Subverting Exclusion

The Japanese immigrants who arrived in the North American West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries included individuals with historical ties to Japan's outcaste communities. In the only English-language book on the subject, Andrea Geiger examines the history of these immigrants in the United States and Canada and their encounters with two separate cultures of exclusion, including the notion of outcaste status. Geiger reveals that the experiences of Japanese immigrants in North America were shaped in part by Japan's formal status system, mibunsei, decades after it was formally abolished. The immigrants' understanding of social status as caste-based, however, collided with American and Canadian perceptions of status as primarily race-based. Geiger shows how the lingering influence of Japan's strict status system affected immigrants' perceptions and understandings of race in the North American West in the early twentieth century.