American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II (review)

In this study of the Japanese American internment, Eric L. Muller focuses on a single, though crucial element of the wholesale incarceration of American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II: the determination of Nisei loyalty to the United States. Muller's purpose is to follow the paper trail left by the infamous loyalty questionnaires "into the bowels of the wartime bureaucracy," (2) a disjointed collection of military and civilian government agencies with conflicting cultures and interests, to show how any attempt to determine individual loyalty in general, as a sentiment, is doomed to confusion, arbitrariness, and failure. Considering the involved agencies' inability to even come to a coherent definition of loyalty, Muller doubts that any such enterprise can ever have even a semblance of predictive power on individual behavior. He suggests, although without further elaboration, that past disloyalty is the only fair indicator of an individual's allegiance. Any attempt to determine current attitudes only brings to light the bias and prejudices of the examining bodies and the bureaucrats who staff them. Muller's most significant contribution to our understanding of the Japanese American internment is in the examination and analysis of new archival sources—minutes, letters, verbal communications on record—to trace the handling of the loyalty question by midlevel bureaucrats who interpreted, applied, and, Muller shows, often influenced, the directives of top level officials. In his conclusion, Muller identifies a stark dichotomy between military and civilian bureaucrats, whereby civilian administrators appear better able to make assumptions favorable to Japanese Americans, while military administrators tended to see loyalty as a function of race and ethnicity. In comparative terms, this is convincing, although other studies of civilian administrators (Brian Masaru Hayashi) reveal more insidious motives to their concern with the internees. From an American Studies perspective, Muller's analysis and archival work can be a springboard for the investigation of other closely or loosely related problems. One such concern, only alluded to by Muller, is the character of modern evil, which, though horrific in its consequences, may be characterized as banal (Hannah Arendt) and depersonalizing (Zygmunt Bauman) in its mechanics; another, is to understand how loyalty functions when diversely qualified as "national", or "racial", or as a necessary attribute of a juridical understanding of citizenship. From this reviewer's perspective, this book exhibits one limitation, namely a diminutive view of the political, visible in the (not infrequent) suggestion that agencies and individuals were motivated by "just politics." (82) This approach precludes areas of inquiry which, although more ambivalent than Muller's excellent evidence-driven research, should remain open. In modern political systems, legitimated from below, mere being is already political behavior. Thus, the anxiety of the military and the inquisitiveness of civilians, both so well documented by Muller in this valuable contribution, may be rooted in different understandings of the political.