NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY ORGANIZATION
ORGANIZATION du TRAITE de l'ATLANTIQUE NORD
NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN REGIONAL PLANNING GROUP

9 July 1951

Prof. Edward N. Barnhart
Department of Speech
University of California
Berkeley 4, California

My dear Professor Barnhart:

I am glad that my correspondence has been of some help to you, but I prefer not to be credited with specific statements in your published work. If you intend to include a general list of source acknowledgements I would not object to being listed therein but that is as far as I would care to go. Anything I was able to do was strictly in line of duty; the opinions I gave you are entirely personal ones and I have written solely on the basis of personal recollection without reference to records or notes of any kind. I particularly desire to avoid raising, even at this late date, any apparent inter-service difference of opinion which would inevitably be the case should my connection with naval intelligence be mentioned as the source of specific statements.

Now as to the specific inquiries in your letter of 6 July.

All of the names of organization you mentioned are familiar to me, but I cannot remember any specific data in connection with any one of them. The older Japanese -- by which I mean the "Isei" or those born in Japan and hence aliens all their lives in the United States -- were great joiners. Being aliens, they clung together, and looked to the Japanese consular officials for their legal rights. You have mentioned only a few organizations. The most common were the prefectural or city societies. Those from the same city or prefecture would form clubs, much the same as the Iowa Society or the Kansas Club, in and around Los Angeles. These were largely social.

The ones you named were a bit different, but at this time I cannot -- nor do I wish -- to condemn any organization in toto. I re-iterate my previous statement that by and large the matter must be resolved on the basis of the individual. I will state again that nearly all of the nisei were loyal to the United States and were looked upon by the Japanese government and its officials with the greatest suspicion; also that most of those born in Japan who had lived most of their adult lives in this country were at least passively loyal to the United States. My quarrel with the whole exclusion program is due to the fact that it was based solely and exclusively on race and that it completely disregarded the American citizenship of the nisei.

I wonder if you have seen an article in Harpers of October, 1942? It was published anonymously, but it is no great secret that I wrote it, originally in the form of reports to the War Relocation Authority.

I have written you rather freely on this question, but I still am somewhat in the dark as to the form your articles will take and when and where they will be published. I would like very much to see them either before or after publication.

Sincerely,

K.D. RINGLE
Captain, U.S. Navy