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Overall, Conroy uses this chapter to look at the common people’s experience of the Asian exclusion controversy. He looks at several cases in detail, for example, illegal aliens coming into Texas from Mexico to work as so-called shareholders in a planned 1,000-acre rice farm owned by T. Hayashi. By the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement, Japan would no longer send laborers to the United States; however, “settled agriculturalists” from Japan should be able to immigrate by the same rules as Europeans. Were Hayashi’s shareholders laborers or agriculturalists? Conroy notes that “the basic trouble with the Gentlemen’s Agreement was what its name has since come to imply, in the ugly sense.” It divided humans into those like us and not like us, with the little people—most Japanese, and virtually all Chinese, Koreans, and Filipinos—pushed to the margins. Yet, “within their basic framework on unrighteousness, the ‘gentlemen’ tried very hard to be fair, and took great pains with details,” he adds. Conroy ends his chapter by quoting D. W. Stevens, an American of long residence in Japan, who said, concerning the immigration matter, “There will be no war on that account,” but “the warm regard for America which has hitherto been one of the salient features of Japan’s international relations will be transformed into a wall of chilly reserve which I fear will last for many years to come.”
We have begun to see emerge one of Hilary Conroy’s major themes concerning the four decades leading up to America’s (Pacific) World War II: unlike the European theater, there was more complexity and less good versus evil; that is, in the Pacific theater, we were the racists.
Chapter 4, “Chilly Reserve and the Beginning of the Manchurian Question” begins: “The ‘chilly reserve’ which Mr. Stevens had predicted was not long forthcoming as the keynote of Japanese relations with the United States. It having become clear in the course of the immigration controversy that Americans did not really like Japanese after all, the Japanese reacted officially, not with emotional outbursts, but with calculation.”