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SF: Were there other ethnic groups at that time who were as well organized? How did the Japanese...?

FM: That, that I think is the thing that is to me impressive. The only other ethnic group I can think of who were comparably organized were the Jewish people. But the Chinese, for example, although organized into their mutual benefit associations and also into tongs and so on, were not however very well organized as a community, especially in representing them to the larger society. I've always had a problem with judging what the situation of the Chinese community was. After all, the anti-Chinese sentiment in a sense was much more damaging to the Chinese immigrants than the anti-Japanese sentiment ever was to the Japanese. And it, I think it was partly historical, but this was so. The Chinese Exclusion Law came very early as you know, 1882 was it? And so the Chinese are unable to develop the kind of community structure that the Japanese were fairly freely allowed to develop right up until 1924. And therefore Chinatown -- Chinatown is an isolated community of single, bachelor Chinese to a large extent simply because the Exclusion Law restricted the possibility of the Chinese developing into something larger. The other side of the picture, however, is that the Chinese I think have always been less disposed to adjust to the larger community than have the Japanese. I've always had the feeling that the capacity of the Japanese society to have made headway in the industrial world for example, as compared to the Chinese inability to do this kind of thing relatively speaking, reflects two different kinds of orientation of the societies. And this is true also of India. You know, India has not developed as an economic or industrial power in spite of the fact that they got a start much earlier than did Japan. And my feeling is that there is something fundamental in Indian society and likewise in Chinese society which (they) lack. Fortunately for the Japanese, they did not have that (which) restrained their capacity for developing. Well, then you apply (these) kind of (observations) to the (Chinese), the Japanese, and (other) immigrants, and (you ask why), the Japanese immigrants were able to expand outward in a way that the Chinese were not able to do. Well one reason as I say, was the discriminatory, the power of the discrimination against the Chinese. But the Chinese also had, I think, a background that restrained them from getting outwards as much as the Japanese did. Well that's a separate problem in itself.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.