Looking Like the Enemy by Mary Matsuda Gruenewald

Author:Mary Matsuda Gruenewald [Gruenewald, Mary Matsuda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780939165650
Publisher: NewSage Press
Published: 2016-06-26T16:00:00+00:00

Immediately after Pearl Harbor, nearly all Nisei were declared unfit for military service, including those who were already in the armed forces. This was an insult to those who had served honorably. In late 1942, the army began reconsidering the status of draft-age Japanese-Americans. In November 1942, a small group from the JACL met in secret in Salt Lake City to discuss the possibility of reversing the Niseis’ draft classification. According to Bill Hosokawa in his book, Nisei, the Quiet Americans, the national secretary for the JACL, Mike Masaoka, made a compelling case that “the Nisei needed a record of having fought for their country to bulwark their postwar struggle to win full citizenship rights.”

This would mean that men of military age whose classification had been changed from 1-A to 4-C (enemy alien) immediately after Pearl Harbor would be reclassified to 1-A again—fit for general active military service. The leaders of the JACL believed strongly that military service by the Nisei was the only reasonable path toward eventually achieving full citizenship rights for all Japanese-Americans. The JACL met with officials from the U.S. government to argue for the creation of an all-Nisei fighting force. In doing so, these leaders fully expected an angry backlash, but they were willing to risk even their own personal safety for their cause. Several of these leaders were later beaten by anti-JACL internees, some severely, when their work was suspected.

The Manzanar riots created a crisis for the WRA, which was already aware of the tensions building in the internment camps. The U.S. government decided it needed to find a way to separate those Japanese who were pro-America from Japanese who were not. The government reasoned that if this wasn’t done, and done quickly, more violence would inevitably result. In Washington, D.C., plans were underway to accomplish this task.

The WRA was working on a plan for mass registration of all adults to determine who qualified for school or employment outside of camp. The current system was painfully slow due to red tape. The WRA wanted to return internees to a normal life as quickly as possible, but only those whom government officials decided could be “trusted.” The government wanted a systematic, documentable way to determine who was safe outside of the confines of camp.

On January 28, 1943, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson announced the formation of a combat team made up of Japanese-American men from the internment camps and the Hawaiian Islands. Stimson had received the approval of President Roosevelt as a step toward returning the evacuees to normal life. In order to accomplish this, the army needed to assemble information on young men of military age. One critical piece of information was to determine whether these men would be loyal to the United States.

When the WRA learned about the U.S. Army’s plans, it decided to combine the two projects and accomplish both tasks with a questionnaire. The intentions may have been understandable, but the results were disastrous.

In January 1943, the combined teams from the army and the WRA received extensive training on how to administer this questionnaire.

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