A Scene of Japanese Immigration to the US

Vaccinating Japanese emigrants aboard a Pacific Steamship en route to Hawaii

Notes: A stereoview (stereograph) photograph of a line of Japanese women awaiting an immunization shot administered by a tall man in a white suit.

As a single moment in the journey from Japan to the United States, this photograph tells a considerable story. It dates from the seven-year period (1901–1907) when the US had throttled immigration from China while placing no restrictions on Japan, leading to more than 120,000 Japanese immigrants coming to American shores. The fifteen people crowded into the small frame of the stereoview format suggests the surge in immigration.

The central figure of this image is a Japanese woman who stands in profile to the camera. The American official, dressed in white, grips her outstretched arm in one hand while his other hand is posed to administer the shot. He has turned away from her, to talk to a Japanese man.

The woman has pulled her arm out of her kimono sleeve, revealing her left breast. The photographer chose this instant to take a photograph and the publisher chose this image to represent Japanese immigration to the US. In 1904, when this image was taken, the United States still operated under Victorian moral codes and such an image of a white woman would not have been published by a mainstream photography company. Whatever the woman's thoughts about nudity—and they were likely much more open than her white American counterparts—the photographer took advantage of American racial prejudices to exploit a loophole in its sexual conservatism, a loophole many photographers used to photograph topless women from Africa, the Pacific Islands, Native American tribes, and Asia.

Fittingly, the woman behind the woman getting the shot looks at the camera out of the corner of her eye with a frown on her face.

Edition + Condition: A curved-back stereoview on a gray mount. In the Art Nouveau (Platino) Stereograph series. A fine example, with two Japanese chops on the back (verso).

Publication: Philadelphia: C. H. [Carlton Harlow] Graves and Universal Photo Art Co., 1904.

Item No: #307315

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