This article critically examines how the 1919 Federal Survey of Education in Hawai'i, under the guise of a scientific study to guide educational reform, was used as the means to implement colonial policies over the territory's largest ethnic group, the Nikkei, people of Japanese ancestry. Furthermore, the survey was also used by various other political and religious parties and individuals to further their own objectives. Although there were many facets to the federal survey, this study focuses only on the debate surrounding Japanese language schools, the most sensational issue of the survey. The battle over the control of Japanese language schools among the white ruling class, educational authorities, and the Nikkei community in Hawai'i created the foundation for an anti-Japanese language school movement that spread to the West Coast of the United States. The survey was also a catalyst for Nikkei in redefining their Japanese language schools and a battleground concerning their future and identity. Despite numerous studies on Japanese Americans in Hawai'i, and studies of the Japanese language schools, neither the process, results, nor effects of the survey have been critically examined to date. This paper analyzes the process of how the federal survey evolved and how it arrived at its conclusions through an examination of the Education Bureau's files in order to illuminate the origins of the Japanese language school control movement and its chapter of ethnic American educational history.

Just about two years before Pearl Harbor, a young Japanese American woman took this pledge to herself when she completed a special study program in Tokyo, Japan. Although the shadow of war loomed increasingly over the Pacific, thousands of American-born Japanese (Nisei) youth like her flocked to their parents' native land during the 1930s to pursue cultural and language learning, as well as formal secondary and higher education. In any given year following 1932, an estimated 1,500 young Nisei students from North America resided in Tokyo and other urban areas of Japan. Often referred to as Kibei after returning to their native land, these young women and men attempted to embrace their ethnic heritage and identity during their sojourn in Japan with the support of Japanese educators.

During Reconstruction between one-fourth and one-third of the southern African-American work force emigrated to northern and southern urban areas. This phenomenon confirmed the fears of Delta cotton planters about the transition from slave to wage labor. Following a labor convention in Memphis, Tennessee, during the summer of 1869, one proposed alternative to the emerging employment crisis was to introduce Chinese immigrant labor, following the example of countries in the Caribbean and Latin America during the mid nineteenth century. Cotton plantation owners initially hoped that Chinese “coolie” workers would help replace the loss of African-American slave labor and that competition between the two groups would compel former slaves to resume their submissive status on plantations. This experiment proved an unmitigated failure. African Americans sought independence from white supervision and authority. And, Chinese immigrant workers proved to be more expensive and less dependable than African-American slave labor. More importantly, due to low wages and severe exploitation by planters, Chinese immigrants quickly lost interest in agricultural work.

Pupil for pupil, more has been written about Japanese American students than about those of any other ethnic group in America. They enter into our historical consciousness with the abortive attempt of the San Francisco School Board to segregate Japanese American students in 1906–07 which led to the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907–08 between the United States and Japan. As Henry Yu has recently reminded us, scholars were fascinated by the achievements of “oriental” students in American schools in the 1920s. Sociologists and educational psychologists, especially at Stanford University and the University of Chicago and often in conjunction with the Institute of Pacific Relations and/or Robert E. Park's Survey of Race Relations, produced a substantial corpus of work that focused on second-generation Asian Americans and stressed such things as test scores and life course studies. Conceived as studies in Americanization they almost totally ignored the community-run language schools: the lack of sophisticated studies examining these schools remains one of major gaps in the historiography of ethnic education in America.