紐育新報: Nyū Yōku shimpō, The Japanese Times
One hundred years ago today … Nyū Yōku Shimpō (The Japanese Times) catered to New York City’s Japanese-speaking population: immigrants and the "issei” (first-generation US citizen). Estimates are that between four and five thousand Japanese immigrants lived in NYC in 1920 (Sawada, 14; Inouye, 314).
The Japanese Times, 23 June 1920, p. 1. Courtesy the Hoover Institute, Stanford University.
The Japanese Times was founded as a weekly in 1911 by Ken’ichi Kai and Tomihei Hayashi. Taking over in 1916, Shōzō Mizutani, described as a “pioneering issei” by Mitziko Sawada, increased its circulation and demand such that it went semi-weekly (16).
Mizutani kept his readers abreast of international politics. The June 23 edition starts with an editorial urging the US to join the League of Nations, and critiquing the Republican Party for taking an isolationist approach that would be detrimental to US credibility on the world stage.
The Japanese Times’ front page articles address, respectively: the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and the direction of British government, territorial conflict between Japan and Russia, China’s attack on a Japanese battleship, fluctuations in the world economy, Japanese business interests in Shanghai, and the spread of cholera. Subsequent pages report a variety of current events focused on politics in Japan and the US. The lone photo showed the Japanese Olympic Team.
The Japanese Times 23 June 1920, p. 2. Courtesy the Hoover Institute, Stanford University.
That day’s paper included advertisements for a panoply of services, including social dance classes, music classes, English classes, acting lessons, insurance, Victor Records, grocery stores, dry goods, many banks (e.g. Chase National Bank), many restaurants (e.g. the City Hall Tea Room, a chop suey restaurant), hotels, drivers, tailors, and doctors. One optometrist, F.I. Frederico of 136 East 59th Street, advertised that Japanese customers would be greeted by his Japanese assistant, Morizo Ogawa, who had graduated from Columbia University.
The Japanese Times 23 June, 1920, p. 4. Courtesy the Hoover Institute, Stanford University.
In Tokyo Life, New York Dreams: Urban Japanese Visions of America, 1890-1924, Sawada writes in detail of the Japanese community in New York.
Socially, the New York Japanese were of the newly forming middle class or close to it. Almost three-quarters held hi-imin passports as opposed to imin passports. Hi-imin were generally students, merchants, businessmen, and professionals and were required to have a middle school education or its equivalent. Imin, by contrast, were largely skilled or unskilled laborers, whom the Japanese government discouraged from emigrating to the United States. National leaders were responding to the barrage of verbal contempt Americans heaped upon Japanese labor immigrants, as well as the U.S. government's requests that Japan limit the emigration of laborers. Furthermore, they were anxious that the Japanese who came to the United States should represent their country in a way befitting citizens of a rising nation-state. (15)
Sawada points out that the Japanese Times readers would have been interested in international politics and business for a particular reason, that they strategically skewed middle-class as opposed to working class –which would have been indicated by their passport type.
SOURCES:/FURTHER READING:
Inouye, Daniel. Distant Islands: The Japanese American Community in New York City, 1876-1930s. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2018.
Sawada, Mitziko. Tokyo Life, New York Dreams: Urban Japanese Visions of America, 1890-1924. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
WRITTEN BY JONATHAN GOLDMAN, JUNE 23, 2020.
MANY THANKS TO AREI SEKIGUCHI AND FUSO MARASE FOR TRANSLATING.
TAGS: Japanese, immigration, newspapers, optometrists