Newspaper Article Paper #1 (1906)

A significant story that appeared in The New York Times on December 16, 1906 was directed to the upcoming immigration of Japanese laborers to the island of Hawaii. Immigration companies had intentions of sending 2,000 of these laborers to the Hawaiian sugar plantations by the following June. Even more surprising was that around six thousand more of these young Japanese men were ready in Yokohama to sail off to Honolulu and partake in laborer positions as well. Even more unsettling to Americans, the ex-Japanese Minister to the United States was heading the Japanese Immigration Association and was put in charge of facilitating the transition of laborers. Aside from the overall facts of this article, however, a more notable detail is the way in which it questions the immigration process of the time period. The following are examples of its rhetoric: is not this proposal of the Japanese emigration authorities a direct violation of our immigration laws? and consequently, would it therefore not be prudent for our more simple-minded government at Washington to investigate whether any of those proposed immigrants are not in reality soldiers without uniform in the disguise of laboring men? As demonstrated by the previous questions, this was most certainly a hot topic of the day. This was due in part to the discrimination and anti-Japanese sentiment that was prevalent during the era. There were a plethora of posters presenting derogatory slang not only about people of Japanese descent but also those of other nationalities, in particular, those who were not of Caucasian ethnicity. A great deal of court cases, policies, and other mandates were prosecuted that display the racism set forth against African Americans, Native Americans, as well as Asian Americans. To provide an

example, not much earlier than the current date of this newspaper, October 11th of 1906, the San Francisco, California Board of Education passed a regulation wherein children of Japanese parents would have to attend a racially segregated separate school. Even just a year earlier in 1905, anti-Japanese propaganda filled the insides of the San Francisco Chronicle. There was even a Japanese Exclusion League formed on the basis of white supremacy. As such, it makes sense that an article would be published in the newspaper, like the one above, expressing its qualms with Japanese laborers possibly immigrating to Hawaii and joining the sugar plantation. In addition to the aforementioned event of the day, there were several other interesting side stories as well. One of them, in particular, was an article about how a doctor cured cancer through the use of trypsin. It was Dr. John Beard of the University of Edinburgh who claimed to cure cancer through several injections of the pancreatic ferment known as trypsin. Over a five-year period a patient was given twenty injections to treat the disease. It was after the third injection, however, that the patient began to show signs of improvement and heal thereafter. The only issue was that as a side effect the patient developed a deep depression in the area treated. In any case, an accomplishment of this nature was very remarkable at a time in the early 1900s when medicine was considered primitive relative to todays standards.