Loyalty to U. S. of Japanese in America Big Disappointment to Tokyo Spy Chiefs

By Jay Franklin

Washington, Monday, Nov. 24.--One of the aces which Roosevelt has up his sleeve is the knowledge that the Japanese and Japanese-Americans on the West Coast and in Hawaii are thoroughly loyal to the United States.

Since Japanese strategy and propaganda has tried to use these citizens and residents as the basis for Fifth Column operations, this is an important victory in our "war of the nerves" with the ruler of the Mikado's Empire.

The Japanese exclusion clause of the 1924 Immigration Act, which ended the Gentleman's Agreement, choked off immigration to the United States. As a result it left over here a sizable group of Japanese who were not "eligible for citizenship" -- and caused considerable anger in Tokyo.

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This group, however, is about eighteen years older today and has no stomach for adventure or heroic self-sacrifice. They have settled down, as farmers, small merchants, or professional men, and are in many cases elderly people who have become an accepted and useful part of their communities.

Their substantial loyalty to a country which does not admit them to citizenship is one of the most touching phases of American-Japanese social relations.

Their children, the so-called Nisei (or American Japanese) are American citizens by virtue of having been born in the United States. This group is enthusiastically loyal to America, proud of the role they have played in supplying recruits to the Army, and resentful that they are, unlike the American Negroes, denied employment in defense-industries.

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It was from this group that the Japanese spy-service and consular agents hoped to recruit a Japanese "Fifth Column" on American soil for mass-sabotage in the event of war with the United States.

For this reason, at considerable trouble and expense, arrangements were made to have large numbers of the Nisei educated in Japan, in hope that thus their loyalty to the Emperor might offset their natural loyalty to the land of their birth.

It didn't work out that way. Exposure to life and ideas in Japan was a great shock to the vast majority of American-born Japanese. Not only were living conditions far harder in Japan than in America but the Japanese themselves had such hatred for "dangerous thoughts" (that is, foreign ways and ideas) that they took it out on the Nisei.

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Any American who has bumped into the far more subtle and considerate English conviction of social, moral and intellectual superiority over "colonials" and "Yanks," has a faint idea of the sort of beating these Japanese-American boys took from the narrow-minded European-worshiping militarists who tried to drill out of them all the American ideals of freedom, equality and individualism.

On top of that, the Japanese clapped the Nisei into the Japanese army--since Japan refuses to admit that any child of Japanese parents is not a subject of the Mikado--and gave them a taste of goose-stepping and barracks which made them realize that, with all the discrimination, they were better off in America.

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So the result was that, with only a tiny number of exceptions, the Nisei who saw what Japan was like lost their illusions and returned to America fired with new loyalty for the land of liberty.

In the meantime, except for trouble-makers, the mass of native White Americans on the West Coast came to accept and respect the Japanese-Americans as part of the American people, more concerned for their safety and protection from ignorant abuse than with any fear lest the Japanese arise to attack American power on the West Coast.