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Mandating Americanization: Japanese Language Schools and the Federal Survey of Education in Hawai'i, 1916–1920

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Noriko Asato
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Extract

Under the policies of the United States, it will be very difficult to prohibit schools of this kind unless it were definitely proven that they were teaching treasonable things.

—P. P. Claxton, U. S. Commissioner of Education

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.

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Articles
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History of Education Quarterly , Volume 43 , Issue 1: A Special Issue on Asian-American Educational History Guest Editor: Eileen H. Tamura , Spring 2003 , pp. 10 - 38
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Copyright © 2003 by the History of Education Society 

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References

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58 Claxton, Kinney to January 22, 1918, HSF. Claxton originally planed to send H. W. Fought, Bureau of Education Specialist in Rural School Practice, and Willis E. Johnson, President of Northern Normal and Industrial School, South Dakota to undertake the survey in the fall of 1918.Google Scholar

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159 An annual series of “New Americans” conference between 1927 to 1941 conducted by Okumura aimed first to Americanize the Issei but later targeted coming-of-age Nisei to raise awareness of themselves as new American citizens; what they could do to fulfill their responsibilities as American citizens. The actual purpose of the conference, however, was to encourage the Nisei to choose a career as workers in the sugar and pineapple plantations, “‘the most stable industry’ in Hawaii.” Tamura, Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity, 131.Google Scholar

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165 Although there was no mass forced relocation of Japanese Americans in Hawaii, Japanese language school principals in Hawaii were among the community leaders detained during World War II. Okihiro, Cane Fires, 209, 218.Google Scholar

166 My larger study of the attack on Japanese language schools also compares the situation in Hawaii and the West Coat in order to examine the various agendas behind the attacks. See my paper “The Issei Challenge to Preserve Japanese Heritage during the Period of Americanization,” in Nikkei disAppearances: Twentieth Century Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians in the Pacific Northwest, eds. Louis Fiset and Gail M. Nomura, (forthcoming).Google Scholar