images of nisei manhood during world war ii. “it would be grossly simplistic to assume that the...
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Images of Nisei Manhood during World War II
“It would be grossly simplistic to assume that the human body has timelessly existed as an unproblematic natural object with universal needs and wants...” (Roy Porter, “History of the Body”)
To what extent is the body a “flesh and blood” object? To what extent is it a “symbolic construct”?
The boundaries of the body are fluid, subject to historical change
Life Magazine,Dec. 1941
Family form as mediator and metaphor of U.S. national existence
Two important national kinship metaphors:
Male-headed home Military fraternity
Racial implications of imagining the nation as a symbolic kinship
Regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, (1986), 7.
Scapegoating outsiders promotes both negative and positive attachments:
“The passion of . . . negative attachments to others is redefined simultaneously as a positive attachment” to those who can claim membership in the privileged social group.
“Together we hate, and this hate is what makes us together.”
Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22.2 (2004), 118.
The consensus of opinion is that . . . there is more potential danger in this state from the group that is born here than from the group that is born in Japan.
--California Attorney General Earl Warren, Testimony before the Tolan Committee, 1942
If the Japanese Army should be landed on the West Coast and should be driving the White Man before him . . . how do we know the American Japanese . . . might not have an upswelling of emotion even on the part of those who might have said, “I am a loyal American; I owe nothing to Japan,” [who] might suddenly say, “This, after all, is a race war. These men are my brothers. I have more in common with them. I never really belonged here anyway.”
Verbatim Transcript of Proceedings: War Relocation Authority Meeting, July 23, 1942. RG 210,
National Archives.
"This is a bit of propaganda in part. It will be a sort of 'corps d'elite . . . We are working on plans for radio programs, movie shorts, newspaper articles .”
Dillon Myer, WRA Director, January 1943
"If your strength were diffused throughout the Army, you would be important only as manpower. . . . But united, and working together, you would become a symbol of something greater than your individual selves, and the effect would be felt both in the United States and abroad."
U.S. War Relocation Authority, Nisei in Uniform, 1944.
“Story after story is told . . . about the JA’s ability to bear pain.”
“They’re deadly,” summarized one Caucasian officer. “We’re America’s secret weapon,” Sergeant M.
Miyamoto bantered.
Photograph originally published in Life; reprinted with accompanying text in Nisei in Uniform (USGPO, 1944).
Another Inmate Gold Star Mother, April 21, 1945. WRA promotional still shows a colonel from the Seventh Service Command in the camp at Granada, Colorodo as he presents the Distinguished Service Cross to the mother of aman killed near Sureveto, Italy. Bancroft Library.
Stilwell presents Mary Masuda the Distinguished Service Cross in honor of her brother, SSgt. Kazuo Masuda, at the Masuda farm Talbert, California, Dec. 1945
"I've seen a good deal of the Nisei in service and never yet have I found one who did not do his duty right up to the handle."
--General Joseph Stilwell ,
Initially buried in Italy.
Remains returned to U.S. on Nov. 9, 1948.
Family sought burial in cemetery near their home, but faced “restrictive covenants.”
After public protests, Masuda’s body was buried there on December 9, 1948.
"Blood that has soaked into the sands of a beach is all of one color. America stands unique in the world, the only country not founded on race, but on a way - an ideal. Not in spite of, but because of our polyglot background, we have had all the strength in the world. This is the American way.“
-Army Captain Ronald Reagan, 1944
“Maybe I am getting soft, but my heart weeps for our men, especially those who gave all, those who really ‘went for broke.’ I feel that we have written with our blood another chapter in the history of our adventure in democracy.”
Masao Yamada, 442d Regimental Chaplain
"[T]hese [Nisei] soldiers are as far away from the stereotyped picture of the evil-doing sons of Japan as the all-American boy is from a head-hunter . . ."
"They came back to this country, why, we will never know. I will give you my opinion. I think most of them came back to keep out of serving in the Japanese Army. They capitalized on their American citizenship to that extent . . ."
Testimony of Dillon Myer, Director, WRA, Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Military Affairs, U.S. Senate, 78th
Congress, 1st Session, on S. 444, a bill providing for the transfer of certain functions of the WRA to the War Department, part 4, Nov. 24,
1943, Events at the Tule Lake Center, November 1-4, 1943.
Sex, Scapegoating, and the Racialized Body of the Nation
“Troublemakers” at the Leupp Penal Colony, 1943
LIFE Magazine, March 20, 1945. Caption reads: These five Japs are among the trouble makers imprisoned within the Tule Lake Segregation center. Here they are answering roll call.
“the most maladjusted group of Japanese in this country”
“The girls didn’t like to dance with them – they were social outcasts.”
Kibei found companionship among the “old bachelors”
LIFE Magazine, March 20, 1945. Caption reads: These five Japs are among the trouble makers imprisoned within the Tule Lake Segregation center. Here they are answering roll call.
Photograph of Kibei youth from LIFE photoessay. Note pinups of white women visible on wall behind him.