The first Japanese women to immigrate to the United States in the late nineteenth century called themselves Issei, the "first generation," for they envisioned themselves as the first generation of many Japanese Americans in the United States. They called their U.S.-born citizen children Nisei, the second generation. Subsequent generations are called Sansei, Yonsei, and Gosei, respectively.
The immigration of Japanese women to Hawaii and the mainland United States started in 1885 with the beginning of government contract labor importation from Japan to the kingdom of Hawaii, later annexed by the United States in 1898. These women were married and accompanied or joined their husbands who worked on the Hawaiian sugar plantations. Within five years of their arrival, Issei women comprised the majority of wage-earning women in Hawaii, where most worked as field hands in the sugar industry. Although the sugar industry remained the most important employer for Japanese women until 1920, Issei women gradually moved into other occupations. They played a major role in such fields as domestic and personal service, clothing trades, and the new pineapple industry. Many developed income-producing jobs in their homes, using their skills of cooking, washing, and sewing.
Issei women who first labored in Hawaii often lived in rural, isolated areas with few Japanese, helping their husbands till the soil. In urban areas, they worked in small businesses operated by their husbands, such as boardinghouses, stores, restaurants, and laundries, or became domestic servants, seamstresses, or cannery workers. Many of the women cooked for the workers employed by their labor contractor husbands, who worked for railroads, lumber mills and camps, and in agriculture.
The entry of Issei women into Japanese immigrant society was an integral part of the process by which Japanese immigrant society sank its roots into U.S. soil. The arrival of women guaranteed that community and family life could be established. With the birth of the second generation, Issei began to identify their children's future in the United States. The Japanese American community developed a family orientation focused on schools, churches, clubs, and associations. But with the start of families, child care was also a critical issue for Issei working mothers, whose labor was vital to supplement their husbands' incomes.
Exclusion was a central force in the early history of Japanese American women. In 1907-08, under pressure by the United States and hoping to halt anti-Japanese agitation in the United States, the Japanese government agreed to prohibit the immigration of Japanese laborers to the United States. This was called the Gentlemen's Agreement. However, the Japanese government continued to allow wives, children, and parents of Japanese settled in the United States to emigrate. After 1908, many were "picture brides," whose marriages had been arranged by their families through the exchange of pictures with Japanese male immigrants, and married through proxy. After 1921, most grooms returned to Japan to marry and brought their wives back with them.
Between 1924 and the post—World War II period, restrictive legislation precluded further Japanese immigration. Following the war, however, women married to U.S. servicemen, known as "war brides" or shin Issei (new Issei), began to arrive. Still, because the Japanese males had been able to send for wives from 1908 to 1924, the Japanese community continued to grow as a generation of Japanese American citizens, Nisei, were born in this country. Clearly defined generation and gender cohorts developed as a result of discriminatory U.S. immigration laws that halted new Japanese immigration early in the century.
The denial of naturalization rights led to the political weakness of the Japanese immigrant community during the first half of this century. Japanese immigrants were permanently disenfranchised in the United States by their status as "aliens ineligible to citizenship." This also served as the basis for further discriminatory laws, such as the anti-alien land laws passed in various West Coast states, which prohibited ownership, leasing, renting, or sharecropping of land. Furthermore, discriminatory legislation and social practices limited job opportunities for Nisei women before World War II.
The culmination of a century of racist discriminatory public policy came on December 7, 1941. Japanese immigrants, who had been denied the right of naturalization, suddenly were enemy aliens. They and their citizen children were subject to a myriad of restrictions, following Executive Order 9066, issued February 19, 1942, by President Roosevelt. More than 110,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes on the West Coast and interned in inland concentration camps. Two-thirds of them were U.S.-born.
After the war, there had been a dispersal of Japanese Americans on the mainland and many moved to more urban jobs and residences. Issei women, now nearing retirement age, with all their prewar assets and capital taken from them by internment, had to begin their lives over again as seamstresses in garment factories or as domestic servants. But their Nisei daughters were able to get higher education and better jobs in the postwar years.
There were many postwar reforms of discriminatory immigration and naturalization legislation. "War brides" marked the first significant number of Japanese women immigrating to the United States since 1924, a fact made possible by their marriages to U.S. servicemen. In 1952, Congress passed the McCarran-Walter Act, which ended the total exclusion of Asian immigration to the United States by giving every country a quota and made all races eligible for naturalization. However, this act still perpetuated a discriminatory barrier to Asian immigration by giving only a token quota to Asian countries (for example, Japan had an annual quota of 185). It was only after the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act that Asian countries were given quotas equal to those of other nations. Partly as a result of the strength of the Japanese economy since 1965, few Japanese immigrants, shin Issei, have come to the United States. With little new immigration, low birthrate, and increasing outmarriage, some observers question the viability of the Japanese American ethnic group. But Japanese American ethnic and community identity persists, despite predictions of its demise that date back to the 1920s. In the postwar years, Japanese American women have succeeded in an array of fields, including Sansei Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first woman of color in Congress, and Yonsei Kristi Yamaguchi, the 1992 Olympic gold medalist in ice skating.
Gail M. Nomura
See also
Asian Pacific Women;
Japanese American Citizens League;
Japanese American Internment.
