There is a notion of continuity in the negotiation zone from its inception up to its current state in this study. While the reasons for its maintenance and the actors involved varied, the feeling that Japan was an exception among ‘coloured’ races and had to be treated differently remained constant. During the First Sino-Japanese War, granting a special racial status to Japan was made easier by the fact that its enemy was China. Widespread contempt for the alleged backwardness and weaknesses of the Chinese helped to build the image of Japan as a Western proxy in the East. The context of the Russo-Japanese War was far more complex. Fear was added to the equation, and both the Japanese and the Russian side actively tried to influence the effectiveness of the middle ground.

One point, however, needs to be emphasised: the middle ground described up to this point was only relevant for international relations. It had nothing exceptional, if anything at all, to say about interpersonal relations and it is important not to be misguided in believing that the preferential treatment of the Japanese nation automatically extended to Japanese individuals. Statesmen often have different perspectives and agendas than their citizen. In the West, politicians were at first concerned with what meaning Japan would have for future relations in the Far East. On the societal level, the concern was more with what influence the Japanese, as individuals, would have on the daily lives of people. People chose to view the Japanese in the frameworks of economic competition, social norms, morality and racial purity. In some cases, the frameworks used by state and civil society actors could overlap. However, the latter tended to disregard the potential threat of Japan as a nation in favour of the one posed by Japan as a race. State actors, on the other hand, kept in mind that the existence of Japanese individuals implied the presence of a Japanese state in the background. This discrepancy in priorities was nowhere more obvious than in the interactions between Japan and the United States.

Becoming visible: Japanese immigration to the United States

American sympathetic feelings towards Japan started to fade away once the Russo-Japanese War ended, leaving the Japanese confused about their status in the world. Much of this can be attributed to a change in the visibility of Japan and its people.

In the previous chapter, we saw how Fukuzawa Yukichi translated the concept of race and adapted it to suit the needs of modern Japan. This was a crucial step, as it acquainted the Japanese people with race and gave the Japanese elite an additional conceptual tool to understand the West. The nation was now aware that international relations were also conducted through the lens of race, and that Japan was at the bottom of a racial hierarchy alongside other ‘coloured’ people. However, this understanding makes us reach the crossroads mentioned in the introduction of this book. Fukuzawa's work is essential for further discussions about the conceptualisation of race at the domestic level. Yet, it is not enough to grasp the process behind the construction of the Japanese racial identity on the world stage. The reason is that, simply put, race was a game for which the rules were decided in the West. The adaptations Fukuzawa made to the concept did not influence the international racial standing of the Japanese inside. It is safe to assume that at the beginning of the Meiji period, policy makers in the West were not interested to know that some Japanese intellectual rejected biological determinism. In fact, keeping an international mindset, it is of secondary importance whether the Japanese even truly believed in the validity of race. The Western nations did, and that meant that if Japan wanted to have a place in international relations, it had to take the Western definition of it into account. The Japanese, however, were not forced to remain passive. If one continues the metaphor of a game, they may not have been able to decide the rules, but they were certainly able to influence the way in which these were interpreted.

As already mentioned, during the Meiji period, international relations had long become interracial relations as well. As the Australian Prime Minister Alfred Deakin (1856–1919) put it, the British Empire was ‘divided broadly in two parts, one occupied wholly or mainly by a white ruling race, the other principally occupied by coloured races who are ruled’. This pattern became so common that by 1914, less than one fifth of the world was free of European or American encroachment. This clear-cut distinction between a ruling White race and ruled ‘coloured’ races worked well enough on paper and did find confirmation in most corners of the globe.

Of all the ‘Western things’ Japan imported over the decades following the arrival of the Black Ships, race has to be the most complicated. The very nature of the concept itself, its function as a pillar for the structure of White supremacy, as well as its intrinsically exclusive nature should have been enough to persuade the Japanese to ignore it. Moreover, we have seen in the previous chapter that Japan already had patterns of exclusion which were in their function similar to race. Thinking in the framework of domestic intellectual thought, then, the introduction of the concept does not make much sense, and even appears to be rather counterproductive. Following up on what was argued in the previous chapter, the early history of race in Japan cannot be separated from coeval developments in the West, as the country became part of an international struggle in which race played a pivotal role. Retracing parts of that history is the aim of the present chapter.

Introducing modernity: the translation of race in the early Meiji period

On 6 April 1868, the Charter Oath was read aloud before the Emperor in the Kyoto Imperial Palace. Comprising five articles, the Oath was designed to set the future course of Japan and to usher the country into a new era of Western-inspired modernity. The last article famously required that ‘Knowledge shall be thought throughout the world so as to strengthen the foundation of imperial rule’. This rapidly became a priority, for the opening of treaty ports and the unequal treaties imposed on Japan made the acquisition of information about the Western nations not only unavoidable but also of paramount importance: only by having a substantial knowledge of these nations could Japan hope to escape the fate of its neighbour China after the Opium Wars (1839−42 and 1856–60). Knowledge came either from the Western people themselves in the form of foreign consultants and teachers (o-yatoi gaikokujin), or was acquired by Japanese going abroad as emissaries or exchange students. It also came to Japan through the translation of Western works. Translation, therefore, became a means to understand the West, its institutions, history, geography and arts. Most of the geography works translated in the early Meiji period contained a section about race, a fact that made the importance of the concept palpable to the translators.

In the year 1850, a thirteen-year-old boy named Hamada Hikozō left Edo Bay on a junk bound for the south of Japan. One night, his ship was caught in a storm and severely wrecked. After days of drifting on the sea, he and fellow survivors were saved by an American vessel which brought them to San Francisco. In 1852, the castaways were told that the American government was sending them to Hong Kong to join the expedition of a certain Commodore Perry who was supposed to take them home to Japan. Upon arriving in Hong Kong, however, Hamada decided to return to the United States. During his time there, he was baptised, met the American president, and went on becoming a citizen of the United States. Forty years after his shipwreck, Hamada, now known under his American name Joseph Heco, sat down and wrote his autobiography The Narrative of a Japanese: What He Has Seen and the People He Has Met in the Course of the Last Forty Years.

Heco's description of his odyssey to the West offers us a rare glimpse into the life of a Japanese from the Tokugawa period (1603–1868) who was able to leave his country. There are several fascinating anecdotes in his work, but one seems particularly striking: on a torrid July evening in a cabin on board the Susquehanna (one of Perry's Black Ships), he and his friends decided to go on deck to escape the heat. They saw no harm in their actions, but when the officer on watch duty saw them, ‘he shouted out something in a loud voice. Then he kicked us with his shoes and pointed down for us to go below. Thus we were driven down to our quarters on the berth-deck like a herd of swine’.

This was no isolated incident: Heco complained that the crew of the Susquehanna frequently tormented him and his fellow Japanese. Upon enquiring into the reason for this treatment to an interpreter, the latter explained that the crew had long been stationed in China and had ‘become accustomed to deal with Chinamen’. ‘The Chinese are a greedy and cringing race’, Heco explained,

In July 1894, tensions between the Qing dynasty and Japan over the status of Korea erupted into war. One week after the Japanese forces took the city of Port Arthur in late November 1894, a journalist for the French newspaper Le Petit Journal gave his comment on the siege of the city. He had not much sympathy left for the Chinese defeat:

The occupation of the main parts of China, he continued, will make civilisation in Asia do a leap forward of three centuries and it was quite the spectacle to see ‘the beneficial invasion of the backwards and barbaric Orient by the progressive and modern Orient’.3 Before the war, China, ‘that amorphous monster, terrible as much as abject, the shame of humanity’, was thought to be invincible. But the Japanese had shown ‘that there was nothing in China. No authority, no intelligence, no military capacity’. The French opinion, according to the journalist, could be resumed as follows:

This article from Le Petit Journal is visibly tainted by resentment towards China: one decade prior to its publication, the French and Chinese armies had been clashing in French Indochina. Nevertheless, bitterness aside, the palpable sympathy towards Japan was not restricted to the French journalist, as Western public opinion often sided with the Japanese during the war.

There were several reasons for this tendency. The United States, for example, believed that a Japanese victory would lead to the advancement of progress and civilisation in Asia. It also believed that Korea would remain independent. The Americans also seemed to feel sympathetic towards what they saw as an underdog taking on a much bigger enemy.

Over the centuries, the alterity of the Japanese island nation never ceased to puzzle Western observers, often in a contradictory manner: Japan was different, because exotic and remote from the West, but also different, because so fundamentally close to Western nations. More than one century after Perry's arrival, in the wake of the Second World War, scholars and laymen alike were still trying to decipher the Japanese mind, be it to understand the enemy or the economic miracle of the country. The uniqueness of Japan was also a beloved topic in Japan itself, as testified by the popularity of Nihonjinron (theory of Japaneseness) in the post-war years.

In the Meiji period, however, it was before all Japan's resemblance with the West in civilisational terms that made it truly special. According to the scientific and political logic of the time, this closeness led to a profound dissonance. Political and military achievements such as a ‘modern’ form of government might have seemed to be objective factors attainable by any nation. Yet, by the nineteenth century, racial categories were clearly overlapping with civilisational achievements, causing the racial category ‘White’ to be synonymous with ‘civilisation’ and ‘coloured’ with ‘barbarity’. That Japan, classified as ‘yellow’, could pretend to a place amongst the civilised White nations must therefore truly be seen as an anomaly.

As explained in the introduction to this work, historians of Japan today, while having the clear advantage of hindsight, find themselves facing the same dilemma as the individuals concerned with Japan's racial identity at the turn of the twentieth century: how to fit the Japanese into the ideological framework of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The idea of the Racial Middle Ground can be an answer to that question, as it not only recreates the process through which Japan escaped the usual dichotomy, but also offers a conceptual approach to understand how and why this process was launched and made possible. I hope to have shown that when considering the case of Japan at the turn of the twentieth century, thinking in binary terms of ‘White’ and ‘coloured’ is not meaningful. In addition to making the explicit formulation of the standard of civilisation necessary, Japan's modernisation along Western lines eroded the foundations of White supremacist thinking and made a compromise necessary to uphold the racial status quo. This compromise took the form of a racial middle ground.

The African American reaction to the events in California was a complicated one. The similar situation in which Black Americans were stranded without doubt led to feelings of sympathy towards the Japanese. However, sharing the White animosity directed towards the Japanese may have given African Americans the opportunity to improve their position inside the American racial system, that is, being granted a racial middle ground of their own.

The race at the bottom (I): the Black press and the California Crisis

The ambivalent position of Black Americans hinders us from giving a uniform account of their reaction to the California Crisis. This is reflected in the Black American press of the time: commentators from outside the Pacific Coast area tended to be more objective in their assessment of US–Japan relations, while those from the West Coast were prone to denounce the privileged position of the Japanese.

The intellectual W. E. B du Bois (1868–1963) promptly recognised the torn feelings of his community. According to him, the educated African Americans on the West Coast understood the implications of anti-Japanese feelings, but Black labourers shared the animosity of their White counterparts. The question was what would matter most: racial solidarity or economic competition? Du Bois was unequivocal: school segregation was ‘a mark of contempt, an institution of inferiority, where it is imposed on the man who has to attend it against his free choice’. In his understanding, the hostile feelings directed towards both the Japanese and Blacks were the same race bigotry based on the belief that the White race was ‘the natural and divine guardian of all other races’.

Du Bois was not isolated in his criticism. The Colored American Magazine, for example, assured that African Americans ‘do not subscribe to race prejudice’. Adding a pinch of salt to its solidarity, it asserted that the Japanese hated Chinese people and were ‘in haste to show their contempt for the Negroes’. Nervetheless, ‘race hatred was wrong per se’. The Voice of the Negro used the unclear stipulations of the treaty between the Unites States and Japan to assure that the segregation order was illegal. Recognising the parallels between the Japanese exclusion from White schools and the segregation of Black children in the South, the magazine assured its readers that ‘we are watching this controversy with great interest.

The practice of differentiating between individuals is a feature that knows neither spatial nor temporal limitations. With the organisation of human beings into societies came the development of oppositional relationships: there have been leaders and followers, rulers and ruled, worldly and spiritual authorities, those who owned the land and those who worked on it. There have been those who possessed social, economic and political capital, and those who did not. According to the context, the reasons why these relationships developed and were sustained varied greatly. Often, further differentiation occurred inside differentiation. For example, wielding a sword or a plough was not the only determining factor, but also if one was a man or a woman, or if one believed in one religion or the other. From the seventeenth century onwards, differentiation based on race was added to the equation.

Being part of one group – whatever the group and the criteria for being included were – had a dual effect: it meant simultaneously belonging but also estrangement. At the risk of taking away the complexity from the matter, when the inclusion in or exclusion from a group entailed unequal treatment (in reference to other groups), then one talks not only of differentiation but also of discrimination. The simultaneous existence of several patterns of differentiation inside a given society makes the analysis of discrimination a convoluted undertaking, in which defining the concepts one uses becomes of crucial importance. An enquiry into Japanese history is no exception. Certainly, as in every society, there have been instances of economic, social, gender and racial discrimination. Equally certain, it is often difficult to distinguish between these, as the ways in which these occurred often overlapped. Yet, it is possible to do so, with the prerogative, however, to conceptually frame the object of enquiry. Not doing so invites the hazard of wrongly ascribing peculiar types of discriminations to the wrong causes.

Exemplary of this problem is the attribution of a racist character to the society of Tokugawa Japan. Historian Herman Ooms, for example, asserted the existence of an ‘intra-race racism’ aimed at the eta and hinin outcasts and fostered by the authorities. The cultural anthropologist Takezawa Yasuko argued in a similar vein that these groups were at the margins of the Tokugawa society and were victims of racial discrimination.