Orientalizing the Pacific Rim: - History, Department of

In an attempt to dispel the illusion that there was a ‘yellow peril’ in the United
States and that Asians were “unassimilable,” the Reverend Sidney Gulick had included
in his book The American Japanese Problem chapters answering ‘Yes’ to questions such
as “Are Japanese Assimilable?” and “Can Americans Assimilate Japanese?” Examples
of the ‘assimilability’ of the Japanese centered around ‘Americanized’ Japanese
children in Christian homes and schools in America, complete with pictures of them in
American dress and hair-styles. Proudly, one of the picture captions announced that
the “American-Japanese” man in the photograph could “speak no Japanese” and was
a graduate of Yale--obvious proof that he had reached the pinnacle of ‘white, anglosaxon,
Protestant’ achievement in America. 21 Even the reference to ‘American
Japanese’ rather than Japanese American was a calculated attempt at emphasizing the
‘American’ rather than ‘Japanese’ nature of the young man.
Outward signs such as clothing and hair style became the proof of outright
assimilation, since they signified the ‘loss’ of traditional dress and speech. Gulick and
other pro-Japanese writers often used these signs as a rhetorical weapon to combat the
fears of anything less than ‘100% Americanism’ which the nativist organizations were
propagating. 22 Americanization was a focal term in the debate which surrounded the
image of America as a ‘melting pot,’ and as we shall see, the question of ‘assimilation’
became the center of the ‘Oriental problem.’ For the missionaries, a key claim for their
argument against nativist groups such as the American Legion and the Sons of the
Golden West was that ‘Orientals’ were in fact ‘assimilable’ to American life, as proven
21 Gulick, The American Japanese Problem, cited above, 220.
22 The best study of 19th-Century American nativism remains John Higham, Strangers
in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 1955)
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