Yellow Peril Quotes
The two were cousins. Wilhelm was a very dominant personality and his cousin quite weak. This quotation shows the tyrannical view of the German Kaiser. The letters were secret but after the execution of the Czar, the Russians released the letters to show the dominant and warlike history of Germany under the Kaiser who was furious that the Russians had made such personal and secret letters public. Russia was involved with the Russo-Japanese war. Both the Russian and German aristocracies had designs on dominating Asia for the memories of the Asian invasions of Europe were still alive.
1st Viscount Shibusawa. Not only was there gross discrimination—mostly in the Western States—against the Japanese, but they were subjected to physical harassment and violence.
This is a very important historical quotation. When the anti-Asian racists first organized into a League, their racism was offensive to most national politicians and Eastern business and political leaders. However, this changed quite rapidly. It illustrates the constant vigilance that has to be maintained to condemn racism whenever it erupts last that was anathema becomes fashionable. The extremes become the norm. These minutes were taken when the League was still operating under the name of the “Japanese and Korean Exclusion League”.
This quotation shows that the racism and master race of Nazi Germany was a norm in Germany well before Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. It was an endemic part of the culture. This makes the German post WWII reforms all the more remarkable as the vast majority of an entire nation had to radically change its world and personal views and perceptions.
While the Western nations were doubtless guilty of blatant racism and anti-Asian discrimination, the Japanese protest was tainted with a substantial degree of hypocrisy. At the Versailles Peace Treaty negotiations the Japanese argued strenuously for equal treatment of Japanese by the West but did not favor extension of the equality principle to Koreans, Chinese, Thais, Chomoros, and other Asian peoples. Japan itself, led by its Emperor, considered other Asian people racially and culturally inferior. Thus they were the inherent leaders of Asia and all Asian people.
The reason this historical quote is so important is not only that it provides more evidence of the anti-Asian racism that existed in America in the 1920s, but it also shows that The American Legion was one of the leaders in fomenting race hatred of Asians. The anti-Asian racism was much worse on the West Coast than on the East Coast where there was a thriving Chinese Community in New York City that was relatively un-harassed.
This was an effort to keep Asian immigrants—who were ineligible for citizenship under the racist Federal laws though the 1930s from competing with American farmers. Many of the Western states also had laws or Constitutions prohibiting Asians to not only own land but also forbidding them from even having long tern leases on land. The Japanese in California were so successful that in the 1920s that state passed a version of Asian land ownership prohibition. The Supreme Court at the time actually ruled that this kind of discrimination was legal. A French alien could own land but not a Japanese. The loophole however was that many Japanese short term tenant farmers who had saved enough money to buy land, had children who were born in the United State and hence where citizens. The land was purchased by the citizen children. California however went so far as to make it illegal for a Japanese person to be a guardian of his minor children if the children were born in the United States, but that law was struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
