This is a book written by Jamie Ford that I recently finished reading. If you are looking for a review of the book, look elsewhere. What I want to talk about is the history covered in the book. Most of the action takes place in 1942. The rest of the action takes place in 1986 where we find out what happened to the main character. I will focus on the 1942 activities.
The main character is a Chinese boy who is 12 years old at the time. He falls in love with a Japanese girl who is a few months older. Most of the action takes place in Chinatown and Japantown in Seattle during the early part of World War II. A key point is the hostility between the Chinese and Japanese during this period. Towards the end of the book the girl is sent to an internment camp in Idaho. Before this happens one of the impediments to the romance is the boy's father. The father hates the Japanese. The father is not aberrant. This is an opinion that was broadly shared within the Chinese community. The book spends some time on why this was so but I want to get into this in more detail.
The cause is both the result of domestic politics within the U.S. and also of international politics. And funnily enough you can get another look at this issue in an entirely different book. The book is, of all things "Charlie Chan" by Yunte Huang. The center of the Chan book is the fictional detective named in the title. Charlie Chan was immensely popular (6 books, a couple of dozen movies) between 1925 and the late '40s. The author takes pains to set the Chan the phenomenon in the context of the Chinese, and to some extent the Japanese experience in the U.S. There were no orientals in the U.S. in any numbers until California businessmen imported Chinese to work originally in the Gold fields and later on the railroad. At some point the need for labor to work in these industries dried up. The the same businessmen who had originally supported Chinese immigration reacted by stirring up "yellow peril" trouble and causing anti-Chinese immigration laws to be passed. This caused other businessmen to turn to the Japanese as a source of cheap exploitable labor that got around the Chinese exclusion laws. So almost from the beginning the Chinese and Japanese were put into competition with each other.
And this competitive situation was a microscopic version of what had been happening in Asia for millennia. The Chinese have been the dominant culture in Asia for thousands of years. The Chinese influence on Japanese language, writing, and culture is so strong that it can't be ignored. So a major aspect of the Japanese experience has been the effort by the Japanese to differentiate themselves from the Chinese. So while Japanese writing is superficially similar to Chinese there are many differences in the details. The same is true of Japanese architecture. There are overlapping themes and motifs but at a detailed level there are many differences. And so it goes through all of Japanese culture. The Japanese swim in an ocean of Chinese culture but, where they can, they try to build in some distance. This long battle for a separate identity results in a certain amount of resentment by the Japanese toward the Chinese.
And the modern (last 500 years) history of the two countries has diverged quite a bit. Both countries spent a lot of time initially rejecting western influences. Over a long period of time various assaults by Europeans weakened the Chinese to the point that by about 1900 the country as a whole was a basket case. The Japanese also followed a course of rejecting western influence. But eventually they too were forced to abandon this course. The Japanese response was to do a complete reversal. They embraced western culture particularly western business and military methods. This was so successful that in 1905 the Japanese scored a military victory against a traditional western power in the Russo-Japanese War. They did it by using traditional western technology operated in the usual western manner. In the 1920's the Japanese were a party in the 5-5-3 Naval treaty, a very big deal at the time. By this time they were seen as having a completely modern and western navy and the third largest in the world. So during the run up to World War II you had China, effectively a third world basket case as opposed to Japan, now a major power and one of the largest. This was a complete reversal of fortunes. Japan was now culturally, economically, and politically the premier Asian power. This could have engendered a great deal of resentment by Chinese with respect to Japanese.
But there was a much more powerful and more specific basis for bitter resentment of Japanese by Chinese. In the summer of 1937 Japan invaded China. China at this time was too weak to represent a political, economic, or military threat to Japan. It was a pure and simple power grab, a colonial annexation, if you will. And the war was particularly viscous. China was much larger in terms of both physical size and of population. The only way Japan could pull it off, and do so cheaply, was to use its much superior military to intimidate the Chinese population into submission and acquiescence. An example of Japanese tactics was the so called "Rape of Nanking", which involved the wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of Chinese civilians. To be effective in intimidating the rest of the Chinese population the rest of the Chinese population needed to be aware of what was going on. And what was going on inevitably made its way to the overseas Chinese population in places like Chinatown in Seattle.
So by 1942 Chinese communities in places like Seattle were very familiar with the tactics the Japanese were employing in China. And U.S. politics forced Chinatowns and Japantowns to be adjacent to each other in city after city. Seattle was no exception. So it is entirely understandable that in 1942 the average Chinese as exemplified by the main character's father in the "Hotel" book would fear, hate, and resent the Japanese living a couple of blocks away in Japantown.
With all the history that has happened since the 1930s and early 1940s the war between China and Japan has been largely forgotten outside of China and Japan. Things have evolved to the point where the Nazis pretty much fully occupy the role of WW II villain and the Japanese misbehavior, to use a perhaps too mild term, is far less prominent in our consciousness.
Now that I have explained why a Chinese man in 1942 would very reasonably have not wanted his son to have anything to do with a Japanese girl let me widen my scope and take a more nuanced look at things from the Japanese perspective. (Spoiler alert: The book has a happy ending). As the Chan book admirably points out, by well before 1942 the U.S. perspective had broadened out. It wasn't just the Chinese that were subhuman and undeserving of "full human" status, it was any member of "the yellow races", what we would now call Asians. In most situations, whites saw no reason to differentiate between Chinese and Japanese. And the very idea that there might be still other kinds of "yellow devils" like Koreans, Viet Namese, etc. had just not entered anyone's consciousness.
I have already alluded to an example of this sort of racism in action and directed specifically at the Japanese. The 5-5-3 Naval treaty was ostensibly about avoiding an arms race. The Battleship was the super weapon of its era. By the 1920's there had been several generations of Battleships and each generation was substantially more expensive than the previous generation. For instance the Dreadnought, the original Battleship, was built by the British in1906 and was considered obsolete by 1912. Battleship construction was consuming larger and larger chunks of military budgets. If this kept on too long bankruptcy seemed the inevitable result. So the idea of the 5-5-3 treaty was to cap the rate of construction of Battleships. The British and Americans would be allowed to build equal amounts of tonnage (5 to 5) and everyone else would build less. So why couldn't the Japanese build the same amount of tonnage as the Brits and the Americans? Simple racism and because at the time the Brits and the Americans could force the Japanese to accept lesser status and only get to build 3 for every 5 the Brits and the Americans could build.
And, of course, the seminal event around which "Hotel" is built is the internment of people of Japanese descent in the early days of WW II. The measure was justified on military grounds - "they be spies and saboteurs". But that's nonsense. All you have to do is to look at what happened to the other two nationalities on the WW II "enemies" list: the Germans and the Italians. In all the years since the war and even during the war there was precious little evidence of spying and sabotage by Japanese-Americans. All the intelligence work done leading up to Pearl Harbor, for instance, was done by Japanese diplomatic people or by people brought in from Japan by the Japanese government specifically as spies. No Japanese-Americans living in Hawaii were involved in spying. And there is no evidence of spying by Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast either.
Contrast this with the German community. By the late '30s there was a large network of "bunds", clubs formed to support Hitler and to agitate for Nazi interests. Hollywood made numerous "B" movies about the FBI breaking up German spy rings in the run up to the war. There were well known and prominent Nazi sympathizers like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. Yet there was no general roundup of people of German origin and no action against prominent Nazi sympathisers. Of course, all these Nazi sympathisers and people of German origins all came out as "100% all American" after war was declared. But there is little or no evidence that Japanese-Americans were ever anything except "100% all American" at any time and large numbers of them volunteered to sign various pledges immediately after hostilities broke out. And although the Italian pro-Mussolini forces were never as active as the German pro-Hitler people, the Italian model generally followed the German one.
Finally, I want to note a small and, as far as I know now completely forgotten, piece of Washington State history. I had a paper route while I was in High School. My father helped me out on Sunday when the papers were particularly overwhelming. I distinctly remember a story on the car radio during one of these Sunday excursions with my dad. There was about an Initiative on the ballot. If approved it would again make it legal for people of Japanese descent to own real property in Washington State. Some time during WW II the state had passed a law making it illegal for people of Japanese origin to own property even if they were U.S. citizens. This heinous law effectively made it legal for white people to steal land, etc. from the poor Japanese people who had been bundled off to the internment camps. In the early '60s an effort was made to get this horrible law off the books. The State Legislature and State Courts had apparently been too gutless to do it themselves. So at some point an Initiative campaign had been launched. The campaign for the initiative was deliberately kept low key so as to avoid stirring up anti-Japanese racism. Fortunately, the campaign worked and the law was finally gotten off the books.
My experience with this initiative (at the time I know nothing of the background and was mystified about why the original law existed) and other experiences since have convinced me of something. All peoples, Europeans, Asians, Africans, Americans, whoever I have left out, are capable of wickedness at least some of the time. And all peoples are capable of goodness some of the time. I don't buy the argument that some person or group of people are evil (or good) because of who they are. I try to judge them by what they do. And I expect that I will judge anyone to have at times done evil and at other times to have done good. Google's slogan is "Don't be evil". I think most of the time they live up to that slogan. But not all of the time. The great villain of our time is Osama bin Laden. Certainly he has done a lot of evil. But I am sure he has done good some of the time. But don't get me wrong, I'm glad he is dead.
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