ABSTRACT
Japanese immigrants were anything but passive victims; on the contrary, they actively fought the exclusion movement. Japanese diplomats were aware of the questionable status of the Japanese immigrants with respect to naturalization. Inasmuch as the naturalization problem was shared by all immigrants in the United States, it was this body which assumed responsibility for solving it. Ozawa was a paragon of an assimilated Japanese immigrant, a living refutation of the allegation of Japanese unassimilability. Written to plug up the loopholes of the earlier legislation, it had the undisguised aim of driving Japanese immigrants out of California agriculture. The term kimin often appears in the writings of Japanese immigrants. Meaning "an abandoned people," this special term stems from the immigrants' profound sense of rejection. Parallel to the Ozawa case, the immigrants instituted land litigation to contest the 1920 California and 1921 Washington alien land laws.
