<Begin Segment 17>

SF: Do you think that that, prewar experience of seeking out "white angels" is perhaps the only way to combat discrimination, as the kind of only lever that the young Nisei had, may have influenced the way the JACL reacted to the evacuation problem?

FM: Oh yeah, I think so. The JACL... well, take Jimmy Sakamoto's clear example of that kind of an attitude. The JACL leadership was manned by people who -- in Jimmy's case, he grew up here in the city of Seattle attending language schools where you were taught the Pledge of Allegiance and singing the Star Spangled Banner and so on. And about American history and how great George Washington was, etc. Now here in Seattle, incidentally, we had a principal of a public school named Ada Mahon, who was of Irish background I suspect. Very strong disciplinarian who taught the Japanese American kids coming through her school, you know, the "rah, rah America." If you do good, why you'll be a good American and that's what you want to be. And she was, she had a very positive impact, effect on the American, Japanese American students in this community. But also had a limiting effect on them, in that you got the idea that if you were a good American in the sense of being you know, firm, loyal citizen of the country, why you would be accepted. That was the kind of idea that... and more or less, I suspect that Japanese Americans growing up in that period in California, Oregon, or Washington were trained into that kind of sense. To take another tack, you know this, book by what's his name on assimilation, which emphasizes Anglo, Anglo conformity as the...

SF: Gordon?

FM: Gordon, yeah. Gordon's term Anglo conformity as the dominant American philosophy with respect to assimilation in the pre-World War II era, I think is right on the nose with respect to what was expected. Anglo conformity and if you would take over in American ways of behavior, you would succeed as an American and you would succeed in becoming assimilated and accepted within the American society. JACL leaders like Jimmy Sakamoto, trained as they were in the kind of school we had, and with a kind of strong discriminatory attitudes which I described earlier with respect to black America. With that kind of narrow, provincial Americanism that dominated American society in the pre-World War II era, the Nisei had very little choice mentally in thinking about ways in which they might advance, other than by being good Americans in that kind of a sense. So Anglo conformity was a, in a sense, a bit of nonsense that everybody was sold, was taught and the Niseis accepted it because there was no other model that they could anticipate as the way of succeeding in this American society. Given that, and given the -- also, I think we've, you and I, and Tets have talked about the Japanese attitude about gaining acceptance from the other person as a strong Japanese trait, a strong Japanese value. I think it is fundamental in Japanese training that you take kind of the other person and his attitudes and then try to behave accordingly. And that attitude I think was fairly firmly embedded in the minds of the Nisei, the Japanese Americans. And that again, I think accounted for what Bill Hosokawa has called the quiet Americans or what... is that the term, quiet American? You know, you don't aggressively confront people who have different ideas from you, you try to work with them and thereby work yourself into a position where you can change things that you don't like about the world around you.

The problem of the Nisei, the problem of JACL at the time, at the point where the evacuation issue was in front of them, I think arose out of that kind of background. The fact that Anglo conformity was so strong a philosophy in American society, it was not a world in which, as in the 1970s, ethnic identity had any positive stature in American society. Rather the contrary was the case. If you were, if you were non-American, non-white American, non-Anglo, then you had to become Anglo-like in order to gain acceptance. That was the dominant philosophy of the society and Japanese Americans bought it, probably because there was nothing else they could do. The other thing was the Japanese Americans, of course, were a small group, relatively speaking, with very limited influence and another fact was that the Japanese Americans had never experienced... for one thing there was this Japanese heritage of working towards consensus type of thing. But in addition to that, Japanese Americans had never experienced opposition against the larger society as the black Americans had. Black Americans had, of course, such experiences as, the, the black protest, even in the pre-World War II era under people like DuBois and so on. We didn't have any experience of that kind. We didn't have leadership of that kind. So, JACL gets caught up in that kind of thing.

SF: So you have this kind of Anglo conformity as being the kind of sole world view, not only of the Japanese community, but also the larger society?

FM: Larger, that's right.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.