by Gerald Horne
When in the succeeding decade it appeared that Japan would come to the aid of Ethiopia in its confrontation with Italy, there was a surge of pro-Tokyo sentiment among Black Nationalists generally. Certainly the UNIA paved the way for this movement; beginning in the early 1920s, it highlighted events in Japan and their impact on U.S. Negroes. “Japan may attack America in 1922” was a typical headline in its journal.2 Apparently one of the UNIA’s members resided in Yokohama, for it was from there that Emanuel McDonald hailed the “great cause” of the UNIA and the “Moses of the race,” “our great Hon. Marcus Garvey”; he expressed the hope that “in the near future we may have ships running to and from the Orient.”3 Subsequently, a writer identified as Emanuel McDowell (who may have been the same man who had been corresponding from Yokohama) this time was in Hong Kong, where he hailed the “Japanese people,” who “are respected and feared,” notably “here in the Orient.” As he saw things, “especially in Japan, there is no opposition to the UNIA. Here a man is a man and there is no discrimination”; more to the point, the UNIA’s Black Star Line was “met with a hearty welcome.”4
“Race war threatens world” was yet another blaring headline in the UNIA journal from the early 1920s; in that article, the former secretary to the “late Premier Ito of Japan” was quoted at length from Honolulu, as he reproved the anti-Tokyo bias of California.5 This was a prelude to lengthy reports on a disarmament conference where Japan’s role was spotlighted as being “very sensitive on the color question”—and “justly so too.” Again, California was pointed to as problematic “for Uncle Sam,” though “there is a possibility that he will [ultimately] convince England, France and Italy that the California idea” of anti-Japan bias “is right and then Hades will break loose.” Tellingly—and unlike other Black Nationalists—the UNIA journal did not invoke the example of European colonialism in order to justify Japanese incursions into China. “Japan is in Shantung upon the same principle that Great Britain is in Africa and she should get out on the same principle which should force Britain out of Africa”; likewise, the UNIA should not “let Great Britain thrive upon that which we deny the Japanese.”6
This concern about the impact of disarmament was not unique to the UNIA. The Negro press—in this case the Savannah Tribune—thought Tokyo was being targeted and, thus, “plainly the white races of the world are deeply concerned” about Japan. “Whites everywhere,” it was reported, were considering what “the darker people of the world are up to,” a consideration that prompted President Warren Harding to make conciliatory “utterances in Birmingham” on the matter of racism “due to the clear vision of fact that the world cannot go on and oppress darker people.”7 The Negro press recognized earlier than most that the retreat from white supremacy in the United States was propelled in no small measure by global considerations.
The UNIA was alert to the point that as early as the 1920s, Japanese encroachment in China had commenced. This reality also had dawned on a proliferating number of jazz musicians from the United States who began moving to Shanghai particularly during this time. Though this metropolis was wracked with conflict, compared to what these U.S. Negroes had experienced back home, it was paradisiacal. When this reverie was disrupted, typically Euro-Americans were singled out as the culprits, as, it was thought, the harassment of African Americans was part of their birthright.8
Still, this evenhandedness toward Japanese and British colonialism did not include any ambiguity on the bedrock point as to who was responsible for the ominous war clouds then gathering. If “anti-Japanese” propaganda did not cease, it was said, Tokyo would have little choice but to “unite the Indians, Chinese, Egyptians, Mohammedans, Negroes and even Bolshevists in a colossal alliance. What then will be the superiority of the white race?”9 Lest there be any doubt, more praise was heaped upon the “little brown diplomats” of Japan, who were seen as resisting the hegemony of white supremacy.10 Hubert Harrison, the Negro Socialist who aligned with the UNIA, was among those who as early as 1922 predicted a war between Japan and the United States, with racism lurking as a motive force.11
Tokyo was praised by the UNIA, since it “squashes [the] race inferiority complex.” The focal point was Umeshiro Suzuki, a parliamentarian in Tokyo, and his “amazingly frank brochure on the relation of the races.” This member of the Diet foresaw the “white race’s abandonment of its dream of world control” in the face of stiffening opposition, which was deemed to be an “amazing doctrine.”12 The UNIA made it clear that it was “opposed” to “the white race organizing to dominate the world.”13 Garvey noted that “though not liked, Japanese are respected.”14 Japan’s excoriation of the United States was adopted by the UNIA, which agreed when Tokyo “score[d] American morals” and charged that “men and women” in the republic were “depraved.”15
Numerous Euro-Americans were also concerned about what might well be termed the racial correlation of forces. In the wildly popular novel The Great Gatsby, early on a character asserts, “It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.” The rise of the “Coloured Empires” was a pre-eminent concern.16
The UNIA appeared to take great pleasure at the idea of worsening bilateral relations between the United States and Japan, auguring, it was thought, a setback for the former and a weakening of white supremacy. As the Negro World reported, the attorney general of California found the “Japanese problem more threatening than [the] Negro problem”; he termed the “racial problem on [the] coast more serious than that of [the] Civil War. . . . As the Japanese line advances, we retreat and we do not like to retreat. . . . We have already lost the Philippines. The Japanese dominate there now.”17 The Los Angeles Examiner argued that the Golden State was on track to have a larger population of residents of Japanese descent than those defined as “white,” signaling an oncoming era of Asian domination.18
Unsurprisingly, when a massive earthquake hit Japan in 1923, the Negro World was quick to report on the sympathy and financial support offered by African Americans: “$500 [was] subscribed by the members of the UNIA to give aid to the sufferers.” At UNIA headquarters in Harlem, “thousands of members of the race came out” in support of this humanitarian venture. A telegram was sent to the emperor of Japan signed by Garvey declaring that “the Negro peoples look . . . to the Japan[ese] as a friend in the cause of racial justice.” His Imperial Majesty in reply expressed his “deep gratification for your sympathetic message.”19 So buoyed, the UNIA seemed to broaden its portfolio, taking on the added assignment of defending Japanese abroad, for example, when journalists from the archipelago were “rebuffed and insulted in South Africa.”20
Upon the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, which barred immigration from Japan to the United States, the UNIA reported on the response in Japan. The “Japanese people” were “greatly offended” by the exclusion act, and Washington was reminded of what befell Russia in 1905 when it offended Japan.21 As the Negro World reported, the Diet condemned the exclusion law, and “patriotic societies last evening placarded virtually every telephone and telegraph pole” in Tokyo with angry words of protest. Police officers were recruited to guard the U.S. embassy and consulates as well as hotels where U.S. nationals were thought to reside.22 Washington was warned that Japan was “lining up Asia for coming race conflict,” and that “utmost resentment” toward the United States was a driving force. Once more, 1905 was invoked. “We regret that this war of races is coming, but it was promised when the Peace Conference [Versailles] denied Japan’s demand for racial equality. Those who sow to the wind reap the whirlwind.”23 Repeatedly, Versailles and California’s exclusionary policies were tied together as indicative of a downward (racist) spiral.24
While these immigration provisos were being debated, one Slovakian American journalist agreed with the anti-Japanese restrictions, arguing that Japanese “are not assimilable. They are of the yellow race and we are white.” In some ways, this legislation was a gift to Tokyo, si
nce it barred not only Japanese immigration but all immigration from Asia, helping to promote nascent ideas of Pan-Asianism and the related idea that Japan was the “champion of the colored races.” Tokyo protested vainly that it had not been granted a quota like those of European nations; a Japanese periodical termed the bill “the greatest insult in our history,” as a ritualized disemboweling took place outside the U.S. embassy. Domestically, this biased bill gave further impetus for Italians, Poles, Greeks, and the like in the United States to trumpet their “whiteness,” distinguishing themselves from Asians—and Japanese particularly—thus intensifying racial polarization.25
In 1924 the Japanese intellectual Sugita Teiichi denounced the United States as barely containing “those with the strongest racial consciousness and the strongest sense of the omnipotence of imperialism,” as reflected in the “history of the brutal, cruel and inhuman treatment meted out to the black slaves”; “for people easily moved to tears, it is outrageous.”26
When the celebrated Negro journalist T. Thomas Fortune visited Japan shortly thereafter, like many other African American sojourners he was overwhelmed. It was a “revelation,” he informed readers of the Negro World. “I seemed to be very much at home in Japan,” where “everybody was so polite,” wholly unlike his homeland. He raved about Nagasaki and saluted “glorious Japan.”27
The UNIA maintained a keen interest in a critically important “Pan-Asiatic Congress” that took place in Nagasaki in 1926.28 Japan returned the favor. Haruji Tawara, of Japanese origin though residing in Brazil, proclaimed that “every young Japanese knows the name and work of Marcus Garvey”; his message was that the twentieth century would witness “the rise of the colored peoples of the world.” “American Negroes,” he asked beseechingly, “do you know how eagerly your Asian friends are awaiting the success of Garveyism?”29
As the 1920s unfolded, continuing sympathy was expressed in Japan toward African Americans and their sorrowful plight. There was a tendency in Tokyo to use the republic’s racist conflicts as evidence that the so-called colored races would overcome worldwide bias under Japanese leadership. Others argued that lynching simply demonstrated the “cruelty of white people.” There was a tendency to see a connection between exclusionary immigration measures targeting Japan and the concomitant rise of anti-Negro violence. Revealingly, Japanese diplomats in the United States reported to the Foreign Ministry about anti-lynching legislation. Few were shocked when there were attempts in California to lynch Japanese migrants.30 A number of Japanese intellectuals saw African Americans as a key anti-imperialist constituency. This view tended to come from the left, but what was striking about pre-1945 Japan was the sympathy for U.S. Negroes that spanned the entire ideological spectrum.31
Nevertheless, as “Garveyism” was being hailed, it was already declining in the United States, as Garvey himself was indicted, tried, imprisoned, and then deported. However, as so often happens, the ideas that he propounded did not depart with him, for they reflected a deeper malaise then besetting U.S. Negroes. In any case, the popularity of Garvey’s ideas preceded his own fame. Garvey had studied in London with Duse Mohamed Ali, who also established a popular journal and who had been backed by Tongo Takebe of Japan. Ali’s fictional creations confronted the complex matter of “race war.”32
As noted, the tentacles of Garvey’s influence stretched to Africa. The international import of Garveyism was revealed in 1927, when Arthur Gray of the Oakland, California, branch of the UNIA shared a platform with Edgar Owens of the U.S. Communist Party, along with representatives from movements with ties to India and China; other than the Communists, all there assembled had varying ties to Tokyo, including the representative of the recently deceased Sun Yat-Sen. Later a Japanese diplomat visited this UNIA branch and saluted Garvey as a “prophet” while hailing the determined struggles of the “colored race” throughout Asia and Africa.33
Oakland was a harbinger of a national trend. In April 1932 a leader of the Communist-backed League of Struggle for Negro Rights reported on a “very important matter”: Garvey’s UNIA was “holding mass meetings with Japanese speakers,” stressing the “unity that should exist between the colored races against the whites.” Chicago and Gary, Indiana, were the primary sites for this seditious propaganda. It was said that there were “250 Japanese students touring the country and everywhere speaking under the auspices of the UNIA.”34 However, by this late date those who held U.S. national security dear were seemingly more concerned with Moscow than Tokyo, which facilitated the flourishing of the latter’s acolytes, just as it hampered the ability of the former’s supporters to serve as a counterweight to the latter.
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Nonetheless, as pointed as the UNIA might have been in its orientation toward Tokyo, this militant viewpoint did not emerge from whole cloth but instead had roots in a U.S. Negro community deeply skeptical about the nation in which they found themselves and thus susceptible to looking abroad—be it to Japan or Ethiopia or Africa generally—for sustenance. To a degree, Germany during the Great War had created the template in making appeals to U.S. Negroes in order to undermine the United States itself. However, Tokyo—being “colored” itself—was in an even more advantageous position than Berlin from which to pursue this stratagem. Germany, for example, during World War I had sought to make a special appeal to Muslims in pursuit of its larger ambitions.35 Tokyo acted similarly in the prelude to World War II.36
The logic of Pan-Asianism, an ideology avidly pursued by Tokyo, perforce meant making appeals to predominantly Islamic Indonesia, not to mention the sizeable Muslim minorities in British India—to the detriment of the Netherlands and Britain.37 As Islamic tendencies spread among African Americans, this too provided fertile soil for the rise of pro-Tokyo sentiments.
Religion generally was a card played by Tokyo in its multipronged attempt to destabilize European colonialism. Mohammed Baraktullah, an Indian political activist resisting British control of his homeland, taught in Tokyo as early as 1909 and promoted “Pan-Islamic” ideas that were congruent with Japan’s own Pan-Asianism.38 “What has happened to the descendants of the people who brought Buddha into this world?” asked Seigo Nakano in 1917. “They are the wheels on the road, while the passengers all have fair skin and blue eyes.”39 As Hajime Hosoi of Japan saw things in 1932, “the white countries in fact occupy 87% of the world’s land area and rule over 69% of the world’s population,” which was “like having a person sitting in a crowded train, where there are people unable to get a seat, who stretches his arms and legs over the other seats and who, if anybody tries to sit even on the edge of a seat, immediately starts berating them as an ‘invader.’”40 Inevitably, this potent sympathy between Japan, India, and Islam was echoed among African Americans, not only in terms of the Muslim groupings that arose during this era but also in the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois.41
In 1930 Mehmet Ali of Detroit, rapidly becoming the headquarters of Islamic groups among U.S. Negroes, presented Mustapha Kemal Pasha, Turkey’s leader, with a petition calling for the founding of a Negro colony there. “In the name of 28,000 Moslems suffering from racial prejudice in America,” he petitioned for “land on the shores of the Bosphorus where we may create a Negro city”; most of the petitioners were “born in the South. Recently in both Detroit and Chicago they have had clashes with the police.”42
The group that came to be known as the Nation of Islam—whose leaders were indicted in 1942 for alleged pro-Tokyo sentiment—helped to popularize the idea of the “Asiatic Black Man.” Japan was at the core of its theology and cosmology, notably in the case of the “Mother Plane.”43 It too had roots in Detroit. It is unclear whether Nation of Islam members were included in the aforementioned petition, though assuredly all emerged from the same militant root. Just as fascist Italy was preparing to invade Ethiopia, “the ‘Muslims’ in Chicago,” wrote a subsequent critic of the NOI,
attracted momentary attention in 1935 when fifty or sixty of them attended the trial of a fem
ale member who was charged with having broken a white woman’s glasses in a quarrel. The Faithful disapproved of the court’s procedure and accordingly picked up chairs and went to work. A captain of the Chicago police was killed, a bailiff was seriously wounded, and twelve policemen and six bailiffs were injured.
This critic, Revilo Oliver, spoke of an “individual with the euphonious name of Wyxsewixzard S.J. Challouchilcziliczese who claimed to be a special envoy sent by the Emperor of Ethiopia to the ‘Black Nation of the West,’” who was said to have allied with the Nation of Islam.44
Thus, when the man known variously by the authorities as Elijah Mohamed, alias Elijah Poole, alias Gulan Bogans, alias Mohammed Ressoull, was placed on trial in 1942 because of his reluctance to endorse the war against Japan, he was accused of asserting that “Moslems [i.e., the Negro members of the Allah Temple of Islam] are not citizens” of the United States;
they have no flag [they] can call their own but the flag of Islam. That the flag of Islam and the flag of Japan are the same because they both offer freedom, justice and equality. . . . The Japanese are the brothers of the Negro and the time will soon come when from the clouds hundreds of Japanese planes with the most poisonous gases will let their bombs fall on the United States and nothing will be left of it.
