Orientalizing the Pacific Rim: - History, Department of

The survey’s focus upon ‘Orientals’ had much to do with its missionary
organizers. Davis, Gleason, and Fisher had begun their project because of their
background in Japan and their concern over anti-Japanese agitation; they had only
expanded the focus of the survey to include the Chinese at a much later date.
Strangely, this expansion was less in response to labor leaders, who no longer had
much ‘problem’ with the Chinese, but to the many other missionaries who worked
among the Chinese in both China and the United States. The definition of who in the
end was an ‘Oriental’ was intimately connected with the missionaries’ interest in the
Orient as the geographical location of their mission. They empathized with ‘Orientals’
in America because they viewed them in the same way that they viewed ‘Orientals’ in
the Orient, as potential converts. Organizations such as the YMCA International and
the American Board of Foreign Missions professed a global vision of not only
Christianization but Americanization, spreading the ‘good word’ about the American
way of life, which they saw as a concurrent goal. The Survey of Race Relations was
only one step towards the remaking of the ‘Oriental’ at home, but it fit into the
broader attempt of remaking the ‘Oriental’ abroad. In his justification for the necessity
of the survey, George Gleason explained the duty of the returned missionaries who
were on the west coast:
referred in 1919 to “Asiatic immigrants” by including Armenians and Syrians from
“Western Asia” together with Chinese and Japanese from “Eastern Asia.” By the
Survey of Race Relations five years later, he was referring more specifically to Chinese
and Japanese as “Oriental immigrants.” The point is that the boundaries of the
definitions changed through time with the contexts and situations of usage. Emory S.
Bogardus, Essentials of Americanization (Los Angeles: University of Southern California
Press, 1919, 2nd edition, 1920), 201.
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