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HY: About in the... just the turn of the century, 1900, it was before blatant discrimination had reared its ugly head in California and in Oregon and Washington. So around 1900, 1903, it was, there weren't a lot of people, white people saying, well, "Keep out you Japs," and things like this. So thousands of Issei did come here, and they got jobs because they were the jobs that a lot of people didn't want to do, very backbreaking jobs like gutting salmon for the canneries and clearing out stumps from the logged over forestry land and building railroads because these were hard jobs, you're out in all kinds of weather. So that was okay; so thousands came. But then from that, then the nativists, interesting. Let me backtrack a little. All of the people who were agitating against these Chinese, the Oriental hordes and the Japanese, were not native-born Americans. For example, one of the most vicious, well, I shouldn't say vicious. One of the most vociferous was a man named Dennis Carney. He was an Irishman. He was an immigrant from Ireland, and he was one of the most rabid anti-Japanese men. He was the one that originated the saying, "The Chinese Must Go." The other one who organized the Anti-Asian Exclusion League was a guy named [inaudible] who was a Norwegian immigrant, and the organization, the... well, I forgot what I was going to say. But anyway, the CIO, no, not CIO, but the other... help me. The organization, the big labor organization.

MR: Oh, AFL?

HY: Yeah, AFL, Samuel Gompers. I think he was Jewish. And these are the guys that were picking on the Japanese and the Chinese. Now maybe it was to defend their own positions, because they obviously were minorities, you know. Anyway, from around 1903, then the drumbeats of hatred started up, particularly from California, so it spilled over into Oregon. So in Oregon, they did have small chapters of the Anti-Asian Exclusion League and the anti-Oriental leagues and so on, but still it wasn't real huge. So in 1903, it was, still a lot of laborers were coming in, let me refer specifically to Hood River which I know because that's where I'm from. Many, many Issei laborers, they were young bachelor men, they went to Hood River, and the main purpose of going to Hood River was, one, was to clear out the logged over stump land because at that time Hood River was becoming known for its orchards, so they hired all these laborers. And because of that, they, at one time they said that there were about 600 Japanese laborers there. And at that time because there were so many of them, the Niguma family started a Japanese store in Hood River around 1903, 1905. The Niguma family still lives there. A representative of the Niguma family still lives there. 1908, my father went to Hood River and decided to move and stay there, so they bought a farm, not a farm, bought a store in Hood River too, and that's how the Yasui family got implanted in the Hood River Valley where we've been ever since, at least part of my family. So the years from 1910 'til the war, 1941, there is a pretty stable population of Japanese in Hood River Valley roughly around 500, 490 people actually. And over the years, they prospered, and they were able to build up the farms, and they all got married, and they raised their families. So by the time the war broke out, they had overcome the disabilities and the disadvantages of the Depression of 1929, and they were, like everybody else, beginning to do pretty well. Things were looking up. Then boom comes Pearl Harbor and that immediately reversed the action of the progress of the Japanese people in the valley. To this day, in my opinion, there's still fallout on that. There's still ill feelings that, I don't think the rift had been totally healed in Hood River yet. In fact, I'm convinced it's not. But anyway, that's, in brief, what it was like for me in Hood River.

MR: Can you explain the Gentlemen's Agreement? I really never understood that.

HY: Yeah. Well, the Gentlemen's Agreement was actually drafted in 1907, and the President, the United States President was Theodore Roosevelt, and his Secretary of State was Elihu Root. And the purpose of the Gentlemen's Agreement was because he agitated, I remember, you remember I told you about Samuel Gompers and Dennis Carney and [inaudible], and they were all raising this ruckus. This is beginning from 1903 about, "Hey, the Japs are coming over. They're going to take over our valleys and our golden hills and all that sort of stuff, so we got to keep them out." So in order to mitigate the rabid sentiments, particularly from the native Californians, Roosevelt directed Root to negotiate with the California legislators. So Root goes to talk to the governor and the state legislators. He says, "You guys simmer down in California. Now, we'll do something about them, but let us handle this because this is a national problem, not a state problem." So the Secretary of State, Root, hammered out an agreement with the Japanese government to the effect that from 1908, now this was drafted in 1907. But from 1908, January, the Japanese government would no longer issue passports for common laborers to come to the United States. So that meant that those laborers that were already there could stay there, and they can send for their wives and family, if they had any. But the Japanese government would no longer issue railroad passports or sugarcane workers in Hawaii and so on from that point on. Teachers, traders, students, wives, children, family could come, and that was the essence of the Gentlemen Agreement. In turn, the Japanese government says, well, they would not only restrict the number of common laborers to the United States, but the federal government, they asked something from the federal government. They wanted the federal government to assure Japan that their people, their immigrants in the United States would be treated more fairly and be treated more equitably, and that was the essence of the Gentlemen's, that was promulgated in the '07 and well, initiated in 1908.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.