Opposition to California's Alien Land Law, Printed in San Francisco

[Summary of the Japanese Exclusion Question: Passage of the California Alien Land Ownership Prohibition Act and Subsequent Measures] Hainichi mondai kogai: Kashu gaikokujin tochi shoyuken kinshho seiritsu to sono zengosaku

Chiba, Toyoharu (also Toyoji)

Notes: "A book designed to explain the 1913 California Alien Land Law and its background. Contains a short history of the exclusion movement, a summary of previously unsuccessful land law bills and the 1913 law itself, and a discussion of legal and other measures which the Japanese might take."—A Buried Past, 199.

"The general manager of the Japanese Agricultural Association of California in San Francisco... and educated at Waseda University, [Chiba] was a typical immigrant expansionist who viewed his own community in California as an integral part of the borderless settler colonialism and global Japanese development. Faced with California's Alien Land Laws, which denied Asian immigrants land ownership and tenancy, Chiba became increasingly pessimistic about the future of Japanese ethnic agriculture in California." In later decades, Chiba suggested that Japanese immigrants in California would make excellent colonists in Manchuria. See Azuma, In Search of Our Frontier, pp. 156–61.

This book was printed on the presses of the Nichi Bei Shimbun newspaper in San Francisco. Relatively few Japanese language books were actually printed in the US at this time—most were printed in Japan and exported to the US. It is one of the first books to address the Alien Land Laws in California, and it documents resistance to the anti-Japanese sentiment in the US.

146, 32 pages.

OCLC: 835809516, 673431886, 672876729, 1229112511 (US: only Hoover Institution)

Edition + Condition: First edition. Minor chipping to the wrappers, particularly at the spine ends, else a near fine copy of a scarce and significant book.

Publication: San Francisco: Chiba Toyoharu, 1913 (Taisho 2).

Item No: #360977

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