<Begin Segment 11>

I would say that the primary variation occurred on the basis of generation, to begin with. Issei, the immigrant population, the immigrant generation of Japanese, felt somewhat differently from the Nisei. The Nisei being American citizens on the whole felt themselves, and American-trained, felt themselves attached to the American country, to the American scene in a way that perhaps the Issei did not. The Issei, on the other hand, having been a population that was excluded from citizenship, had been discriminated in many ways throughout their experiences, were much less trustful of the white people, of the American government, than were the Nisei. The Nisei, on the other hand, were divided into two sub-groups. One, those who were called the Kibei, who returned from Japan, who had as a group received a fair amount of training within the Japanese system and whose, who had come, had returned to the United States following more or less degree of training and instruction in Japanese ways. The Kibei reacted in many instances much more radically in their protest against the American government than did the Nisei, who showed a much more ambivalent attitude towards the whole situation.

However, it was not simply a generational division that made the difference in the kind of reaction that was exhibited in these protest actions. I think fundamentally, the issue came back to one which I mentioned before. Namely, the degree of trust or distrust, which the person, whether of Issei, Kibei, or Nisei generation, felt towards the white people, towards the federal government. And this degree of trust or distrust in turn, it seems to me, hinged very much upon the prewar experiences which these people, of whatever generation, had had with the larger society, with the American people, and the like.

In Tule Lake, for example, where we were, there was a fairly large contingent of evacuees who had been forced out of their homes in the Sacramento valley. Now Sacramento valley, it seems to me, was historically a very unusual place... unusual, or at least from a sociological point of view, a very interesting place for, in trying to understand the Japanese American, Japanese immigrant and American population. It was a place where historically in California there was probably more anti-Japanese agitation directed against the Japanese minority than anywhere else. But this was particularly true in the rural areas of Sacramento valley, in places like Walnut Grove, Florin, Isleton, and the like, whereas in the city of Sacramento, many of the residents were participants in the state government of California, were workers for the state government and the like, and attitudes were, therefore were rather distinctly different. In the rural areas of California, of Sacramento valley, the residents were, in many instances, were segregated into total Japanese communities, islands within the larger society, which were almost totally Japanese. And this was not so much a voluntary action as that the segregation practices in the larger community forced people to remove themselves into these ghettos which were distinctly different from the larger society. Ichihashi, the well-known social scientist who wrote perhaps the classic work on the Japanese Americans, or Japanese in the United States, in 1930, said of those Sacramento valley communities, that they were in many respects more Japanese than the Japanese villages in Japan. That if you wanted to see reproductions of Meiji Japan, Japanese life, you should find them in Walnut Grove rather than in Kumamoto or some other place where things had moved along. The point I'm making is that discrimination, segregation, prejudice, had a profound effect on the kinds of backgrounds which people experienced as immigrant Japanese here in the United States. And one of the findings that came out in our study was that the California Japanese, California in the broad, were by and large more likely to respond with a quote, "disloyal reaction," end of quote, than were the Northwestern Japanese. That is the Japanese Americans or Japanese minority from the Pacific Northwest. That is a very broad generalization and of course one has to take account of the tremendous amount of variation that occurs within each population, but nevertheless the point is to be made, that on the average, the Japanese minority from the Pacific Northwest were inclined to be more trustful of the white population, the federal government and the like than on the average was true of Californians. And of the Californians, particularly in Tule Lake, those who were most distrustful were those from the rural part of Sacramento valley.

CO: So how did this play out in the registration situation?

[Interruption]

FM: So, the question is, what difference did it make in the evacuee population as to what kind of background they came from? And the point I'm trying to establish is that the degree of trust or distrust towards the white people, federal government, the WRA, the administration to which they were being subjected, hinged very substantially in my mind, at least on a probability basis, on the degree of discriminatory, prejudicial experiences they had had prior to the outbreak of war, prior to their evacuation. And this is perhaps not different from common sense but I think it's a point that is frequently overlooked. That people vary a great deal, immigrant populations vary a great deal, in the kind of experiences to which they're subjected. Some are subjected to more prejudice and discrimination and segregation -- segregation is perhaps the key issue -- than are others and that this then makes a great difference in the kind of reaction they will show to something like the evacuation.

Okay, what effect did this have on the registration? The effect was... those who were most distrustful, those who came from those kinds of backgrounds where they had been most discriminated against, subject to most prejudice, were the ones who were the most distrustful of the registration program, which called for their declaration of loyalty. And those who were less distrustful, although not really happy about the registration, nevertheless generally tended to go along with the idea that it was necessary to answer "yes" if they were to express their basic sentiment correctly, and that they would do so. Now then, this led, as you know, to the decision on the part of the federal government and the WRA to, to differentiate the population which responded "yes-yes" and therefore declared their loyalty to the United States, from those who answered "no-no" on the questionnaires and therefore presumably were the "disloyal" population. The term "disloyal" is extremely unfortunate because it does not... disloyalty is a category that was created as a reaction to the registration program and does not by any means necessarily mean disloyalty in the more abstract sense that we understand the term. Nevertheless, using the term "disloyal" for those who answered "no-no," one would have to say that this group of people tended to involve more of the Kibei than the Nisei generally, more of the Issei than of Nisei, more of the rural people than the urban and the like, mainly because it was this class of population that had been subjected to more of the segregation and discrimination than had the other people, other groups.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 1992, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.