Chinese and Japanese in North America: The Canadian and American Experiences Compared

Abstract

This essay examines two streams of migrants to North America: one from China and one from Japan. While this conflation may outrage some nation- alistic historians on both sides of the border, it is certainly justified from the point of view of the migrants who, for a long time, largely ignored the international boundary. It was notorious for decades in the Pacific Northwest that the four chief Chinese communities near the border—Port Townsend and Port Angeles in Washington State and Victoria and Vancouver in British Columbia—did a thriving business in goods and persons with little regard to the law that made the southern and northern shores of Juan de Fuca Strait parts of separate nations. Moreover, if the strait itself or the docks and piers on either side of it were too heavily patroled, there was always the convenient chain of San Juan Islands or, on the mainland, miles of unguarded common frontier.1 For Japanese migrants, too, the border was not a great inconvenience. The reminiscences of one Japanese pioneer illustrate the point nicely. Kihachi Hirakawa, a twenty-six year old bachelor, took advantage of an 1890 rate war between Yokohama ticket agencies which cut fares from fifty to twenty-five yen, to come to "America." He found out about the opportunity just three days before the ship's departure, which was not enough time to get a passport. A ship's officer told him: "A passport was not necessary, and if I paid my fare I would be accepted. Then I asked if I could land without a passport at Vancouver, B.C., and the officer replied, 'Maybe...but I am not sure.'"

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