The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 31 (2020)
Copyright © 2020 Yushi Yamazaki. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with thisnotice 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.

Becoming Internationalist Subjects: The Growth ofMultiracial Labor Organizing among Japanese
Immigrant Communities in California, 1925–1933

Yushi YAMAZAKI*INTRODUCTION
In this article I attempt to reconstruct the history of Communist-led labororganizing in California in the 1920s and 1930s involving Issei (Japaneseborn) and Kibei (US-born Japanese who were raised in Japan and eventually
returned to America). Two key analytical concepts I address are foundin the terms “un-becoming Japanese American” and “internationalism.”1
Much previous scholarship in Japanese American history has emphasized
the narrative of “becoming Japanese American.” These scholars haveassessed the racially differentiated vulnerability of Japanese immigrants
and their American-born descendants by investigating the sociolegal
institutionalization of anti-Japanese racism, including bans on Japaneseimmigration, denial of naturalization rights, denial of property rights
through alien land laws, limited work opportunities, and segregation ofschools and residency. Many of these discriminatory practices were
underpinned by derogatory Orientalist representations and outright mob
violence. An analytical framework that measures social vulnerability by the
distance from full American citizenship, however, impedes a critical*Lecturer, Nagoya University, Aichi Prefectural University, Nagoya University of Foreign
Studies, and Kinjo Gakuin University

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examination of those Japanese immigrants whose visions did not conform toideas of American civil nationalism, inflated boasting about JapaneseAmerican economic ascendancy, or the preservation of middlemen ethnic
economy.2 These individuals, rather, questioned the US system of racial
capitalism and attempted to expose and deflate the model-minority myth that
had captured the minds of mainstream Japanese American community
leaders. My goal is to rescue the history of those early Japanese immigrants
who looked beyond liberal capitalist property rights and sought racial andeconomic justice for all.3
This topic is relevant not just for those Issei but also for Nisei (US born,
second generation living in the United States) and Sansei (third generation)and their descendants because it alters the narrative of victimization that
culminated in Japanese internment during World War II. Though Japaneseinternment is a prime example of the violation of Nisei and Sansei civil
liberties, a thorough understanding of it must include sovereign power overimmigration that controls labor influx and outflow, expulsion, detention, anddeportation—all of which were previously used on Issei. In the 1920s and1930s, the US government found that their ability to detain and deportmigrant workers was an indespensable method of maintaining a desiredlabor pool and deradicalizing agricultural workers in the interests ofcapitalist agribusiness.4
Although I follow and expand on the emergent scholarship of global
radicalism and internationalism, I wish to pay keen attention to thedifferences between transnationalism and internationalism.
“Transnationalism” refers to a mode of analysis or description of
movements that cross national boundaries, usually because of undesirable
conditions (e. g., such as slavery and global color line) that extend beyond asingle nation-state. Movements built by subjects of diasporas tended tooverarch home and exile because these immigrants have to deal withproblems in one or more countries. Understanding “internationalism,” incontrast, involves a fundamental critique of the nation-state as the basic unit
through which racial capitalism operates with its antiradical laws, antiforeign-born deportation policies, lack of labor protection laws, and otherstate-sanctioned differentiation of social vulnerability. When the movementof capital overseas dramatically increases in the form of imperialist projectsof colonization, monopoly, and bloc economies, internationalism leads
struggling groups to become involved in cross- or supranational solidarity
movements. Although many scholars have used the term “transnationalism”
with the implication that it involves “internationalist” politics, I use the term

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89“transnational” as a neutral descriptive adjective.5
In addition, I use the adjectives “multiracial” and “multiethnic” not torefer to persons of mixed ancestry but to point to the diverse composition oforganizers and participants who aimed to abolish racially and ethnicallydifferentiated wage hierarchy by not excluding anyone from their labor
unions and by not working as strikebreakers.6
Historian Josephine Fowler has, significantly, investigated both Japaneseand Chinese immigrant radicals in the United States by using not only
American sources but also Russian archives related to the Communist
International (Comintern). While Asian Americans tended to be invisible insuch oral histories of Communist California agricultural labor organizing as
Dorothy Ray Healey and Maurice Isserman’s California Red, she argues thatthe experiences of Issei and Kibei leftists was not simply peripheral but
integral to the historical narratives of Asian Americans and the US Left.
Fowler provides a powerful analysis of communications within CPUSA
apparatuses (spanning New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles). The
campaigns of Japanese Communists in California, however, receive little
analysis in the context of California’s political economy. In this article I
attempt to correct this lack by providing a more specific description of theiractivism in and around Japanese American communities.7
Historian Scott Kurashige has given a concise overview of JapaneseCommunists in Los Angeles with an emphasis on their relationship with
African Americans and forms of solidarity for racial and economic justice.
He duly argues that the campaign in support of the black Scottsboro youths
was a crucial part of the solidarity work. While his account sheds light on
divergent class interests within the local Japanese community, hisinterpretation of the isolation of Issei radicals from the mainstream Japanesecommunity does not go far enough. I analyze this isolation resulting fromthe oppressive racial regime in the United States, including California, thatcombined antiradical laws and police brutality, immigration policies thatcreated pools of migrant workers, as well as intra-ethnic alienation caused
by Japanese community leaders’ accommodationist politics.8
THE LOS ANGELES JAPANESE WORKERS ASSOCIATION
A new generation of labor activists emerged both independent of anddependent on the heritage of Sen Katayama and Shusui Kotoku. The transPacific travels, sojourning, and migration of these two prominent Japanesesocialists and their comrades stimulated antiwar and anti-imperialist

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discourse among Japanese students who were working their way throughcollege by doing menial jobs in the San Francisco Bay/Oakland area in thefirst decade of the twentieth century. Kotoku criticized the American
Federation of Labor’s (AFL) refusal to organize Asian immigrant workers
and tried working with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which
advocated inclusionary policies under “One Big Union.” Tetsugoro Takeuchi
and others under Kotoku’s anarchist influence founded the Fresno Labor
League in 1908 and attracted more than four thousand members. Their
pointed criticism of the militarism of Tennosei (the Japanese emperor
system) provoked the spying program by Japan’s Department of Interior aswell as Japanese consulates, resulting in the infamous 1910 High Treason
Incident in which Shusui Kotoku and some other anarchists were hanged.
This had a chilling effect on Japanese immigrant communities, particularly
among immigrant leftists. Despite this setback, the seeds of labor activism
among Japanese immigrants continued to be sown by Sen Katayama, who
returned to the United States in 1914.9
One of the New York–based student laborers, Yada (an alias), who wasunder the influence of Katayama and founded the New York Nihonjin Rodo
Kyokai (NY Japanese Workers Association) with other comrades in 1923,
came to Los Angeles with Japanese immigrant radicals from San Francisco,
Waseda graduate Sadaichi Kenmotsu and farmworker Tetsuji Horiuchi. They
found there the Okinawan leftist youth group Reimeikai (New Dawn
Society) and many Issei and Kibei-Nisei who were willing to organize
Japanese immigrant laborers. Together, they eventually founded Rafu
Nihonjin Rodo Kyokai (Los Angeles Japanese Workers Association,
hereafter JWA) in spring 1924. They sought to organize a broad
constituency of workers including gardeners, farmhands, domestics,
housewives, and day workers, along with some students. The membership of
JWA grew to nearly three hundred during the 1930s.
The JWA published its program in one of the major Japanese-language
newspapers in Los Angeles, Rafu Shimpo:
We intend to organize all Japanese workers in the U.S. and carry on
economic and political struggles; we will work together with all anticapitalist groups such as trade unions and socialist, communist,
anarchist, and syndicalist organizations; . . . we are against nationalism,
imperialism, racism, as well as colonialism and semi-colonialism; wewill aid any form of struggle against the capitalists; our final goal is thenationalization of production and distribution; we will teach andBECOMING INTERNATIONALIST SUBJECTS

91

advocate to the proletariat how to achieve this transition from acapitalist to a socialist society; we firmly believe in the organization,unity, and education of the proletariat; the JWA declares that our work
cannot be accomplished without the support and help of all working
people.10
The start of their organ and the peripatetic movement and networking asorganizers marked their early activity. In 1925, Horiuchi, Yada, andKenmotsu launched a monthly JWA journal, Kaikyusen (Class war). Soon
Kenmotsu traveled east to Passaic, New Jersey, where the Communists led
the textile strike, and also took the summer training course of the Party
school in New York, where he met a member of the Young Workers Leagueof America, Seizo (Seiya) Ogino. The YWL was a Communist youth
organization established in 1922 in New York. Returning to San Francisco
after this exciting experience, Kenmotsu resumed editing the journal in
September 1926 along with Hoko Hideo Ikeda, an Issei farmworker,
newspaperman, and participant in the 1920 Oahu sugar strike.11
JWA members considered the California Criminal Syndicalism Act of1919 as an impediment to their labor organizing as well as something thatmade foreign-born activists especially vulnerable. In 1927, in the eleventh
issue of Kaikyusen, contributor Ogino introduced the organization
International Labor Defense to its readers. Established in Chicago in 1925,
the ILD defended the rights of strikers, exploited farmers, and victims ofpolitical frame-ups. Because defending foreign-born workers fromdeportation was a central issue to them, the JWA founded a Japanese Branchof ILD in Los Angeles on August 5, 1927. (The Japanese Branch of ILD in
NY had been organized in fall 1926.) Nisei, as well as those born in Japan,
could be targets of the Criminal Syndicalism Act, receiving long prison
sentences. It was crucial to solidify the ILD branch before the JWA started
their planned organizing drive in California’s rural farming communities.12
Karl G. Yoneda, a Kibei, returned from Japan to the West Coast at thisjuncture and, recruited by Einosuke Yamaguchi, joined the Los Angeles
JWA and ILD, Japanese Branch in 1927. Yoneda’s trajectory shows his
distinctive politicization process in Japan. In the upsurge of labor activism
after the 1918 rice riots, in which poor port laborers of Toyama Prefecture
tried to prevent the transportation of rice to protest excessive rice prices—
the uprisings spread to about 360 municipalities in forty-one prefectures in
the following three months and involved more than a million people—
Yoneda organized rubber factory workers and printers in Hiroshima and92

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corresponded with local Japanese anarchist journalist activists Etsuta Tan
and Ryuzo Hironaka. Yoneda returned to the United States to evadeconscription. He had been unfamiliar with American racist practices until
Yamaguchi explained how Japanese had been excluded from unions
affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which supported
the Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Asian Exclusion Act.
Yamaguchi also informed him that the Workers Party of America (after mid
1929 known as the CPUSA) had begun paying special attention toorganizing what we now would term workers of color.13
ORGANIZING AGRICULTURAL WORKERS
In 1928, the JWA took up the issue of wage cuts that many Japanese
farmhands suffered at that time. Though the monopolization andconsolidation of land through white settlement and discriminatory land laws
set the fundamental conditions, a Japanese agriculture economy wasestablished through coordination among family farms, ethnic wholesalemarkets, and nogyo kumiai (associations for commercial agriculture).
California’s intensive farming, however, required cheap, plentiful seasonallabor—the presence of a migratory agricultural proletariat. In 1925, 46
percent of employed Japanese in California worked in farming, with mostbeing migrant workers. Japanese farmhands often shared their difficult labor
conditions with Mexican, Filipino, and Chinese workers. As historian Mae
M. Ngai has deftly analyzed, the “agricultural labor market and immigration
laws worked in tandem to create a kind of imported colonialism” to recruit
Filipino colonial subjects, who were not under the jurisdiction of the 1924
immigration exclusion laws, to meet labor needs. The laws also exempted
workers from the Western hemisphere from quotas, thereby maintaining atransnational flow of Mexican laborers, while excluding them from theAmerican polity through restrictive immigration controls.14
JWA members needed to place themselves in a historical context in orderto understand the formation of racial hierarchy within the California farming
industry and how their precursors resisted labor exploitation by multiracial
and multiethnic labor organizing. It set up a separate organization fororganizing farmworkers, the Japanese Agricultural Workers Organizing
Committee (JAWOC). Bakunin Fukunaga took the lead in gathering ahistory of Japanese farmworkers’ struggles in the West. Especiallysignificant were the examples of multiethnic organizing in the 1903 Oxnard
beet strike, the 1920 Oahu sugar strike, and the Fresno Labor League, which

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93

organized four thousand Japanese grape pickers and sought the collaborationof Italian and Mexican IWW organizers in 1908–10.15
JAWOC’s organizing drive through the small farms of Stanton, San
Gabriel, Fresno, and Lodi beginning in spring 1928 gave them theindispensable experience of achieving the goal of obtaining “equal wages
for equal jobs” among different ethnicities. Though JWA members who
were fluent in English played an important role in communicating with
Filipino and Mexican fellow laborers, the organizers felt a need to hire anorganizer from each ethnicity. They also were concerned about how tointervene in the larger power structure of the industry made up of
landowners, growers, shippers, and market owners.16
JWA AND ILD SOLIDARY WITH WORKERS IN CHINA AND WITH
COMMUNISTS IN JAPAN
While organizing locally, the JWA also paid attention to the struggles ofthe proletariat in East Asia. The May 30, 1925, killing of Chinese student
labor protestors in Shanghai, known as the Nanjing Road Incident, hadtriggered the rapid spread of a global movement in defense of China’s
factory workers known as the May Thirtieth Movement. In Los Angeles,
Communist Party organizers held two “Hands Off China” mass meetings,
with help from local Chinese and Japanese.
By 1926, there were 16,940 Japanese living in Shandong, China, and 150
million yen had been invested under Japanese imperialist control. In May
1928, when Japan announced its military intervention against the Chinese
Nationalist Party’s Northern Expedition that was trying to reunify China, inorder to “protect the life and property of Japanese,” the JWA denounced it
and had their Chinese comrades translate their anti-imperialist statement to
distribute it in the Chinatowns of New York, San Francisco, and Los
Angeles.17
The February 1928 Japanese general election, the first one since thepassage of universal male suffrage in 1925, gave an opportunity for leftists
to gain seats in the central Diet. The Japanese Communist Party (JCP),
though outlawed, openly supported some leftist candidates. Prime Minister
Giichi Tanaka evoked the provisions of the 1925 Peace Preservation Laws
and ordered the mass arrest of Communists on March 15, 1928. Fivehundred of the 1,652 arrested Communists and sympathizers were tried.
Members of the JWA and the ILD Japanese Branch protested by sending
telegrams to the Japanese government and raising funds for their comrades’

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trials. All were found guilty and sentenced to stiff jail terms. Sadaichi
Kenmotsu denounced the mass arrests at the 1928 May Day demonstrationin Oakland, California, and the gathering sent a protest resolution to Japan.
Months later, at an ILD mass meeting at Los Angeles’s Union Church on
San Pedro Street members expressed their support for the prisoners and theirfamilies. This campaign was a crucial part of JWA’s internationalist
politics.18
TUUL-AWIU FARMWORKER ORGANIZING
Organizing agricultural workers continued to be one of the main foci of
the JWA. The Trade Union Unity League (TUUL) was formed at thenational level at the beginning of September 1929 to create independent
industrial unions inside and outside the AFL and to prepare the Los Angeles
JWA organizers for a larger strike. From its founding convention, Jim Yanai
and Kaizo Hakomori brought back the exciting program based on classstruggle and industrial unionism. JWA members unanimously joined theAgricultural Workers Industrial Union (AWIU), which was affiliated with
the TUUL. It clearly opposed nativist unions and racial discrimination in
general. The AWIU’s membership card of 1931 reads: “Experience has
shown us that in fighting for better conditions we must not only fight against
the growers and other bosses, but also against the misleaders and agents ofthe bosses, the fakers in the reactionary trade union movement.” The AWIU
welcomed “all those who, regardless of race, color, age, or sex, are ready tofight.” Their organizing strategy was to form farm committees that would
analyze the working conditions and the demands of each ethnic work force
on a given ranch.19
In California’s Imperial Valley in 1930, the new TUUL-AWIU effectively
organized farmworkers across racial and nationality lines. The Great
Depression had tremendously lowered the prices of agricultural products,
leading to reduced agricultural pay, so that Mexican, Filipino, Indian,Japanese, and Chinese workers earned starvation wages under inhumane
conditions, while growers pitted racial and nationality groups against one
another. Farmhands in the area responded enthusiastically to the call fromthe organizers, overcoming the barriers that the Mexican Mutual Aid
Association maintained between Mexicans and other workers. As union
organizing spread from field to field, some eight thousand workers became
involved, according to Rodo Shimbun of January 15, 1930. (JWA’s organ,
Kaikyusen, was renamed Rodo Shimbun [Labor newspaper] in March 1928).

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The workers’ militant demands were: “union recognition; abolition of thelabor contractor system; abolition of piecework; a minimum wage of fifty
cents an hour; a fifteen-minute rest period after every two hours of work;
abolition of child labor; equal pay for equal work; free ice to be furnished bygrowers; better housing; better water; and no racial segregation.” The
Communist Party in tandem with the ILD organized support for a strike.20
With the appearance of this militant labor movement led by Communists,
white-supremacist vigilante groups became increasingly aggressive in
California. These included the Associated Farmers, a powerful right-winggroup of growers in rural communities in the Imperial Valley such as
Brawley and El Centro, the Silver Shirts in San Diego, and a revived Ku
Klux Klan in the Central Valley. In the Imperial Valley, police and vigilante
forces aligned against the strike movement with their sheer numbers andbrutality. All outside shipments of food and other supplies for the strikers
were blocked. Although the Workers Defense Corps protected union
headquarters from tear gas and gun violence, arrests came on April 14, 1930,
when the union was holding a meeting to prepare a conference of all
agricultural workers in the Imperial Valley.21 ILD organizer Frank Spector
described that meeting:
One after another the workers spoke, each in their own language. They
told of starvation and sickness of their wives and children, of constantwage-cuts, of the long hours of bitter toil under a scorching sun . . . ofthe readiness to fight under their union’s militant guidance. Suddenly
the door burst open. Into the hall rushed an armed mob of policemen,
deputy sheriffs and privately hired thugs, with revolvers and sawed-off
shotguns. . . . Out of this mob stepped Sheriff Gillette, chief gunman of
the Imperial Valley bosses. Ordering the workers to throw up theirhands . . . [there was] a frenzied search of the 108 workers . . . they
were chained in groups. Then the mob, with a brutal display of force,threw them into huge trucks [and] . . . into the El Centro County jail.22
Nine Communist organizers were sentenced from six to forty-two years instate prisons for violating the Criminal Syndicalism Act. Tetsuji Horiuchi
was sent to Folsom prison and chose to be deported after he served over two
years of his term.23 The foreign-borns were especially vulnerable todeportation. Horiuchi was not the first JWA member to be deported.
Sadaichi Kenmotsu had been arrested at an antiwar demonstration in front of
the San Francisco Chinese Consulate on July 27, 1929. On January 3, 1930,

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Einosuke Yamaguchi was arrested at a forum at a small hall on Brooklyn
Avenue in Los Angeles. Under the Criminal Syndicalism Act, the police
were able to hold anyone in custody without bail for seventy-two hours
before filing specific charges.24
At an “organize the unemployed” demonstration spearheaded by the
TUUL in March 1930, Yamaguchi, Hakomori, and Fukunaga were arrested
and thrown into jail and fined $500 each. Yamaguchi, who had been an
earnest mentor for Karl Yoneda, was eventually ordered to be deported. Just
two weeks after the mass arrest in the Imperial Valley, two other Issei
Communists, John Isamu Kobayashi and Meikichi Nishimura, were arrested
at an antideportation and anti-imperialist demonstration at Battery andWashington Streets in San Francisco that was organized by Japanese andChinese branches of the ILD. They were also ordered to be deported.25
This series of deportations of radical activists shows that those who
contributed to the movement cannot be grasped within the scope of a“becoming Japanese American” narrative. Rather, their existence makes us
reconsider their vision of community building through a radical labor
movement and racial and economic justice. In other words, without
recovering the working-class perspective in the Japanese community in
America, it’s not possible to properly assess the Issei’s vulnerability toinstitutionalized racism and anti-radicalism and their experience of intraethnic prejudice.
THE UNEMPLOYED COUNCIL CAMPAIGNSOn July 4, 1930, the National Unemployed Council was organized in
Chicago as the result of an escalating struggle for “work or wages,” which
proposed relief at full wage rates. In its first iteration this amounted to $25
per week for the unemployed person and $5 for each dependent.26 Ripples
from the Great Depression also reached the Japanese community in Los
Angeles. Unemployed cooks, chauffeurs, and gardeners, who had been let
go by formerly well-off white families, filled Little Tokyo employment
agencies. Soon, Japanese branches of the National Unemployed Council
were established in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. The Los
Angeles branch estimated that there were approximately three thousand
unemployed Japanese in Southern California. It asked the Japanese
Association (a national organization founded in 1908 and led by the
economic elites of Japanese American communities as a proxy for theJapanese government and consulates) and the Sumitomo and the Yokohama

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97

Specie banks to contribute to an unemployment relief fund. They all refused.
In contrast, the Tokyo Club, a gambling joint where working-class Japanesehung out, opened its dining room daily to feed jobless Japanese. Dr. Toshio
Ichioka, a medical physician, and Dr. Jinkichi Matsuda, a dentist, exReimeikai member, and longtime JWA supporter, provided Japanese
Unemployed Council members with free services. Intra-ethnic coldness
toward Japanese Communists was clear, but members of the UnemployedCouncil also knew that relying on private charity would not in itself solve
their distress.27
Thus, the Unemployed Council began campaigns that demanded
distribution of state aid to both US citizens and foreign-borns. On February
25, 1931, the Unemployed Councils of every major city held hunger
marches and petition campaigns in support of the Workers’ Unemployment
Insurance Bill. Early in 1931, the Los Angeles City Council submitted abond issue to city voters for five million dollars to fund a work-relief
program. The Los Angeles Times, owned by anti-union Harrison Gray Otis,
expressed skepticism about funding the unemployed to engage in public
works projects, commenting that Mexicans and other unemployed workers
of color were “mostly vagrants profiting from the public purse.” Nativist
discourse was surging in strength, since immigrant laborers were frequently
seen as the cause of job loss among whites in the context of the harsheconomic downturn. Charles P. Visel, the city’s coordinator ofunemployment relief, came to view Mexican repatriation as a one of themore effective means of solving the unemployment problem. On March 23,
1931, the first train of Mexican repatriates left Los Angeles, and many more
followed in the next few years.28
Policymakers who wanted to remove foreign-born laborers always had tonegotiate with urban nativists and the rural agricultural industry that neededcheap migrant labor. In August 1931, the state legislature in Sacramento
passed the Alien Labor Act (Stats. 1931, Ch. 398), which made it illegal for
any company doing business with the government to employ “aliens” onpublic works projects such as building schools, highways, and government
offices. The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce withdrew its support for
repatriating Mexicans because its ties with rural landowners made itconsider the potential economic damage resulting from a decreasing pool ofmobile Mexican workers.29 Japanese farm owners feared labor shortages andstarted an informal “return-to-America” campaign. They attempted tomaintain an influx of Japanese workers, despite the 1924 Immigration Act
that prevented immigration from Asia, by bringing back Kibei, though it was

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the later passage of the Filipino Repatriation Act of 1935 that decisively
accelerated the effort to secure Japanese farmhands for Japanese-owned
farms.30
POLITICS OF SOLIDARITY AND COMMUNISTS’ POSITIONALITY IN THE
JAPANESE COMMUNITY
Japanese CPUSA members (most of whom were also JWA members)
worked to introduce the idea and practice of solidarity in the struggle for
economic and racial justice. Rodo Shimbun highlighted the intersection ofrace and class. Its January 15, 1930, issue drew attention to the exclusion ofcolored workers in the AFL, exemplified by the racially isolated non-AFL
1929 Japanese launderers’ strike in Salt Lake City and the Chineselaunderers’ strike in San Francisco. It also reported on an African Americanattendee at the ILD’s national convention at Pittsburg who called for fighting
against lynching, and a protest against the oppression of Mexican leftist
labor activists in Mexico, staged in front of the Mexican embassy inWashington D.C., and the Mexican consulate in Los Angeles on January 4,
1930. Rodo Shimbun’s coverage of workers of color included the protest
against the lynching of Filipinos in Watsonville in early 1930; the protest
against the death penalty sentence levied on six organizers of a coalition of
blacks and whites that campaigned against lynchings in Georgia; supporting
the strike by two thousand Mexican and Filipino farmhands in Bakersfield in
November, 1930; reporting on the decreasing number of embroidery jobs for
women; demanding full-coverage accident insurance for coal miners ofcolor; expressing solidarity with Filipino strikers at pea farms in San Luis
Obispo and Lompoc in February 1931; and criticizing Japanese scabs.31
When the Scottsboro youths were arrested in March 1931, major
Japanese-language newspapers and the liberal Nisei-oriented JapaneseAmerican Citizens League remained indifferent. In contrast, Rodo Shimbun
avidly protested the injustice of the white-supremacist testimony process. As
the historian Rebecca N. Hill has argued, the ILD changed the definition oflabor defense by including the defense of working-class African Americans
accused of nonpolitical crimes. She reported that the ILD “invoked mass
heroic ideals, celebrated a multiethnic working class as a vehicle ofliberation for the imprisoned and called for popular mobilization.” Karl
Yoneda, then the district literature agent of the Southern California ILD,
mobilized the sale and distribution of the Labor Defender, the national ILD
monthly. Rodo Shimbun on July 15, 1931, reported the beginning of a

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99

speaking tour by an ILD black organizer, Richard Moor, from San Diego.
Eight Issei and Kibei from the ILD Japanese Branch, the Japanese section of
the AWIL-TUUL, the JWA, and the newly formed Japanese Proletarian
Artists League attended the district-wide ILD conference at Long Beach on
October 4, 1931, which mustered support for the Scottsboro nine; Tom
Mooney, the socialist labor leader wrongly convicted of the bombing of the
prowar parade in San Francisco in 1916; and the Harlan, Kentucky, striking
coal miners. Subsequently, Eighty-four organizations decided to hold anindoor mass meeting to widen and deepen the scope of their solidarity at thePhilharmonic Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles on October 30. But thepolice Red Squad blockaded and then attacked the crowd of over three
thousand people with blackjacks and tear gas.32
Rodo Shimbun was fighting an ideological struggle within the Japaneseimmigrant community, too. They were often at odds with the dual
nationalism views of Kyutaro Abiko, the founder and publisher of the daily
Nichibei (Japanese American news). Abiko hoped that Nisei would be able
to assimilate into white America through what George Lipsitz called the“possessive investment in whiteness.”33 He also believed that this generation
was playing a role of improving relations between the country of their birthand the country of their parents’ birth by removing white American“misunderstanding” of both Issei and Japanese living in Japan. Rodo
Shimbun of February 25, 1930, stated that “it was disappointed by thesolution of the Nisei problem proposed by Japanese Association and theJapanese Chamber of Commerce,” which supported a cultural nationalismthat is aloof from the labor problem. For the editors of Rodo Shimbun, theeconomic insecurities that Nisei were facing in the form of discrimination inwork opportunities were part of a larger racialized labor hierarchy. They
were insistent on trying to bring awareness of class struggle to these
American-born Japanese. Rodo Shimbun of December 10, 1930, in
expressing its support of a strike by young reporters at Rafu Shimpo,
indicated that it saw class conflict within the Japanese American community
as inevitable.34
The strike by the fifty employees of Nichibei on June 8, 1931 was anothersign of the crevasse within the Japanese immigrant community. In June, agroup of employees of the Nichibei and Shin Sekai (New World, one of themost widely read Japanese-language newspapers in Northern and Central
California and a less-assimilationist rival of Nichibei) came to ask Rodo
Shimbun workers for advice on how to make management hear their voices.
Though they were low paid, the demand of the first Nichibei strike was not

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for higher wages but for the dismissal of the conservative chief editor,
Hachiro Shishimoto. When they achieved this goal, these reporters founded
the San Francisco Japanese Press Workers’ Union with an Issei reporter and
CPUSA member, Yoshio Sakuma, as its head. On the news of the formationof this union, Abiko fired Sakuma. This incited another strike. Abiko fired all
strikers and restarted the newspaper with scabs on August 12. When the
strikers continued to picket the newspaper, Abiko called for the San
Francisco Police Department to disband them. On September 21, Abikoreluctantly accepted the workers’ demands, including reinstating Sakuma,
and promised the reinstatement of strikers. But he reneged on thereinstatement. Another strike ensued. The San Francisco TUUL gave thestriking workers full financial and moral support. Then Abiko fired thereinstated workers. On December 20, thirty of the strikers began publishinga new bilingual daily, Hokubei Asahi (North American Sun), which mergedwith Shin Sekai in 1935 and was renamed the Shin Sekai Asahi (New World
Sun).35
JWA’s recruitment of Issei laborers was crucial for solidarity work
because it helped their movement to take root in the Japanese American
community. When the Southern Pacific railroad laid off fifty Japanesemaintenance workers on November 23, 1931, the Los Angeles TUUL,Japanese branch tried to help them get severance pay. Although they could
not obtain it, it had them join the Los Angeles Unemployed Council,
Japanese branch. When Los Angeles City suddenly dismissed seventy-four
Japanese streetcar depot employees on September 15, 1932, the TUUL,Japanese branch helped them put forward their demand for rehiring or onemonth severance pay. The workers lost their jobs, but they became membersof the Unemployed Council. With the growing number of unemployedlaborers in the community, the Japanese branches of the UnemployedCouncil made six demands of establishment organizations. These were:
1. The elimination of the fees charged by the Japanese Consulate andJapanese Association for draft deferment and other official papers
2. An end to evictions of the unemployed by hotels and boarding houses
3. A moratorium on bank loan payments due from unemployed workers andsmall farmers
4. The opening of facilities of the Japanese Association, Japanese language
schools, Buddhist and Shinto temples for lodging the homeless
5. The distribution of interest earned by Japanese Association “relief funds”
earmarked for major disasters in Japan to unemployed workers and small

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farmers
6. The distribution of 10 percent of the 1930 one hundred-million-dollar
profits of local branches of Yokohama Specie and Sumitomo banks to
the unemployed in Japanese communities
Little success ensued. Although some Japanese community buildings andtemples donated housing space, those organizations willing to provide cash
relief did so on the condition that the Communist group could not represent
the unemployed and that the relief was strictly a charity handout. In otherwords, the establishment community organizations did not acknowledge
their contributions were made because of workers’ rights or empowerment.36
Two statewide hunger marches organized by the National UnemployedCouncil starting in various locations and converging on Sacramento in 1932
and 1933 drew many people. Karl Yoneda and Harold Ono, a Kibei, joined
the 1932 march. Ono wondered why tangerines were being dumped andpork and potatoes with oil were being buried during the Great Depression.
He started attending a study group at Dr. Matsuda’s clinic and living at theJapanese Communists’ “commune” on West First Street in Little Tokyo in
Los Angeles.37 Ono and commune members Ishige, Murata, and Ikeda gave
speeches in Sacramento’s Japantown on their arrival at the state capital. On
January 11, more than ten thousand people gathered in downtown San
Francisco with demands for “immediate enactment of unemployment
insurance,” “repeal of the Criminal Syndicalism Act,” and “fight against
deportation.” While Ono was staying at a Japanese commune in San
Francisco, a Nisei newspaper carrier of Rodo Shimbun, Toshio Okutsu, got
shot in his leg by a neighbor, Motoharu Inoue, who had been hired by theJapanese Consulate for surveillance. Inoue was indicted for inflicting bodily
injury but was found not guilty after he testified that the consulate had hired
him.38The relative invisibility of the practice of labor activism in the Japanesecommunities in the Japanese American media of the time and in later
historiography by Japanese Americans owes much to repression fromwithout, but it also comes from within the communities. Lack of Japanesecommunity cooperation in unemployment-relief efforts and the Japanese
Consulate’s spying on Communists within the Japanese immigrantcommunities indicates that working-class vulnerability came from many
directions.

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RED SQUAD POLICE BRUTALITY AND DEPORTATION
While Japanese Communists attempted to get a foothold within theJapanese American communities and maintain their overarching solidarity
work, they remained vulnerable to antiradicalism and police brutality
directed at the foreign-born. California inflicted plainly punitive hardships
on Issei Communists. On January 15, 1932, the Los Angeles Red Squad, led
by Capt. William Francis Hynes and local Long Beach police, raided alecture on the economic crisis held by the Communist Party in Long Beachand arrested about two hundred workers who attended. These mass arrestsand subsequent deportation of those Issei who were arrested were one resultof state-sanctioned antiradical suppression.39
As historian Frank Donner has revealed in his book on the Red Squads,
Captain Hynes, who was head of the Intelligence Bureau of the Los Angeles
Police Department and who had appeared before the Fish Committee with amassive 1,500-page testimony and exhibits about the “red menace,” helped
guide other cities in setting up their own police intelligence units. He “didnot permit jurisdictional barriers to impede” his union busting “outside thecity limits.” (Long Beach was not within LA City limits).40
Of those arrested in Long Beach, forty-five were charged with “unlawful
assembly.” Among them were nine Issei Communists. Although themunicipal court judge dismissed the charges against all the defendants, heturned over eleven aliens (including an Indian worker and a Greek activist)
to the US Bureau of Immigration for deportation. The Issei were Kaizo
Hakomori, a gardener and a JWA founder; Bakunin Fukunaga, a farmworker
and AWIU organizer; Kitajiro Yoshioka, a domestic worker and editor ofProletarian Art; Keijiro Nagahama, a chauffeur and ILD activist; and five
Okinawan gardener-activists—Jun Matayoshi, Yosaburo Miyagi (Yotoku
Miyagi’s cousin), Chusei Teruya, Jiro Yamashiro, and Seiei Shima.41
ILD activists who were also Communist Party organizers got busy
obtaining writs of habeas corpus, organizing protests against police brutality
and against the violations of the right to assembly, raising bail funds, andappealing deportation orders on the grounds that those who were deported
would face long imprisonment on return to Japan. After the court granted
these Issei “voluntary departure” to the Soviet Union, they had to raise faremoney to get there. The Southern California target for fare money was three
thousand dollars total. From 1931 through 1935, eighteen Issei Communist
Party members went to the Soviet Union after the ILD communicated with
the International Red Aid headquarters in Moscow about receiving them.

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Four Issei who were previously charged with violation of the Criminal
Syndicalism Act—Horiuchi, Kobayashi, Nishimura, and Yamaguchi—were
also ordered to leave the country along with the Long Beach nine. Kenmotsu
had been deported on December 16, 1931, from San Francisco. Two
gardeners (Noboru Tani and Reiji Taira), a fruit stand worker (George
Hisgashi), and a farmworker (Joe Mori) were arrested for union activities
and deported between 1933 and 1935. It was a huge setback for the JWA andthe multilayered network that they had built through various front
organizations.42
It is also important to note that the Soviet Union had its own problems
with political repression. Some of those who volunteered to go to the Soviet
Union (Hakomori, Fukunaga, Matayoshi, Shima, and Miyagi) trained andtaught at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV) andlater became victims of Stalin’s Great Purge, dying before a firing squad in
May 1938.43 This tragic result does not necessarily reduce the significance of
the internationalism of these Issei. They had recognized the racial regime in
the United States that rendered them unnaturalizable and undeserving aliens.
They were able to join with Chinese comrades to fight both American
racism and Japanese imperialism. Their internationalism helped them createa vehicle of antiracist labor movement that advocated for workers’ rights andunity regardless of race and nationality.
As Karl Yoneda recalled in his 1983 memoir, much time, money, andenergy were spent on the deportation cases in 1932. Despite difficult
financial conditions, the ILD Japanese Branch was able to recruit two newmembers for each deportee, increasing Los Angeles branch membershipfrom two hundred to three hundred. They were also able to gather threehundred dollars to publish a Japanese edition of Labor Defender and to
expand the bimonthly Rodo Shimbun into a weekly. To further raise funds forRodo Shimbun, they organized a Japan Night on February 11, 1933, at the
Hollywood John Reed Club under the sponsorship of the Japanese
Proletarian Artists League, the ILD Japanese branch, and Rodo Shimbun
readers. The program of the night consisted of proletarian theatrical drama,
speeches, and the serving of food. Five hundred guests turned out, many ofwhom were whites from the Communist Party, labor organizations, andprogressive churches.44
The event did not end without disturbance. Hynes’s Red Squad raided thegathering and mutilated David Alfaro Siqueiros’s mural, which was in theauditorium, and paintings of the nine Scottsboro youths. Historian Michael
Denning has discussed John Reed clubs as important sites of leftist cultural

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production. At this Hollywood branch, activists had mounted an exhibitionof works by black painters to benefit the Scottsboro defendants andsponsored lectures by Mexican muralist Siqueiros. The authorities feared not
the artwork in itself but the way in which these images at this particularsocial location demonstrated the unity of all workers of color.45
CONCLUSION
The 1920s and 1930s saw the creation of the Communist-led JWA as avehicle of multiracial and multiethnic labor organizing. For Japanese
workers in America, who had been excluded by the AFL, this was a majorchance to push forward the struggle for racial and economic justice. In
contrast to the visible Japanese community that clung to an Americanization
effort, many Japanese and Okinawan leftists undertook direct confrontation
with racial capitalism. As they worked with Chinese organizers, discussed“the Negro problem in the United States,” denounced the global reach of
racial capitalism, criticized the two empires of Japan and the United States,and organized integrated unions they developed a politics of solidarity andinternationalism.
During what the Comintern called the Third Period, beginning in 1928
and featuring mass working-class radicalization, the tightly networked
CPUSA and front organizations with their ethnic sections embodied thewidth and depth of the multiracial and multiethnic movement. TUUL-AWIU
and its California branch, played a major role in organizing farmworkers
when New Deal labor legislation excluded them. The racialization of Asian
immigrants as unassimilable and unnaturalizable aliens enabled thecommercialized agricultural industry of California to include them in theirpool of cheap migrant farmworkers of color. Deprived of socioeconomic
security, these farmhands remained vulnerable to the farm labor market’s
conservative open shop system that left room for nonunion workforce andsometimes for scabs to be introduced. They were also vulnerable to theantiradical, anti-foreign-born state violence sanctioned by the US
deportation regime. The 1930 Imperial Valley striking farmworker massarrests and the 1932 Long Beach Communist lecture mass arrest epitomize
the extent of the oppression.
In other words, some Issei had already experienced the danger ofstatelessness before the United States government presented them with
Question 28 of the loyalty review during the World War II internment.
(Question 28 asked individuals to swear unqualified allegiance to the United

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States and forswear any allegiance to the emperor of Japan. Japaneseimmigrants were barred from becoming US citizens on the basis of racial
exclusion, so renouncing their only citizenship would leave them stateless).
The existence of those Issei Communists, who were deported from theUnited States but chose to live in the Soviet Union rather than Japan becauseof its persecution of Communists, points to the significance of class-based
struggle and the problem of global capitalism and Japanese and American
imperialism. Rather than the liberal narrative of “becoming JapaneseAmerican,” with a narrative of “becoming internationalist subjects,” theysubjectively formed what Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker see as theplanetary consciousness of the proletariat.46 What was essential was thatthese often invisible radical Issei and their comrades were able to generate abroad critique that was also applicable to oppression of other groups andother forms.
NOTES
1
I borrow the term “un-becoming” from historian Erica Lee, who suggested it in a panel
titled “New Directions in Asian American History” at the 2015 annual meeting of theOrganization of American Historians. The historical narrative norm has considered theachievement of full citizenship as the ultimate goal. “Un-becoming” means to deconstruct thenorm and allow other narratives to emerge. Using the term “un-becoming” allows me to shedlight on the Japanese deportees, who were a forgotten but significant part of theinternationalist labor movement. For some remarkable examples of scholarship on global
radicalism and internationalism, see George Lipsitz, “Abolition Democracy and Global
Justice,” Comparative American Studies 2, no. 3 (2004): 271–86; Maia Ramnath, Haj to
Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow
the British Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); and Winston James,
Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century
America (New York: Verso, 1998).
2
The “middleman ethnic minority” points to a particular phase in ethnic businessdevelopment, in which immigrant business owners begin to serve the majority population as
well as their ethnic clientele. For example, Japanese Americans opened a wholesale produce
market in downtown Los Angeles, which served the white population as well.
3
Criticism of Asian Americans’ complicity in a power structure that featured racism toward
blacks and white supremacy has emerged as a significant theme in Asian American history.
The relationship between upper- and middle-class Japanese immigrant communities andwhites in the pre-World War II period foreshadows the model-minority myth. See Ellen D.
Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). Historian Yuji Ichioka was critical of thedual nationalism upheld by Japanese American community leaders. See Yuji Ichioka, The
Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885–1924 (New York: Free
Press, 1988), 253, 248–50.
4Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz, eds., The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty,
Space, and the Freedom of Movement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 9. See
also Daniel Kanstroom, Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History (Cambridge,

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MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
5
Laura Briggs and some other scholars use “transnationalism” with an implication ofinternationalist politics. See Laura Briggs, Gladys McCormick, and J. T. Way,
“Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis,” American Quarterly 60, no. 3 (September 2008):
625–48.
6
For an analysis of the politics of multiracial identity, see Jungmiwha Suk Bullock,“Multiracial Politics or the Politics of Being Multiracial?: Racial Theory, Civic Engagement,
and Socio-Political Participation in a Contemporary Society,” PhD diss., University ofSouthern California, 2010. As for the similar use of the term “multiracial” to show thecomposition of local residents, work force, and movement builders, see Scott Kurashige, The
Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los
Angeles (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Laura Pulido, Black, Brown,
Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2006); Mark Wild, Street Meeting: Multiethnic Neighborhoods in Early TwentiethCentury Los Angeles (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008); and David M.
Struthers, The World in a City: Multiethnic Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century Los
Angeles (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2019).
7
Josephine Fowler, Japanese and Chinese Immigrant Activists: Organizing in Americanand International Communist Movements, 1919–1933 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2007), esp. chaps. 1, 2, and 8; Dorothy Ray Healey and Maurice Isserman,
California Red: A Life in the American Communist Party (Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 1990). For Japanese scholars’ examination of the transnational network of JapaneseCommunists, see Iori Kurokawa, Teikoku ni kosuru shakai undo: Daiichiji Nihon Kyosantono shiso to undo [Social movement against an empire: The thought and movement of the firstJapanese Communist Party] (Tokyo: Yushisha, 2014); Shoki Comintern to Higashi Asia
Kenkyukai (Study group on the early Comintern and East Asia), ed., Shoki Comintern toHigashi Asia [The early Comintern and East Asia] (Tokyo: Fuji shuppan, 2007); and Akito
Yamauchi, Shoki Comintern to zaigai nihonjin shakaishugisha: Ekkyo suru Network [Theearly Comintern and overseas Japanese socialists] (Kyoto: Minerva shobo, 2009).
8
Kurashige, Shifting Grounds of Race, 77–90.
9
For further details of the genealogy of the early socialist group derived from Shusui
Kotoku and Sen Katayama, the historical consciousness of struggle that Okinawan
immigrants brought, and the distinctive politicization of Kibei, including Karl Yoneda, Paul
Kochi, and Harold Ono, see Yushi Yamazaki, “Radical Crossings: From Peasant Rebellions toInternationalist Multiracial Labor Organizing among Japanese Immigrant Communities in
Hawaii and California, 1885–1935” (PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2015),
chaps. 4, 5, and 6.
10“The Program of the Japanese Workers’ Association,” January 10, 1925, Karl Goso
Yoneda Papers, Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA (hereafter
KGYP), box 1, folder 11; Rafu Shimpo, January 10, 1925. KGYP holds various contemporary
primary sources including newspapers, leaflets, and resolutions produced by movementbuilders so that researchers need not rely solely on Yoneda’s autobiography, Ganbatte for
information on who built the movement and how.
11
Kaikyusen, September 5, 1926, KGYP, box 47, folder 2; Philip S. Foner, History of theLabor Movement in the United States (New York: International Publisher, 1991), 10:148.
12
Kaikyusen, August 5, 1927, KGYP, box 47, folder 2; Norio Tamura, “Shimbun‘Kaikyusen’ to Kenmochi Sadaichi,” Tokyo Keizai Daigaku jinbun shizen kagaku ronbunshu,
no. 122 (October 2006): 72–73; Karl Goso Yoneda, Ganbatte: Sixty-Year Struggle of a Kibei
Worker (Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1983), 18–19; Ichioka, Issei,
253.

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13
Etsuta Tan to Goso Yoneda, June 1, 1925, KGYP, box 34, folder 10; Naoki Monna,
Minshu Journalism no rekishi [History of popular journalism] (Tokyo: San’ichi shobo, 1983),
chap. 7; Yoneda, Ganbatte, 14–15.
14
Valerie J. Matsumoto, Farming the Home Place: A Japanese American Community in
California, 1919–1982 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 11, 23; Noritaka
Yagasaki, Imin Nogyo: California no Nihonjin Imin Shakai [Immigrant agriculture: Japaneseimmigrant society in California] (Tokyo: Kokon Shoin, 1993); Mae M. Ngai, Impossible
Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2004), 93–95; For a more detailed history of California agriculture, seeJohn Modell, The Economics and Politics of Racial Accommodation: The Japanese of Los
Angeles, 1900–1942 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977); Cletus E. Daniel, Bitter
Harvest: A History of California Farmworkers, 1870–1941 (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1981); Suchen Chan, This Bitter-Sweet Soil: The Chinese in California
Agriculture, 1860–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Devra Weber, Dark
Sweat, White Gold: California Farm Workers, Cotton, and the New Deal (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994); Don Mitchell, The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers
and the California Landscape (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); and Matt
Garcia, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles,
1900–1970 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
15
Yoneda, Ganbatte, 20, 23. For the details and the subtlety of the 1903 Oxnard beet strike,see Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Line: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in
California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), chap. 7.
16
Yoneda, Ganbatte, 23–27.
17
Fowler, Japanese and Chinese Immigrant Activists, 53–59; Yoneda, Ganbatte, 27.
18
Yoneda, Ganbatte, 27; ILD mass-meeting flyer (January 19, 1929), KGYP, box 1, folder
11.
19
AWIU’s membership card of 1931, KGYP, box 1, folder 1; Yoneda, Ganbatte, 30, 32.
20
Daily Worker, January 6, 1930; Rodo Shimbun, January 15, 1930, KGYP, box 4, folder 3.
According to Rodo Shimbun, June 25, 1930, the number of workers involved was fifteen
thousand. Yoneda, Ganbatte, 38; Vivian McGuckin Raineri, The Red Angel: The Life andTimes of Elaine Black Yoneda (New York: International Publishers, 1991), 15–16; Devra
Anne Weber, “The Organizing of Mexicano Agricultural Workers: Imperial Valley and Los
Angeles, 1928–34; An Oral History Approach,” Aztlan 3, no. 2 (Summer 1972): 307–47. The
strike did not happen because arrests were made before it could actually begin.
21
John H. M. Laslett, Sunshine Was Never Enough: Los Angeles Workers, 1880–2010(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 110–11; Fraser M. Ottanelli, The
Communist Party of the United States: From Depression to World War II (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 25.
22
Labor Defender article, cited in Raineri, Red Angel, 17.
23
Leaflet of a mass meeting on April 11, 1931, “Release the Imperial Valley prisoners!”
KGYP, box 1, folder 7.
24
Japanese leaflets “Stop Deportation Order against Comrade Kenmotsu!” issued by
CPUSA District 13, Los Angeles Branch (December 21, 1929) and “Defend Comrades
Kenmotsu and Fujii, who are facing deportation,” issued by CPUSA District 13, San
Francisco Branch (December 22, 1929), KGYP, box 1, folder 11; Yoneda, Ganbatte, 38–9;
Raineri, Red Angel, 17.
25
Yoneda, Ganbatte, 30–39.
26
Karl Yoneda’s 1930 and 1931 membership cards for the Unemployed Council, KGYP,
box 1, folder 11; Chris Wright, “Popular Radicalism in the 1930s: The History of theWorkers' Unemployment Insurance Bill,” Class, Race and Corporate Power 6, no. 1 (2018),

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Digital Commons of Florida International University, https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/
classracecorporatepower/vol6/iss1/4/, accessed January 11, 2020.
27
Japanese leaflet “Appeal to 3,000 Unemployed Japanese in Los Angeles Area,” issued by
the Unemployed Council, Los Angeles Branch (November 22, 1931), KGYP, box 1, folder
11; Yoneda, Ganbatte, 37, 40.
28
Yoneda, Ganbatte, 40–42: Wright, “Popular Radicalism in the 1930s”; Laslett, Sunshine
Was Never Enough, 110; George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture
and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993),
chap. 10.
29
Sanchez, Becoming Mexican America, 211–15. Sanchez astutely points out, “The Los
Angeles Chamber of Commerce, chaired by George Clements, pulled back from their initialsupport of repatriation and called on political officials to restore calm in the Mexican
community. The ties between local urban industrialists and rural landowners in the San
Joaquin Valley and Imperial Valley were strong, so despite widespread unemployment in thecity, the business community was adamant about protecting the large pool of Mexican
workers. What business leaders wanted was an orderly program that would lessen the burden
on local welfare agencies without disturbing the availability of Mexican workers needed tocomplete the harvest at minimal wages” (215).
30
Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in JapaneseAmerica (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 119.
31
Rodo Shimbun, January 10, 1930; January 15, 1930; February 10, 1930; February 25,
1930; March 10, 1930; May 25, 1930; June 25, 1930; and November 25, 1930, KGYP, box 4,folder 3; Rodo Shimbun, January 10, 1931; January 25, 1931; and May 1, 1931, KGYP, box 4,folder 4.
32
Rodo Shimbun, May 15, 1931; June 15, 1931; and July 15, 1931, KGYP, box 4, folder 4;
Rebecca N. Hill, Anti-Lynching and Labor Defense in US Radical History (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2008), 209–11; Yoneda, Ganbatte, 43–45.
33
For a definition of “possessive investment in whiteness,” see George Lipsitz, The
Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), vii–viii. Lipsitz deftly explains that “white
supremacy is . . . a system for protecting the privileges of whites by denying communities ofcolor opportunities for asset accumulation and upward mobility . . . nonwhite people canbecome active agents of white supremacy as well as passive participants in its hierarchies andrewards. One way of becoming an insider is by participating in the exclusion of otheroutsiders.” The economic elites of the Japanese American community tended to emphasize
their economic ascendancy in order to differentiate themselves from other Asian immigrants.
34
Rodo Shimbun, January 15, 1930; February 25, 1930; and December 10, 1930, KGYP,
box 4, folder 3; Rodo Shimbun, January 10, 1931, KGYP, box 4, folder 4.
35
Pictures of strikers and a chronological table of the strike in KGYP, box 1, folder 8;
Yoneda, Ganbatte, 46–47.
36
Yoneda, Ganbatte, 47, 54–55.
37
Leaflet “Support the 1932 California State Hunger March,” KGYP, box 1, folder 12;
Photo of participants in the 1932 hunger march taken in Fresno, KGYP, box1, folder 1;
Tomoyasu Takekuni, Little Tokyo monogatari: Nikkei Communisto to sono shisontachi [Little
Tokyo story: Japanese Communists and their descendants](Osaka: Shiki shobo, 1978), 31–
72.
38
Takekuni, Little Tokyo monogatari, 73–78; Harold Ono probably misremembered the date(February 25) of the shooting in Little Tokyo monogatari. A contemporary leaflet “Protest
Resolution against Japanese Imperialism” (December 1932) addressed to Japanese Prime
Minister Saito and the Japanese Consulate in San Francisco is probably more accurate.

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Leaflets “Come Open-Air Unemployed Meeting! February 4, 1932!” and “Japanese Workers!
Come and Hear the State Hunger March Report!” (March 2, 1932). All leaflets referred tohere are in KGYP, box 1, folder 12.
39
An ILD leaflet “Fight against Police Brutality! Demonstrate against Starvation on Feb. 4!”(February 1932) has some detail on the Long Beach incident, KGYP, box 1, folder 12;
Yoneda, Ganbatte, 49–52; Okinawa Club of America, History of the Okinawans in North
America, trans. Ben Kobashigawa (Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Center, Universityof California, Los Angeles, 1988), 38–41.
40
Frank Donner, Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban
America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 59–60.
41
An ILD leaflet “Fight against Police Brutality! Demonstrate against Starvation on Feb. 4!”(February 1932), KGYP, box 1, folder 12; Yoneda, Ganbatte, 49–52; Okinawa Club ofAmerica, History of the Okinawans in North America, 38–41.
42
Karl Yoneda, “List of Deportees,” KGYP, box 1, folder 7; An ILD leaflet calling for
donations, “11 Workers to be Deported: $3,000 Needed by the End of November,” KGYP,
box 1, folder 12; Yoneda, Ganbatte, 50–51.
43
Shun’ichi Kobayashi and Akira Kato, Yami no otoko: Nosaka Sanzo no hyakunen [Man in
the dark: A hundred years of Sanzo Nosaka] (Tokyo: Bungei shunju, 1993), 117–44; Tetsuro
Kato, Mosukuwa de shukusei sareta Nihonjin: Sanjunendai Kyosanto to Kunisaki Teido,
Yamamoto Kenzo no higeki [Japanese purged in Moscow: The Japanese Communist Party inthe 1930s and the tragedy of Teido Kunisaki and Kenzo Yamamoto] (Tokyo: Aoki shoten,1994), 80, 286–301.
44
Yoneda, Ganbatte, 52–53. According to Harold Ono, Japan Night was held once a year forat least five years in a row. Takekuni, Little Tokyo monogatari, 85–88.
45
Yoneda, Ganbatte, 44, 56–57. The Japanese Proletarian Artists League publication, whosename changed from Puroretaria Geijutsu [Proletarian art] to Hataraku Hito [Workingman] in
1933, was a “cultural front” where many Japanese Communists expressed their life and hopethrough Japanese-style poems, such as tanka and haiku, and other forms of expression;
Raineri, Red Angel, 44–45; Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American
Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1997), 65, 209, 486n24, 510n20.
46“[The proletariat] was planetary in its origins, its motions, and its consciousness.” Peter
Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, andthe Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 332–33.