September 29, 1920. The American Legion expresses its (1920) view on Japanese immigration . .

and it wasn't welcoming.

The degree to which really strong anti Japanese immigrant views were once not only common, but probably the majority view of the country, is well known but still not always appreciated. We wouldn't think, for example, that the American Legion would have made a statement about it in 1920.  Indeed, it's not even clear why this was a topic for the brand new veterans' organization at the time.

FWIW, a "picture bride" was a mail order bride arranged through a matchmaker, who paired photographs of the prospective bride and groom. In this case, that was done in Japan and then the bride went to be with their husbands. The "gentleman's agreement" referred to here allowed for the immigration of spouses after the Federal Government quit issuing visas to Japanese immigrants and the exception for picture brides had been made illegal in March, 1920.  The elimination of the exception left about 24,000 male Japanese in the United States batchelors.

Japanese picture brides arriving at Angel Island, California.  1919.

For those who may wonder why that was the case, immigration by the Japanese was heavily male.  Before World War Two, Japanese in the United States (or Japan) almost never intermarried with other cultures, although World War Two would change that forever in the United States and briefly in Japan.  The role of women in Japanese marriages, moreover, placed a very heavy emphasis on women being dominant in the households and it would really take acculturation of the Japanese in the United States, which World War Two accelerated for a variety of reasons, to alter that in the US.  So the nest result was lonely lives for a lot of Japanese men, and not a few Japanese women, who were willing to take the risks of marrying somebody they didn't know over a lifelong single status.

It should be noted that not all of the brides were Japanese.  Some were Korean, at a time at which Korea was an unwilling Japanese colony. That also says something about how the male Japanese diaspora was viewed in Japan.  Generally intermarriages with Koreans in Japan, or Korea, was frowned upon, but not in the case of women being shipped across the sea.

The male motivation isn't hard to figure out, but the female one is more so.  Many of the marriages were arranged by the parents of the couple back in Japan and therefore they knew each other a bit.  Some did it as it was regarded as adventuresome in Japan at a time when women's ability to travel abroad in that country was very limited.  Some took it up simply as a means of immigrating to a new country where social restrictions on women were known to be much less restrictive.  Most were apparently shocked by the conditions they lived in at first, and disappointed with their prearranged male matches who were ten to fifteen years older than they were, but they came to adjust to them.

It's really odd to think of the American Legion, which was brand new at the time, even having an opinion on this topic, let alone an anti-Japanese immigrant one in light of Japan having been an Allied power in World War One.

It's also a bit odd to think of Natrona County having less than 15,000 people.  Indeed, I'm envious of that.