The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 17 (2006)“Will White Man and Yellow Man Ever Mix?”:
Wallace Irwin, Hashimura Togo,and the Japanese Immigrant in America

Yoshiko UZAWA*I
In November 1907, “Letters of a Japanese Schoolboy,” a literarycolumn featuring an imaginary Japanese named Hashimura Togo, waslaunched in the New York weekly Collier’s. Togo was the pseudonymof a Scotch-Irish writer, Wallace Irwin (1875–1959), then a staff writerof this weekly. The author and the editor ﬁrst kept the fact that Irwin was
Togo to themselves. However, it did not take a month before a numberof letters inquiring about Togo’s racial identity ﬂooded Collier’s editorial staff room. The author and the editor, with the help of James Hare,a war photojournalist famous for his coverage of the Russo-JapaneseWar, took a portrait-photograph of “Hashimura Togo” (Fig.1). Given
yellowface make-up, Irwin posed before the camera in exactly the same
way as President Theodore Roosevelt posed in his life-size portrait hungas the backdrop. This photo appeared as Togo’s in the fourth installmentof “Letters,” provocatively titled “The Yellow Peril.”1 The photo somehow satisﬁed most sceptical readers at least for a couple more months,
until Collier’s in its editorial bulletin of May 1908 ﬁnally took readers
Copyright © 2006 Yoshiko Uzawa. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work
may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without
permission from the author.
*Professor, Keio University

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Fig. 1 “Hashimura Togo” photographed by James Hare
Collier’s, Nov. 30th, 1907, 24.

into full conﬁdence. The text, accompanied with two photos, respectively captioned “Mr. Wallace Irwin, as ‘Hashimura Togo’ ” and “Thesame photograph of Mr. Wallace Irwin before he was Japanned,” creates an overall impression that the author, the publisher, and the reader
took this racial impersonation as an entertainment. A letter from ananonymous reader quoted in the article states: “My congratulations toyou and to Togo, who, I imagine, is, at least, only a near-Jap. No real
Oriental could, I fancy, get quite that real aspect of his own people.”2
Irwin’s Hashimura Togo column could have come to an early demise
without a letter of support from Mark Twain. The father of American literature sent an encouraging letter to Collier’s and highly praised Togo:“That boy is the dearest & sweetest & frankest & wisest & funniest &delightfulest & loveablest creation that has been added to our literature

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for some time. I think he is a permanency & I hope so too.”3 Twain’s
prediction came true before long, and The Letters of a Japanese Schoolboy was published in 1909 by the thriving literary publisher Doubleday& Page Company. The American Magazine called The Letters “thecomic sensation of the decade,” while New York Globe named it “thegreatest joke in America.” Twain’s words provided the most powerfulendorsement, and eventually awarded Togo the lifelong title of “MarkTwain’s pet.”4Wallace Irwin was a proliﬁc writer during his lifetime, although almost unknown today. He published more than forty works, four of whichfeatured Togo. Irwin created this imaginary persona partly from his own
experience of being a poor, self-supporting student. Togo achieved suchenormous popularity in the early 20th century that Irwin could not surpass him in his creations. The Togo columns appeared for over a quarter of a century in various magazines and syndicates such as Collier’s,
Good Housekeeping, The American Magazine, Sunset, Life, and The
New York Times. The ﬁrst Togo book was followed in succession by Mr.
Togo: Maid of All Work in 1913, Hashimura Togo: Domestic Scientist
in 1914, and More Letters of a Japanese Schoolboy in 1923. Togo
became a propagandist for Herbert Hoover’s national campaign for the
starving children of Europe in 1921, having already become a nationalcelebrity in the early 1920s. For millions of Americans Togo became a
representative of the Japanese, and his popularity reached its peak around
World War I, bottoming out around World War II.
Hashimura Togo has thus far intrigued scholars as an early exampleof racial stereotypes created by Anglo-American authors. As Elaine H.
Kim and other critics have observed, Togo, a comical servant who speaks
with a funny accent, is one among many “caricatures of Asians,” fabricated “Orientals” which have been the stock-in-trade in American
popular culture for generations. Togo owed his honoriﬁc speech to“Chinese” English. This pseudo-Chinese accent had long been employedin minstrel shows and other popular cultural media, placing emphasis on
Oriental otherness phonetically as well as visually. The Oriental’s contrast to the “white” had also been encoded in the Oriental’s body images.
A buck-toothed, slant-eyed, pigtailed man wearing puffy-legged pants,
eager to eat the uneatable with pleasure and ready to receive whatever
physical violence with ease, was a typical “Chinese” caricature in the
19th century. Based on this supposed Chinese, the Oriental body image
was constructed as non-American and non-human.5 Togo’s features and204

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physique were also derived in part from this Oriental image, especiallythose created by the New York caricaturist Ralph Barton in 1923.
Irwin created his comical Japanese schoolboy in this Orientalist tradition. And as Kim has justly observed, Orientalism promoted racism bycreating a racial other in caricatures of Asians, by deliberately distorting
real Asian existence and experience, and by depriving Asians and Asian
Americans of their chance to express themselves and be accepted in theAmerican media.6 There is no doubt about this.
The present paper, however, proposes to reveal multi-layered social
existences within this Oriental persona. Hashimura Togo was for
Wallace Irwin what Mark Twain was for Samuel Langhorne Clemens:a literary pseudonym, commercial trademark, the writer’s mask to protect himself, and a medium by which to express himself, in one. Irwin
created Togo not only as his racial other but as his authorial self, coming from the same class, sharing the same critical spirit. In the minstrel
tradition, wearing the mask of a literary fool, Irwin could make astutesocial comments from the viewpoint of the social underclass, putting theeasy premises of middle-class society into question. Togo’s hilariously
broken English, which has been thus far taken only as a sign of racism
by critics, functioned as a means to at once remove the smug mask ofAmerican middle-class values while casting light on the confusion beneath.
Moreover, Togo did not appear in the absence of real Japanese. His
was a time when America had mixed feelings toward Japan, Japanesepeople, and things Japanese. Through its victories over China andRussia, Japan became a new military power in Asia and the Paciﬁc overwhich America also held its own imperialistic designs. Partly as aconsequence, a tide of xenophobia ran increasingly high, especially on
the West Coast. The Asiatic Exclusion League was formed in San
Francisco in 1905, the San Francisco school controversy occurred in
1906, and the Vancouver Riot in September 1907 stimulated the antiJapanese movements growing rampant on a large scale down the West
Coast. The early 1900s thus marked the beginning of violent racial antagonism toward Japanese immigrants, which was a natural continuation of
the anti-Chinese sentiment that began several decades earlier. It was inthis context that Hashimura Togo made his appearance. No matter how
imaginary Togo was, the Japanese in America did not and could not simply receive him passively. Instead, they worried about, rejoiced in, exploited, and groped for various possibilities, which Togo’s appearance

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opened up for them. In 1917, he became an exotic, sexual hero in the
Paramount movie “Hashimura Togo.” Sessue Hayakawa played the titlerole, giving birth to another Togo that Irwin never dreamt of creating.
The contrast between Togo in print and Togo on screen enables us toﬁnd in him a multifaceted view of class, gender, and race issues in theearly 20th century American popular culture.
II
Hashimura Togo’s “Japanned” English is the staple of his humorous
writings. He is addicted to honoriﬁcs, invents unconventional phraseology, and makes many seemingly careless mistakes in grammar andspelling. A good example is his ﬁrst letter in Collier’s, entitled “Our
Noble Allies.” When involved in a race riot, Togo confronts the violent
mob with jujitsu, but as weak as he is, he is injured. From his hospital
bed in San Francisco, he sends his ﬁrst letter to New York: “To Esteemed
Excellency the Editor of what is much widely read Collier Weekly,” hebegins. “Dear Sir—I am a Japanese Schoolboy age 35 years & I come tothis Free Country . . . to return to Japan. . . . I am conﬁned in hospitalenjoying much pain from brick-bat wound sent to me by an American
patriot.”7The most ironical misunderstanding occurs when Togo answers “Yes”
to the question about racial “mixing”:
Some frequent Professors are asking the question now: Will White Man andYellow Man ever mix? I answer Yes because I have knowledge of the affair.
They mix once in San Francisco, they mix once in Vancouver. But suchmixing is not good-healthy for the human race because it make broken glass,pistol-shot, outcry, militia and many other disagreeable noises. Japanese gentleman mix races with jiu jitsu, Irish gentleman with gas-pipe. Those are both
good ways to know.8

The above passage suggests more than one type of racial-mixing. First,
to the sceptical reader, this is equivalent to a tongue-in-cheek confessionof Togo as a yellowface persona. The word “affair” insinuates homosexuality or homosociality between two men of different races. Second,
this passage reﬂects the anti-assimilation and anti-miscegenation arguments, frequently heard in the surge of anti-Japanese feeling in the 1900s.
In both contexts, “no” was the expected answer: the white race and theyellow race will never, and should never mix. Togo however ignores

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such social contexts of the question, and answers in the afﬁrmative,
revealing his cultural illiteracy. His justiﬁcation provides another interpretation. Hence, third, the race riot is a racial “mix.” This seemingly
naive misinterpretation of “mixture” parodies the underlying premise ofsegregation, that people can and should be separated along the color line,
which is basic to the anti-assimilation and anti-miscegenation arguments. Fourth, Togo is alluding to the history of the Irish in America,
who have actually crossed the color line from the colored to the ethnic
white in the course of the 19th century. In the early days, as Noel Ignatiev
notes, they called the Irish “niggers turned inside out,” and the black“smoked Irish.”9 Accordingly, the Irish and the black were given similar features and physiques in their caricatures. For the Irish, Togo deserves a “brick-bat wound” precisely because he is right about the Irish
being ex-colored men.
Thus, Togo’s serious social commentary is sugarcoated with his seemingly foolish slapstick of English. No matter how far-fetched his acrobatic English sounds, how unreal his comical nature makes him look, hisconcern is down-to-earth. He keeps in touch with his contemporary
America, not the far away fairyland. Pseudo-Japanese columnist that heis, Irwin’s Togo does not seem to feel camaraderie with either American
Japonism in art and craft which was in vogue from the 1870s, orJaponism in print and on stage, popular in the 1900s, both of which cultivated romantic feelings for the “good old Japan.” The Togo column
had at least at the beginning the raw power of the laughter of the social
underclass, powerful enough to blow away such quaint aestheticism
based on exoticism.
The Japanese schoolboy Togo is a curious mixture par excellence. He
is a man of 35 years expected to do work that is traditionally genderedfemale. In spite of his name, which is the name of the military hero
Admiral Togo, he is a physically weak paciﬁst. Unable to escape theappellation of Japanese schoolboy, he is more often than not out of work.
His name itself is a curious mixture. Both Hashimura and Togo are
Japanese proper names. Yet Hashimura is a surname, as is Togo; therefore the combination of the two makes a strange name for Japanese. In
the signature printed in each letter, the name is in Japanese in the orderfrom the top to the bottom (Fig.1). Hashimura is in katakana (one of theJapanese phonograms) and Togo is in kanji (ideogram). From the use of“Mr. Togo,” Togo must be the last name. Thus the signature is in theorder of the ﬁrst name ﬁrst and the surname last, quite contrary to theway in which Japanese names are normally written.

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During three decades of Togo’s appearance in various magazines andnewspapers, the original emphasis on his mixed character more or lesschanged. The longest and possibly the best serialization appeared in
Good Housekeeping in 1912. Anthologizing the best stories from thisserialization, the book Mr. Togo: Maid of all Works was published. As
is apparent from the title, the gender-class inversion was more in focus,
and his “Mr. maid-hood” was in the foreground.
Togo’s letters are written in the ﬁrst person; therefore, all the protagonists, regardless of their social status, no matter whether it is coded byclass, gender, race, or age differences, speak in “Togo English.” Thisessentially non-discriminatory use of discriminatory English seems to
be more operative than ever to produce comical effects in Good Housekeeping. Togo speaking with a curious accent sounds funny as a matterof course. And yet, middle class prudent ladies—the epitome of white
middle class American civilization—speaking with a Togo accent also
makes a humorous, if not funnier, impression.
To put this in perspective, Togo’s English induces laughter because it
subverts categories to disturb grammatical as well as social order. Threeof the characteristic features of his English—excessive use of honoriﬁcs,
abuse of personiﬁcations, and gender inversion—are a useful means ofsubverting categorical assumptions. In Togo English, a mistress is “honorable,” as is a ﬂy. A master is “he,” and so is a vacuum cleaner, which
Togo the servant “girl” strives to master. In this subversive English,
absurdity of social hierarchy is laid bare; no authority is spared fromattack. Togo, for instance, looks up the word “vacuum” in a “Webster”
dictionary only to ﬁnd the deﬁnition useless to understand a vacuum
cleaner. “How could Mr. Danl Webster speak such untruth by his Dictionary?” Togo wonders. Just as the politician Daniel Webster is mixed
with the lexicographer Noah Webster because they are both Websters,so vacuum cleaner is mixed with ostriches because they are both voracious: “This intellectual Vacuum machinery resemble ostriches in what
they eat. He delight to sip up tacks, needles, buttons and other hard groceries.”10
Togo is not timid. He knows how to talk back to the supposed authorities. To Mrs. K.W. Pumphrey, for example, who has ordered Togo tocatch ﬂies, he retorts back with his criticism of “wasp”:“How much ﬂies we caught this a.m., Togo?” she ask it.
“Six,” I say it. “Five house and one butter.”“Unloosen Hon. Butterﬂy,” she dement. “We should not punish nature’s
lovely insex because of sins of others.”

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So I grabb that lovely insex and attemp remove him from his sticky toes. But
when I done so he turn meanly and bit me on thumb with hot end of his poison tail.
“That butterﬂy are a wasp!” I lecture amid Japanese word curse.
“Wasps does little harm,” she say sweetishly.
“What little they does can be noticed immediately,” I snarrel.11

Or, to Mrs. Washington Fillups who says no to everything her husband
does, Togo speaks on behalf of his suffering master: “Husbands should
not be furniture for the home—Home should be furniture for the
Husband. I speak this because I saw it.”12 To Mrs. Cicero Earnest who
advocates a strict vegetarian diet in her family, Togo sympathizes withher husband who appears to him “very vegetable.”13 Togo always has
his say about his mistresses’ high-handedness.
Togo in this series is constantly at odds with white middle-class housewives. He loses his job of domestic servant time after time, forever insearch of a new employer. A clever device to keep the stories going, his
incessantly moving from one place to another gives us an ample chance
to view the most hidden secrets of the white middle-class households:
the confusing reality under the veneer of the cult of domesticity. Mistresses of their respectable homes are busy with their obsessions, suchas the cult of cleanliness, the scientiﬁc management of baby rearing,
modern cooking, social calling, vegetarian diets, and so on. Togo puts
these obsessions into question. In spite of his efforts to understand, as
Kim has observed, Togo’s English is as faulty as his interpretation. The
reader knows that all his efforts to understand American middle-classlife and language will be in vain.14 At the same time, however, we also
wonder whether it is worthwhile to understand an obsessive cult likeMrs. Bellus’s, for whom a vacuum cleaner is next to godliness, or likeMrs. Pumphrey’s, for whom the germ theory of the ﬂy is her bible. In
his essay entitled “Are you one of those perfect housekeepers?” Irwin
contends that “There is a certain arrogance about perfect housekeepers,
only comparable to the arrogance of those who speak foreign languages
you don’t understand.”15 This is exactly what is in the foreground in the
Togo column in Good Housekeeping. By juxtaposing a Japanese Mr.
Maid-of-all-Work with tyrannical white female housewives obsessedwith various cults in the 1910s, Irwin succeeds in presenting his doubleedged social commentary.
In the early 20th century, the situation surrounding middle-classwomen was confusing, not just to Togo. As argued by Lois W. Banner

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and David M. Katzman, many middle-class women were suddenly
forced to be managers of households in a modern society, having to copewith ever changing contemporary trends. These women had more freetime but a less rigid standard of conduct to rely on. They had more information on new thoughts and technological advancements advocated byearly feminists and domestic scientists, but little experience and less conﬁdence. In the whirlwind of middle-class households, it was often theservant who bore the brunt of these changes and the entailing confusion.
This resulted in a signiﬁcant shortage of female domestic workers, andproduced a great number of writings on the so-called servant problem.16
The problem was not so much the servant’s unwillingness to work as the
mistress’s whimsical maltreatment of her servants. The Togo column inGood Housekeeping also functioned as an exposé of the servant problem from a servant’s point of view. Togo’s confused/confusing existence, like secret ink, reveals and caricatures the confused/confusingstate of his employers. By adding a backstage view to the problem, he isa “servant problemb [sic]” (a mixing of bomb and problem) par excellence.
III
The term “Japanese schoolboy” was invented in the 1880s, but
Japanese students who supported themselves by working as domestic
workers in middle-class families were as old as the history of theJapanese immigrant in the United States.17 For example, Joe Niijima, thefounder of Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, started his self-supporting student life in Boston working as a domestic servant as early as the1860s.18 “Schoolboy” in America was introduced to Meiji Japan througha number of tobei (crossing-to-America) guidebooks and ex-schoolboys’
autobiographical writings. These tobei publications repeatedly statedthat the job of a “schoolboy” was a convenient way for the poor student
to support himself, and that America was a “paradise for poor students.”19
Tobei publications thus encouraged readers who craved an opportunity
to cross the Paciﬁc Ocean.
However, it is one thing to read about a “Japanese schoolboy” andanother to actually be one. The Japanese schoolboy as an occupation wasa categorical anomaly. Crossing the Paciﬁc Ocean was not the only
crossing that ﬁrst generation Japanese immigrants (issei) had to go
through. As Hashimura Togo says, “I am a Japanese Schoolboy

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employed as a servant girl.” Schoolboys were expected to do the job ofa maid, a job normally done by working class women and colored womenin America. How this crossing of the gender-class boundaries humiliatedthe Meiji Japanese man’s sense of manliness is demonstrated in the confession of a real Japanese schoolboy anonymously published in theweekly Independent.
What would the boys in Japan say if they found me out? I am thus employedin the kitchen receiving the orders from the maid-servant whom I have once
looked down and thought never to be equal while I was dining at my uncle’s
house. . . . There is no personal liberty while your manhood is completely
ignored.20

Apparently, the above example’s misery arises from his own consciousness that he has crossed the gender-class boundaries. He has fallen below
his social status, and has become something that his friends back in Japan
would never even think of becoming: a jocyu or gejo (servant girl), a job
only the lowly woman would have undertaken in Japan. Yoshio Markino,a Japanese painter who made his career in London, likewise recalls his
tragic ﬁrst day as a schoolboy in San Francisco. He got the job to earn
the wage of a dollar and a half per week, and when the ﬁrst day of heavy
duty was almost over, he was too exhausted to remember that his hiredname was “Charlie,” not Yoshio. Failing to answer his mistress’s calling him “Charlie,” he was bitterly scolded for his inattention. A minutelater, he saw himself in a white coat and apron in the mirror, and wasanguished: “the tears so freely ﬂowed out from my eyes, and I buried myface with both arms.”21 Kyuin Okina, a journalist and writer, also spent
his ﬁrst days in the United States as a houseworker. In his autobiography he chronicles his mixed feelings about his position: “This is the mostdespised work of servant girl [ jocyu boko] in Japan.” Feeling shame andgrief, Okina can only justify his lowly work by appealing to the incantation “rodo wa shinsei (it is sacred to work)” and differentiating his jobfrom hers: “This job of housework is as lowly as that of Japanese servant girls, and yet, I am not as ignorant as they are, and I am not what
they are.”22
The phrase “rodo wa shinsei” that Okina repeats to himself was widelybelieved among Japanese immigrants to be an American doctrine rooted
in Protestantism. This was, in fact, one of the most frequently cited ideas
in tobei guidebooks and writings of ex-schoolboys. The historian Teruko
Kumei points out, however, that this phrase was possibly not an

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American but a Japanese invention. According to Kumei, Japaneseimmigrants, pressed to justify the lowly job of “schoolboys” in someway, seized on the work ethic of American Protestantism and made up
the phrase. With this allegedly American doctrine, Japanese houseboys
could “justify their servile position of a servant girl and could still believein their bright futures in America,” inviting “unsatisﬁed youth of Meiji
Japan to come over to the United States.”23
Although invented to justify the servile jobs, the idea of rodo wa shinsei could in fact foster servility among the poor Japanese immigrants. It
was so difﬁcult for self-supporting schoolboys to complete higher education that they were inclined to ﬁnd in this idea an easy excuse to giveup. As Keieisei, an ex-schoolboy at Stanford University in the early
1900s, argued in his memoir in 1911: “Nothing is more lamentable thanto let oneself be deceived by the mere words of ‘rodo wa shinsei’ and towaste one’s precious time.”24
The Japanese leading politician Yukio Ozaki voiced his gender-classprejudice in 1888 that schoolboys had developed “maid-servant servility,” and he even called these schoolboys a “blot on Japan’s national
image.”25 He feared that these lowly domestic man-maids would represent Japanese in the future, and that these socially castrated Japaneseimmigrants might be excluded in the way Chinese immigrants had been
excluded.
The Japanese community leaders in America shared this prejudice andanxiety. They stigmatized domestic laborers including schoolboys, despite the fact that the majority of the Japanese community were actuallyengaged in some kind of domestic labor. Shozo Mizutani, a leading
member of the Japanese community in New York, stated in his book on
the Japanese community history that domestic labor was “a job rooted
in slavery,” and therefore absolutely “not an ideal job” for Japanese to
do.26 Given that in 1921, the year Mizutani published his history, threefourths of the community members were domestic laborers, the historian
Mitziko Sawada points out that the community leaders’ stigmatizationof domestic labor was “confusing.” The Japanese community could havelifted the stigma and eased the wounded pride of Japanese domestic
laborers; or, they could have created new employment opportunities andprovided assistance for Japanese immigrants to make career changes or
seek promotion. However, they kept on stigmatizing domestic labor as“slave work” or “jocyu boko.” As Sawada maintains, the stereotype of
Asian men as “unmanly” played on both American and Japanese

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patriarchal perceptions, and could not help but put “the Japanese domestic worker in New York in a state of perpetual subordination and inferiority.”27
Although in such a state of “perpetual subordination and inferiority,”
the schoolboy’s life was not entirely tragic. Novice schoolboys made anumber of funny mistakes in their ﬁrst encounters with American life.
Yone Noguchi in his autobiography recounts a number of comical mistakes of his fellow schoolboys, beside his own experience of rushing“into my Madam’s toilet room without knocking.”28 The American middle-class household was a complex mystery to novice schoolboys. They
needed to learn everything from A to Z, but their poor English ability,and no small cultural differences, made them poor students. A schoolboy named “Frank” in Henry Kiyama’s The Four Immigrants Manga
wakes up at four o’clock in the morning and takes apart the cooking stove
in order to clean it. Another schoolboy named Henry (probably Kiyama
himself ) offers to scrub the back of his mistress bathing in the bathtub,
only to ﬁnd himself accused as crazy for his efforts to act like a servant
girl in Japan. A bilingual situation helped produce comic relief. Keieisei
notes that some clever Japanese schoolboys gave themselves false names
such as taiko (minister) and danna (master). Every time their masters
called their names, they were referred to as “masters” without their realmasters knowing it.29
The anxiety of Japanese politicians and Japanese community leadersin America—that Japanese men might be represented by unmanly
Japanese schoolboys—did not prove to be groundless. In 1907,
Hashimura Togo made his appearance, adding fuel to the ﬂames of anxiety. The mistakes (both intentional and unintentional) that real novice
Japanese schoolboys made are not unlike (at least some of ) Hashimura
Togo’s. Like Markino, Noguchi, and Keieisei quoted above, a numberof ex-schoolboys have left their writings, which usually contain at least
one passage about funny mistakes they made. Although he is an imaginary persona, Togo seems to share something with the real Japanese
domestic laborers. This is because for Togo and for the real Japanese
schoolboys, humor and laughter could provide powerful weapons to survive in, and to ﬁght against, the oppressive hierarchies to which they
were subordinated.
What was Hashimura Togo’s reception among the Japanese community members? The Japanese Consul in Chicago, Kazuo Matsumura,sent a letter (dated May 29, 1909) to Foreign Minister Jutaro Komura in“WILL WHITE MAN AND YELLOW MAN EVER MIX?”

213

which he called Irwin’s Togo column in Collier’s a “gimmick [gibun].”Matsumura mistakenly assumed that Wallace Irwin was a “Will Irwin”
who wrote a treatise sympathetic to anti-Japanese sentiment on the West
Coast, entitled “Why the Paciﬁc Slope Hates the Japanese” in New York
Pearson’s Magazine. Matsumura feared that Hashimura Togo might bea premonition of a rising tide of anti-Japanese sentiment on the East
Coast.30
A letter from a Toku Oe reveals entirely different feelings toward
Togo. The letter, sent from Sacramento to Irwin via Collier’s, is typed
and beautifully autographed in Japanese with a pen in the way theJapanese name should be written, the ﬁrst name last and the last nameﬁrst:
Dear Sir, I am a young Japanese school-boy in this town, and one of many
enthusiastic admirers and thousands readers of the Collier’s Weekly. Allow
me to say that Hon. Hashimura Togo was the best friend of mine, and think
he is the funniest and the frankest general in the humor world, as well as
Admiral Togo the Nelson of Far East is the most ﬁerceful [sic] and thestrongest sea-ﬁghter.31

The author of the letter continues that he has failed to ﬁnd Togo in San
Francisco, and heard the rumor that Togo was not a true “Samurai,” buteither a “Nipponed Yankee” or a “Yankeed Nipponese.” I wonder if it
was another fake letter written in imitation of Togo’s English, because“Hon.” and “Samurai” sound too Orientalistic. But the way the writertries not to humiliate Admiral Togo seems to be in accord with patriotic
feelings that Japanese issei all shared. It is also very likely that the real
writer was either Oe’s white master, who asked Oe to sign the letter, orOe himself, who asked his master to check and correct his English. Thereis no way to prove this letter’s authenticity, but no way to disprove it
either. So let us assume that it was from a Japanese schoolboy who signed
the letter, and imagine what this schoolboy’s sympathy could possibly
mean.
Before Hashimura Togo, “Japanese schoolboy” had been, socially, theleast valued existence even among his own countrymen in the UnitedStates. Notwithstanding this, Collier’s, one of the major white American
weeklies, ran the column of a “Japanese schoolboy.” It is difﬁcult toimagine that schoolboys would waste this chance of social acknowledgment given from white society over the heads of arrogant elite membersof the Japanese community in America. Astute immigrants exploited this214

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chance to survive in this doubly discriminatory society. An example canbe found in Irwin’s valet named Jiro, whom Irwin hired in 1915 when
he was a widower. Irwin jokingly called him “zero,” but not without reason. Jiro was extremely careless and Irwin ﬁred him many times. But
every time he was ﬁred, Jiro came back the next morning as if nothing
happened, and talked about how he felt honored to be able to work forthe creator of Hashimura Togo. This small trick worked, and Jiro kept
his job till the day he went back to Japan.32
Kiyoshi K. Kawakami, an issei journalist, gave yet another interpretation of Togo in his review of The Letters of a Japanese Schoolboy in
The New York Times Saturday Review of Books. This one-time socialist
came to the United States in 1901, received his master’s degree in political science from the University of Iowa, and since 1906 had been a regular contributor to this major American newspaper’s book review pages.
When he wrote a review article on Irwin’s Togo book, he was already aconspicuous ﬁgure in American journalism.
In his review “Japanned-English, English-Japanned,” Kawakami
invites us to a walk on the streets of the port city Yokohama to search
for the “masterpieces in pidgin English.” At every turn we take, “genuine” unique phrases welcome us. We see “The ribbons, the laces, theveils, the feelings” inscribed on the signboard over a dry goods store. A
store specializing in women’s dresses calls itself “A Dealer in Draper,
Milliner and Ladies Outfatter.” On a barbershop’s window, we ﬁnd“Head Cutter.” Kawakami suggests that the comparison of these genuine
masterpieces of Japanned English with Togo’s would reveal theiressential dissimilarities. “Assisted by an eminent author, poor Togo lostthe characteristic naiveté and charming simplicity of his own style, andhis letters are burdened with words and phrases that he never dreamedof using.”33
Thus, Kawakami emphasizes the difference between the real and thefake. Togo’s English is a dangerous mixture of pleasure, pain, humor,
and racism. Togo easily allows his “noble allies” to vent their anger
against him. For no matter how hard he is struck or how many times heis kicked, he would say, “I enjoy my pain, thank you.” Knowing that to
be confused with Togo was a risky business for a real Japanese schoolboy, Kawakami attempts to dissuade the reader from carelessly mixing
the two.
Though Togo’s English is entertaining, its author Wallace Irwin seems
to have “another purpose,” which Kawakami deﬁnes as “an attempt to“WILL WHITE MAN AND YELLOW MAN EVER MIX?”

215

bring home to the Americans their follies and foibles and extravagances
through the pen of an imaginary Japanese schoolboy who is extremely
humorous, cheerful, and jolly.” What Togo portrays is “their [Americans’]”follies, not Japanese, yet here Kawakami sounds ambivalent. Should one
interpret Irwin’s attempts at social commentary “through the pen of animaginary Japanese schoolboy who is extremely humorous, cheerful,and jolly” as a part of “their follies and foibles and extravagances”?34
Kawakami signiﬁcantly leaves this as an open question.
IV
When the Paramount movie “Hashimura Togo” was released inAugust 1917, the Togo column in Good Housekeeping was at the heightof its popularity. The serialization of the column in this family magazine
was breaking its own record for the longest run every week; the ﬁnal
record was stretched out into six long years from 1912 to 1918. In effect,
the name of Hashimura Togo was, at that point, virtually a household
word for American middle-class families.
Though Wallace Irwin had not contributed a line to the scenario of
this silent ﬁlm, his name was also credited along with the scenario writer
Marion Fairfax, the director William C. de Mille, and other (white andJapanese) actors and actresses. The title role of Hashimura Togo wasplayed by the Japanese Hollywood star Sessue Hayakawa, who was thenat the prime of his popularity. The ﬁlm of this silent movie is no longer
extant, but from its scenario and other available material we can reconstruct “Hashimura Togo” on the screen.35
A short synopsis given in American Film Institute Catalog reads:
Bearing the burden of an accusation of a breach of diplomacy committed byhis brother, Hashimura Togo leaves Japan in disgrace for the United States
where he enters the employ of Mrs. Reynolds as a butler. Togo soon learns
that Mrs. Reynolds’ daughter Corinne, although in love with Dr. Garland, isbeing coerced into marrying Carlos Anthony who, having appropriated all ofher deceased father’s funds, now promises to save the family from ﬁnancial
ruin in return for Corinne’s hand in marriage. Enlisting the aid of a reporter,
Togo succeeds in proving Anthony’s duplicity in time to stop the marriage,
thus freeing Corinne to marry Garland, and after a series of misadventures,
returns home, his name cleared, to his sweetheart in Japan.36

Togo on the silver screen is in double jeopardy: he risks his life and honor
for his unworthy brother; and he risks his love and job for his beloved

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YOSHIKO UZAWA

mistress knowing that she is in love with someone else. To accommodate this new Togo, a new social background is created. Throughout theﬁlm, Togo is a noble man (the second son of a Japanese noble, Baron
Katzu) thinly disguised as a butler, a job at the top of the hierarchy ofdomestic labor. He is thus no longer a Japanese schoolboy at the bottomof the domestic hierarchy, with no particular Japanese social backgroundto speak of. So even when Hayakawa-Togo ﬁghts against the racism of
his fellow domestic workers at Mrs. Reynolds’s, his upper-class gentleness gains the upper hand. To the maid who insistently demands that heeat the food drenched with Tabasco sauce in scene 90, Togo simply
declines to dine, saying, “I have already eaten with my honorable nose.”To the chauffeur who openly declares war with Togo in scene 83, heﬁghts using jujitsu with elegance. Unlike Togo in the magazine, Togoon the screen is always the winner of the “race riot.”
The personae of Togo on the silver screen and Togo in the magazine
seem very different at all points. The fact that the Japanese Hollywood
star Hayakawa played the title role of Togo explains these differences.
The Hollywood star system controlled and used star identities, beyond
the conﬁnes of individual ﬁlms, as “capital” and “image” to promoteﬁlms to the public.37 Sessue Hayakawa’s Oriental star image—the exotic,
sexy, glamorous man from the Orient—curbed the dry laughter thatpunctuated Togo’s social critique of American middle class households.
Accordingly, on the screen, Hayakawa-Togo was more glamorous thanabsurd, more sexy than troubled, with a sense of humor more quiet thanloud.
Still a Togo, Hayakawa on the screen writes and speaks in Togo
English to show the Togo trademark of cultural ignorance and/or innocence. Applying for a job, he writes the following recommendation letter all by himself. The letter is a masterpiece in its imitation of Togo’s
characteristic grammar. “To lady, Dir Sir: Hire Togo and you will wonder why! He can cook without pain. O see. See how well he boils pies
and other American vegetables. Can ron furnaces, babies and ottomobiles. Behaves like sweetheart to strangers. He will be a nice trial foryou. I have know Togo since baby. Yours truly, Togo.”38 The mistakes
in spelling and grammar, mixing things of different categories (a “pie”
is an “American vegetable,” “furnaces, babies and ottomobiles”), gender inversion (“lady” is addressed as “Sir”), unlikely phraseology (“boilpies,” “cook without pain,” “behaves like sweetheart to strangers”), andoxymoron (“nice trial”) are typical of Togo’s acrobatics of English.

“WILL WHITE MAN AND YELLOW MAN EVER MIX?”217

On the screen, Hayakawa-Togo alone speaks in broken English thatreinforces its racist aspect. However, in such an exceptional scene ofrelaying messages, we can have a glimpse of the Togo world in the magazine where all speak in the same broken language, regardless of their
racial, gender, and class differences. Knowing that her beloved Dr.
Garland is at the door, Corinne asks Togo, “Tell Dr. Garland that I’m
not dressed but will be right down,” which Togo conveys to Dr. Garland
as “Miss Corinne no dress on—but be right down.”39 Though on a small
scale, this is the movie version of a comic scene of a prudish lady speaking in Togo English. Here the joke is not only on Togo, but also on
Corrine who is stripped with words and on Dr. Garland who is teased
with them.
Thus Togo through the power of his English transformed Hayakawa
into a comedian. More often than not, however, it was Hayakawa whotransformed Togo to conform to his own “star” image: a sexy, glamorous, Oriental lover whose deathly embrace will captivate women. We
can see Hayakawa’s Togo in a still photo, where he appears in a white
kimono in a dim candlelit room (Fig.2). Here on his body two opposite
instincts of life and death, Eros and Thanatos, are doubly encoded, andboth of them contribute to the creation of the new Hashimura Togo.
According to the scenario, the scene depicts Hayakawa-Togo attempting suicide. Here in the photo, we see him kneeling down in a frontal
position on the white carpet holding a dagger in his hand. His pale face
and white kimono stand out against the dimness surrounding him. Taking
the responsibility for his brother’s treasonous crime, he submits to hisfather who has blindly urged him to die with “honor.” In the original
Togo columns, no such pathetic scene of suicide exists; there, “harakiri”
is only a comical interjection used always with an exclamation mark.
The idea of “death with honor” might remind the contemporary audience in the 1910s of another “Japanese” death enacted on stage, Madame
Butterﬂy’s. “To die with honor . . . when one can no longer live withhonor” is the supposed inscription on the blade with which she commits
suicide.40 In 1917, Togo thus joined the long procession to come of deador dying Asians on stage, who can become “real” only through their“death or self-effacement” for Western spectators.41 Not only kimono,
but also “harakiri,” an archaic style of suicide practiced by the samurai
class in feudal Japan, is part of the ﬁlm’s interpretation of Japonism orOrientalism.
A small detail of this kimono, however, leads us to its dual meanings.

218

Fig. 2YOSHIKO UZAWA“Hashimura Togo,” 1917 (Courtesy George Eastman House)

Taking a closer look at Hayakawa’s kimono sleeves, we see his cuff-buttoned shirt sleeves slightly sticking out. If this kimono is worn as formal
attire for a traditional Japanese suicide, this western shirt underneathdoes not make sense. Rather, it is conceivable that Hayakawa wears thiskimono also as an American dressing gown for white consumption. Overthe body of Hayakawa in an Americanized kimono fashion, codes of(forbidden) sexuality and exoticism play a duet. In fact, Hayakawa’shead, slightly raised, looks as if it is on a pillow on the bed behind him.
The burning candle is placed in a way that looks phallic, as is the dagger in his hand. Hayakawa’s facial expression looks ecstatic and his open
arms seem ready to embrace a phantom white woman on this side of thephoto.
In the scenario, Togo’s embraces are for a particular “phantom”
woman on the screen, his Japanese ﬁancé O-Noto-San, whose role wasplayed by a white actress in yellowface makeup. The name O-Noto-San
is similar to the name of the pseudo-Japanese author Onoto Watanna,
whose Japanese romances had been very popular in the 1900s. Onoto

“WILL WHITE MAN AND YELLOW MAN EVER MIX?”

219

Watanna (Winnifred Eaton) was a Chinese Canadian author in America
writing Japanese romances with a Japanese-sounding pseudonym. Herforte was the sentimental romance between men and women of a different race but similar class often set in an exotic Japan. In her search forinter-racial woman-to-woman sympathy, Watanna’s works shared muchof the sensational design of the Orientalist dramas of Madame Butterﬂy,whose role was often played by white actresses and singers on stage.42
Watanna’s works, beautifully illustrated, were sold as Christmas books
to millions of American middle-class readers. Watanna and Irwin were
two contemporary pseudo-Japanese authors. Irwin’s forte was in stark
contrast to Watanna’s; his was the realistic social commentary (sugarcoated with comical slapstick) from the viewpoint of the underclass,which was also coded by race, gender, and sexuality. The marriage ofHashimura Togo (young Baron Katsu) and O-Noto-San suggested in thelast scene of the movie epitomized the marriage of two Orientalist traditions of American pseudo-Japanese narratives in “Hashimura Togo”
in 1917.43
The desexualized Hashimura Togo that Irwin created in print, and thesexual Togo that Hayakawa enacted on screen, are apparently at odds.
However, let us recall that Hayakawa’s star image is rooted in popularcinematic Orientalism, where Japanese, Burmese, Indian, Chinese,
Arabian, and Hawaiian symbolize the same Other to middle-class
America; therefore, the two contrasting Togos can also be conceived as
the two sides of one coin. If the original Togo is rooted in the Orientalist
tradition of yellowface slapstick-cum-social commentary, this new Togo
is a curious hybrid blossom, romanticizing the Orient as in Onoto
Watanna’s Japanese romances.
About this Hayakawa-Togo, the reviews were mixed. Motion PictureNews called Hayakawa’s Togo “natural and realistic,” while Rafu
Shinpo, a Japanese-American newspaper, found Hayakawa’s performance unsatisfactory, stating that “Hayakawa is not much of a comedian.”44 Wallace Irwin, also dissatisﬁed with Togo’s mutation on thescreen, was going to publish the alleged anti-Japanese novel Seed of the
Sun in 1921. Irwin later stated that his primary motivation for writing
this serious novel was to “give a realistic view of the Japanese living in
America” to the public. Irwin believed that Americans “had fed too longon romantic stuff about the people of Nippon who, according to the popular version, live mostly under cherry blossoms, wangling samisens andcommitting hara-kiri according to the ancient code.”45

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YOSHIKO UZAWA

And yet, let it be said that by exploiting sexuality and exotic nobility
in the comical servant Togo, a character that originated in the minstrel
tradition of social commentary, Hayakawa gave Togo (and himself ) a
chance to balance the competing popular Orientalist traditions. By mixing the two to create the hybrid Togo on screen, Hayakawa at least
searched for a way out of stock caricatures of the Japanese in America,and perhaps also out of his own star/stock image of the Oriental villain.
“Will White Man and Yellow Man ever mix?” Togo asks and answers
in the afﬁrmative. In the case of Hayakawa-Togo we may ﬁnd anotherafﬁrmative answer to the question. Togo has been a cultural arena inwhich not just Anglo America but Asian America took part in their struggles for meanings within and outside American Orientalism.
NOTES
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at Smith College in 1999, and at theConference of the American Literature Society of Japan at Konan University in 2004. I
would like to thank Floyd Cheung, Daniel Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, andMitziko Sawada for their insightful comments and suggestions.
1
I have given a detailed discussion of how this photo-portrait relates to the Togo stories in my paper, Yoshiko Tomishima, “Nippon danshi urimasu: Wallace Irwin to koka
monogatari [A Japanese Schoolboy for Sale: Wallace Irwin and the Discourse of Yellow
Peril]” Monogatari no yurameki [American Narrative in the History of Consciousness],
ed. Takayuki Tatsumi and Momoko Watanabe (Tokyo: Nanundo, 1998), 245–70.
2
Quoted in “The ‘Japanese Schoolboy’,” Editorial Bulletin, Collier’s: The National
Weekly, 23 May 1908, 7.
3“A Letter from Mark Twain,” photoengraved in “Editorial Bulletin,” Collier’s, 8Aug. 1908, 22.
4
Undated newspaper clippings, Wallace Irwin Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
5
See Elaine H. Kim, Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings andTheir Social Context (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); Frank Chin, Jeffrey
Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Sawn Hsu Wong, eds., Aiiieeeee!: An Anthologyof Asian-American Writers (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974); Robert
G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999); Yuko Matsukawa, “Representing the Oriental in Nineteenth-Century
Trade Cards,” Re/collecting Early Asian America: Essays in Cultural History, ed.
Josephine Lee, Imogene L. Lim and Yuko Matsukawa (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 2002); Krystyn R. Moon, Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American PopularMusic and Performance, 1850s–1920s (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press,
2005).
6
Kim, ibid., 22–23.
7
Wallace Irwin, Letters of a Japanese Schoolboy (New York: Doubleday, Page &Co., 1909), 3–4.
8
Ibid., 4.
9Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995), 41.

“WILL WHITE MAN AND YELLOW MAN EVER MIX?”

221

Irwin, Mr. Togo: Maid of All Work (New York: Dufﬁeld & Co., 1913), 5.
Irwin, Hashimura Togo: Domestic Scientist (New York: Hearst’s International
Library, 1914), 43.
12
Irwin, Mr. Togo, 47.
13
Irwin, “Togo and the Vegetarian Diet,” Good Housekeeping, September.1915, 332.
14
Kim, ibid., 13.
15
Irwin, “Are You One of Those Perfect Housekeepers?” Wallace Irwin Papers. Thisessay is narrated from the viewpoint of a baby named Wallace Irwin, who is constantly
at odds with his mother, a perfect housekeeper and believer in the scientiﬁc rearing ofchildren based on the germ theory of disease and modern dieting. Because of her, thebaby Irwin cannot do what he wants to, such as sucking his thumb to his heart’s content. Although limited to non-verbal protests he nonetheless presents a commonsense
criticism against trendy cults ﬁrmly believed by the middle-class households in the early
20th century. The position of the baby narrator is comparable to that of Togo, whose
innocence or ignorance makes him at once a victim and a critic of “perfect” housekeepers’ reigns.
16
Lois W. Banner, Women in Modern America: A Brief History (San Diego: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 54; David M. Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women andDomestic Service in Industrializing America (New York: Oxford University Press,
1978), especially chapter 1.
17
The excellent studies that have shed light on the lives of early Japanese studentimmigrants are Yuji Ichioka, The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese
Immigrant, 1885–1924 (New York: Free Press, 1988); Mitziko Sawada, Tokyo Life, NewYork Dreams: Urban Japanese Visions of America, 1890–1924 (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1996).
18
About Niijima as possibly the ﬁrst Japanese schoolboy, see, for example, Daijiro
Yoshimura, Saikin shisatsu seinen no tobei: Kugakusha no tengoku [A Recent Surveyof Young Japanese Going to America: A Paradise for Poor Students] (Tokyo: Chuyodo,
1902; repr. Tokyo: Yumani-shobo, 2000), 98–99.
19See, for example, Yoshimura, ibid.; Seisyu Fujimoto and Syuko Akihiro, Kaigai
kugaku annai [A Guide to Self-Supporting Student Life Abroad] (Tokyo: Hakuho-do,
1904: repr. Tokyo: Yumani-shobo, 2000), 185–386.
20
Hamilton Holt, ed., The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans As Told by Themselves (New York: James Pott & Co., 1906), 261–2.
21
Yoshio Markino, When I was a Child (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifﬂin Co.,
1912), 216.
22
Kyuin Okina, Waga Issho: Uminokanata [My Life: Beyond the Ocena] (Okina
Kyuin Zensyu Kankokai, 1972), 37–38. My translation.
23
Teruko Kumei, Gaikokujin wo meguru shakaishi: Kindai America to nihonjin imin
[A Social History of Foreigners: Modern America and Japanese Immigrants] (Tokyo:
Yuzankaku, 1995), 79. My translation.
24
Keieisei, Beikoku kugakusei jikki [A Memoir of a Poor Student in America] (Tokyo:
Naigaisyuppan-Kyokai, 1911), 82–85. My translation.
25
Translated by and quoted in Ichioka, ibid., 24.
26
Shozo Mizutani, Nyuyoku nihonjin hattenshi [History of the Japanese in New York](New York: Japanese Association of New York, 1921: repr. Tokyo: PMC PublishingCo.,1984), 380, 381. My translation.
27
Sawada, ibid., 28.
28
Yone Noguchi, The Story of Yone Noguchi Told by Himself (London: Chatty &Windups, 1914), 36, quoted in Ichioka, ibid. 25.
10
11

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YOSHIKO UZAWA

Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama, The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in
San Francisco, 1904–1924, trans. Frederik L. Schodt (Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press,
1999), 32–49; Keieisei, ibid., 59–61.
30
Nihon gaiko bunsho [Archives of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs], vol. 42:
no. 2 (Tokyo: Nihon kokusai rengo kyokai, 1961), 684–85. My translation.
31
Correspondence from Toku Oe, Wallace Irwin Papers.
32
See Irwin, “I Look at Me[autobiography],” 204, Wallace Irwin Papers.
33
Kiyoshi K. Kawakami, “Japanned-English, English-Japanned,” The New YorkTimes Saturday Review of Books, March 27, 1909, 180.
34
Ibid.
35
“Hashimura Togo,” Paramount Scripts, Special Collections, The Margaret Herrick
Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I am grateful to Daisuke Miyao
for information and perspectives regarding this scenario of “Hashimura Togo.”
36
Alan Gevinson, ed., American Film Institute Catalog: Within Our Gates: Ethnicity
in American Feature Films, 1911–1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997),
436.
37
See Paul McDonald, The Star System: Hollywood’s Production of Popular Identities(London: Wallﬂower Publishing, 2000), 38–39.
38
Scene 68 in “Scenario” (dated May 19, 1917), “Hashimura Togo,” Paramount
Script. The Margaret Herrick Library.
39
Scene 94, ibid.
40
David Belasco, Six Plays (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1928), 32.
41
As for the idea of “death of Asia” on stage, see James S. Moy, Marginal Sights:
Staging the Chinese in America (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993), 82–94.
Kevin Brownlow’s caption to this still photo stresses not just Togo’s but Hayakawa’s
own experience of attempted “harakiri” when he was “dismissed from the JapaneseNavy.” Brownlow, Behind the Mask of Innocence: the Social Problem Films of the Silent
Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 350.
42
See Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), chapter 3.
43
Different interpretations of this ﬁlm version of Togo can be found in Donald
Kirihara, “The Accepted Idea Displaced: Stereotype and Sessue Hayakawa,” The Birthof Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema, ed. Daniel Bernardi (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 81–99; Daisuke Miyao, “ ‘East is East andWest is West’?: A Cross-Cultural Study of Sessue Hayakawa’s Silent Stardom” (Ph.D.
diss., New York University, 2003), 248–265. Kirihara argues that in the ﬁlm version ofHashimura Togo, the “accommodationist narrative” of Irwin’s Togo stories provided
Hayakawa with not just humor but “useable narrational goals” such as “characteristics
of earnestness and cleverness, and a nostalgia for the past” (Kirihara, 89–90). Miyao
observes the “Americanization” of Hayakawa’s star image by Japonism in the ﬁlm“Hashimura Togo.”
44“A Wallace Irving [sic] Story Adapted to Screen, Sessue Hayakawa in ComedyDrama,” Motion Picture News, 25 August 1917, 1275; “Katsuhai wo seisai seyo [Punish
These Motion Picture Actors],” Rafu Shinpo 25 August 1917, 3.
45
Undated miscellaneous personal correspondence, Wallace Irwin Papers.
29