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Q: Roger, what I'd like to you do is if you could you start off by explaining what was the "yellow peril," what did it mean and who were some of the people behind it or organizations that may have perpetuated it, and then how it had an impact on Japanese Americans. Give us a summary of what the "yellow peril" was.

RD: The yellow peril was a notion prevalent in both the United States and some parts of Europe that somehow the white world was threatened by being overrun by yellow people, both as immigrants and by armed conflict. In the 19th century, many people seemed to fear China, but particularly after the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 when it became clear that the major power in Asia was Japan, the yellow peril and Japan were roughly synonymous. Starting about that time, 1906, 1907, right up to and including the Second World War, there was a kind of sub-literature about the invasion and the conquest of the United States by yellow armies, almost always Japanese. There were films made on this subject, the Hearst movie company made one called Patria during the First World War, and this was important, I think, for two reasons. Number one, it demonstrated almost a century of prejudice against first Chinese and then Japanese, not only for what they did in this country but for what might happen. But secondly, when Pearl Harbor did come, it was for many Americans a kind of nightmare become reality, they say, well, this happened, therefore that may happen. And in most of the yellow peril novels, short stories and movies, the invading armies were always aided by treacherous and duplicitous immigrants. Butlers who turned out to be really generals in the Japanese army; fishing captains who were lieutenant commanders or admirals in the Japanese navy, etcetera. It just went on and on and on. So this was a kind of nightmare. The worst and best known example of this yellow peril was the movie that John Huston made in 1942 called Across the Pacific. It was the direct sequel to the Maltese Falcon. It had Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor and Sidney Greenstreet. And the villain was supposedly a young Nisei; he was actually played by the same actor who played Charlie Chan's number two son, but he's a very hyper American except at the end of the movie he turns out to be the chief villain masterminding a plot with Sidney Greenstreet to blow up the Panama Canal. So this put out in 1942, was another way of saying to the American public, "You see? These Japanese American, these Nisei," if you want, although most Americans didn't know that term, "they look American, they act American, but you can't trust them. They're really Japanese at heart, and you can't tell what's... from their face and their actions, you can't tell what they believe."

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