Japanese Americans

JAPANESE AMERICANS. Within the pre–World War II Japanese immigrant communities, the Japanese American Left consisted of a small but vocal minority whose birth and fortunes reflected developments in both the labor and radical movements in Japan as well as the United States. In stark contrast to the European immigrant Left, however, Japanese American immigrant leftists were at a special disadvantage because they stood outside the American body politic. As aliens ineligible for citizenship, they could not enter the political arena to participate in the American political process. Furthermore, Japanese American Leftists, unlike their European counterparts, also stood outside the structure of organized American labor because Asians were excluded by organized labor on racial grounds until the advent of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s.

Japanese American socialist study groups first appeared in San Francisco, Oakland, and other cities shortly after the turn of the century under the influence of the early socialist and labor movements in Japan. In 1906 a handful of Japanese immigrants formed the Social Revolutionary Party in Berkeley. An anarchist organization, it was launched at the behest of Kōtoku Shūsui, the noted Japanese anarchist. In 1908 remnants of the Social Revolutionary Party organized the Fresno Labor League, an incipient agricultural labor union of migratory Japanese laborers, under the partial influence of the Industrial Workers of the World. In 1910 Kōtoku and his alleged coconspirators were arrested on trumped-up charges of plotting to assassinate the Japanese emperor, and in the following year he, along with others, was executed in what came to be known as the High Treason Affair. This marked the temporary demise of the Japanese socialist and labor movements both in Japan and the United States.

The Japanese American Left resurfaced after World War I under the influence of Sen Katayama, who was one of the founders of the socialist and labor movements in Japan. In 1914 he came to the United States because his life as a socialist in Japan had become intolerable. While residing on the East Coast, he came under the influence of Russian revolutionaries living in exile and became one of the founding members of the American Communist Party in 1919. In New York City, Katayama published a monthly called the Heimin [The Commoner] between 1916 and 1919. Under his influence, Japanese immigrant communists, including Okinawans and women, appeared in the 1920s, and by the middle of the decade they organized Japanese Workers Association branches in New York City, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

During the course of the 1930s, Japanese immigrant communists were active in the American labor movement and the international struggle against fascism. Some were active in CIO organizing drives, especially among Alaskan cannery workers. Japanese immigrant Leftists were also immersed in labor organizing on the waterfront and organized across divisions of race, ethnicity, and nation. They faced severe repression from the police, including the constant threats of raids, arrests, and deportation. In one twelve-month period from 1931 to 1932, fifteen Issei communists on the West Coast were deported, while Nisei (second-generation) Communists like Karl Yoneda faced beatings and arrests. To address these problems, they helped to form the Oriental Branch of the International Labor Defense and worked within the Committee for the Protection of Foreign Born. In San Francisco, they published a monthly called the Kaikyūsen (Class Struggle) from 1926, renamed the Zaibei Rōdō Shimbun (Labor News) in 1928. From 1930, this publication was issued as a semimonthly under the title Rōdō Shimbun (The Japanese Worker) as the official organ of the Japanese section of the American Communist Party. In 1937, the Rōdō Shimbun was redesignated Dōhō, meaning “Brotherhood,” in line with the Popular Front policy of the Comintern, and published continuously out of Los Angeles until April 1942.

Almost immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the American Communist Party suspended all Japanese American Party members and their spouses and supported the mass internment of all Japanese Americans. This racist policy (later acknowledged as an error by the Party), along with the actual mass internment of Japanese Americans during World War II all but spelled the demise of the Japanese American Left in the continental United States. Nonetheless, Japanese American Leftists organized in the postwar period, notably in the Communist Party and labor movement in Hawaiʻi and in the Nisei Progressives in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago.

By the late 1960s, the next generation of Japanese Americans (Sansei) were instrumental in revitalizing Japanese American radicalism in Japanese American Left organizations such as East Wind in Los Angeles. They worked primarily through the Asian American Movement (AAM) and in US Third World formations, but in the overall US Left as well. Through the struggle, the Sansei activists learned about their community’s radical past and worked with older Japanese American activists. The legacy of the Japanese American Left and Asian American Movement continued in the redress and reparation movement and through multifaceted organizing to the present.

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Sen Katayama Archive, 1859-1933. Marxist International https://www.marxists.org/archive/katayama/index.htm.