Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture

Jennifer Ann Ho

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780813575377
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The sheer diversity of the Asian American populace makes them an ambiguous racial category. Indeed, the 2010 U.S. Census lists twenty-four Asian-ethnic groups, lumping together under one heading people with dramatically different historical backgrounds and cultures. In Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture, Jennifer Ann Ho shines a light on the hybrid and indeterminate aspects of race, revealing ambiguity to be paramount to a more nuanced understanding both of race and of what it means to be Asian American.    Exploring a variety of subjects and cultural artifacts, Ho reveals how Asian American subjects evince a deep racial ambiguity that unmoors the concept of race from any fixed or finite understanding. For example, the book examines the racial ambiguity of Japanese American nisei Yoshiko Nakamura deLeon, who during World War II underwent an abrupt transition from being an enemy alien to an assimilating American, via the Mixed Marriage Policy of 1942. It looks at the blogs of Korean, Taiwanese, and Vietnamese Americans who were adopted as children by white American families and have conflicted feelings about their “honorary white” status. And it discusses Tiger Woods, the most famous mixed-race Asian American, whose description of himself as “Cablinasian”—reflecting his background as Black, Asian, Caucasian, and Native American—perfectly captures the ambiguity of racial classifications.      Race is an abstraction that we treat as concrete, a construct that reflects only our desires, fears, and anxieties. Jennifer Ho demonstrates in Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture that seeing race as ambiguous puts us one step closer to a potential antidote to racism.   

1

From Enemy Alien to Assimilating American

Yoshiko deLeon and the Mixed-Marriage Policy of the Japanese American Incarceration

Yoshiko Tanaka Nakamura deLeon led an exceptional life. Her Japanese immigrant mother divorced her alcoholic husband at the turn-of-the-century at a time when divorce was unheard of and in a cultural climate that made female enfranchisement nearly impossible, and she moved with her daughter to the Central Coast of California after remarrying another Japanese immigrant farmer. Yoshiko herself also transgressed propriety and Japanese cultural norms by marrying her Filipino immigrant husband, Gabriel deLeon, a man who initially sold vegetables out of a truck upon his arrival to the United States and who built up his fortunes and his political clout to become the first Filipino–Asian American mayor of a US city—Arroyo Grande, California. However, what makes Yoshiko’s life story truly exceptional is that she was one of ninety women of Japanese ancestry living in Military Zone I who evaded incarceration during World War II through the auspices of the Mixed-Marriage Policy of 1942—the military-sponsored program that allowed for “certain persons of Japanese ancestry” to be exempted from imprisonment in US concentration camps during World War II.1

The Mixed-Marriage Policy of 1942 was an exemption program that allowed for a total of 568 people of Japanese ancestry (predominantly women and children) to live within the restricted zone of the United States—the West Coast—and to escape incarceration.2 But more specifically, it was an assimilation policy; one of its stated goals was to allow mixed race (or in the language of the policy, “mixed-blood”) children of Japanese women and non-Japanese men a chance to live a “normal” lifestyle outside of the contaminating cultural influence of the Japanese community detained in American concentration camps, a belief stated clearly by General John deWitt, one of the architects of both the Japanese American incarceration as well as the Mixed-Marriage Program: “The policy was designed to afford an opportunity for mixed-blood children, the product of mixed-marriages, who had previously been raised in a non-Japanese environment, to continue their development under conditions as nearly normal as feasible.”3 To qualify for exemption under the Mixed-Marriage Program you had to be a Japanese or Japanese American woman married to a non-Japanese man with unemancipated children.

Few people knew of the Mixed-Marriage Program during World War II, and among contemporary scholarship on the incarceration there is only a single essay dedicated to this phenomenon by historian Paul Spickard, with brief commentary in works by Tetsuden Kashima and Klancy Clark deNevers.4 Indeed, conventional wisdom among most Asian American scholars avers that all people of Japanese descent living on the West Coast during World War II were incarcerated.5 The Mixed-Marriage Program remains an under-recorded exception to incarceration among nearly all secondary sources. This is an unfortunate lacuna because the policy exposes important implications about the basis for incarceration and the ambiguity of race as a category. The entire rationale for incarceration was predicated on the myth of “military necessity”: the threat of a fifth column element embedded in the Japanese American communities of Hawaii and the West Coast.6 Believing the Japanese to be, inherently, more foreign and less trustworthy than their Euro-American counterparts, the architects of the incarceration connected a Japanese essence with disloyalty. However, the exceptions to incarceration under the Mixed-Marriage Program prove that loyalty and assimilation could be engineered, as Spickard notes: “The criteria for choosing these groups [for exemption] had little to do with individual loyalties. Rather the groups were chosen by racial and gender attributes.”7 These exemptions under the Mixed-Marriage Policy betray the absolute fixity of racial difference and the concomitant “military threat” that Japanese people embodied (and upon which the incarceration was based). If the US government could arbitrarily decide that certain types of Japanese were suitable for assimilation and qualified for exemption based on exterior factors of marriage and children, then the idea of race as an immutable, essential, inheritable category is undermined by the Mixed-Marriage Program’s attempt to socially engineer “appropriate” racial and national identities. In other words, assimilation becomes a form of racial ambiguity in this period as implemented through the Mixed-Marriage Policy and as evidenced in the life story of Yoshiko deLeon.

As a twenty-three-year-old nisei married to a non-Japanese man, Yoshiko deLeon, along with her three-year-old son Martin, qualified for exemption on October 6, 1942.8 A conversation with my college roommate twenty-five years earlier began my investigation into Yoshiko’s exceptional status, because deLeon was her maternal grandmother. Family lore, as recounted by my roommate, asserted that Yoshiko was kept out of the camps by her Filipino husband, a man of considerable charisma and influence. My roommate did not have more details other than the fact that her grandmother had never been incarcerated, whereas the rest of my roommate’s extended family—great-grandparents, great-aunts, and great-uncles—had spent the duration of World War II in Poston, Arizona.9 This story was fascinating but also a bit unimaginable because everything I had read in my collegiate Asian American studies classes had led me to believe that there were no exceptions to incarceration for Japanese Americans. Yet on March 8, 2005, at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, I found the document that proved if not fully explained Yoshiko deLeon’s exemption.10

Yoshiko deLeon’s tale is part and yet apart from the official record of mass removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans.11 Her life was exceptional in multiple ways: in her family of origin, in her decision to marry a man outside of her ethnic community, and in her embrace of her husband’s cultural affiliations over her own. Yet Yoshiko deLeon could never assimilate completely, whether into American, Japanese, or Filipino cultures. Her multiple border crossings marked her as ambiguous, particularly in an age when race was purportedly believed to be an essential category and identities were, seemingly, fixed. In many ways deLeon and her story of non-incarceration is an ambiguous narrative that cuts against the grain of the threat of military necessity, the government’s belief in assimilation, as well as standard narratives of Japanese American incarceration during World War II.

Drawing on official military records, historical accounts of the incarceration, and the unique family narrative of Yoshiko deLeon, this chapter charts the rationale and implementation of the Mixed-Marriage Program, concluding with the ambiguous effects of this policy on the deLeon family.12 Assimilation guided the Mixed-Marriage Program; hence, this chapter demonstrates how the military’s conception of assimilation was predicated on the paradoxical belief that racial identity was both immutable and flexible, thereby allowing Japanese Americans to be coded as either assimilable or unassimilable depending on their marital, gender, and reproductive status.13 Analyzing the language of the Mixed-Marriage Policy documents, as well as its lingering effects on the deLeon family, reveals the inherent instability of race as well as its efficient persistence as a mark of difference, one used all too often in times of crisis to demarcate lines of threat and security. Conceptually, if one could be exempt from incarceration, as the select cases of women and mixed race children demonstrate, then one could be neither an alien nor non-alien in the language of Executive Order 9066, since both alien and non-alien Japanese were subject to incarceration during World War II.14 Exemption discursively created another category of Japanese Americans, who, according to the Mixed-Marriage Policy of 1942, could only be rendered as racially ambiguous since their ability to evade incarceration rested on the government’s interpretation of both their racial and national identities, which were often conflated to be one and the same. Women like Yoshiko deLeon who qualified under the Mixed-Marriage Policy of 1942 were ambiguously figured as not quite Japanese and hence almost white, nearly American.

Japanese American Incarceration and Exemption: The Mixed-Marriage Policy of 1942

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, the presidential decree that led to the mass removal and incarceration of any persons of Japanese ancestry, whether American citizen or not, living on the West Coast of the United States. The atmosphere of fear, anxiety, and xenophobia that permeated the United States, and especially the West Coast, during this time period, cannot be overstated. Rumors of Japanese espionage and treachery abounded, while pressure for the US government to address the threat of enemy alien saboteurs mounted. Thus Executive Order 9066 was, ostensibly, designed to identify and target people potentially hostile to US military interests.15

Although approximately 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans were subjected to incarceration in US concentration camps during World War II, the executive order made no mention of race or geography. Instead, President Roosevelt allowed for the secretary of war (Henry Stimson) and various military commanders (most notably Lieut. Gen. John DeWitt and Col. Karl Bendetsen) “to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restriction the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion.”16 In effect, Executive Order 9066 nullified the constitutional rights of every person living in the United States, although in practice the military designated only the West Coast region as military areas and solely targeted people of Japanese ancestry. As historian Roger Daniels observes, “The words Japanese or Japanese Americans never appear in the order; but it was they, and they alone, who felt its sting.”17

As Daniel notes, although the language of the order never referred to race, numerous scholars have shown that President Roosevelt and his advisors had only one ethnic group in mind when they signed the order. In a memorandum to President Roosevelt the day after he signed Executive Order 9066, Attorney General Francis Biddle confirmed the legality of the order in excluding citizens based on their ethnic heritage: “These powers are broad enough to permit them to exclude any particular individual from military areas. They could also evacuate groups of persons based on a reasonable classification. The order is not limited to aliens but includes citizens so that it can be exercised with respect to Japanese, irrespective of their citizenship.”18 This correspondence makes clear not only the designated group targeted within Executive Order 9066 but also that the mass removal of both Japanese aliens and Japanese American citizens was always part of the original thinking of Executive Order 9066—one completely in keeping with the popular anti-Japanese sentiment of the majority of US Americans as well as those within the Roosevelt administration.19

Yet despite the popularity or even the purported “military necessity” of incarcerating Japanese and Japanese Americans, the Western Defense Command (WDC) and West Coast Civil Authority (WCCA) were immediately presented with a problem: how Japanese did one have to be to qualify for imprisonment?20 According to The Final Report: Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast 1942, the official government and military record documenting the Japanese American incarceration, if you were one-sixteenth Japanese, if you had a great-great-grandparent who was Japanese, you were incarcerated, even if no one else in your family tree was Japanese.21 However, in the wake of Executive Order 9066, the WDC became inundated with appeals: letters from senators, priests, student organizations, sheriffs, and attorneys all inquired after exemptions on the grounds of religion, infirmity, veteran class, and, most notably, mixed race and mixed marriage status.

In one such letter, dated March 27, 1942, Seattle attorney Austin Griffiths asked whether Japanese American women married to Chinese American and Filipino American men could be exempted.22 Replying to this request, Lieut. Col. William A. Boekel stated that “no exemption from evacuation in favor of Japanese of the whole or part blood” regardless of their spouse’s status, could be granted.23 In another letter, addressed on March 30, 1942, Contra Costa County deputy sheriff Ralph Harrison inquired after several different cases for possible exemption: pregnant Japanese women in their last trimester, Japanese parents of a US soldier, a Japanese American World War I veteran who also happened to be of mixed Chinese and Japanese ancestry, and “a Japanese girl, American born and married to an American [sic] Husband” with “one young child.”24 Thomas A. Clark, chief of Civilian Coordination, answered point by point all of Deputy Sheriff Harrison’s inquiries. Like Lieut. Col. Boekel, Clark’s reply to Harrison confirmed that the military was not considering any types of exemptions—not for pregnancy, current service in the armed forces, veteran class, or mixed marriage/mixed race status.25

However, even in Clark’s reply, the rationale for the Mixed-Marriage Policy was already formed; in both the case of the Chinese-Japanese American veteran as well as the Japanese American wife and her “Eurasian child,” the possibility of exception that was briefly raised and then quickly terminated was based on their cultural upbringing or, in Clark’s phrasing, a particular “way of life.”26 In the case of the veteran, Clark advised Harrison that the young man’s affidavits declaring his loyalty and service to the United States in World War I “should be particularly keyed to the question as to whether the young man in his way of life is more American or Chinese than Japanese.”27 As for the family with the “Eurasian” child, Clark again emphasized that the daughter would be incarcerated “unless a petition can be presented similar to that discussed earlier, disclosing that the child has been brought up in the American way of life rather than the Japanese.”28 For both the veteran and the “Eurasian” child, of paramount concern was the environment in which the biracial person in question was raised—Japanese or not Japanese, or perhaps more important, was this a person who was more American than Japanese?

Another dilemma that Clark’s reply raised was the issue of not only split heritage but split families. Continuing his explanation for the possible exemption of the “Eurasian” child, he noted that “the mother, of course, cannot be exempted from evacuation. The exemption of the child, if granted, would involve the splitting of the family. All things considered, it would probably be better to have the mother and child evacuated together.”29 Various letters inquiring after exemptions indicated that the composition of many interracial marriages troubled the ideology of whom the WDC should incarcerate and how to keep families together.30 However, despite the concern of not wanting to fracture families, the WCCA adhered to the policy that no exemptions would be granted, regardless of the unique circumstances or influence of those petitioning for exceptional status.31

Yet by late May 1942, the WDC had changed its view on exemptions. The first formal mention of a Mixed-Marriage Policy allowing for exceptions to incarceration can be found in correspondence of the WCCA records as of May 23, 1942.32 The earliest internal memorandum, dated July 12, 1942, outlined the exemption of families based on interracial marriage status; the only families who would be both exempted from incarceration and allowed to remain in the restricted military area were “families composed of a Caucasian husband who is a citizen of the United States, a Japanese wife, and mixed blood children.”33 Initially, the WCCA’s bias was for families with a “white” lifestyle, emblemized by a Caucasian American head of household.34 Yet Maj. Herman P. Goebel, the author of this memo, included a paragraph immediately following the four categories of exemption observing that “a policy respecting families composed of Filipino and Chinese husbands, Japanese wives and mixed blood children, is now under consideration. You will be advised relative thereto as soon as the policy has been established.”35 Although the initial conception for the Mixed-Marriage Policy was founded upon a white male–Japanese female model, the program was eventually expanded to include spouses other than Caucasian husbands under the rubric of “non-Japanese.” Emphasizing loyalty, the wording of the official policy would eventually state that the h...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Ambiguous Americans
• Chapter 1. From Enemy Alien to Assimilating American: Yoshiko deLeon and the Mixed-Marriage Policy of the Japanese American Incarceration
• Chapter 2. Antisentimental Loss: Stories of Transracial/Transnational Asian American Adult Adoptees in the Blogosphere
• Chapter 3. Cablinasian Dreams, Amerasian Realities: Transcending Race in the Twenty-First Century and Other Myths Broken by Tiger Woods
• Chapter 4. Ambiguous Movements and Mobile Subjectivity: Passing in between Autobiography and Fiction with Paisley Rekdal and Ruth Ozeki
• Chapter 5. Transgressive Texts and Ambiguous Authors: Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Literature
• Coda. Ending with Origins: My Own Racial Ambiguity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author