This dissertation places Meiji-era Japanese immigration to the United States and Canada in both comparative and transnational perspective. It focuses on ways in which the immigrants' own understandings of race, caste and class informed their responses to the different categories of exclusion imposed under U.S. and Canadian law, and considers how immigrants who structured their own understanding of social difference in terms of caste and class participated in and tried to shape definitions of race and nation. At the center of a complex cross-Pacific dialogue, Meiji immigrants in North America simultaneously engaged in conversations about the meanings of race and class both with members of the dominant white society and with critics of emigration in Japan. In addition to providing an interpretive framework for the hostility they encountered in North America, cultural attitudes rooted in Tokugawa-era social categories helped to shape the responses of Japanese immigrants both to white racism and to employment opportunities in Canada and the United States. White racism was offensive to Japanese not only because it relegated them to the bottom of North America's labor hierarchies, but because it failed to maintain class- and caste- based distinctions they continued to regard as meaningful. Traditional social biases also informed the discursive strategies of Meiji officials, ultimately helping to reproduce the Japanese as an excludable category. Japanese tried to counter the impact of white racism by turning the language of race back on North Americans and emphasizing the asserted homogeneity of their own communities. Written into the historiography of Japanese immigration, reliance on the discourse of homogeneity has helped to mask the complexity and diversity of pre-war Japanese immigrant communities. It has also obscured the extent to which migration and relocation offered descendants of former outcaste groups in Japan a chance to transform their status. This dissertation argues for the importance of taking cultural perceptions of class and caste difference into account in studying Japanese immigration. It also complicates and deepens a broader history of racialization and transnational movement by exploring ways in which race, class and caste structured the perceptions and strategies of immigrant, sending and receiving communities alike.
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