Agriculture and American Orientalism in the Anti-Japanese Movement

From the time of Thomas Jefferson’s celebration of independent yeoman farmers in the new republic, agriculture has figured centrally in the American cultural imagination. The image of pioneering white, Euro-American male-headed families moving westward across the continent to establish farm households resonated in the early twentieth century as the popular perception of the typical American agricultural experience. By the 1910s, as immigrants from rural Japan settled along the Pacific coast and made their livelihoods as intensive farmers, however, many white Americans felt that the intrinsic “American-ness” of agriculture was being increasingly undermined by “Oriental” farmers and farming practices. This paper explores the ways in which American Orientalist discourse permeated discussions of Japanese in California agriculture in the first decades of the twentieth century, as well as how a select group of Japanese immigrant leaders and writers sought to invert those views. White alarmists pointed to Japanese agricultural methods, patterns of crop specialization, labor practices, and attempts to acquire farmland as proof of the deviance of Japanese farmers and their designs to “invade” American agriculture. Meanwhile, educated commentators within the Japanese community countered vociferous calls for alien land laws and immigration exclusion with a decidedly (and deliberately) anti-Orientalist perspective that emphasized the universality of class concerns over ethnic and racial differences. Racialized and Orientalized perceptions of farming became foundational to the ideology of the escalating anti-Japanese movement in California and other western states, revealing the continuing significance of agriculture as a contested site for the construction of American identity.