JAPAN AND THE UNITED STATES 151 



EELATIONS OF JAPAN AND THE UNITED STATES^ 



By President DAVID STARR JORDAN 



STANFORD UNIVERSITY 



IT is now nearly sixty years since the modern history of Japan 

 began. The arrival of Commodore Perry at Kurihama, the 

 downfall of the Shogun and the restoration of the Mikado mark the 

 point of transition from feudal Japan to the Japan of to-day. 



In all this period, the Japanese nation has been the subject of in- 

 tense interest to the cultivated people of America, and a warm sym- 

 pathy has arisen between those people of each nation who have come to 

 understand the character and the ideals of the other. This sympathy 

 has been kept alive by the influence of Japanese students in America, 

 on the one hand, and on the other by the interest of those who have 

 gone as missionaries, as teachers or advisers in the affairs of Japan. 



In Asia there has existed for many years a division of the non- 

 Japanese into two sharply defined parties, or one may say, attitudes 

 of mind, the pro-Japanese and the anti-Japanese. The disputes of 

 these two types of people have not come to our notice until very lately. 

 Till within the last decade, American influence was almost wholly 

 ranged with the pro-Japanese. Contributory to this fact was our 

 general tendency toward sympathetic interest in a nation which rose 

 to constitutional government through influences from within. The 

 Shimonoseki incident, the visit of General Grant, the aid of the United 

 States in setting aside the obnoxious consular jurisdiction in the treaty 

 ports, all these became expressions of the friendly attitude of America. 



The Japanese question, as it is now called, first rose to the horizon 

 in 1899, the year of the abrogation of consular jurisdiction. 



The needs of cheap labor on the sugar plantations of Hawaii was 

 great and constant. Kalakaua, the king, had tried to meet this need 

 by " blackbirding " expeditions among the islands of Polynesia. The 

 steamship companies followed by strenuous efforts among the laborers . 

 in the rice fields of the region about the Inland Sea of Japan, the dis- 

 tricts of Okayama, Hiroshima and Yamaguchi. By their insistence 

 and by offers of real wages their emigration agencies brought to Hawaii 

 many men from the lowest stratum in Japanese life, next to the crim- 

 inal and the outcast — the unskilled and homeless laborers in the rice 

 fields. These have been called coolies, but their position in Japan was 



* Abstract of an address at Clark University. 



