The Early Japanese Immigrant Quest for Citizenship: The Background of the 1922 Ozawa Case

Abstract

Denied the right of naturalization, Japanese immigrants were socalled “aliens ineligible to citizenship” for decades. In the noted case of Ozawa Takao, the United States Supreme Court upheld the ineligibility of the Japanese in a 1922 landmark decision that stood unchallenged until the McCarran Act of 1952 altered their legal status and finally admitted them into citizenship. The literature in English on the early history of the immigrants is one-sided.’ Principally devoted to the movement to exclude the Japanese from the United States in the first quarter of the twentieth century, it covers the origins, causes, and development of the exclusion movement and the adverse repercussions it had on United States-Japan relations. Highlighting the excluders rather than the excluded, the literature rarely touches on how the immigrants felt, thought, and reacted to being excluded. Slighting them, past studies give at best the false impression of their having been merely a victimized mass. Japanese immigrants were anything but passive victims; on the contrary, they actively fought the exclusion movement._As a part of their long and bitter struggle, they supported the Ozawa case in the