Part I
War and the Assimilating Other
The Second World War irrevocably altered the place of the United States in the global arena. American history, of course, had never been free of foreign entanglements despite the isolationist streak firmly embedded in the nationâs political culture. Continental expansion, the dispossession of Native peoples, the claim to the Western Hemisphere as its sphere of influence with the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, the annexation of Hawaiâi, and the conquest of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam as spoils of the Spanish-American War in 1898 were all building blocks of US empire. Yet the United States had remained relegated to the second tier of the international pecking order dominated by the European powers before the 1940s. It was not until its anointment as one of âBig Threeâ Allies that the United States came to be consideredâand accepted its responsibilitiesâas the preeminent world leader. And it was also at this moment that the Asia Pacific region vaulted into a vital geopolitical preoccupation for US officialdom.1
These momentous shifts in the United Statesâ international position and its foreign policy priorities undergirded an overhaul of the nationâs racial alignments. In the American West and Hawaiâi since the mid-nineteenth century, the various immigrant streams from Asia had been racialized together as the âyellow perilââan alien menace courted for its labor yet despised for its purportedly unbridgeable cultural distance from white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. With the nationâs entry into World War II, however, the conflation of separate ethnic groups as Orientals lost its political purchase. Most saliently, the battles in the Pacific theater forced the disaggregation of Japanese and Chinese American racialization and social standing; the two could no longer be lumped together into one undifferentiated horde. In the wake of the Pearl Harbor bombing, middlebrow magazines famously published tutorials on âHow to Tell Your Friends from the Japs.â According to Time, Japanese were âhesitant, nervous in conversation, laugh loudly at the wrong time,â whereas Chinese were âmore relaxedâ with an âeasy gait.â Life explicated that âenemy Japsââlike Tojoââshow[ed] humorless intensity of ruthless mystics,â compared to âfriendly Chineseâ who wore the ârational calm of tolerant realists.â2 The wartime rivalry between the United States and Japan along with the concurrent US-China alliance thus obliged the stateâs and societyâs divergent treatment of Japanese and Chinese Americans.
In one direction, World War II saw the culmination of the Asiatic Exclusion regime with the removal and incarceration of 120,000 Pacific coast Nikkei (individuals of Japanese ancestry), two-thirds of who were US citizens, and half of who were children under age eighteen. President Franklin D. Rooseveltâs ostensibly race-neutral Executive Order 9066, signed on February 19, 1942, authorized the secretary of war to âprescribe military areas ⌠from which any or all persons may be excluded.â The mandate was selectively applied to Japanese Americans in Washington, Oregon, and Californiaâa decision justified by federal authorities on the unsubstantiated grounds that all Japanese Americans were potential fifth columnists by virtue of blood alone. Beginning on March 31, Issei, Nisei, and Sansei (first-, second-, and third-generation immigrants, respectively) left their homes, farms, businesses, and communities for sixteen temporary âassembly centers.â By November 1, all had moved again, this time to ten long-term ârelocation centers,â or concentration camps, in remote locations from Idaho to Arizona to Arkansas. The US Supreme Court upheld the legality of evacuation and detention for the sake of âmilitary necessityâ in Hirabayashi v. United States (1943), Yasui v. United States (1943), and Korematsu v. United States (1944). In authorizing, executing, and defending the constitutionality of mass imprisonment, the state effectively classified each and every ethnic Japanese in the United States as âenemy aliens,â thereby meriting the utmost instantiation of political and social ostracization.3
Irrefutably, Japanese American internment entailed a spectacular denial of civil liberties. Yet to its liberal administrators in the Department of the Interiorâs War Relocation Authority (WRA), it also presented unparalleled promise for refashioning ethnic Japanese into model Americans. Internee life was designed with this goal in mind. Camp school curricula, for instance, prioritized English language instruction and the inculcation of American values, while camp âcommunity councilsâ trained inmates in the art of democratic governance.4 The WRA also laid out two pipelines to reentry into American life and fortifying Japanese Americansâ station in the national polity. The first of these was postinternment migration throughout the United States, or âresettlement.â The WRA envisioned resettlement as an ethnic dispersal, whereby Nikkei would scatter throughout the country in order to prevent the camps from devolving into âsomething akin to Indian reservations.â A geographic fanning out would also inhibit the reconstitution of prewar Japanese enclaves. Just as important, it would push former internees to identify and associate with the white middle class. In theory, resettlement seemed the perfect test case for racial liberalismâs incipient solution to Americaâs race problems: state-engineered cultural and structural assimilation.5
The resettlement program commenced in October 1942, granting indefinite leaves to qualified applicants (that is, those deemed sufficiently loyal and assimilable by camp administrators) who had secured job offers in areas where their presence would not likely inflame local ire. To expedite resettlement, the WRA established dozens of field offices in intermountain, midwestern, and eastern states; Chicagoâs was the first to open in January 1943.6 The authority conducted vigorous public relations efforts within the camps to persuade prisoners to leave, with the hope that all those eligible would be resettled by June 1944. Concurrent policies such as reducing the number of jobs available within the relocation centers and lowering the subsistence allowances were interpreted by inmates as coercive measures designed to force them out. Ironically, the effect was to cool Nikkei receptivity to the idea of resettlement. Other disincentives included economic difficulties, the lack of attractive employment options, fear of racial hostility, the desire to keep families intact, and the yearning to go back to their former homes.7
In all, only thirty-six thousand interneesâless than one-third of the totalâtook part in the resettlement program by the end of 1944, starting anew in Denver, Saint Louis, MinneapolisâSaint Paul, Detroit, Cleveland, New York City, and Seabrook Farms, New Jersey, among other places.8 Resettlers did not comprise a representative sample of detainees; they tended to be college-educated Nisei who were the most familiar with âAmericanâ culture. In January 1945, the federal government lifted the exclusion order, and by 1946, 57,251 Nikkei had returned to the Pacific coast, including 5,541 who had first gone eastward. Put another way, just over 60 percent resisted permanent resettlement.9 If the resettlement program fell short of its objectives in the quantitative sense, the same was true of its qualitative dimensions. Using Chicago as the example, chapter 1 examines the ways in which resettlers defied the WRAâs insistence that they forgo ethnic congregation in favor of assimilation.
The second means to restored citizenship promoted by the WRA was military service: surely a foolproof way for internees to authenticate their unswerving loyalty to the United States. After Japanese Americansâ tours of duty, federal authorities believed, the public would no longer question their credentials for national belonging. This time, in contrast to resettlement, the prognosis came true. The rehabilitation did not happen without contention and forfeiture, however. Chapter 3 details the benefits and costs to Japanese Americans that accompanied the investiture of the Nisei soldier as the public face of the community.
As with Nikkei, the Pacific War decisively altered Chinese Americansâ societal stature. But while the federal decision to intern Japanese Americans characterized the triumph of yellow peril agitation, the 1943 congressional repeal of the Chinese exclusion lawsâin effect since 1882âsounded its death knell. This initial step in reversing the marginalization of Chinese in American life was a diplomatic maneuver designed to sinew the Sino-US entente against Japan. For the first time, persons from China were permitted to naturalize their US citizenship, while the legal entry of Chinese resumedâa symbolic elevation to equality with European immigrants.
Just as crucially, the mobilization for total war opened previously restricted avenues for socioeconomic advancement in industry and the armed forces. Until Pearl Harbor, employment options for Chinese Americans had been severely limited. The 1940 US Census found that 62.55 percent of the nationâs 77,504 Chinese (including 59 percent of the English-speaking, American-born individuals over age fourteen) were manual laborers, concentrated mostly in restaurants, laundries, and sewing factories. The 20.58 percent who earned their livelihoods as proprietors, managers, and officials were mainly confined to Chinatownâs ethnic economy. Another 11.44 percent occupied the semiprofessional, clerical, and sales ranks, while only 2.82 percent held professional or technical positions. This demographic snapshot, though, changed considerably within a few yearsâ time as the wartime labor shortage and booming defense industry drew large numbers from their traditional, segregated niches. Of the 17,782 ethnic Chinese residing in the San Francisco Bay Area, for instance, 1,600 (almost 9 percent) landed war-related work such as shipbuilding by 1942. The war economy provided a lasting foothold for Chinese Americans in the primary labor market, foretelling occupational advances in the postwar period. By 1950, Chinese American men and women had substantially raised their presence in the white-collar world. Chinese in professional and technical fields more than doubled from 1940 to 7.08 percent in 1950, while the percentage working in clerical and sales positions went up to 15.96 percent. Conversely, the proportion of Chinese manual laborers dropped to 51.61 percent. Historians have celebrated World War II as nothing less than a defining instance for ethnic Chinese in the United States, the point at which they â[fell] instep ⌠with fellow Americans,â and âreceived a newfound acceptance and stature.â10 Yet while the war undeniably improved their lot, Chinese Americans did not feel fully secure in a society where they still faced racial discrimination. Chapter 2 considers the social and cultural work devoted to realizing the uptick in their social standing as well as second-generation Chinese Americansâ continuing uncertainty about national belonging in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Despite traversing discrete historical paths after 1941, both Japanese and Chinese Americans found themselves recast from aliens ineligible to citizenship to assimilating Others in the crucible of World War II. But the stuff and implications of their assimilation processes continued to play out in unlike ways with the geopolitical reshuffling at the Cold Warâs genesis. As Japan became Americaâs junior partner against Communism in Asia, and China split into friend (the âfreeâ government exiled to Taiwan) and foe (the Peopleâs Republic on the mainland), the absorption of Japanese and Chinese Americans into the body politic encountered new catalysts as well as new blockades unique to each group, as shown in chapters 3 and 4. The excavation of the historically contingent and often-contradictory ideas and practices of incorporation in part I uncovers dissimilarities alongside commonalities that the two communities encountered as they struggled to redefine both their place in the nation and the nation itself.
Chapter 1
Leave Your Zoot Suits Behind
Some 275 young people converged at Chicagoâs Ashland Auditorium on Saturday evening, November 20, 1943, to attend the Reminiscent Dance of Relocation Days. The soiree was billed as the areaâs first large-scale public event exclusively catering to second-generation Japanese Americans. All were recent arrivals to the Midwest, having left the WRAâs internment camps as participants in the federal governmentâs resettlement program, and eager to reunite with old friends and forge new acquaintanceships. A palpable tension marred the highly anticipated affair, however, as Nisei zoot-suiters, commonly referred to as âpachukeâ and âyogore,â appeared in droves. Noticing the âsneers on the faces of the stags,â one young man worried, âI kept thinking all the time that I was dancing that I would get beaten up because I refused to let them cut in on my partner. Those fellows got very ugly about this and it was an experience that I never want to go through again.â Many of the female partygoers likewise disapproved. âI didnât like the crowd at all because it seemed cheap,â said one. âThe people I saw were mostly the rowdy type. I didnât see any fellow there that looked like he had any ambition. The dance didnât look nice at all.â Another confirmed, âA lot of yogores had been drinking and you could smell it all around the roomâŚ. The cops were there because everybody was anticipating trouble.â1
The threat of impending conflict shot through subsequent resettler gatherings. âSome of the Los Angeles guys carry knives and they are always waiting to gang up on somebody,â surmised a zoot-suiter who frequented the cityâs Nisei party circuit. âOne of these days somebody is going to get hurt.â One woman articulated her discomfort at having a stranger âcut inâ during her turn on the floor. âI didnât know him and didnât want to dance with him and when my partner tried to continue dancing, the other boy threatened him,â she recounted. âI didnât want to create a scene so I consented to dance with the stranger. Iâm never going to another dance like that again.â In response, event organizers took steps to keep ârowdy elementsâ at bay. The sponsors of a fete held at the Loop YWCA in November 1944 recruited the Chicago WRA office staff to chaperone and sold tickets in advance to deter spontaneous party crashers.2
To resettlement coordinators and many resettlers themselves, the unsavory habits of these rowdy elements jeopardized much more than the attendance and ambiance on social occasions. Yogore hazarded liberalsâ plans for repairing the damage to Japanese American citizenship wrought by the internment, especially the redistribution of internees throughout the United States so that they might fade into the white middle class. From the perspective of federal authorities, resettlement presented the chance for Nikkei to abandon their injurious typecasting as enemy Japs if they conformed to the default settings of legitimate American citizenship. By embracing orthodox social conventions, normative masculinity and femininity, and reputable heterosexuality alongside explicit avowals of patriotism, Japane...