ABSTRACT
This chapter is based on materials originally collected for Illegal Migrations and the Huckleberry Finn Problem (Temple, 2013), and it provides an interpretive social history of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans in the first half of the twentieth century. As we already know, from 1913 through the 1940s, the Alien Land Laws in California and several other states were designed to forbid the Japanese immigrants from owning or leasing agricultural lands, on the theory that they were “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” In addition, beginning in 1942, after the attacks on Pearl Harbor, all persons of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast were incarcerated in internment camps. Historians of this period have analyzed both these laws and policies in great detail, in numerous scholarly articles and books. This essay attempts to add some small portion to these existing analyses, by collecting and foregrounding the behavior of non-Japanese persons who were asked to assist, or even volunteered to help, their Japanese neighbors. By doing so, they evaded or mitigated the harshest aspects of American public law against persons of Japanese ancestry.
