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FM: Perhaps I should tell you a little bit about the set-up of the canning industry at that time. As I have pointed out elsewhere, we have to think of the canning industry as something that was very new in Alaska. Alaska, as you may know, was acquired by the United States in 1867 which, curiously, is the same year that the Tokugawa feudalism ended in Japan and Meiji Reformation, Restoration came in that same, 1868, perhaps, came virtually at the same time. So... and then Meiji, when I think of the name Meiji emperor, I recall that my own birth, date of birth was July 29, 1912, which is exactly the same date that Meiji emperor died and Taisho came into his regime. So, you see, when you say the Meiji regime, I feel I have a direct connection with the beginnings of not only the Meiji Restoration, but of the beginnings of Alaska. In short, this is not a very long period when you, when the canning industry was being established in Alaska, when you look at it in this fashion. The canning industry was organized by large, ultimately, by large food packing companies like Libby and A&P, the Atlantic and Pacific Company and others of this kind, and they organized it by allotting contracts to other companies such as the Nakat Packing Company here in the Seattle area, organized by Scandinavian families. And then these companies in turn under the necessity of finding relatively cheap labor, would contract with Chinese contractors or with Japanese contractors, whoever could supply labor at a relatively cheap cost. Laborers... in this kind of industry where, that is seasonal, such as the fruit orchards and the salmon industry, laborer is very, labor contractors are important because they are not a population that is going to be readily accessible on short notice except through this kind of contracting system. And that's why the contractors, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, were of some importance.

The Chinese came in first and dominated the Alaska canning labor market for possibly ten, twenty years, but gradually, gradually were displaced by -- or fairly rapidly, were displaced by the Japanese contractors and this leads me to raise the question, why was it that the Chinese contractors were not able to succeed over the period of... a longer period when they had ample sources of labor available to them? In fact, there is the interesting question; why was it that the Native Americans, who were available in Alaska, were not used more extensively by these large packing companies as laborers in the canneries? And this is a very important and interesting issue sociologically because what you realize and what you find out if you analyze this sociologically is that there are certain kinds of organizational experiences which some people have and others do not, which enable people to become part of an industrial system such as the canning system. Native Americans -- it may surprise you to know -- cannot organize very effectively across tribes. Tribal units want to have exclusive control over their tribal group and whatever they organize and they have difficulty maintaining peaceful or harmonious or cooperative relations across tribes in the organizational situations of this kind. And curiously, similarly, the Chinese do not have a good capacity for organizing across, between kinship groups. Within kinship groups organization is very effective, bur across kinship groups or across large impersonal populations, their organizational capacity is relatively limited, a very interesting point about the Chinese. And this is a problem, as it turns out, in China as well as in the canning industry. If you have that situation, then it is very difficult to draw an impersonal body of laborers into any industry and this is the difficulty which the Chinese experienced.

Now the Japanese, for reasons of history, going back to the village life that characterized Japan in their rice farming economy, built up an exceptional, unusual capacity for cooperative relations among people who were not directly related to each other, and as a result of this background, the Japanese immigrants coming in from Hiroshima, or Fukuoka, or Tokushima or wherever they may, might come from, could easily get together and organize, as they did, in the communities on the Pacific Coast to which they immigrated. You will find, therefore, that Japanese communities of the Pacific Coast region were heavily organized in the degree that you would not find virtually in any other immigrant population, except the Jewish people. The Jews, curiously, have the same kind of capacity for organization that the Japanese have, community organization, and if we had the time I could go into a sociological analysis of why this is so. But in any event, this... then there is the additional question: why was it then, that ultimately the Japanese contractors were displaced by Filipinos, Filipino work organizations? And I'm gonna have to take that up later, but it's the same kind of an issue that is involved here, the system of relationship is the factor that determines -- the background experiences with systems and relationships, is the factor that determines who prevails and who does not.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.