Gentlemen's Agreement (1907–1908)

Yvonne M. Lau

The Gentlemen's Agreement represented a set of six diplomatic notes communicated between the United States and Japan to curtail labor emigration from Japan to the United States. Led by President Theodore Roosevelt, these initiatives were intended to ease increasing tensions between the two countries and to offer a national response to the rising anti-Japanese movement centered in California. On the heels of the Russo-Japanese War and after a wave of anti-Japanese “yellow peril” ordinances in California, the Gentlemen's Agreement arose out of mutual diplomatic needs between the United States and Japan. Consequently, they were informal and shrouded agreements, not entirely revealed to the public until years later, in which Japan voluntarily agreed to restrict its nationals from entering the continental United States. This entry looks at the agreement and its background in both participating countries. On February 24, 1907, the first agreement ended in a Japanese note agreeing to deny ...

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