Race War!: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire

6. Race Reversed/Gender Transformed

6 Race Reversed/GenderTransformed THE BRITISH AUTHORITIES WERE VERY CONCERNED with the presumed enemy within the gates of U.S. territory.1 Weeks after Hong Kong surrendered and just as Singapore was about to do so, the Foreign Office briefed the United States on “lessons” to be drawn from the at­ tack on Pearl Harbor. “For some days before” the assault on U.S. terri­ tory, “Japanese girls had been making ‘dates’ with sailors for that Sat­ urday night and most of them saw that the sailors were filled up with liquor. This was remarkable because it is apparently unusual for Japan­ ese girls to mix with the sailors. Also a Japanese restaurant keeper near Pearl Harbour gave drinks on the house. On Friday many Japanese quit their jobs and did not turn up on Saturday morning.” During the bomb­ ing, “attempts were made to obstruct military traffic by such means as drawing lorries across the roads by Japanese truck­drivers. . . . Some of the local Japanese expected an uprising and a seizure of Hawaii by force. One Japanese restaurant keeper, who owned a restaurant close to Pearl Harbour, appeared at the height of the attack dressed in the uni­ form of a Japanese officer. . . . He was promptly shot.” It has been sug­ gested,” said London ominously, “that many of the [Japanese aviators] were Hawaiian born Japanese.” Some that crashed had “McKinley High School . . . rings and Oregon State rings.” Expressing astonish­ ment and bewilderment at the hybrid Asian American community that had arisen in the race­obsessed United States, the lengthy report con­ tinued that in Hawaii “the Orientals cooperate and there is none of the Sino­Japanese animosity which exists in Asia. The Japanese, as the most pushing, active and well­organized, run the Chinese.”2 These over­ heated assertions were not only suggestive of the temper of the times, but also foreshadowed the internment of Japanese Americans in the western United States—though, tellingly, not in Hawaii itself.3 This anti­Nippon attitude quickly gained currency in western Canada, principally in British Columbia. The clear message that 128 RACE REVERSED/GENDER TRANSFORMED 129 emerged from a Cabinet­level confab that convened in Ottawa in Janu­ ary 1942 was that citizens of Japanese ancestry should be used as lever­ age to improve conditions for Britons in Hong Kong. There was earnest concern, on the other hand, that if they mistreated Japanese Canadians, the Japanese would retaliate against internees in the occupied territo­ ries.4 This was part and parcel of London’s difficulty—both before and during the war—in deciding how those of Japanese ancestry under Britain’s jurisdiction should be treated. The Japanese community in Hong Kong was relatively small, about twenty­two hundred all told in 1931. However, under British rule they were discriminated against.5 An attempt before the war to have Japanese doctors “admitted to practice” in Hong Kong “stirred the antagonism of many.”6 Afterwards, this bias was rationalized on the grounds that during the invasion “Japanese agents worked as waiters, barmen, hairdressers and masseurs, or at any trade in which customers were given to sharing confidences. Japanese bars in Wanchai were among the most popular in town. A pint at Na­ gasaki Joe’s was ten cents cheaper than anywhere else and the girls in Japanese bars seemed especially solicitous.” The “finest hairdresser” in Hong Kong, who in “seven years cut the hair of two governors, the commissioner of police, the officer in charge of Special Branch, the colo­ nial secretary and the [Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank] chairman,” in late December 1941 “presented himself” as a “commander of the Impe­ rial Japanese Navy.”7 Thus, it was thought after the fact, Japanese doc­ tors in Hong Kong could have perpetrated much damage. One Hong Kong police officer noted sorrowfully that a man he now knew in an internment camp as a “lieutenant in the Japanese Army­ Mizuno,” had “run a sports shop in Wanchai” prior to that.8 In prewar Hong Kong “Yamashita” was the “best barber in the Hong Kong Hotel barber shop. . . . Then after the surrender . . . Yamashita had appeared in uniform.”9 The British sailor George Harry Bainborough recalled a “hotel in Hong Kong called the Chitose,” a “bar with Japanese women used to be in this place.” A “fellow” officer told him that when the “Japs [sic] caught him he was interviewed by an interpreter, the interpreter, no less, was one...