Book Notes -10 - Summary A Different Mirror: a History of Multicultural America PDF

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Notes /questions/answers of important events and people and critical thinking for that specific chapter. ...

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Book Notes Chapter 10 1. Who are the main characters and why are they significant?  Franklin D Roosevelt was the acting president in 1941 which was his 2nd term. He led the United States from isolationism to victory over Nazi Germany and its allies in World War II.  John McCloy and assistant Secretary of War. He recommended removing everyone suspicious and establishing restricted areas for Japanese-Americans. He suggested returning those who did not seem dangerous, back to their homes.  Henry Stimson was in the Secretary of War. He had been wavering in his decision about relocating the Japanese, but decided in favor of evacuating the Japanese to internment camps  The Japanese Americans were people who migrated to the Americas and it started with immigration to Hawaii in the first year of the Meiji period in 1868.  Commodore Matthew Perry of the United States Navy, commanding a squadron of two steamers and two sailing vessels, sailed into Tôkyô harbor aboard the frigate Susquehanna. 2. What are the significant events (cite dates, periods, locations)?  In 1920, women represented 46 percent of the Japanese in Hawaii and 35 percent in the Golden State, compared with only 5 percent for the Chinese.  The Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 was an informal agreement between the United States and Japan whereby the United States of America would not impose restrictions on Japanese immigration, and Japan would not allow further emigration to the U.S.  The attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise military strike by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service against the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii Territory, on the morning of December 7, 1941. 

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In 1920, the Oahu sugar strike multiracial strike in Hawaii of two unions, the Filipino American Filipino Labor Union and the Japanese American Federation of Japanese Labor. The labor action involved 8,300 sugar plantation field workers out on strike. The unions' demands for a pay increase were met by the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association. Some 150 evicted workers and their family members died of the epidemic Spanish Flu during the strike, with their poor living conditions presumably contributing to their deaths. Compared with their counterparts in Hawaii, where the Japanese represented 40 percent of the population in 192, the Japanese on the mainland were a tiny racial minority, totaling only 2 percent of California population. In 1900, California’s Japanese farmers owned or leased 29 farms totaling 4,698 acres. Within five years the acreage had jumped to 61,858 and increased again to 194,742 by 1910 and to 458,056 acres ten years later.

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In 1907, the federal government pressured Japan to prohibit the emigration of laborers to the United States. Six years later, California enacted the Alien Land Law, which prohibited landownership to “alien’s ineligible to naturalized citizenship”. Aimed at the Japanese immigrants, this restriction was based on the 1790 federal law providing that only “white persons could become citizens”.

 3. What important themes does Takaki focus on in this chapter?  A theme that Takaki focuses on in chapter 10 is he describes that the Japanese and other Asian cultures migrated first to Hawaii and then eventually other parts of the United States. Takaki mentions the reasons in why they came to United States. He says that their frustration with the taxes in Japan and economic hardship for farmers is what made them pursue to the “new world”, which is one of the main reasons. Initially the immigrants from Japan were all men, but the Japanese also had a good number of women crossing the seas. The women immigrants from Japan were allowed entry because they were considered “family members” according to Takaki on page 248. This is where Takaki starts to describe the term “picture bride”. The women coming to America were given this term if they were leaving Japan to be married. This was a form of arranged marriages and the ones engaged were only allowed pictures of each other until the day they would meet. Whether the Japanese woman were to go to America it would depend on which son she married within the Japanese family. If she were to marry the first son, she would stay in Japan where he would tend to his parents and take over the inheritance. If she were to marry the second son, this is where she would move to America because he would be the one to leave the family and find employment. The Japanese then settled within the sugarcane business and farming. The management control decided to “Keep a variety of laborers, that is different nationalities, and thus prevent any concerted action in case of strikes, for there are few, if any cases of Japs, Chinese, and Portuguese entering strike as a unit.” (Takaki, 252).

4. Identify the power takers in this chapter. By what means did these individuals or groups gain power?  The power takers in this chapter is the American Government. They took away the rights of the Japanese and of course they were discriminated and were forced to work in unstable work conditions. This groups once again gained control of another race, brutally beat them to and were having racial issues with the white Americans. They gained control and power, and some gained money to get economically stable from these Japanese workers. 5. Identify the characters whose power was appropriated. What were the circumstances that lead to their oppression? How did these characters demonstrate resistance to their oppression?  The characters that had their powers appropriated were the Japanese. Takaki describes the awful work conditions and how the workers were living in

dormitories and worked from dusk till dawn. The field work was punishing and brutal. The workers were never even called by their name, they were given numbers. The Japanese then began to protest. They organized themselves into “blood unions”. The Japanese and the Filipinos had come together and Takaki describes it as the “Hawaiian version of the “giddy multitude”. The Japanese thought if you were Japanese and you had a great education the Americans would accept you. Takaki concluded with the racial segregation of Asians, specifically Japanese descent and how they were never accepted. People in America thought that racism was only between the African Americans, but it was with the Japanese as well. Takaki ended with the sentence “but their hope to be both Japanese and American would be violently shattered on a December morning in 1941.” As we learned in school the morning of 1941 was when the Japanese army attacked Pearl Harbor killing thousands of American soldiers, which was the main reason why the united states entered World War 2. During this time the Japanese were sent to internment camps, but they remained strong and united, but did not really do anything to fight back against the American oppression during the time....