Mandating Americanization: Japanese Language Schools and the Federal Survey of Education in Hawai'i, 1916–1920

Abstract

Under the policies of the United States, it will be very difficult to prohibit schools of this kind unless it were definitely proven that they were teaching treasonable things.—P. P. Claxton, U. S. Commissioner of EducationThis article critically examines how the 1919 Federal Survey of Education in Hawai'i, under the guise of a scientific study to guide educational reform, was used as the means to implement colonial policies over the territory's largest ethnic group, the Nikkei, people of Japanese ancestry. Furthermore, the survey was also used by various other political and religious parties and individuals to further their own objectives. Although there were many facets to the federal survey, this study focuses only on the debate surrounding Japanese language schools, the most sensational issue of the survey. The battle over the control of Japanese language schools among the white ruling class, educational authorities, and the Nikkei community in Hawai'i created the foundation for an anti-Japanese language school movement that spread to the West Coast of the United States. The survey was also a catalyst for Nikkei in redefining their Japanese language schools and a battleground concerning their future and identity. Despite numerous studies on Japanese Americans in Hawai'i, and studies of the Japanese language schools, neither the process, results, nor effects of the survey have been critically examined to date. This paper analyzes the process of how the federal survey evolved and how it arrived at its conclusions through an examination of the Education Bureau's files in order to illuminate the origins of the Japanese language school control movement and its chapter of ethnic American educational history.