Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

No one has a keener appreciation of the fact that old customs are hard to shake, but I confess an abiding faith in the future of man. The world's labor movement, with all its faults, is the most religious movement of the day. Its precepts are in perfect harmony with the most beautiful teachings of Jesus, Confucius and Buddha.

18. ASSIMILATION IN HAWAII

BY ARTHUR L. DEAN

I have been in contact, through a long period of residence here, with young people of all races represented in the Hawaiian Islands, and have certain definite opinions about them, which are not shared by everybody by any means, but many people are substantially in agreement with them.

The problem we meet here is: "Can a people which has evolved an entirely different type of social system be transplanted into a foreign system, such as the American, and become what we call "assimilated"? There are a great many more Japanese here than Americans, and, as far as the logic of numbers is concerned, the assimilation should go the other way, but it does not.

The first thing that strikes one in coming in contact with the young people socially is that one can find no reason why Japanese and Chinese cannot become "assimilated", and that is true even when the ancestry of these young people is, for the most part, decidedly plebeian. Most of the Japanese in Hawaii, who are born here, are born of parents who come from the small farming people and not from people who belong to the "better class" of Japanese. The point I am making is that, in spite of the fact that these people come from the lowly walks of life in Japan, many of them show first-class mental ability. At a Faculty Meeting of the University some time ago a list of names of students of all races represented in the school was on the board, showing the particular attainments of these students. Upon inquiry, it was interesting to learn that many of those who had done honor work had come from a long line of illiterate ancestry, which shows startlingly interesting effects of environment upon these young people. The first point I would like to bring out is, that as far as mentality is concerned, lowly or illiterate ancestry is no barrier to assimilation.

A good many people express grave fears regarding the loyalty to the United States of the young Japanese born in Hawaii. My answer to that is that my observation of the Japanese character has been, both here and in Japan, that one of its striking characteristics is loyalty. I don't know of any people who show such loyalty to their country as the Japanese. It is almost appalling to a stranger. The capacity to be loyal is a fundamental

characteristic of the individual, and to what the loyalty will be displayed depends upon the environment in which he finds himself, and way in which he is treated by the American people. There isn't a doubt in my mind that we can turn them against us, as we can turn anybody against us that has any self-respect, and the way to do that is to mistrust them. I have yet to notice in my personal experience, any cases of disloyalty which would give me any reason to suppose that the Japanese were any less loyal to the United States than any other element of our population, not excluding the old Puritan to which I happen to belong. If they, either Japanese or Chinese, have the mental capacity for assimilation and if they have the temperamental aptitudes, then it is a little difficult for me to see any reason why, from a cultural standpoint, they are not perfectly capable of taking on the cultural characteristics of the American people.

It hasn't all been plain sailing here in the Hawaiian Islands. We have a great many more Oriental people here than Americans and we have had one very interesting development of an educational character causing difficulty, and that is the so-called Language Schools. When the Japanese came here they desired that their children should learn to read and write the mother tongue and to learn to speak it better than they were likely to learn it from their ordinary associations. They were aided in founding schools by the plantation managements. They were given land and money to build schoolhouses, and, in some cases, were given money toward the salaries of the teachers. The result is that there has grown up a system. of Language Schools which came to be objectionable. Children went to these schools early in the morning before the opening of the public schools, and, after an hour or two of that sort of thing, when they got to public school at 8:30 a. m. they had had as much education as they could stand for one day. They were handicapped educationally and also from the standpoint of health. The Language Schools were conducted entirely in the Japanese language and there are probably no more than half a dozen white men in Hawaii who can understand it; there were reasons to believe that children were turned in the direction of Japan instead of America. We then enacted a certain amount of legislation and got into hot water over that. We probably have made blunders, but there have been a good many factors not necessary to go into at this time.

There are something like one hundred and sixty Japanese schools, ten Chinese schools and three or four Korean schools on the Islands. Territorial law defines a Foreign Language School as "a school conducted in a foreign language." We have a good body of legislation dealing with that now and one of the members of the institute, Dr. Schwartz, is Supervisor of Foreign Language Schools. We think that we have a good body of laws. The

law requires that no child shall go to a Foreign Language School for more than one hour a day, and that hour must be after public school. Teachers must have a license, and must be able to read, write and speak the English language; they must know American history and the principles of democracy; the text books must be approved by the Department of Public Instruction. The fundamental educational value of these schools is to enable the children born here to translate from English to a foreign language and from a foreign language into English. It is an asset if they can do that sort of thing.

One of the unfortunate things growing out of the situation here in Hawaii is the fact that we have many thousands of young people whose parents are not English-speaking and who come from a different social and cultural background, and the young people find themselves suspended in midair between two types of civilization. They look upon their parents as oldfashioned and feel that they are foreigners and do not deserve very much. respect; on the other hand, these young people have not really gotten much of the inner life of American civilization; they are neither one thing nor the other.

The young people of Oriental ancestry are frequently in conflict with their parents' ideas in the matter of marriage. Their parents come from a system in which marriage is arranged for the children, and the children find themselves in an environment in which quite the opposite concept of the way in which people get united for life obtains.

We have a course in short-story writing in the University and, of course, have Chinese and Japanese students in these classes. You would be interested to read some of the stories that these students write, revealing the emotional life of the Oriental. I have a notion that one of the reasons why the Japanese have developed their strong system of repression is because they unconsciously realize that they have a very emotional nature and they employ these means to keep it under control. This question of marriage comes up in these stories which the young people write and they expose their inner souls in their English themes.

It is my profound belief that, from a cultural and religious standpoint, there is no reason why people of Oriental ancestry cannot be completely assimilated to American life. Whether they should be biologically or not we cannot say. We have not sufficient evidence on that point. Loose assertions have been made by some people, but they are not based on fact. In the course of time in Hawaii we believe we will have a good deal of evidence on this matter. The Chinese have married out of race a good deal, but the Japanese not so much. I think that the Japanese of

the next generation probably will marry out of race here and we will have some interesting facts.

You will probably ask, if I hold these views, whether I would advocate unrestricted immigration into the United States, and my answer is, No. My reason is not that they cannot become assimilated, for that is not the point. My objection to unrestricted immigration is not because it would lower the standard of living. My reason is that I do not believe that we have gone far enough with the experiment of mixing the Oriental and North European races to know anything about how it is coming out, and whether it is desirable to mix them. This is a very open question. Until we know more about it than we know now, I should not like to go into it on a large scale. I would rather see how it will work out here in Hawaii. Another aspect is that I don't believe that it can be done without causing friction, which will do a great deal of harm. We have to make a distinction between the ideal thing to do and the wise thing to do. In view of the circumstances, the only wise thing is not to have Oriental immigration into the United States, and I want to make it clear that my reasons are based only on expediency, and on the desire to get a good deal more scientific knowledge on the matter than we now have.

Although I am not in favor of unrestricted Oriental immigration I am strongly in favor of putting the Chinese and Japanese on the quota basis. The one hundred or so of each race admitted annually would have no effect on American life, even if they did not make as good fellow countrymen as they do. We probably have enough people from the Orient in the United States, including Hawaii, to get a good body of data on the biological and social results of mixing the Oriental and American people, but it will take time to get this data.

19. INDUSTRIALIZATION OF THE FAR EAST

(Excerpts from Public Addresses)

A. THE FAR REACHING EFFECTS OF INDUSTRIALIZATION. BY C. C. BATCHELDER An acute conflict is taking place almost all over the world between human emotions and economic laws. The latter must inevitably prevail, but the struggle is attended with a tremendous amount of human suffering and incalculable waste of commodities and of human effort. The supremely tragic feature of the situation is that much of this is unnecessary, and could be avoided by the adoption of intelligent measures.

There has been a growing tendency in Great Britain and in the United States to act as if economic forces were the only ones to be considered, but this is a great mistake, for human emotions are the driving forces of

conduct, which is only rarely governed by reason. Emotions even control economic forces by stopping and starting them. For instance, it seems probable that wages are controlled by supply and demand, but labor unions can limit the supply of workers, and fashions increase the demand for some goods and make others unsaleable. Careful balancing of all forces is of the utmost importance and due weight must be given to each.

There is general agreement that it is of the utmost importance to remove the causes of war, and, as many of them are of economic origin, it is possible to remove or modify them. Unless the causes are removed, the movements to outlaw war and for disarmament may be not only futile, but positively dangerous.

The Great War showed us that the world is one economic organism, and that serious injury to one country means disaster to the rest. One of the tasks of this Institute is to show that the world is one social organism also, and that if the workers in one country are in misery, the masses in other countries will also suffer. One great task of the future is to devise means to prevent the political dismemberment of the world, due largely to nationalism, from inflicting constant injury on the human race.

One of the principal reasons why the industrialization of the Orient is of the utmost importance to the world as a whole, is the fact that the Occidental nations have based their policies toward the Orient largely upon the necessity of securing raw materials from the Orient such as silk, jute and rubber to support their factory industries. Imported food stuffs, such as sugars and starches, as well as coffee and tea, are needed to feed the operatives in these mills. It is of course evident that these food stuffs and raw materials have to be paid for with exports of some kind in order to balance the trade, as no industrial nation could pay with gold and silver for all the raw materials and food stuffs which are imported over long periods. Thus the markets for manufactured goods are even more important to the industrial nations of the West than sources of foods and raw materials, as the latter can usually be purchased in the world's markets, while manufactured goods can generally be sold to the best advantage in the less developed countries, and are not ordinarily purchased by other competing industrial nations. The great difficulty was that the Orient did not buy large amounts of the goods produced by the Occident, owing to low purchasing power and differences of habits, while the Occident was anxious to buy things from the Orient.

The result of this situation has been a fierce competition between European nations for markets, raw materials and food stuffs, which has been constantly increasing. Efforts were very often made during the last century, to eliminate competition by political control of markets for manufactured

« AnteriorContinuar »