Figuring Things Out Calmly

A valuable contribution to Pacific Northwest thinking with regard to American citizens of Japanese ancestry, the Nisei, is made in the current Pacific Northwest Quarterly by Robert W. O'Brien, instructor in sociology and assistant to the dean of the college of arts and sciences at the University of Washington.

After an entirely realistic and factual analysis, Mr. O'Brien concludes that for the most part Japanese propaganda before the war failed to woo the allegiance of the second-generation, American-born Japanese of this country.

"Although they were a marginal group, socially and economically, the Nisei, even before Pearl Harbor, had committed themselves politically and psychologically to the United States, the land of their birth and training," this observer declares.

Mr. O'Brien's conclusion is valuable in itself, but his calm and unemotional method of arriving at it is equally instructive. Too many of us are ready to make irrational judgments concerning our fellow citizens of Japanese ancestry. We shall be more just, both in our thinking and in our discussions, if we adopt a genuinely dispassionate and objective attitude.