World View
John Robert Badger

Japan's Secret Weapon

Japanese-Americans are returning to the Pacific Coast. Most are moving back into communities without attracting attention. All they want is the opportunity to live as other Americans.

But some people won't permit it, just as some people in the deep South won't permit Negroes to live as other Americans. There have been cases of hoodlumism, of shots fired into the homes of returned Nisei under cover of darkness, of workers walking out of a plant where a Japanese-American has been hired.

The International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union of the CIO had to take drastic action in one case. It suspended an entire local in the city of Stockton, California, and finally ousted from membership and jobs the two ringleaders of an anti-Nisei demonstration.

Public officialdom has been reluctant to follow labor's militant example. And though Attorney General Robert Kenny of California has bluntly warned that anyone inciting such outrages would be punished, the anti-Japanese feeling persists. It is kept alive and fanned into deep hatred by the Hearst newspapers, by super-patriotic organizations of professional bigots such as the Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West.

Which brings me to the point of this week's column.

The Orient Watches

Peoples of Asia, whom many of us believe are illiterate and uninformed, keep a close watch on the United States. Especially now that the United States has become a dominant power in the Pacific, since the time for the Philippines to receive their independence draws closer, the Asiatics are looking to see whether they can regard the United States as their friend or must list it as their foe.

The Japanese noted this attitude toward the U.S. many years ago. And among all Asiatics who had not already come to the point by their own observation, Japanese propaganda diligently painted through Asia the charge that white Americans consider themselves a "superior race."

What is of most importance, the Japanese cited as proof of their charge the treatment of Negroes in the United States!

For instance, the Philadelphia Transit Workers' strike of 1944 was reported to the Japanese and Asiatic public in detail by the Japanese press and radio. Typical comment was the editorial of the Nippon Times of August 9, which said: "Not only in the Southern States, but throughout the United States, the rule of White Supremacy has apparently become the blind, bigoted creed of American Whites ... So intolerant, arrogant and selfish are American Whites, proving to be in their attitude toward colored people within their borders, that it is too much to expect them to accord any better treatment to the peoples of the world in the future."

And Japanese broadcasts in the past year to the Asiatic peoples have stated: "According to the needs of the Americans, Negro slaves and their labor are exploited in America ... This American nation and its leaders have reduced the lives of the Negroes to nothing. On the American soil a specimen of hell is provided for them ... They are considered as slaves, serfs and degraded people."

The Fascist Underground

Only simpletons can believe that this propaganda has left no impression among the Asiatics. On the contrary, though the Japanese have been defeated and driven into their home island, they have left behind in the whole of Asia, the seeds of suspicion and hatred which they have planted.

And they are simpletons, indeed, who do not realize that American domestic policies plus the policies of American imperialism abroad, will play into the hands of the Fascist Underground, which will be ever alert for any tool to use against the peace.

The Soviet-Chinese treaty has already put American policy on the spot, setting an example of a great power's relations to its neighbor which no imperialistic power can emulate. While the Soviets pledged to withdraw the Red Army from Manchuria, the British with U.S. support were reasserting their claim to Hongkong and the concession in Shanghai.

U.S. policy in Japan will be another test. And whether the Philippines are given a bona fide independence with the power to be free will also make a deep impression in Asia.

But Asiatics will also weigh and judge the United States according to how Japanese-Americans and Negro-Americans fare inside the United States.