Takaki Chapter 10

The title of the article is "Pacific Crossings: Seeking the land of money trees" which interested me right from the start. Takaki writes this article about the Japanese wanting to come to America because of the great opprotunities and the fact that they could make one dollar an hour which in Japan would be like making as much as the governor. So as Japanese were coming to America their families back home were getting more excited to make the journey themselves. "Picture Brides in America" was something I didnt know much about until reading this article. Was the main point of this arragened marriage so that people of different races wouldnt have children or get married? Also it said that picture brides were so important because a family man was less likely to leave the plantation so it was a form of control. When I think about Japanese in Hawaii I really didnt think of slavery because I thought by that time the country was better than that. So I was suprised to read in chapter 10 all the struggles that the Japanese had gone through and how comparable the Japanese were to the blacks. They had revolts but the fear of another one came about the plantation owners integrated other ethnicities in so that they wouldnt ban together to overthrow the plantation owner. In some of our other readings we read how black and white slaves would ban together and they were immediatly seperated. The Japanese would also strike, like we do now, to get things that we want from our jobs. And like the black slaves the Japanese were not to be educated, it was frowned upon. There are also stories from this chapter about men who rode on horses with whips and this reminded me specifically of Kindred when Dana was in the fields. I thought it was very sad, the section on "tears in a canefield" because the Japanese came over here and left everything they knew and loved for better opprotunity and they became essentially slaves. More towards the end of the chapter on page 266 Takaki tells us of how successful Japanese farmers became years later and I have always believed that if we accepted other peoples ideas we would become stronger as a society and I think that the Japanese were very strong when it came to farming, because of their past experiences in Japan. Takaki gives an example of one man who when he died his possessions were valued at 15 million dollars, which is so much money now I cant imagine what that was like in the early 1900s. Also like African Americans, the Japanese could not be citizens and that they could not own land. I think it is sad the stuggles that people had to go through to gain the acceptance of whites. In my opinion it should have never been that way, we all should have started out as what we are, equal. I also found it rude that the barber had the audacity to ask a man what his ethnicity was and then shoo him out like a cat or dog. I really did like this chapter in Takaki though because again it is something that we havent had the opprotunity to learn a lot about and yet it is interesting and part of Americas history.