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Yellow Peril (sometimes Yellow Terror) was a color metaphor for race, namely the theory that East Asian peoples were a mortal danger to the rest of the world. In the words of the American historian John W. Dower: "the vision of the menace from the East was always more racial rather than national. It derived not from concern with any one country or people in particular, but from a vague and ominous sense of the vast, faceless, nameless yellow horde: the rising tide, indeed, of color." Dower described "the core imagery of apes, lesser men, primitives, children, madmen, and beings who possessed special powers", which had their origins in the wars between the ancient Greeks and Persians, and which the Yellow Peril theory later associated with East Asians.〔〔Dower, John "Patterns of a Race War" pages 283 -287 from ''Yellow Peril! An Archive of anti-Asian Fear'' edited by John Kuo Wei Tchen & Dylan Yeats, London: Verso, 2014 pages 285-286〕 The sinologist Leung Wing Fai wrote that: "The phrase yellow peril (sometimes yellow terror or yellow spectre), coined by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, in the 1890s, after a dream in which he saw the Buddha riding a dragon threatening to invade Europe, blends western anxieties about sex, racist fears of the alien other, and the Spenglerian belief that the West will become outnumbered and enslaved by the East". The American historian Gina Marchetti defined the Yellow Peril as being: "Rooted in medieval fears of Genghis Khan and the Mongolian invasions of Europe, the Yellow Peril combines racist terror of alien cultures, sexual anxieties and the belief that the West will be overpowered and enveloped by the irresistible, dark, occult forces of the East".〔Marchetti, Gina ''Romance and the "Yellow Peril"'', Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994 page 2〕 The term Yellow Peril was coined by German Emperor Wilhelm II in 1895, but the theory that Asian peoples represented a menace to the West originated in the late nineteenth century with Chinese immigrants as coolie slaves or laborers to various Western countries, notably the United States. It was later associated with the Japanese during the mid-20th century, due to Japanese military expansion, and eventually extended to all Asians of East and Southeast Asian descent. The term refers to perceptions regarding the skin color of East Asians, the fear that the mass immigration of Asians threatened the wages of whites and their standards of living, the fear that Asians had some sort of unnatural sexuality that threatened Western women with rape and the fear that they would eventually take over and destroy western civilization, replacing it with their ways of life and values. The term also refers to the fear and or belief that East Asian societies would attack and wage wars with western societies and eventually wipe them out and lead to their total annihilation whether it be their societies, people, ways of life, history, and or cultural values. ==Origins== In the late 19th century, Chinese immigration to the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada sparked a racist backlash against people who were willing to work hard for less than whites, and who were so different in appearance, language and culture from whites. In 1870, the French writer Ernest Renan warned of the danger from the East to the West, though in this case Renan primarily meant Russia.〔Tsu, Jiang ''Failure, Nationalism, and Literature: The Making of Modern Chinese Identity, 1895-1937'' Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005 page 80〕 In the 1870s, working-class whites in California demanded that the U.S government stop the immigration of "filthy yellow hordes" from China who were supposedly responsible for the economic depression by taking away jobs from white Americans.〔 Horace Greeley, the editor of the ''New-York Tribune'' newspaper wrote in an editorial in support of Chinese exclusion that: "The Chinese are uncivilized, unclean, and filthy beyond all conception without any of the higher domestic or social relations; lustful and sensual in their dispositions; every female is a prostitute of the basest order".〔 Widespread dislike of the Chinese led to the Los Angeles pogrom in 1871 where 18 Chinese immigrants were killed by a white mob. Denis Kearney, the Irish-born leader of the Workingmen's Party of California gained popularity in the 1870s-80s with his slogan: "The Chinese Must Go!"〔Wei Tchen, John Kuo & Yeats, Dylan ''Yellow Peril! An Archive of anti-Asian Fear'', London: Verso, 2014 page 349.〕 The pressure to ban Chinese immigration led to the U.S. Congress passing the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「yellow peril」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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