Japanese Immigrants Can Promote Racial Equality

Talking with Japanese Brethren in the United States [Zaibei doho to kataru]

Nagata, Shigeshi

Publication: Tokyo: Nihon Rikkokai, 1940 (Showa 15). First Edition.

Notes: This book combines the author's philosophical views on Japanese immigration with excerpts from interviews of Japanese American immigrants. Nagata lived for many years in the United States, and returned to Japan when anti-Asian laws in California began to make life difficult for him and his compatriots. In Japan, he became the leader of the Nihon (or Nippon) Rikkokai, a Christian organization that promoted immigration to the poor in Japan.

One of Nagata's main ideas ideas about the role of Japanese immigrants is as a counter to white Western society's belief in its racial superiority. Nagata argues that Japanese people by nature do not discriminate. (He notably ignores the atrocities being committed by the Japanese military in both China and Korea at the time he was writing this book.) According to Noriaki Hoshino, seemingly the only scholar to have explored Nagata's immigration views immediately before the outbreak of the Second World War, in this book Nagata "insists that he could not find intense discrimination in Japan. He even defines the Japanese as 'people who do not know the existence of discrimination (sabetsu no sonzai o shiranai kokumin)' (quoted in his disseration, Mobility, Contacts, and the Formation of Multi-ethnic/racial Empires across the Pacific, page 70).

For more on Nagata and the Rikkokai, see Tsurutani Hisashi's America-Bound (pp. 77–79) and Eiichiro Azuma's Between Two Empires, p. 81.

[2], 4, 6, [2], 4, 6, 169, [1], 4, [2] pages.

OCLC: 17057304 (LC, Bishop Museum, Minnesota, Washington)

Edition + Condition: First edition (first printing). A good-only copy in wrappers, seemingly removed from a bound group of pamphlets (although it was not issued that way). With paper adhesion to spine and some stab holes.

Item No: #362959

Price: $500