In its first flush of its gratitude to the American
people for their wonderful generosity at the time of the earthquake, the Japanese Press anticipated that Japanese-American relations were entering upon an entirely new phase, and it was hoped that the tension of the past couple of decades would disappear. It is difficult to see how Japanese-American relations can ever be anything but delicate so long as the Japanese nation feels that its citizens are discriminated against in the United States, and especially in California. Washington dispatches state that the Japanese Government is about to launch a formal protest against the recent decree of the Supreme Court debarring Japanese from owning or leasing land on the Pacific Coast. Another cloud on the Japanese-American horizon is the reported intention of the Californian members of Congress to seek the enactment of Federal laws barring Japanese immigration, With our own recent experiences of the delicacy of the
problem of the status of Indians within the British Commonwealth, we can appreciate the difficulties of the American and Japanese Governments in their desire to maintain friendly relations.
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