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

Preface and Acknowledgments

P R E F A C E A N D A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S Many years ago I began to write a book on the military and its effects in modern Japan that would have had much less to say about race than does this volume. While this book reflects some of the concerns I had at that time, the racial politics of the mid- to late 1990s derailed that project, at least for a while. In the United States and especially in California, where I have taught for many years, the anti-immigrant movement,thewidespreadattackonaffirmativeaction,andthesteadilygrowingrant against considerations of race in opening opportunities for historically underrepresented minorities in employment, education, and other arenas of life pushed me to rethink my research agenda. Above all, I was most struck and offended by the virulenceandself -righteousnessof atypeof racismthatpresenteditself asitsopposite— namely, as antiracist. Using slogans such as “reverse racism” and pegging as racist eventhemostmodestpoliciesintendedtohelprectifytheeffectsof centuriesof racial discrimination, the movement obviously has a longer history (including within the period that concerns this book) and certainly continues into the present in our postObamaage —anagethatsomemistakenlyordisingenuouslyregardas“post-racial.” But in the mid- to late 1990s, the movement’s hysteria reached a peak. At such a time I wanted to learn more about the modern histories of racism and its varieties in the United States, initially less as a scholarly pursuit than as a means to better engage in discussions and activism around the ongoing problem of racial justice. An unexpected opportunity to write on the topic emerged in conversations with Geoffrey M. White and Lisa Yoneyama as we planned a major international ix conferenceonmemoriesof theSecondWorldWarintheAsia-Pacific.Havinggrown up in California, I had long been struck by the discourse on Japanese American war heroes, both in the mainstream media and in Japanese American communities. I had intense memories of aging and often frail Japanese American men donning clothing , insignia, and caps from the U.S. Army uniforms that they had originally worn as much as half a century earlier, even when the occasion had no immediately apparentrelationshiptowar ,nationalism,ormilitarycommemoration.SinceIwanted to know more about the history of these veterans and to understand how in the politics of race the figure of the Japanese American soldier had come to achieve such visibility in mainstream and Japanese American memories of the war, I decided to research this area for our conference. It seemed a way for me to approach the momentous subject of race in America from an angle with which I already had some organic familiarity, even though at the time I had no idea that I would pursue the topic beyond the conference paper. In the paper I explored the connections between Japanese American military service ,theWorldWarIIdisavowalof racialdiscriminationeveninthecontextof Japanese American internment, the inextricable relationship between racism and nationalism , the construction of Japanese Americans as the foremost model minority, the postwar emergence of Japan as what I began to call the model minority nation, and scholarship in Japanese studies. Eventually this paper was published in the volume Perilous Memories: The Asia Pacific War(s), which I co-edited with my conference co-organizers.1 The ideas that I first sketched out there can be found in various places throughout this book, but especially in chapter 5. I would like to thank Geoff and Lisa first of all, for the collaborative thinking that we did for the conference and volume. So many of my perspectives began to take shape through our intense discussions. During and soon after the conference many individuals offered criticism and encouragement on the paper, as well as on subsequent presentations based on the essay. I want to mention in particular George Lipsitz, the late Yuji Ichioka, and Lisa Lowe. George helped allay my hesitation to cross over from Asian into American studies and brought me up to speed on the emerging scholarship, including his own, concerningAfricanAmericanengagementswithimperialJapan.Iamconvincedthat the sensitivity that he and Ishmael Reed (in a brief conversation) gave me on the ties between African American and Japanese history helped me understand the signi ficanceof archivaldocumentsthatIsubsequentlydiscoveredconcerningwartime fears of a global alliance of the “darker races” with the Japanese, and how such a race panic contributed to the wartime decision first to suspend Japanese Americans x · preface from military service, and then to begin accepting them as volunteers. I met Yuji for the first time with some trepidation, since...