Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II

by Daniel James Brown

February 1905, the San Francisco Chronicle launched what would become a drumbeat of fiercely anti-Japanese editorials: the japanese invasion: the problem of the hour; japanese a menace to american women; crime and poverty go hand in hand with asiatic labor. In 1913, California passed the Alien Land Act, prohibiting “all aliens ineligible for citizenship” from owning land. Other western states soon did the same. In June 1919, Senator James Phelan of California testified before Congress, seething about what he considered the unfair advantage Japanese immigrants gained by working too hard or being too ingenious: “They are tireless workers and persevering and clever agriculturalists. They know how to get the last penny out of the soil. . . . I regard them in their economic destructiveness, their competitive ability, as enemies to be rejected, to keep away from as a plague of locusts, not to be compromised with but to be eliminated.”