Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II

4. Reasoning, Counterreasonings, and Counter-conduct

c h a p t e r f o u r · Reasoning, Counterreasonings, and Counter-conduct [I]t seems a universal observation that one cannot have self-management in any kind of community without struggles and politics, sometimes more disturbing, sometimes less, but always there. . . . The alternative is toward force, to which there is always resistance and this leads by action and reaction to extremes of suppression, resulting in tyranny, slave labor and undercover antagonism. Inefficient self-rule, charged with good will, sloppy as it may be, seems to be better and more economical than anything else attainable. alexander h. leighton (on the Poston Relocation Center), The Governing of Men (1946) In the previous chapter I charted the shift in modality of governing Japanese Americans toward a complex governmentality that mobilized exceptions and force precisely for the purpose of enabling liberal rule. As Dillon S. Myer put it in response to aggressive questioning in the Senate about the need to more strictly police the internees , “it is a question whether we are going to make more fifth columnists by one kindof treatment”—thatis,byseverity—“orwhetherbyanothertypeof treatment we are going to make more good citizens.”1 Yet in the process I have only in passing observed the internees as they lived through this historical juncture, and how they participated in or refused volunteering for the army and registration. In this chapter I attend to this task, not through lenses that focus and simplify using the binary framework of resistance or collaboration, and even less with an intent to prove thatmostJapaneseAmericanswerebasicallyloyalAmericans.Suchobjectiveswould unwittinglyreproducetheframeworkof theauthoritiesthemselves,whohadshifted to the view that the overwhelming majority of Japanese Americans were loyal and that registration was intended to separate out the unredeemable from those who couldbesafelyreleasedintomainstreamsocietyorthe“free”spacesof theninecen163 ters other than Tule Lake. Instead, I explore the utterances and acts of the governed in relation to the demand that they speak as supposedly free subjects. As we will see, governing in this modality was a messy affair. One of the most striking aspects of Japanese American responses to registration andthecampaignforarmyvolunteersistheintensityandfrequencywithwhichthey produced counterquestions. For example, while the War Relocation Authority (WRA) and War Department questionnaires contained 33 and 28 questions, respectively ,afteraseriesof meetingstheCommunityCouncilof TuleLakepresented their project director with some 150 queries about volunteering, registration, and the questionnaires. Tule Lake was a particular hotspot in the registration effort, but theferocityandquantityof theirquestionswerebynomeansatypical.Mostinternees responded to the numerous questions not with answers but with a barrage of counterquestions , some effectively if only momentarily sabotaging the reasoning of all those civilian, military, and intelligence agencies that had come together to collect information about them and to make them speak. Nevertheless, over the long run their dialogue with the governors resulted in the elaboration of a liberal model for governing a society that would include suspect minorities. The internees’ prerogatives to question, to submit petitions, and to expect answersemergedwithinthecontextof liberalgovernmentality.Sincethiswasamodalityof governancethatwassupposedtooperatethroughreasonandthemobilization of supposedly free subjects, the authorities had to give the internees opportunities to listen to official rationale and to ask questions. Of course, many authorities attributed to the American-educated, Christian, more assimilated, and wealthier among them a greater capacity for reason than laborers and those they considered uneducated.Forinstance,atMinidoka,wherenoonerefusedtoregisterandthearmy recruited the most volunteers, the team captain Stanley D. Arnold attributed these circumstances to the belief shared by many that internees in the center from WashingtonState (whomadeuptheoverwhelmingmajorityof theinterneesinMinidoka) were of a better and “different class, generally speaking, from others of their race on thePacificCoast.”Ontheonehand,theJapanesewhohadimmigratedtoCalifornia and Oregon were largely lower class peasants in Japan with little education, no money, and bound to old country religions through fear and ignorance. The Washington Japanese on the other hand came to this country of their own accord, with some education and either money or business connections. They came because it was the land of opportunity and not a land of necessity. They had done will [sic] 164 · japanese as americans financially in the Puget Sound area. . . . [A] large majority of the younger generation have [sic] adopted Christianity. . . . There were few, if any, Buddhist volunteers.2 Inhisstudyof Poston,thesocialscientistAlexanderH.Leightonsimilarlydisplayed thisOrientalistunderstandingof raucousinterneesassomehowoutof timeandlacking reason when he invoked the historian Hugh Borton’s study of peasant uprisings in Tokugawa Japan (1600–1867) to analyze the famous Poston Center strike of fall 1942.3 Notwithstanding such class-based, religious, and Orientalist prejudices, the War Department was so committed to dialogue that it provided the team captains not onlywiththe...