In California West Meets East

[The New Japan of North America] Hokubei no shinnihon (also romanized Hokubei no shin Nihon)

Abe, Isoo

Notes: "A general treatment of the Japanese in America by a Waseda University professor and a Christian socialist. He views the exclusion movement as rooted in racial prejudice, looks for more emigration from Japan, and anticipates that the Pacific Coast will become the meeting ground for the East and West. The statistical data on Japanese agriculture and businesses are derived from the Nichibei Nenkan (Japanese American Yearbook), no. 1, 1905."—A Buried Past, 263.

Abe attended Hartford Theological Seminary, in Connecticut, and he understood Americans, but he did not spend time in the West before he returned to Japan.

In the spring of 1905, he took the opportunity of the Waseda University baseball team's exhibition tour to return to the US. They toured the Pacific Coast, from Los Angeles to Seattle. Based on his observations and experiences, Abe wrote this philosophical and political overview of the growing Japanese society in California. He predicted that as many as 6 million Japanese could find new homes in the US (p. 119). He devotes one chapter to women immigrants, and seems to have absorbed some of the ideas about independent women from the nascent Japanese feminist movement. He asks, "Why is it that our educated and refined women cannot go abroad for legitimate business?... I of course hope that the girls who come to the US will find a suitable spouse and marry, but I will not force them to do so" (Chapter 5; translation by your cataloguer).

Abe, who did much to promote baseball in Japan, does not spend much time on the sport in this book, He instead weighs the advantages and disadvantages encountered by Japanese immigrants in the US and comes down firmly on the side of East meeting West in California.

For more on Abe, see chapter 3 of The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism by Sidney Xu Lu which compares Abe's views with two other leading Japanese thinkers about immigration.

[8 leaves, including six half-tone plates], 3, 4, 216, 8 pages.

OCLC: 672848316 (Japan only)

Edition + Condition: Second printing, three months after the first. Despite apparently good sales, the book is quite scarce, with only the uncatalogued copy at UCLA referenced in A Buried Past identified in US libraries. A very good to near fine copy in original decorated wrappers.

Publication: Tokyo: Hakubunkan, 1905 (Meiji 38).

Item No: #361851

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