An Analysis of Early Issei Settlement from the 新世界 (Shin Sekai) • September 2, 1906

The September 2, 1906, edition on pages 3-4 of the 新世界 (Shin Sekai), details the daily labor, wages, and social practices of the Issei.

The article entitled Dispatches from Los Angeles [ローサンセルス通信”] provides a direct look into the economic reality of Japanese workers in Southern California. The article indicates that the summer fever among Issei in LA, caused many of them to fall ill daily. Due to the high demand for agricultural and physical labor, Issei workers faced a heightened vulnerability to heat exhaustion and sickness in addition to the poor sanitary conditions they suffered. Issei manual laborers earned a daily wage of “$1.35” per day, today’s equivalent to about $50.09 a day in 2026.

In addition to the wage figures, the article describes how laborers managed daily routines during the summer heat, arranged temporary room and board, and navigated employment opportunities across agricultural and municipal work sites. The article also included tips on how to avoid falling ill and taking care of oneself.

In addition to describing the condition of workers, the article also serves as a survival directory for immigrant workers. Shin Sekai also allowed for ads by Labor recruitment agencies to place job services listed under headings like “勞働口周旋” (Labor Placement Agencies) in addition to featuring advertisements for Japanese run boarding houses and hotels like the Toyo Hotel, Fukui Inn as well as listings of neighborhood support. Outside of prefectural associations (kenjinkai) that supported Japanese immigrants adjusting to new life in the states, institutions like the Shin Sekai and Yokohama Specie Bank often added support to the guidance of new incoming Japanese immigrants.

As more newcomers arrived, the mutually supportive network made economic partnerships stronger between businesses and new Issei outside of prefectural circles, creating a self-reliant economic community, as well as help to those who did not have deep prefectural ties. Newspapers like Shin Sekai had a statewide circulation and helped spread information throughout the whole community, allowing a larger circle of Issei to identity as an ethnic group rather than just by prefectural ties.

Another article in this edition encourages readers to put aside private animosities and regionalism to build a social trust that can extend throughout the entire community “交際的關係の利害” (The Advantages and Disadvantage of Social Intercourse). This was emphasized by noting a story of a legal battle that illustrated harm to the collective reputation and financial standing of Japanese immigrants in America.

While Kenjinkais remained a valued social club/group, the daily struggle and necessity to find work, housing, and services, as well as interminority tensions, moved isolated prefectural groups and intra-ethnic rivalry into the more unified “pan-Japanese American” Nikkei identifying community that we see today.

Following the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement which barred further entry of Japanese men to the United States, thousands of young Japanese women crossed the Pacific to the United States as “picture brides” [This term later became a demeaning way to label Issei women]. These women immigrated to this country to marry Japanese men through a pre-arranged marriage.  Many women only had a photograph or letter to rely on before meeting their husbands upon their arrival into this country. For many, the journey was a shocking introduction. The reality of their new lives clashed harshly with the promises they had been given; they found themselves in a strange, segregated country, wed to strangers that looked nothing like the pictures sent, and completely unprepared for the emotional and economic hardships of the quality of life they now faced.

To help these vulnerable women navigate their difficult new reality, a visionary group of Issei (first-generation) women, including Yona Abiko, a prominent member of the Japanese American society at that time, founded the San Francisco Joshi Seinen Kai (Young Women’s Association) in 1912. This association later became the Japanese YWCA as Japanese women were strictly barred from using the whites-only facilities including the San Francisco YWCA.  Thus, they had no choice but to build their own independent sanctuary which was designed by architect Julia Morgan.

“A New Year’s Recipe”

Caption: “Page 2.” 新世界 = The New World, 1 Jan. 1930, hojishinbun.hoover.org/en/newspapers/tnw19300101-01.1.2. JAHA collection.

This focus on inner strength and character is captured in this Shin Sekai newspaper clipping featuring a metaphorical “New Year’s Recipe” submitted by club member Kuniko Fujita.

Roughly translated in English, “To the New Year’s Dining Table: A New Recipe,” the article bypasses actual food to offer a poetic guide for living a virtuous, resilient life.

• Blend “half a cup of friendship” and “one cup of kindness.”
• Add a pinch of grace, and put these together inside a “bowl called sincerity.”
• Add one cup each of “love, hope, and faith,” and stir quietly.
• Add a spoonful of cheerfulness and smiles, give generously to unfortunate people with sympathetic tears, knead the mixture with the dew of reason, and finally, bake it over the “heat of a sincere heart.”

The mission to guide and support women through changing times was not limited to the United States. There were other branches in Japan, such as the Osaka Joshi Seinen Kai, which was established to help young women navigate their evolving roles in a modernizing world.

In another Shin Sekai newspaper clipping, the headline roughly translates to: “To help unmarried women understand real society / Osaka Women’s Youth Association Established.”

February 10, 1897. Ads from the Shin Sekai (The New World) reveal that Japanese immigrants were actively seeking Western clothing and abandoning traditional Japanese dress. 

June 26, 1897. A three-line notice appeared in the help-wanted columns of the San Francisco Chronicle:

“Japanese boy wishes a situation to do light housework: has good recommendation. Please address Masuko 1329 Pine St.”¹

Like the story of many other dekasegi, this boy was fifteen, and his address was the Japanese Methodist Episcopal Mission Church. His name was Takanori Mashiko, which was later shortened to Masuko, later Anglicized to Masko, and eventually he went by the nickname Tozan. He had reached San Francisco barely a year earlier, around the beginning of May 1896, after boarding the SS Doric at Yokohama around spring and crossing the Pacific alone. A prominent politician from his home district in Fukushima, Hironaka Kono, had urged him to study in the United States, master English, and prepare for the world power that Japan was about to become. ²

Masko belonged to a particular class of Issei: the privately funded working students, or dekasegi shosei. As Professor Yoshida has shown, according to Kumajirō Ishida’s 1886 emigration guidebook Kitare Nipponjin (Come, Japanese)-such students were typically young men of fifteen to twenty-five, from families of some means and education, who came to acquire English and a working knowledge of Western culture in order to raise their standing once they returned to Japan.³ Masko was a son of Kurobei Mashiko, a Fukushima landowner and entrepreneur who kept a house in Tokyo; as a boy he had frequented the offices of the Yamato newspaper and impressed its reporters with his precocity; and he had crossed the Pacific, at Kono’s urging, expressly to acquire English and a Western education. Like many students, he supported himself with part-time labor while he studied, with the domestic “schoolboy” work his Chronicle notice sought, and the wages he earned at the Shin Sekai.⁴

The paper he worked for was the Shin Sekai (新世界 = The New World), a Japanese-language daily founded in 1894 by Hachiro Soejima. When Tozan was there in 1897, it was only a small enterprise with a circulation of only about two hundred. Its surviving pages from that winter, were among the few issues we have to look into the daily life of early Japanese San Francisco.⁵ The teenager who placed the notice in the Chronicle was also one of the staff helping to produce those issues.

Almost none of the Shin Sekai issues from Masko’s years survived. The earthquake and fire of April 1906 destroyed the presses, offices, and back files of San Francisco’s Japanese immigrant press. The earliest issue of the paper that survives today dates only to August 28, 1895.⁶ We cannot read Masko’s byline, or find his name in a masthead, or recover a single sentence he wrote in those years. The record of his story survives not in the paper he worked for, but in information scattered across other documents referenced below.

Just from those fragments, we know that summer Masko left the mission for the household of the sugar magnate Claus Spreckels near Santa Cruz, where he cooked, attended an American high school, and learned baseball. He returned to the Shin Sekai in 1902, and Soejima placed him at the head of the paper’s Fresno bureau; when he left it under circumstances the record no longer explains, he carried his trade south to Los Angeles in 1904.⁷

In Los Angeles, Masko found the success he had crossed the ocean to pursue. Not in the newsroom, but on the ballfield. He was apparently never much of a player, but had a newspaperman’s flair for spectacle, and he turned it into a career as a baseball promoter, organizing by the end of the decade the first professional Japanese ball clubs owned and run by an immigrant on either side of the Pacific. ⁸ The dekasegi shosei who had once advertised for housework and headed a Shin Sekai branch, had made himself an issei baseball pioneer

Footnotes

1. San Francisco Chronicle, June 26, 1897, help-wanted advertisement.
2. Robert K. Fitts, Issei Baseball: The Story of the First Japanese American Ballplayers (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020), ch. 4.
3. Ryo Yoshida, The Japanese Immigrant Community in America during Its Formative Years as Seen in the Fukuinkai Enkaku Shiryō (The Gospel Society Historical Sources): Non-sectarian Strategies of Welfare and Educational Advocacy among Japanese Immigrants in Late Nineteenth-Century America, citing Kumajirō Ishida, Kitare Nipponjin (Come, Japanese) (1886).
4. Kazuo Ito, Issei: A History of Japanese Immigrants in North America, trans. Shinichiro Nakamura and Jean S. Gerard (Seattle: Executive Committee for Publication of Issei / Japanese Community Service, 1973).
5. Fitts, Issei Baseball, ch. 4; Shin Sekai (The New World), February 10, 1897, advertisements, Japanese American History Archives, Seizo Oka Collection.
6. Fitts, Issei Baseball, ch. 4; Shin Sekai (The New World), August 28, 1895, Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection, Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford University.
7. Fitts, Issei Baseball, ch. 4.
8. Fitts, Issei Baseball, chs. 7–10.

Bibliography

Image: “Page 2.” 新世界 = The New World, 24 Jan. 1929, hojishinbun.hoover.org/en/newspapers/tnw19290124-01.1.2.

Fitts, Robert K. Issei Baseball: The Story of the First Japanese American Ballplayers. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020.

Ishida, Kumajirō. Kitare Nipponjin (Come, Japanese). 1886. Quoted in Yoshida, The Japanese Immigrant Community in America during Its Formative Years.

Ito, Kazuo. Issei: A History of Japanese Immigrants in North America. Translated by Shinichiro Nakamura and Jean S. Gerard. Seattle: Executive Committee for Publication of Issei / Japanese Community Service, 1973.

San Francisco Chronicle. Help-wanted advertisement. June 26, 1897.

Shin Sekai (The New World). August 28, 1895. Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection, Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford University.

Shin Sekai (The New World). February 10, 1897. Advertisements. Japanese American History Archives, Seizo Oka Collection.

Yoshida, Ryo. The Japanese Immigrant Community in America during Its Formative Years as Seen in the Fukuinkai Enkaku Shiryō (The Gospel Society Historical Sources): Non-sectarian Strategies of Welfare and Educational Advocacy among Japanese Immigrants in Late Nineteenth-Century America.

February 10, 1897. Ads from the Shin Sekai (The New World) reveal that Japanese immigrants were actively seeking Western clothing and abandoning traditional Japanese dress.

(Left): Advertisements for businesses such as Kubota Tailoring Place (久保田裁縫處) and Numata Tailoring Place (沼田裁縫處) emphasized the production of Western-style garments tailored specifically for Japanese customers, whose proportions differed from Euro-American counterparts. This advertisement for Kubota prominently features a Japanese man dressed in a formal Western suit.¹

For Issei immigrants, especially women, Western clothing was a social necessity tied to survival and acceptance. Picture brides arriving in the United States between 1907 and 1908 were commonly photographed in kimono upon arrival and then quickly taken to Western clothing shops for fittings. Many wedding portraits show Issei women in Western bridal gowns rather than traditional Japanese wedding attire. Oral histories frequently describe the emotional disorientation of abandoning familiar clothing traditions in favor of American fashion standards.²

As Issei women struggled to adapt to Western dress, white American society simultaneously romanticized and commodified Japanese clothing and femininity. The society that pressured Japanese immigrants to abandon visible markers of Japanese identity indulged in “Japanese luncheon” parties where upper San Franciscan white women dressed themselves in kimono, sandals, and haori as exotic entertainment. Japanese culture was considered fashionable and amusing when performed by white Americans, but undesirable or foreign when embodied by Japanese.³

Issei women often wore Western clothing that was already outdated by contemporary American standards—wearing Victorian-style dresses long after blazers and neckties had become fashionable. This reflects the conservative image of American dress that many immigrants observed before emigrating and how Japanese traditions remained deeply rooted among many immigrants, who chose more conservative and less flashy styles of dress. While white Americans freely experimented with “Japanese costume” for leisure, Japanese women themselves were navigating intense scrutiny over how “American” they appeared.⁴

The San Francisco Call described the trend enthusiastically:

“Japanese luncheons became intensely popular among society women weary of the monotony of English-style afternoon teas and matinee lunches.”⁵

At these gatherings, affluent white San Franciscans decorated themselves and their homes with “Oriental” objects, regardless of origin. Guests consumed dishes labeled “suimono,” “yakizakana,” and “sashimi” while surrounded by imported objects from Turkey, China, and Japan indiscriminately grouped together as “Eastern.” Parties even advertised the presence of servants “only from Japan” as part of the entertainment value.⁶

White women could temporarily wear kimono and imitate Japanese femininity without experiencing the discrimination faced by Japanese immigrants themselves. Meanwhile, Issei women were expected to abandon their own cultural appearance in order to appear civilized and assimilated within American society.

More than 120 years later, Japantown remains associated with Japanese pop culture, fashion, and entertainment. But unlike today’s celebration of Japanese aesthetics, the “Japanese fad” of the 1890s reflected a society fascinated with consuming Japanese culture while marginalizing Japanese immigrants themselves.

Footnotes

1. Shin Sekai (The New World), February 10, 1897, advertisements for Kubota Tailoring Place (久保田裁縫處) and Numata Tailoring Place (沼田裁縫處).
2. Amy Sueyoshi, “Mindful Masquerades: Que(e)Rying Japanese Immigrant Dress in Turn-of-the-Century San Francisco,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 26, no. 3 (2005): 67–100.
3. Sueyoshi, “Mindful Masquerades,” 67–100.
4. Sueyoshi, “Mindful Masquerades,” esp. discussion of Issei women’s adoption of conservative Western dress and immigrant clothing practices.
5. “The Japanese Luncheon Fad,” San Francisco Call, February 14, 1897.
6. San Francisco Call, February 14, 1897, “The Japanese Luncheon Fad”; see also Sueyoshi, “Mindful Masquerades,” for analysis of the social and racial meanings of these performances.

Bibliography

San Francisco Call. “The Japanese Luncheon Fad.” February 14, 1897.

Shin Sekai (The New World). February 10, 1897. Advertisements. Japanese American History Archives, Seizo Oka Collection.

Sueyoshi, Amy. “Mindful Masquerades: Que(e)Rying Japanese Immigrant Dress in Turn-of-the-Century San Francisco.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 26, no. 3 (2005): 67–100. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4137374.