce from neurasthenia, which literature scholar Ken K. Ito describes

as “an illness then fashionable in literary circles.”76

Endless vistas of decoration

Reporting from Yokohama, Anna H. Dwyer told readers of the Craftsman,

published in New York, that housekeeping in Japan “opens endless vistas of

decoration so dear to the feminine mind. And—blessed fact—in that delight-

ful land expense is not the one and all-important consideration.” Dwyer com-

bined “brasses, gold screens, and richly tinted hangings” in the tatami-mat

rooms. On her Indian reclining chair, she “piled brightly tinted cushions.”77

Like bungalows, reclining chairs made of tropical materials had become pop-

ular in Anglophone metropoles after first being adopted by colonists in Asia.

As the American author of The House Beautiful: Essays on Beds and Tables, Stools

and Candlesticks had earlier written of a Chinese bamboo reclining chair he

had found in the attic room of a “modern-built house”: “Who but an Oriental

could have devised such a combination of luxury as this chair?” The chair’s

Gentlemen’s Agreement, 1908: Fragments for a Pacific History 113

FIGURE 7. Nagai Kafu’s

self-portrait on a folding

fan. Nihon University

Center for Information

Networking.

REP107_04 6/26/09 3:04 PM Page 113

owner had added to the Oriental effect with a Japanese fan, a bronze sculp-

ture of a crane, and Japanese scrolls hanging from the ceiling.78

Attempt to kick Japanese parasols he had hung from the ceiling

While Kafuwas living in New York, the newspapers reported daily on a

trial for murder sparked by an actress on a swing. Harry K. Thaw was being

tried for killing architect Stanford White in a jealous rage born of White’s

earlier seduction of his wife, actress Evelyn Nesbit. Thaw had fired three

shots at close range. In January 1908, a jury acquitted him on the grounds

that he had been insane at the time. White had been famous for his many

affairs with young women. When he met her at age 16, Nesbit herself was

famous too. She was an artist’s model, and her face adorned department

store displays as well as the stained glass windows of suburban churches. The

press called her hair her “crowning glory.” White placed her in a red velvet

swing in his penthouse studio, from which he had her attempt to kick

Japanese parasols he had hung from the ceiling. He also dressed Nesbit in

kimono. Photographer Rudolf Eickemeyer shot her in a loose kimono lying

on a bear rug and titled the photo “Tired Butterfly” (fig. 8). It became his

best-known picture.79

Although American architecture and design and the popular rhetoric of simple liv-

ing were laden with images of Japan, the cultural trade across the Pacific was pro-

foundly unequal. The cultural vanguard in Japan was attempting to import a totality

of what it was to be civilized as measured by Anglo-Americans. Americans, on the

other hand, were importing—in addition to Asian labor—aesthetics, usually in the

superficial form of adornments and gewgaws. In some cases, particularly among elite

architects and their clients, the Japan aesthetic in America derived from deep admira-

tion for the materials, textures, and designs that Americans found in Japanese art,

books on Japan, and Japanese pavilions at the expositions—an aesthetic strikingly dif-

ferent from the Victorian norm. Yet equally commonly, or perhaps more so, Americans

appropriated things Japanese for an air of Oriental decadence or as part of the game of

temporarily escaping the bounds of civilization.

And urged his compatriots to cut their hair

Korean nationalist An Jung-geun pressed on from Posjet farther north

to Harbin, where he fired seven shots at close range as Prince ItoHirobumi,

the former Korean Resident General, alighted at Harbin station on Octo-

ber 26, 1909 (Itohad been made Prince in 1907 and resigned as Resident

General earlier in 1909). Three of the bullets hit the former Resident

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General in the chest and stomach. He died that day. In cross-examination,

the Japanese military police prosecutor in Liaotung asked An: did he know

that Itohimself had been antiforeign at one time, but had gone to England,

seen Western civilization and changed heart? Yes, An replied, he knew also

that Itohad gone to the United States, where he learned a great deal, and

had then come back and urged his compatriots to cut their hair. The prose-

cutor asked: did An realize that Japan could not annex Korea with the pow-

ers looking on, when that country had “a history of several hundred years of

independence?” An replied that he knew this but he knew reasons that the

powers were choosing to ignore Japan’s ambition to annex Korea and he

believed that Itowas seeking the annexation because Itowas mad.80

In the Japanese press, Itowas known as a man mad for women. A Japanese

newspaper cartoon published the following year showed the Resident Gen-

eral in a contorted position falling backward from the impact of An’s three

bullets. His shadow formed the Chinese character for “woman.”81

The laws of nature don’t allow it

While he was living in Sugamo in 1908, Kotoku Shusui began a roman-

tic relationship with his anarchist comrade Kanno Sugako. The two were

not married and Kanno had another lover who was in prison at the time.

Gentlemen’s Agreement, 1908: Fragments for a Pacific History 115

FIGURE 8. Rudolf Eickemeyer, “Tired Butterfly.” Platinum print, 1909. National

Museum of American History Photographic History Collection.

REP107_04 6/26/09 3:04 PM Page 115

The scandal of Kotoku and Kanno’s “free love” filled the gossip columns of

Tokyo newspapers.82

Then, in June 1910, Kotoku was arrested for a murder that had not

occurred. Kotoku was one of twenty-six people accused of high treason. Oishi

Seinosuke of Shinguwas another. They were accused of plotting to kill Mut-

suhito, the Meiji emperor. In late 1907, after Kotoku had left San Francisco,

some number of his Japanese anarchist compatriots in Berkeley had left a

note on the door of the Japanese consulate addressed to Mutsuhito (using his

personal name). It read, in part: “Do you know the identity of Emperor

Jinmu, who is called your ancestor? Japanese historians say that he was the

son of a god, but this is just a fiction with which to exalt you. The laws of

nature don’t allow it. Thus there is no need for us to go to the trouble of

asserting that he in fact evolved from apes just as we have and possessed no

special powers. . . . If he was not native [to Japan], he probably drifted there

from China or Malaysia. . . . You are treated as sacred and inviolable, while the

bourgeoisie [shinshibatsu; literally, the “gentlemen’s faction”] indulge them-

selves as they please and the masses fall into ever greater misery.” The note

concluded with a threat: “There is a bomb near you, set to explode. Farewell.”

Police fanned out across the Japanese archipelago to make arrests,

including in the port of Shingu. No bombs were found. No arrests could be

made in California, where the crime of lèse majesté did not exist. United

States immigration law prohibited deportation of the accused immigrants

without proof that they had been anarchists before arriving in the country.

At the red-painted house where the Japanese anarchists lived in Berkeley,

Iwasa Sakutaroand collaborator Takeuchi Tetsugorotold investigators that

they had been influenced by Jack London. Kotoku, Oishi Seinosuke and ten

others were hanged on January 24th, 1911.83 The following week, novelist

Tokutomi Roka delivered a famous speech at the First Higher School for

Boys lamenting their execution.

Where lotus-eaters might dwell

In the summer of 1907, twenty-seven days after leaving San Francisco,

the Snark made landfall at Pearl Harbor on the Island of Oahu, Territory of

Hawaii. Jack London, his wife Charmian, and the Japanese cabin boy they

called “Tochigi” (his full name was Tochigi Hidehisa) went ashore. London

and his wife were received at the Hawaiian Yacht Club. London was

renowned for his reports on the Russo-Japanese War, his popular novels, and

his essays. Among these were “The Yellow Peril” (June 1904) and “How I

Became a Socialist” (1905), in the latter of which he vowed never to “do

another day’s hard work with my body more than I absolutely have to do.” In

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an article published in the August 8, 1908, Harper’s magazine, London

described the scene at Pearl Harbor to readers as a dream. The couple was

greeted by “clean men” with tanned cheeks, whose eyes “were not dazzled

and bespectacled from gazing overmuch at glittering dollar-heaps.” They

were led to a “dream-dwelling” with “great sweeping verandas, where lotus-

eaters might dwell.” There they were served by Japanese maids in native

dress, who “drifted around and about noiselessly, like butterflies.” The walls

were hung with tapa cloths. The room held a grand piano, “that played, I

was sure, nothing more exciting than lullabies.”84

Underneath cultural experiments with exotic manners, dress, and hairstyles lay

real politics. Politics in turn were heavily filtered through racial ideology, in the minds

of Japanese and Korean people as much as in the minds of white Americans and Aus-

tralians, and for anarchists as well as for conservatives. The Japanese state and its

elites were in an unusual position because Japan was an underdeveloped imperialist,

trying to export its own population to other countries while at the same time seeking

recognition as an imperial power. One of the ways they negotiated this position was by

implicitly accepting the racist terms of the white-dominated global order and treating the

underclass at home as a race apart. Acceptance of the Gentlemen’s Agreement with the

United States, as Mitziko Sawada has pointed out, was an instance of this strategy of

domesticating international race politics in order to prevent racial perceptions from

affecting the gains the empire was seeking in Asia or the standing of Japan among the

powers.85 When Japanese radicals opposed to the imperialist state went overseas, they

bore with them the burden of being Japanese, which in California also meant “Asiatic.”

Domestically, they faced the burden of the sacred emperor in addition to capitalism.

Korean resisters bore the brunt of all of this plus the loss of their national sovereignty.

An American lake, which is the dream

In summer 1908, as Americans read of the adventures of the Snark, the

United States fleet was also westbound on a grand tour. Plans for the voyage

had been announced on March 14. On March 19, U.S. Secretary of State

Elihu Root received a letter of invitation from Japanese ambassador Takahira

Kogorosaying that the ambassador had the honor “to communicate to you

that the Imperial Government, having learned of the contemplated cruise of

the United States battleship fleet from San Francisco to the Philippine

Islands, are sincerely anxious to be afforded an opportunity to cordially wel-

come that magnificent fleet and to give an enthusiastic expression to the

sentiment of friendship and admiration invariably entertained by the people

of Japan towards the people of the United States.” Acting Secretary Bacon

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responded on behalf of the United States that it gave “this Government

peculiar pleasure to accept” the invitation.86

Writing of the significance of the fleet’s tour for Australians, journalist

A. Maurice Low observed in Forum that although the voyage had no immedi-

ate political objective, it was an “international event” that had “quickened

the imagination of the Anglo-Saxon world.” “The world,” Low wrote,

believed that the United States and Japan would eventually go to war for

dominance in the Pacific. “If the Saxon triumphs and the United States

makes the Pacific an American lake, which is the dream of more than one

American statesman, Australia has nothing to fear; but if Japan is victorious,

and the rising sun mounts even higher, Australia is at the mercy of Nippon

and a white man’s Australia is a memory only.”87 The fleet arrived in Yoko-

hama on October 18 to an enthusiastic welcome. Thousands of Japanese

schoolchildren sang American songs. According to an item published in the

Independent earlier in the year, Japanese “servants and laborers” living on the

Pacific coast of America had contributed in amounts starting from 25 cents

to a fund to pay for entertainment of the fleet in Japan.88

Gentlemen’s Agreement

The two gentlemen were fictional. The “Gentlemen’s Agreement” (as it

came to be known subsequently) was an exchange of letters and cables

between multiple representatives of two governments during 1907 and 1908.

Without a formal treaty, there were no signatories. The precise contents of

the letters were kept secret by the two governments.

Takahira-Root, or Root-Takahira

In Washington, DC, on November 30, 1908, U.S. Secretary of State

Root and Japanese ambassador Takahira signed their names to identical

notes declaring their mutual satisfaction with the “status quo” in the

“region of the Pacific Ocean.”89 The documents signed by these two men

are known in the United States as the Root-Takahira Agreement and in

Japan as the Takahira-Root Agreement. Under Prime Minister Katsura, the

Japanese government adopted the policy of “concentrating overseas migra-

tion on Korea and Manchuria.”90 Korea was annexed in 1910. Japanese

people continued to migrate in large numbers to the Pacific coast of Amer-

ica until 1924, when the United States Exclusion Act prohibited all further

migration.

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Afterword

In the fifty episodes that constitute the body of this essay, I sought

factual specificity and a minimum of interpretive intervention. At the same

time, I made no effort either to hide the exercise of arbitrary authority

underlying my selecting and juxtaposing of facts or to cover the gaps of

uncertainty between and around them.

Despite the great value of linear causal exegesis to the practice of history,

much is also sacrificed for the sake of the discipline’s accepted modes of nar-

ration and argumentation. We sacrifice, among other things, what might be

called the sense of a total milieu: the deep interconnectedness of experience

in any given moment of the past. Montage offers one way to recover this

sense. No causal relation is likely to be found—at least by conventional

notions of causality—between the popularization of a sugary snack through

a song sung at American baseball games and the provision of baseball

grounds to mollify strikers on Hawaiian sugar plantations, or between refer-

ences to a young actress’s hair in the American press and to the former

Korean Resident General’s hair in the testimony of his assassin. Yet the

rough contemporaneity of these events and words permits us to imagine

social and cultural patterns connecting them that would be occluded in a

conventionally constructed argument explaining any one of them.91

In writing this essay, I attempted a historian’s version of the literary experi-

ments of writers in the French group Oulipo, who imposed arbitrary limits on

themselves—avoiding the use of one letter of the alphabet, for example.92

Here my limits were: (1) I endeavored to use a minimum of adjectives and

adverbs, which introduce the subjective evaluation of the author, and of con-

cept nouns, which announce an abstract frame within which the events should

be read. Instead, I made liberal use of quotation, allowing both the juxtaposi-

tion of the texts and their sometimes surprising singularity to imply historical

possibilities without demanding that they serve as representative statements of

a general argument.93 (2) In lieu of discursive unity at the abstract level, I

chose to note in researching and emphasize in writing certain nouns, or sets of

related objects: gentlemen, laborers, animals; bungalows, verandahs, pianos,

chairs, swings; also colonies (but not “colonialism”), expositions, sports, food,

romance, hygiene, contagious disease, murder. I tried to suggest the constant

motion and flowing currents of these things and the people entangled with

them through use of a few active verbs related to physical movement: “travel,”

“move,” “drift,” “scatter” (each implying different degrees of volition), and to

be as precise as possible about who was where and moving in which direction

at the moment in which I described or quoted them. (3) I arranged episodes

so as to have some feature of each episode recur in the next one, in order to

encourage resonance between the narratives of disparate events and to avoid

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entropy. (4) Finally, I sought to restrict the essay as much as possible to acts

and utterances of the year 1908. I permitted myself to deviate from these rules

occasionally when it served to weave the overall fabric more tightly. With the

death of ItoHirobumi (October 1909) and the High Treason trial (1910–11)

toward the end, I introduced a glimpse of the denouement to particular

sequences of events that began to unfold during the period in which the Gen-

tlemen’s Agreement was negotiated.

In contrast to diachronic history, the synchronic approach reminds us

that the moment matters. The morning news conveys this to us in the pre-

sent with its strange juxtapositions of simultaneous events from around the

world. Each day, our minds absorb a montage of information and shape

from it a world. Yet it is too easy when writing history to forget that people

and events of any past moment also occupied one world simultaneously. In

1908, large parts of that world were already “globalizing,” as they became

bound together by railroads, steamships, telegraph lines, and newspapers.

Although it is possible to define “globalization” so as to place its onset cen-

turies or even millennia in the past, global simultaneity was unimaginable

before the late nineteenth century. Near-instantaneous communication

emerged rapidly after midcentury. The first successful trans-Atlantic cable

had just been laid when London was linked to Bombay in 1870. The United

States laid cables to Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines in 1902–3, five years

before the Gentlemen’s Agreement.

Synchronic historical montage may therefore be particularly suited to

narration of global modernity in the same way that visual and literary mon-

tage served to evoke its physical and psychological experiences so vividly in

the early aesthetic experiments of modernism. The figures whose trajecto-

ries I have interrupted momentarily as they moved around the Pacific at the

beginning of the twentieth century are not only players in a fragmentary

Pacific history of my retrospective imagining; they were at the time them-

selves aware of and influenced by the accelerating movements of information,

ideas, and other people along the same traffic routes. The deep intercon-

nectedness implied by the montage form correlates with a real interconnect-

edness that people were just beginning to experience in 1908.

Montage results in an open-ended history rather than a bounded

one. Obviously the associations within one year could spin out infinitely—

theoretically they would be infinite within a day, an hour, or a minute. Wal-

ter Benjamin’s Arcades Project offers perhaps the most famous model for a

history assembled from fragments (although I did not have Benjamin con-

sciously in mind when assembling the fragments for this essay).94 Benjamin

advocated introducing the surrealist technique of montage to history as a

means to achieve “heightened graphicness” and overcome what he termed

“vulgar historical naturalism”—by which I believe he meant the deceptive

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appearance of order and inevitable progression that linear prose narrative

creates. He wrote that through montage, he hoped to “discover in the analy-

sis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event.” In the

instance of the Arcades Project, the event was the entire nineteenth century.

Blessed with an extraordinary imagination and ensconced in the vast Biblio-

thèque Nationale, Benjamin never finished.95 My ambitions here were more

modest. I would not dare wish for the “crystal of the total event” in this histori-

ographic experiment, but I hope it may have something of the “heightened

graphicness” that Benjamin called for.

Notes

My thanks to Ellis Avery, Philip Kafalas, Christine Kim, Aviel Roshwald, Alan

Tansman, and Julia Adeney Thomas for comments on drafts of this essay.

Thanks also to Ken Ito for inspiration.

1. For a detailed account of these events, see Thomas A. Bailey, Theodore Roosevelt

and the Japanese-American Crisis (Stanford, CA, 1934). A key study of the context

of U.S.–Japan diplomacy at the time is Akira Iriye, Pacific Estrangement (Cam-

bridge, MA, 1972).

2. Mitziko Sawada, Tokyo Life, New York Dreams: Urban Japanese Visions of America,

1890–1924 (Berkeley, 1996), 53.

3. Ibid., 44, 53.

4. Uchida Seizo, Amerika-ya shohin jutaku: ‘Yofujutaku’ kaitakushi (Tokyo, 1987),

14, 22–24.

5. H. Addington Bruce, “The Romance of American Expansion, Fifth Paper:

Thomas Hart Benton and the Occupation of Oregon,” Outlook 89, no. 4 (May

23, 1908): 197.

6. Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans

(Boston, 1989), 189; Franklin Ng, ed., The Asian American Encyclopedia (New

York, 1995), 3:786; Brian Niiya, ed., Encyclopedia of Japanese American History

(New York, 2001), xvii (chart); Roger Daniels, Asian America: Chinese and

Japanese in the United States Since 1850 (Seattle, 1988), 69.

7. Alan Takeo Moriyama, Imingaisha: Japanese Emigration Companies and Hawaii,

1894–1908 (Honolulu, 1985), 97 (chart).

8. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 156.

9. Ibid., 45; Moriyama, Imingaisha, 170.

10. Uchida, Amerikaya shohin jutaku, 35.

11. On the global diffusion of bungalows, see Anthony King, The Bungalow: The Pro-

duction of a Global Culture, 2nd ed. (New York, 1995). King’s remarkable study

provided inspiration for this essay.

12. Uchida, Amerikaya shohin jutaku, 14–19, 21, 27, 30.

13. Ibid., 41.

14. Hashiguchi Nobusuke, “Churyuno yofujutaku ni yosuru kagu,” Fujin no tomo

(September 1912), quoted in Uchida, Amerikaya shohin jutaku, 51–52.

Gentlemen’s Agreement, 1908: Fragments for a Pacific History 123

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15. Advertisement reproduced in Uchida, Amerikaya shohin jutaku, 49.

16. On American living rooms and parlors, see Karen Halttunen, “From Parlor to

Living Room: Domestic Space, Interior Decoration, and the Culture of Person-

ality,” in Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America,

1880–1920, ed. Simon J. Bronner (New York, 1989), 157–89.

17. Hashiguchi Nobusuke, “Chutono yofujutaku,” Fujin no tomo (September 1911).

Quoted in Uchida, Amerikaya shohin jutaku, 55–56.

18. Quoted in Sawada, Tokyo Life, New York Dreams, 118–19.

19. “Hamilton Holt Says Japan Seeks Peace with the World,” New York Times,

December 31, 1911, 11.

20. Edward S. Bosley, Greene and Greene (London, 2000), 116; Clay Lancaster, The

American Bungalow, 1880–1930 (Mineola, NY, 1995), 122–31.

21. Anne Mallek, Gamble House curator, personal communication, June 14, 2008.

Dates for the Gamble’s Asian tour: Xing Wenjun, Social Gospel, Social Economics,

and the YMCA: Sidney D. Gamble and Princeton-in-Peking (Ph.D. diss., University of

Massachusetts, Amherst, 1992), 37.

22. Nishimura Isaku, Ware ni eki ari: Nishimura Isaku jiden (Tokyo, 1960), 180–94.

23. KatoYuri, Taishoyume no sekkeika: Nishimura Isaku to bunka gakuin (Tokyo,

1990), 24, 43, 67–72.

24. Quoted in ibid., 73.

25. Quoted in ibid., 75.

26. Nishimura Isaku, Tanoshiki juka, 3rd ed. (Tokyo, 1919), 39.

27. Nishimura Isaku, “Bangaro,” Jutaku 1, no. 4 (October, 1916): 7.

28. King, The Bungalow, 237–39.

29. C. Hartley Grattan, “The Australian Labor Movement,” The Antioch Review 4,

no. 1 (Spring 1944): 63.

30. A. Maurice Low, “Foreign Affairs,” Forum 40, no. 4 (October, 1908): 307.

31. Tanabe Junkichi, “Nishi Goshuno juka,” Kenchiku zasshi 253 (January, 1908):

23–33.

32. King, The Bungalow, 231–32.

33. Abe Isoo, “Nihonjin wa nani yue fukenzen naru goraku ni fukeru ka” [Why Do

Japanese Indulge in Unwholesome Leisure Activities?], quoted in Sawada,

Tokyo Life, New York Dreams, 99–100.

34. Edward D. Beechert, Working in Hawaii: A Labor History (Honolulu, 1985),

170.

35. Ibid., 172–74.

36. Quoted in Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 161–62.

37. Baseball Almanac, http://www.baseball-almanac.com/poetry/po_stmo.shtml.

38. Kato, Taishono yume no sekkeika, 55.

39. Joseph Cronin, The Life of Seinosuke: Dr. Oishi and the High Treason Incident

(Kyoto, 2007), 71.

40. F. G. Notehelfer, Kotoku Shusui: Portrait of a Japanese Radical (London, 1971),

106–7, 109, 116 (quotation).

41. Ibid., 121, 125 n. 4, 127 n. 4.

42. Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California

and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Berkeley, 1962), 30, 127 n. 43.

43. “The Winning War Against Tuberculosis,” Harper’s Weekly (October 10, 1908):

7; Alfred Meyer, “Is Science Conquering Tuberculosis?” Harper’s Weekly (Octo-

ber 17, 1908): 7 (quotation).

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44. Jessica Robbins, “Class Struggle in the Tubercular World: Nurses, Patients, and

Physicians, 1903–1915,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 71, no. 3 (1997):

424–25; see also Sheila M. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis

and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (New York, 1994).

45. T. Ishigami, “Tuberculo-toxoidin and Immunization Serum,” Philippine Journal

of Science (November, 1908): 379–84.

46. “The Flea, the Rat, and the Plague,” Harper’s Weekly (July 4, 1908): 27.

47. Encyclopedia of Japanese American History, xvii (chart).

48. Kiyo Sue Inui, “California’s Japanese Situation,” Annals of the American Academy

of Political and Social Science 93 (January 1921): 99.

49. This Albert Johnson has no apparent relation to Albert Johnson the San Fran-

cisco anarchist.

50. Kiyo Sue Inui, “The Gentlemen’s Agreement: How It Has Functioned,” Annals

of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 122 (November 1925): 194.

51. Azuma Eiichiro, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in

Japanese America (New York, 2005), 51–58.

52. “The Winning War Against Tuberculosis,” Harper’s Weekly (October 10, 1908): 7.

53. Uchida, Amerikaya shohin jutaku, 89–99.

54. The incident is analyzed in Karatani Kojin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature,

trans. and ed. Brett de Bary (Durham, NC, 1993), 97–103. The son’s account is

Miyauchi Kan’ya, Shichirigahama (Tokyo, 1978).

55. Kenjiro Tokutomi, Nami-ko: A Realistic Novel, trans. Sakae Shioya and E. F.

Edgett (Tokyo, 1905), back matter.

56. Quoted in Tsuchida Mitsufumi, Tokyokiroku bungaku jiten (Tokyo, 1994), 201–2.

57. Hatano Yoshiko, Kaikyoo koete: chosen to Nihon (Irubon) (Tokyo, 1996), cited at

Zudon Nihonshi mondaishu(Matsui Hideyuki, ed.), http://homepage2.nifty

.com/mazzn/533.htm.

58. Saki Ryuzo, ItoHirobumi to An Jukon (Tokyo, 1992), 21–23.

59. Tokyopakku 3, no. 21 (August, 1907).

60. Saki, ItoHirobumi to An Jukon, 20–21.

61. “Korea,” Independent 64, no. 3096 (April 2, 1908): 716. Stevens’s killers were in

fact two: San Francisco–based Korean independence activists Jang In-hwan and

Jeon Myeong-un.

62. Peter Duus, The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea,

1895–1910 (Berkeley, 1995), 304–7.

63. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 57.

64. James D. Phelan, “The Japanese Question from a California Standpoint,” Inde-

pendent 74, no. 3369 (June 26, 1913): 1439.

65. Kotoku Shusui, “Kogai seikatsu” (Keizai shinbun, November 3, 1908), reprinted

in Kotoku Shusui zenshudai 6 kan, ed. Kotoku Shusui zenshuhenshuiinkai

(Tokyo, 1968), 470–72.

66. Carol Ann Christ, “The Sole Guardians of the Art Inheritance of Asia: Japan at

the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 8, no. 3

(Winter 2000): 689–91.

67. Robert A. C. Linsley, “Why the Tokio Exposition Was Postponed,” Harper’s

Weekly (October 24, 1908): 28.

68. Kentaro Kaneko, “The Effect of American Residence on the Japanese,” Annals

of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 34, no. 2 (September, 1909):

118.

Gentlemen’s Agreement, 1908: Fragments for a Pacific History 125

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69. Herbert Spencer, “Three Letters to Kaneko Kentaro (1892),” in David Duncan,

Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer (London, 1908), quoted on Molinari Institute

http://praxeology.net/HS-LKK.htm.

70. See Jordan Sand, “Was Meiji Taste in Interiors ‘Orientalist’?” Positions: East Asia

Cultures Critique 8, no. 3 (Winter 2000): 637–73.

71. “Comment: East Is East, and West Is West,” Harper’s Weekly (September 26,

1908): 5.

72. “The Japanese in Evolution,” Outlook 88, no. 9 (February 29, 1908): 509.

73. “In the Vaudevilles,” New York Times, December 8, 1901, 14.

74. Lancaster, The American Bungalow, 93–94.

75. Nagai Kafu, American Stories, trans. Mitsuko Iriye (New York, 2000), 122.

76. Ken K. Ito, Visions of Desire: Tanizaki’s Fictional Worlds (Stanford, CA, 1991), 32,

37–38.

77. Dwyer, “Japanese Wallpapers, Cheap and Beautiful,” Craftsman 11, no. 3

(December 1906): 398.

78. Clarence Chatham Cook, The House Beautiful: Essays on Beds and Tables, Stools

and Candlesticks (New York, 1881), 154–55.

79. Michael MacDonald Mooney, Evelyn Nesbit and Stanford White: Love and Death in

the Gilded Age (New York, 1976), 30, 46, 50, 53.

80. Sixth interrogation report, November 24, 1909. In Kim Chong-Myong, Ito

Hirobumi ansatsu kiroku: sono shisoto kodo(Tokyo, 1972), 174–75.

81. Artist unknown, “Onnazuki mono no saigo,” Osaka kokkei shinbun (November

1909); reproduced in Kindai manga 4: Nichiro sensoki no manga, ed. Haga Toru

and Shimizu Isao (Tokyo, 1985), 87.

82. Notehelfer, Kotoku Shusui, 174.

83. Ibid., 152–57; Kanzaki Kiyoshi, Jitsuroku Kotoku Shusui (Tokyo, 1971), 287–91.

Notehelfer translates a portion of the letter. The excerpt here is my translation

from a transcription in Kanzaki, Jitsuroku.

84. Jack London, “Adventures in Dream Harbor,” Harper’s Weekly (August 8, 1908):

22.

85. Sawada, Tokyo Life, New York Dreams, 41–56.

86. “The Fleet Will Visit Japan,” Independent 64, no. 3095 (March 26, 1908): 659.

87. Low, “Foreign Affairs,” Forum 40, no. 4 (October, 1908): 307.

88. “The Fleet Will Visit Japan,” 659.

89. See Thomas A. Bailey, “The Root-Takahira Agreement of 1908,” Pacific Histori-

cal Review 9, no. 1 (March 1930): 19–35; Raymond A. Esthus, Theodore Roosevelt

and Japan (Seattle, 1966), chap. 16.

90. Duus, The Abacus and the Sword, 303.

91. The exploration in this essay of isolated, seemingly idiosyncratic episodes and

their possible relation to one another may call to mind literary theorist Joel

Fineman’s observations on anecdote. Fineman argued that the unique contin-

gency evident in the historical anecdote opens a hole in the seeming continuity

of history. Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt observe this use of

anecdote in the works of both E. P. Thompson and Michel Foucault. Ulti-

mately, however, historiographic value must be sought in the work of develop-

ing new ways to fill the holes we open rather than in the holes themselves.

Hence my interest in the possibility of a total milieu limned by the gestalt of

these juxtaposed episodes. See Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt,

Practicing New Historicism (Chicago, 2000), 49–74.

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92. On Oulipo and the use of artificial constraints in fiction writing, see Marcel

Bénabou, “Rule and Constraint,” in Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, trans.

and ed. Warren F. Motte Jr. (Lincoln, NE, 1986), 40–50.

93. As Roger Chartier observed of the trend in cultural history to seek unique

voices in the archive: “No longer the illustration of a regularity established by

series and measure, henceforth the quotation indicates the irruption of a dif-

ference and a gap.” Roger Chartier, On the Edge: History, Language, and Practices,

trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore, MD, 1997), 4.

94. Other scholars and writers have experimented with montage as a method of

historical representation. One remarkable example is Michael Lesy, Wisconsin

Death Trip (New York, 1973), which relies almost entirely on a collection of pho-

tographs by a single photographer juxtaposed with quotations from local news-

papers. Novelist Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II,

the End of Civilization (New York, 2008), which combines episodes and quota-

tions from news accounts and memoirs in a manner similar to mine but with

polemical intent was published by coincidence while this essay was under

review. The structure and theme of Baker’s work, in turn, recall Sven

Lindqvist’s A History of Bombing (New York, 2001).

95. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaugh-

lin (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 461. See also Vanessa R. Schwartz, “Benjamin for

Historians,” American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (December, 2001): 1721–43.

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