Eric L. Muller, author of American Inquisition:
The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II, on
the perils and prejudices that can accompany attempts to profile enemy
combatants.
Q: How does American Inquisition differ from
other studies on Japanese internment during World War
II?
A: American Inquisition focuses
on what you might call the "inner workings" of the Japanese American
internment - the tribunals in the bowels of the wartime bureaucracy that
tried to decide which Japanese Americans were loyal to the United States
and which were disloyal. Even though these loyalty programs were an
important engine of the internment program - the mechanism that continued
to repress Japanese Americans long after the government made its initial
decision to force Japanese Americans into camps - the literature on the
Japanese American internment has paid scant attention to these
tribunals.
Q: How did you become interested in writing
about the Japanese American internment and about the government's
loyalty tests for its supposed internal enemies?
A: The themes of racial
incarceration and the persecution of internal enemies run strongly
through my own family history. I am the son of a Jewish refugee from
Nazi Germany. My grandfather was incarcerated at the Buchenwald
concentration camp after the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938; this
incarceration came after years in which my grandparents and all other
German Jews were increasingly depicted as dangerous internal enemies to
the German nation. For these personal reasons, I grew interested in how
the United States racially identified and then incarcerated a supposed
internal enemy during the same time period. Obviously, the Holocaust
and the Japanese American internment were different sorts of programs in
crucial ways. Yet they shared a similar engine - the engine of racial
scapegoating.
Q: The Japanese loyalty questionnaire is
central to your book. Can you explain what the form was and the
significance it had for Japanese internees?
A: The loyalty questionnaire was
a twenty-eight-question form that the government forced all Japanese
American internees to fill out while behind barbed wire in spring of
1943. It tried to probe each internee's work and education background,
reading habits, and familiarity with Japanese and American cultural,
religious, political, and linguistic traditions. It also asked each
internee whether he was willing to serve in the U.S. military and to
forswear allegiance to the Emperor of Japan. These forms became a
centerpiece of the government's administrative efforts to adjudicate the
loyalty or disloyalty of American citizens of Japanese ancestry. For the
internees, the loyalty questionnaires provoked intense anxiety and
controversy. Already a year into captivity, many internees saw the
questions as a series of vague traps that could only force them deeper
into incarceration. Especially provocative was the question asking them
to renounce loyalty to the Emperor - a loyalty that none of the American
citizens in the camps had ever sworn or announced in the first place.
The questionnaires were greeted with wariness, confusion, and even open
hostility and resistance in the camps.
Q: What were the "point systems" used in the
questionnaire?
A: The "point systems" reflected
the attempts of bureaucrats to take the internees' answers to the
loyalty questionnaire and convert them to number values, so that each
internee would have an ultimate loyalty "score." The point systems were
absurdly oversimplified and dependent on cultural assumptions:
practicing judo earned a negative score, while little-league baseball
earned a positive; Buddhism was a negative and Christianity a positive.
Q: What penalties were invoked when a man or
woman was considered to be disloyal?
A: A charge of disloyalty could
force an internee's transfer to a special segregation camp where
conditions were harsher and the atmosphere more turbulent. It could bar
an internee from securing permission to leave a camp for a job in the
country's interior. It could block an internee from obtaining a job that
the government deemed too sensitive for the war effort in any way. And,
as the war wound down and the mass exclusion of Japanese Americans from
the West Coast ended, a finding of disloyalty meant that a Japanese
American could not return home to the West Coast.
Q: What and who were the major authorities
involved in determining loyalty? How did the process of determining
loyalty differ among them?
A: The major authorities
determining loyalty were the War Relocation Authority, which was the
civilian agency that ran the internment camps; the Western Defense
Command, which was the military command that had responsibility for
defense of the West Coast; and the Provost Marshal General's Office,
which was the military unit responsible for industrial security and
military policing. All of these agencies were supposed to coordinate
their work under the auspices of an overarching, inter-agency loyalty
board called the Japanese American Joint Board. But the differences in
vision and mission of the various agencies were so stark that the
Japanese American Joint Board never managed to perform its coordinating
function.
Q: Did any of the Japanese Americans
challenge charges of disloyalty? If so, were any successful in
overturning the charge?
A: The only loyalty adjudication
system that a Japanese American challenged in court was the one that the
military's Western Defense Command used in 1945 to specify which
Japanese Americans were too dangerous to return to the West Coast after
the military lifted its blanket policy of excluding all Japanese
Americans en masse.
Three Japanese Americans filed challenges-George Ochikubo, a dentist
from Oakland, California; Ruth Shiramizu, the twenty-four-year-old widow
of a Japanese American recipient of a Purple Heart; and Masaru Baba, an
honorably-discharged veteran of the U.S. Army. In order to moot the
cases of Shiramizu and Baba, the government relented and permitted them
to return to the West Coast. Thus, only Ochikubo's challenge to the
Western Defense Command's filing of disloyalty actually went to court.
In Ochikubo's trial, military witnesses lied under oath in order to
secure a judicial declaration that the military had virtually unlimited
power to exclude American citizens from broad swaths of American
territory. A federal judge ultimately rejected Ochikubo's challenge to
his exclusion from the West Coast.
Q: Have the men and women who were held in
the camps or punished for disloyalty received any recompense for their
incarceration?
A: All Japanese Americans who were
in the camps qualified for a rather meager compensation system for real
and personal property that was administered in the late 1940s. They also
qualified for a $20,000 token redress payment that Congress authorized
in the late 1980s. Those internees who were wrongfully labeled
"disloyal" have never received compensation of any sort for that
designation or its consequences.
Q: What significance does American
Inquisition have for the United States' current wartime policies in
places such as Guantanamo Bay?
A: The adjudication systems in
American Inquisition bear certain troubling resemblances to those that
the government is now using to designate enemy combatants. These
resemblances include the thinness of the evidentiary data, the opacity
of the decision-making process, the insistence on performing all review
entirely in the executive branch, and the willingness of military and
executive officials to seek judicial declarations of unreviewable
military and executive discretion to determine the rights of U.S.
citizens.
Because the decision-making by the Guantanamo review panels is
not open to public view, it is impossible to say for sure what sorts of
reasoning methods the military is using. However, it would not be at all
surprising to learn - as we no doubt someday will, when archival material
permits the sort of scholarly evaluations of today's programs that are
now possible for our World War II misadventures - that the military is
relying heavily on guilt-by-association and on cultural and religious
practices, just as the government did in World War II.
Q: In your conclusion, you discuss the
concern for loyalty in several wars that the United States has been
involved in. What can readers learn from American Inquisition about
racial profiling in times of war?
A: American Inquisition
documents with great precision how corrosive a reliance on race,
ethnicity, and culture is to a process of loyalty screening. Of all of
the attributes that mark a person's identity-gender, physical
appearance, personality, intellect, manners of speech, educational
pedigree, job, and on and on - few are more pernicious predictors than
ancestry and cultural practices. They are the basis of some of our
society's crudest caricatures and most powerful stereotypes, not to
mention our most intense fears and most destructive antagonisms. Focus
on a person's ancestry and cultural practices is far likelier to corrupt
an inquiry into his loyalty and dangerousness than to enhance it, by
misleading the investigator into assuming that feeling and conduct
correlate more closely than they really do.
