n Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993), Val Plumwood argues that the construction of human identity as "'outside' nature" relies on the West's conception of the human-nature dualism: "In the range of plots which emanate from the master, from the perspective of power, nature is that other which is excluded from the sphere of ends. It is the name for all those whose own ends are denied and have disappeared." 1 In this essay, I connect both the human and natural worlds in the form of naturalized immigrants and human- ized insects and plants. 2 The dualisms of mind-nature, colonizer-colonized, and public health-environment have obscured our intimate relationship with nature through discourse that marginalized Japanese immigrants as irratio- nal, environmentally destructive, and public health threats. The exclusion of marginalized others is inextricably linked with nature—the primitive and the demonized—and as Plumwood points out, is not limited to women but also includes other subordinated groups such as animals, minorities, and the colonized. 3 I tell how government officers and the mass media demonized mutually constitutive Japanese beetles and bodies as deadly yellow perils in the early twentieth century. 4 Prior to the Japanese beetle, perceptions of Japanese im- migrants as a group destructive to the native biota alarmed government of- ficials at the turn of the twentieth century. Through the use of the umbrella metaphor of the Japanese as foreign invaders, dominant images of Japanese and Japanese Americans as a contagious and poisonous yellow peril played a key role in shaping anti-Asianism, including legislation that sought to exclude foreign plants and human immigrants. With the discovery of Japanese beetles and the rise of Japanese agriculturalists, a new toxic danger emerged in the 1920s and continued well into the 1930s. With a whole host of anti-Asian immigration legislation in place by 1924, their increasing presence occurred as the United States grappled with the problem of dealing with those aliens inside its borders. It led to a struggle over land and control of the environment and awakened the consciousness of white Americans, who feared a biological
