ABSTRACT
Like Chinese immigrants before them, Japanese immigrants in the early twentieth century found a hostile reception in the United States. And like the Chinese, the immigrants found an unlikely advocate for their rights in Protestant missionaries. Responding to the scientific racist and eugenic ideologies that structured anti-Japanese propaganda, missionaries developed their own competing racial project. In this era, as scientific racism reached a zenith of cultural credibility in America, the missionary racial project articulated its correspondingly most complete theory of Christian assimilationism.
