This Book Is Dedicated to Katie Métraux in Recognition of Her Fine Work in Restoring The

This book is dedicated to Katie Métraux in recognition of her fine work in restoring the “Beauty Ranch” as well as the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco.Her work is incredibly well done and makes her father very proud!

CONTENTS

Foreword by Wilton S. Dillon,PhDi

Prefaceiii

Acknowledgementsix

Part I:Analysis of London’s Writing on Asia

Chapter I:Background to London’s Career and Focus

on Asia1

Chapter II:Jack London’s Forgotten Role as an Influential

Observer of Early Modern Asia15

Chapter III:Jack London’s First Encounter with Japan:

The Voyage of the Sophie Sutherland and

his First Asian Writing31

Chapter IV:Jack London Reporting From Korea and

Manchuria47

Chapter V:Jack London and the Yellow Peril69

Chapter VI:Jack London’s Plea for Pan-Pacific

Understanding:“The Language of the Tribe”79

Epilogue:Jack London’s Mixed Message93

Part Two: Jack London’s Writing on Asia

The Bonin Islands: An Incident of the Sealing Fleet97

Short Fiction

Sakaicho, Hona Asi and Hakadaki104

A Night’s Swim in YedoBay108

O Haru114

The Unparalleled Invasion123

The Chinago137

Letters and Newspaper Dispatches from Japan, Korea and

Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War (1904)153

Three essays on the Future of Asia

The Yellow Peril294

If Japan Awakens China306

The Language of the Tribe310

Bibliography317

Index321

FOREWORD

Jack London (1876-1916) was one of America’s great fiction writers who also was one of the best known socialists in the early twentieth century. What is not well known is the fact that London was also one of the most respected journalists of his era whose coverage of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) overshadowed every other correspondent. London was also a gifted ethnologist whose many essays, feature articles, and stories concerning Asian and Pacific peoples provide a fascinating in-depth view of the region a century ago.

London was far more than an ordinary armchair scribbler. During his short life he managed three extensive trips to Asia and the South Pacific as well as numerous other ventures to Hawaii, Latin America and Europe. He strongly denounced Euro-American imperialism and exploitation of native peoples across Asia and the Pacific as well as the misery of the lower classes in both the United States and Britain. London was alone among the writers of his era in his realization that the age of Western dominance was coming to an end and that first Japan and then China would rise as great economic powers as the twentieth century progressed and would severely challenge the hegemony of the West. London was also among the very first to conceive of the “Pacific-rim” as one closely connected community. His passionate plea to all peoples of the Pacific, especially Americans, Japanese and Chinese to form Pan-Pacific clubs where they could get to know each other, where they could speak to each other rather than at each other, resonates as strongly today as it did a century ago.

Daniel Métraux’s book provides a strong analysis of London’s extensive writing on Asia and the Pacific. We meet London as a seventeen year-old sailor who first encounters Japanese in the Bonin Islands and in Yokohama and whose very first short-stories written a year or so later are brilliant depictions of Japanese society. We follow correspondent London as the only American reporter to gain direct access to the Japanese army as it marched through Korea and Manchuria chasing Russian forces in the spring of 1904. We hear London’s warnings to the West after his return from China about the inevitable rise of Japan and China as world powers and we follow London to Hawaii as well as the South Pacific near the end of his life.

Another important aspect of this book is that Dr. Métraux has also created an anthology of London’s key writings on Asia. This is the very first time that London’s writing on Asia has appeared together in a single volume. We have his accounts of his voyage to the Bonin Islands and Yokohama, all twenty-two of his lengthy dispatches from Japan, Korea and China as well as his many letters from Asia in 1904, his early stories centering on Japan, and his later stories and essays on the Far East.

There were many sides to Jack London’s life—his journalism, his more than fifty fiction and non-fiction books and his hundreds of essays and short stories. Because London never compiled his work on Asia into an anthology as he did with his writing on so many other topics, no scholar until Métraux has taken note of London’s intense interest in Asian affairs. His volume is a major breakthrough not only on scholarship on Jack London, but also on life in East Asia a century ago.

London’s writing on Asia is a very important commentary on East-West relations at the turn of the last century. No other writer presents such an in-depth view of the Russo-Japanese War—and London’s own account of his time in Korea and Manchuria reads as well as any of his great adventure stories. All of these factors make this book an important contribution between the United States and East Asia. It is also rather ironic that had we followed London’s admonitions, Pearl Harbor might never have occurred.

Wilton S. Dillon

Senior Scholar Emeritus

The Smithsonian Institution

PREFACE

JACK LONDON’S CLAROVOYANT VIEW OF THE RISE OF ASIA

AND HIS APPEALS FOR MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING

BETWEEN EAST AND WEST

Jack London (1876-1916) was the most popular American writer of his era.During his short life he composed a multitude of novels and short stories, became one of the nation’s leading socialists, covered two wars as a star reporter and photographer, and traveled extensively around the world.He left many legacies, one of which is the widely held belief that his supposedly racist writing helped to cement anti-Asian feelings in the United States at a time when attitudes against Asian immigrants and immigration was running high.The point of this research is to challenge this vision of London and to suggest that his portrayal of Asians in his literature is sympathetic and well developed.

At the turn of the last century, when the population of the United States surpassed seventy million, the total immigrant Chinese population hovered under a half million.Chinese had begun immigrating to the United States as early as 1849, but their numbers stopped growing in the 1880s as a result of new American immigration laws designed to slow or stop the flow of immigrants from Asia.These Chinese tended to cluster in large cities on the east and west coasts, often in Chinatowns which to many white Americans became known as places of mystery, corruption, and unspeakable vice.Americans formed clear and often very negative stereotypes of these unfortunate Chinese.Sadly, these negative images of not only Chinese immigrants, but also of Japanese, Korean and other Asian residents in the United States became daily fare in American newspapers, magazines, and fiction as stories of opium dens, prostitution, and dangerous secret societies both fascinated and repelled many Americans.[1]

Many writers in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, active proponents of the contemporary views of Social Darwinism, declared the superiority of the white race (or “Anglo-Saxon civilization“) over the brown, yellow, and black races which they felt were inferior, unfit and doomed to failure.The development of modern technology gave Caucasian Europeans and North Americans a tremendous superiority over other peoples. They came to regard ‘race’ as an explanation of the disparities. They began to attribute military and technological advantage and superiority to possession of a ‘white skin’ and ‘race’.They saw the world in terms of bloodshed, a scramble for markets that would lead to even greater domination by Britain and the United States.

Some scholars of American literature have included Jack London among the prominent writers who fanned this ant-Asian rhetoric that was so integral to California’s dominant white culture:

Perhaps the best example of this can be seen in the work of Jack London, who, along with other authors, provides us with a view of Anglo-popular culture in California that was profoundly anti-Asian. Jack London's futurist story "The Unparalleled Invasion" warns of an invasion of Chinese soldiers in the year 1976 if their population was not put into check. The tale was a de-facto call to eugenic war in order to monitor "China's advancing hordes," which are depicted as running over all of Asia and Europe until stopped at the edge of America. London's xenophobic portrayal of Chinese as a menacing "horde" establishes both the idea that Asian laborers entering the United States are possibly the first wave of invaders as well as the notion that the Chinese are culturally different than white Americans, having nothing in common with the struggles of white laborers. London's writings reached a broad, diverse audience of readers through his publication in "pulp fiction" and serialized formats, his views filtering throughout California like "an unparalleled invasion" that cemented overt racism in the public consciousness.[2]

This description of a xenophobic anti-Asian Jack London, however, is patently false.Even in “The Unparalleled Invasion” there is no large scale Chinese attack on the West.To be sure, there is in London’s writing here Chinese emigration overseas and Chinese seizure of some peripheral territories, but it is the West, fearing China’s economic prowess as much as the migration of its people abroad, that launches a genocidal attack on China that destroys its whole population.

Jonah Riskin, editor of the recent volume, The Radical Jack London[3]has publishedLondon’s 1902 essay, “The Salt of the Earth”arguing that London was a true Social Darwinist who was convinced of the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon.Riskin notes London’s famous statement, “I am first of all a white man and only then a socialist” [4]and writes that “Glorification of empire and fear of nonwhite races surface in other essays, including ‘These Bones Shall Rise Again,’ another paean to empire and the Anglo-Saxon race, and Yellow Peril,’ his warning to the white race about the rising power of China and the Chinese.”

Riskin does have a point—London does indeed project a very visible touch of Social Darwinism in “The Salt of the Earth,” but it is wrong to read “The Yellow Peril” as a racist statement against the Chinese or, for that matter, the Japanese.London does say that first Japan and then China would rise to become strong economic powers which in time would challenge the economic hegemony of the West, but it’s a prediction, not a racist diatribe.

And it is true that in 1915, near the end of his life, he was still sounding like a Social Darwinist, when he wrote on the inevitability of war:

Man, being an animal, a fecund animal, a fighting animal, he will be pressed against the means of subsistence, and when he is pressed to hard he will again and always draw the sword to carve out of their men’s life a place for himself on the earth and in the sun.This is his entire past history.At present [World War I] he is fighting more horribly and more colossal than he ever fought before.Wherefore it behooves a country or

nation like the United States to maintain a reasonable preparedness for defense against any country or nation that at any time may go out upon the way of war to carve earth for itself out of weaker and unprepared nations.[5]

London in fact offers a variety of perspectives on a wide range of topics, so it is impossible to say with total clarity what London strongly felt on many questions in his writing.Indeed, as London scholars like Jeanne Reesman note in their studies of London, it is possible to mine his work to find statements that support the idea that he was a convinced racist or just the opposite.Rather, one needs to look at London’s work as a whole and develop ideas from a preponderance of his writing to see where London may have stood on many issues.

Thus, when one examines London’s depictions of Asians in many of his stories and essays, one finds him to be one of the few writers of the era who had a profound respect for Asians, who wrote about them sympathetically as real people, and who more often than not blamed his fellow “Anglo-Saxon” whites for the misery of the Asians or other oppressed folk who often appear in his stories.London’s writing is complex, offering many different perspectives, but it cannot be said that his writing about Asians was overtly xenophobic.

Jeanne Reesman emphasizes this point in her recent monograph, Jack London’s Racial Lives:

Not only does he consistently explore non-white characters’ points of view and voices, in contrast to his white contemporaries he identifies directly with these characters instead of merely projecting traits. . . . If he celebrated the Anglo-Saxon’s heroic spirit in the Klondike fiction, he exposed the racist hypocrisy underlying the Euro-American takeover of
Northwest and Pacific peoples . . . London’s identifications with so many different cultures is almost certainly a reason he is one of the most widely translated and read American authors in the world….

In many ofLondon’s stories . . . no one wins. In most of his Pacific stories whites are portrayed as diseased, evil, foolish or alcoholic wastrels, while islanders are heroic but doomed resisters of white colonialism . . . .London’s point of view is not only sympathetic to indigenous people but often attempt to see things through their eyes.[6]

What makes much of London’s writing so compelling is that he avoids stereotypes and provides his main characters with many dimensions and considerable depth.He differs from many late Victorian writers in the West in that he was not writing from a mainly Anglo-Saxon-centric perspective.London penetrates the hearts and souls of non-white people who have suffered deeply from the exploitation of the Anglo-Saxon, but there is very little that is moralistic or didactic in his style.While London shows sympathy for many of his non-white characters, he is above all an artist who attempts to develop the full personalities of the key people in his stories.

A goal of this study is to demonstrate London’s generally sympathetic portrayal of East Asians. London’s depictions of East Asians tends to be more favorable in his fiction, particularly his short stories, but considerably less so in his essays and dispatches from Korea and Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905).His Korean and Manchurian dispatches show considerable sympathy for ordinary Asians, but anger at Japanese officialdom and authority in general.His most favorable treatment of Asians comes very early in his career when he visited Japan as a teenager and in the last few years of his life after his trans-Pacific voyage on the Snark (1907-1909).

A constant theme of London’s literature is the problem of communication between Euro-Americans and Asians—that conflicts and ill-feelings result from a clash of cultures brought about by a failure to communicate. At the time of his death he was advocating the creation of a common meeting place (a “Pan-Pacific Club”) where whites and Asians could meet, communicate, and overcome the misunderstandings that conflicted them.

London was above all a man of the Pacific and much of his best and most poignant writing focuses on the people he encountered there.He was one of the first writers to realize the future importance of the Pacific Rim in world affairs and to foresee the rise of Japan and China as major powers.We encounter many Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, native Hawaiians, South Pacific islanders as well as many people of mixed race in his stories.London presents a variety of scenarios for the twentieth century, one of which is ugly war and genocide if East and West cannot develop better ways of communicating and getting to know each other.

London near the end of his life had become an avid internationalist and strong supporter of a multiculturalism.The culmination of his support for these ideals is found in his late 1915 essay, “The Language of the Tribe”[7] where, according to London scholar, Daniel Wichlan, “London publicly presented his evolved views on racial differences and cultural diversity.He proposed the establishment of a Pan-Pacific Club that would be an international clearing house for the synergistic exchange of ideas.”Here East could meet West in an amicable setting to develop bonds of friendship and trust to lay the foundations of a new and equitable world order.[8]

This book consists of two sections.The first part is an in-depth study of London’s writing and life in Asia.The second section consists of an anthology of London’s Asian writings including many of his Asian or Pacific-based short stories, his twenty-two dispatches from the Russo-Japanese War, and his essays speculating on the future of East Asia.

London wrote a great deal about Asia and the Pacific, so much so that it would be difficult to include all of this writing in a single volume.For example, I have omitted his lengthy chapter on Korea in his late novel, The Star Rover, as well as his last incomplete novel Cherry, although passages from both are quoted in the sixth chapter.There are also brief passages in other works, notably The Iron Heel and John Barleycorn which are also not included here.