The controversial marriage of Helen Emery and Gunjiro Aoki was the subject of “Uncle Gunjiro’s Girlfriend,”a one-woman show by Brenda Wong Aoki, granddaughter of Gunjiro’s brother.

by STAN YOGI

“I simply love him and he loves me,” wrote a young Californian in a public letter defending a non-traditional marriage. “It is a matter solely between us two. I cannot see how our marriage will interfere with the workings of the community in any way or to the detriment of the church.”

Helen Gladys Emery, daughter of the archdeacon of San Francisco’s Episcopal diocese, made this statement nearly a century ago in reply to the violent opposition that erupted because she planned to marry Gunjiro Aoki, an Issei. Her words are apt today as a response to Proposition 8.

Proposition 8 would amend the state constitution to take away the existing right of same-sex couples to marry. As the targets of similar measures, Japanese Americans are in a unique position to consider Proposition 8 within the historical context of anti-Japanese laws and initiatives.

Unacceptable Relationships

Most Japanese Americans now take interracial marriage for granted, but when Aoki and Emery tried to marry in 1909, and for decades after that, many considered interracial relationships unacceptable. The children of such unions were thought to be “social problems.”

Emery’s family sought medical opinions to explain why their daughter was in love with the wavy-haired immigrant. Even Aoki’s Issei compatriots opposed the partnership, offering him $1,000 to break up with the sweet-faced 21-year-old.

In Emery’s hometown of Corte Madera, a crowd threw bricks at Aoki and threatened to tar and feather him. When Emery left with her mother to marry Aoki, a mob met them at the train station, jeering and yelling, banging tin cans and throwing rotting flowers.

Anti-Miscegenation Law

The couple faced not only societal disapproval but a legal barrier. The California legislature passed an anti-miscegenation law in 1850, prohibiting marriages between whites and blacks. With growing immigration from Asia, the legislature later amended the law to ban marriages between whites and Asians.

Civil and religious authorities who performed marriages between whites and people of other races faced criminal prosecution.

The young couple also met resistance when they tried to marry in Portland and Tacoma. Finally, the mayor of Seattle gave them permission to marry there — under armed guard.

Nearly 40 years passed before the California Supreme Court struck down the anti-miscegenation law as arbitrary and unreasonable discrimination against certain racial groups. Justice Roger Traynor stated, “Marriage is something more than a civil contract subject to regulations by the state. It is a fundamental right of free men.”

Anti-Japanese Initiatives

Just as the idea of interracial marriage made Californians uneasy for over a century, the prospect of Japanese American equality outraged a majority of Californians in the early 20th century. Japanese Americans, like gay men and lesbians today, were the direct targets of a voter initiative — or “ballot measure” — to legalize inequality 88 years ago, when Nikkei were an unpopular minority.

In 1920, the Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West and the American Legion qualified an initiative for the November ballot to expand the state’s existing Alien Land Law, which prohibited Issei from owning land. Issei had navigated around the law by transferring land titles to their Nisei children. So the 1920 initiative barred Issei from buying land in the names of their children and leasing land for any length of time.

‘Save California’ Campaign

During the months before the election, anti-Japanese groups led a blitzkrieg campaign with the catch phrase “Save California from the Japs.”

Anti-Japanese organizations pushed a broad agenda, including not only the Alien Land Law initiative but also a federal constitutional amendment denying citizenship to Nisei, exclusion of Japanese immigrants, and assurance that Asians would forever be barred from citizenship.

To justify this political program, the anti-Japanese propaganda campaign accused Japanese men of being spies, sex fiends and rapists who debased white women.

The smears worked. California voters approved the initiative by a three-to-one margin.
It took several Supreme Court decisions and another initiative vote to repeal the Alien Land Law 36 years later.

Imagine if the Alien Land Law and the interracial marriage prohibition were added to the Constitution, the state’s governing document meant to define our rights, not to deny them to minority groups that happen to be disfavored at a given moment. The state Supreme Court would not have been able to rule against those laws.

Unequal Legal Treatment

Just as the anti-miscegenation law denied interracial couples the freedom to marry the partners they loved, and just as the Alien Land Law stripped Japanese Americans of the basic right to own and lease land, Proposition 8 would deny gay men and lesbians the right to marry, a right available to all other adults.

History has shown it is unjust to single out a group — whether Japanese Americans in the 1920s or lesbians and gay men today — for unequal legal treatment, let alone to enshrine that inequality in the Constitution.

Nikkei can be on the right side of history by standing up for fairness and voting no on Prop. 8.

Stan Yogi is the co-author of a history of civil liberties in California to be published by Heyday Books in 2009. A Sansei raised in Gardena, he lives in Oakland.