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139 7. From Kuichi to Comrades Japanese American Views of Jews in the 1930s and 1940s Several years ago, as part of my research into the wartime confinement of Japanese Americans, I came across some correspondence by Kiyoshi Okamoto. Okamoto, a Hawaiian-born Nisei, was the founder of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee, which campaigned for restoration of civil rights to confined Japanese Americans during World War II and protested conscription of Nisei from the camps. I was surprised to discover that Okamoto’s letters seeking outside aid were laced with nasty remarks about Jews and what he considered the baneful Jewish influence over the Roosevelt administration.1 I mentioned to a Nisei friend the irony of prejudice expressed by a man fighting prejudice, and he responded that “anti-Semitism was endemic within West Coast Japanese communities” during his childhood . This was corroborated by the memoirs of a Japanese student who migrated to the West Coast during the 1930s and recalled, “As a teenager in prewar Japan I had read a little anti Semitic literature based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the alleged Jewish plot to conquer the world. In California, among the Japanese immigrants and their children I had become aware of a strong prejudice against the Jewish people.”2 Another Nisei friend told me that the Issei had even developed a special code word, kuichi, to designate their Jewish neighbors: ku (the word for the number 9) + ichi (the word for 1) = ju (the word for 10), a homonym for the English word Jew. While the term (like Jew itself) was not invariably negative, it had definite pejorative connotations, hence its in-group use. I was aware of the large-scale literature on black-Jewish connections and tensions, but I had seen almost nothing written on Jews and Japanese Americans. This data went against what little I had seen, such as George Sanchez’s study of Los Angeles’s multiracial Boyle Heights section (an area also treated more recently in Allison Varzally’s book), or Masayo 140 / Interethnic Politics Duus’s account of the Nisei soldier unit that liberated Dachau. All these were positive about interracial friendship and alliances.3 At the same time, there is a small but fascinating literature on Jewish reactions to Japanese Americans, notably to their wartime removal.4 I resolved to study the question of ethnic Japanese attitudes toward Jews, and to collect every piece of evidence I could to determine the extent of group sentiment. Since the subject of prejudice is a shameful and embarrassing one, many people do not want to talk about it at all, and individual memories are not altogether trustworthy. I have thus eschewed oral history and concentrated largely on documents from the period, especially published sources, plus diaries and other materials, which are less tainted by afterthought or tricks of memory. Unfortunately, such a method also inevitably means relying on the viewpoint of a literate and educated minority. Furthermore, since I do not speak Japanese, I have restricted myself to works written in English by Nisei or by westernized Issei, plus a few translations. The resulting sample is admittedly incomplete, and may not be representative. Still, with all these limitations in mind, I would say that the available evidence indicates that West Coast Japanese Americans, both aliens and citizens, expressed complex attitudes in regard to Jews in the World War II era. While they expressed a certain abstract awareness, if not sympathy, for the plight of persecuted European Jews, their expressions of opinion regarding Jewish immigration and Jewish Americans were marked by widespread hostility. Their opinions both reflected mainstream prejudice and drew from popular stereotypes.5 To begin with, Jewish Americans were largely absent from the West Coast Japanese press in the years before 1938, even as the two communities remained rather aloof. There were occasional positive or neutral features—one 1932 Nichi Bei Shimbun article described a Jewish “lochinvar ” who had written the newspaper asking for a Japanese girl of light complexion to marry, and offering to take the bride’s name and move to Japan with her. A piece the following year reported that the Northern California Board of rabbis had voted a resolution to repeal the 1924 Japanese exclusion law and grant Japan an immigration quota.6 One columnist cited a friend’s argument that all the world’s great musical soloists were Jews: “As a race, the Jewish people are endowed richly with highly expressive , almost extravagantly overt...

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