A few weeks ago, the LA Times Travel section had an article about National Park sites that featured two of the ten concentration camp locations (the two within California) that were operated by the War Relocation Authority (WRA) during World War II. That article, which was trying to focus on race and ethnicity in America's history, resulted in the LA Times publishing two letters that criticized the original article, essentially defending the incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry during World War II, and resulted in wide-spread condemnation of the newspaper by readers offended by those letters. This posting is not about the letters per se nor the details of the response to them. Although, I have to say the original letter writers were very ill-informed. I had to chuckle when one talked about "anti-U.S. remake of history," since the history the individual cited was, in fact, the propaganda circulated to the public at the time by the U.S. government and was not an accurate reflection of history....but, that is also the nature of history.
Rather, I wanted to focus on two things about this whole incident. The first was the response of individuals who claimed the LA Times should not have printed those letters to begin with, since they espoused cultural stereotypes, misinformation, and racial bias. The LA Times eventually issued an apology and responded by saying the letters did not meet their editorial standards and therefore should never had been published. However, I would argue that the LA Times should not be faulted for printing those letters. Why should the LA Times have published the letters? First, there's the First Amendment and while what was written was, again, wrong and could be construed racist, those individuals have the right to their opinion, right or wrong. Frankly, by printing those letters, the LA Times has exposed the fact that racism and bias are alive and well in America, something many people are just now starting to realize. Thus, these letters provide an opportunity to educate the public, especially in a time when racial bias is on the rise. The First Amendment is not something that can be selectively applied. By denying these individuals the ability to express their opinion, what's to prevent someone else from suppressing your opinion in the future? Who's opinion is right? Who's is wrong? This is the nature of the First Amendment. My view is that the LA Times has done the community a huge favor and it presents an opportunity to educate America about what exactly happened during that period and why the opinions expressed in those letters were wrong. Suppressing these people won't make them nor their opinions go away. Yelling back at them won't change their opinion nor make them go away. Educating them might change their opinion and might make them go away.
Second, the general discussion of the wartime incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry engendered by these letters reveals a flaw in how the affected population has been characterized. Everyone tends to treat this group as a single homogeneous group; calling them "Japanese" as if they were all Japanese immigrants with Japanese citizenship (naturalization laws at the time prevented Japanese immigrants from becoming naturalized U.S. citizens). Both the letter writers and those who responded to those letters make this same mistake. In fact, I blame many in the Japanese American community for perpetuating this myth, because they too tend to use the phrase "Japanese" when talking about this group. It is extremely important to remember that the population of people of Japanese ancestry was, and continues to be, a mixture of Japanese immigrants and Americans of Japanese ancestry. In fact, the vast majority at that time, and even today, were U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry, not immigrants from Japan. As an example, the 1940 Census estimated there were a little over 127,000 individuals of Japanese ancestry living in the 48 contiguous states, the vast majority living in west coast states. Approximately 42% of the population of Hawaii was of Japanese ancestry. The majority of those individuals (approximately two-thirds) were U.S. citizens....they were not Japanese, they were Americans. Therefore, it is incorrect to refer to all of them as Japanese. The Japanese American community should stop referring to the population (past and present) as "Japanese," since we will always be a mixture of these two broad groups.
Why should we care about what most might call a technicality? The distinction is extremely important, because of perceptions; referring to everyone as "Japanese" immediately equates them as being immigrants and at that time, the enemy. More importantly, the Federal government treated this population as a single homogeneous group and went to great lengths to ensure the public treated them as such. Hence, the use of the phrase "non-aliens" when referring to U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry; they were never referred to as "citizens" in any public declarations or documents. A second example of this were Americans of Japanese ancestry serving in the U.S. military when the war started. These individuals, all U.S. citizens, were labeled as 4-C "Enemy Alien" and expelled from service. How could they be "Enemy Alien" if they were U.S. citizens? Again, the government exploited the existing racial prejudice and fear to justify the label and implement policy. It might be of interest to those two individuals who wrote those letters that prior to the start of the war, the Federal government was concerned about the high concentration of people of Japanese ancestry in Hawaii and along the west coast that they commissioned an investigation into the loyalties of those individuals. The so-called Munson Report came to the conclusion that there would be no need to incarcerate people of Japanese ancestry if we went to war with Japan. Curtis Munson, the author of the report, was very careful to note that the population were mostly Americans of Japanese ancestry and that many of the immigrant Japanese would have become U.S. citizens had our laws allowed them to. A similar independent report by the FBI came to the same conclusion. The conclusions of both these reports were ignored when the war began. Calling the entire population "Japanese" facilitates people assigning guilt upon Americans of Japanese ancestry as being part of the enemy population. In fact, many Americans even today assign guilt to Americans of Japanese ancestry for the heinous war crimes committed by Japanese troops during World War II. How can American citizens be blamed for the acts of individuals of another nation? Guilt by association, or more correctly, paraphrasing the late comedian George Carlin, guilt simply because their parents were born in the wrong country.
Again, these are important issues that don't just apply to the population of Japanese and Japanese Americans. You can replace "Japanese" with whatever ethnic/racial group you want and the same kinds of issues arise. America needs to better understand its ethnic/racial and multi-cultural history, embrace it, and make this a better country for all. Yes, we need to protect ourselves from both internal and external threats. But labeling groups in a homogeneous fashion and creating stereotypes is not the way to do it.
#LetsMakeAmericaBuenoAgain
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