Japanese picture marriage in 1900--1924 California: Construction of Japanese race and gender

This dissertation explored the Japanese picture-marriage practice as an instance of the social construction of race and gender of Japanese immigrants in California during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Expanding the limited scope of existing scholarship which has stressed the negative stereotypes of Japanese immigrants imposed by the majority of the white population, the dissertation approaches the construction of race and gender representation and identity as negotiations that took place among the minority group itself, as well as between the majority and minority groups. The dissertation uses photography as a window to explore the development of Japanese race and gender, the construction of whiteness in California, United States immigration policies, and international diplomacy. There are numerous factors that played an important role in the narrative of the construction of the Japanese race: Japanese modernization that reinvented social structure and gender ideology; American concepts of race, gender, and citizenship; and United States-Japanese relations.; Historical documents and archival materials, such as photographs of the immigrants, journals of Christian organizations, Japanese community newspapers, diplomatic correspondence, and other contemporary sources yielded the following findings on the practice of Japanese picture marriage. Japanese represented their race and gender in the early twentieth century California to conform to the western notion of modernity and civilization; however, these manifestations were an ambiguous blend of tradition and modernity. Second the diplomatic negotiations between the Japanese and United States governments concerning picture marriage played an important role in defining Japanese race and gender, United States immigration policies, and the status of Japanese immigrants in the United States. Japan's status as a world power complicated and prolonged the negotiation process, which was crucial in defining and representing the Japanese race. Third the picture marriage was a product of modern capitalism and consumerism, involving the commodification of the idealized image of modern Japanese genders through photography. In contrast to the existing scholarship on immigration history which has focused primarily on immigration as an exchange of labor, my dissertation interprets the immigration process of the Japanese as the symbolic exchange of self through the exchange of actual photographs centered to picture-marriage process.