After settling down in Honolulu, Ozawa learned English fluently, practiced Christianity, and obtained a job at an American company.

In his legal brief, Ozawa wrote of his personal identity, “In name, General Benedict Arnold was an American, but at heart he was a traitor.

[6] An excerpt from one of Ozawa's legal briefs reads as follows: "I neither drink liquor of any kind, nor smoke, nor play cards, nor gamble, nor associate with any improper person.

Justice Sutherland wrote that the lower courts' conclusion that the Japanese were not "free white persons" for purposes of naturalization had "become so well established by judicial and executive concurrence and legislative acquiescence that we should not at this late day feel at liberty to disturb it, in the absence of reasons far more cogent than any that have been suggested."

Thind was an Indian man from the northern region of Punjab who moved to the United States when he was young, having even joined the U.S. Army during World War I.

[10] Thind made the argument that he should be able to naturalize as a U.S. citizen because he was of the Cacausian race, the rhetoric that Ozawa's case upheld.

"[11] Writing in Foreign Affairs in 1923, a social scientist named Raymond Leslie Buell said, "The Japanese are now confronted with the unpalatable fact, laid down in unmistakable terms by the highest court in the land, that we consider them unfit to become Americans.

"[12] Some Japanese papers regarded the decision to be "an insult and outrage"[13][better source needed] with representative Mochizuki Keisuke stating that, "There can never be permanent world peace unless the principle of world-wide racial equality is first established".

[13] Some West Coast newspapers expressed satisfaction with the Ozawa decision, though the Sacramento Bee called for a constitutional amendment “which would confine citizenship by right of birth in this country to those whose parents were themselves eligible to citizenship.”[14] On the same day, the Supreme Court released its ruling in Yamashita v. Hinkle, which upheld Washington state's alien land law.

Within three months, Justice Sutherland authored a ruling in a Supreme Court case concerning the petition for naturalization of a Sikh immigrant from the Punjab region in British India, who identified himself as "a high caste Hindu of full Indian blood" in his petition, United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind.

The upshot of this ruling was that, as with the Japanese, "high-caste Hindus, of full Indian blood" were not "free white persons" and were racially ineligible for naturalized citizenship.