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December 7, 2005

Genetic Disloyalty

A
fter a full day of poring over archival records of the military's apparatus for identifying disloyal American citizens of Japanese ancestry in World War II, I figured there'd be nothing like going to a movie to get my mind off of things. So last night I went to the movies. I saw "Good Night and Good Luck." Great movie. Very bad choice for getting my mind off of things. My outrage level was even higher after my night out than it was before.

"Outrage?" you ask. "What's to be outraged about?" Well, consider this lovely document I turned up yesterday. It's from a training session for officers who would be deciding which individual Japanese Americans were too disloyal to be allowed back to the West Coast in 1945, after the blanket order excluding Japanese Americans as a group had been lifted. It's a training lecture by a Colonel Hazzard entitled "Background of Japanese Social, Family, and National Customs and Some Criteria for Exclusion."

A famous Scotch surgeon once told me that he could tell the year that a Japanese surgeon graduated from medical school ... from the way he did certain operations--it might be an appendectomy, a tonsilectomy, or operation on the brain or any other portion of the body. I said, 'Why does he differ from a Westerner?" He said, "Because there is a group of brain cells which, when highly developed or among civilized people, they can visualize an incident from a word picture." The Japanese have not yet developed that particular group of brain cells--probably a few thousand that would represent a small section of one percent of the people, who by association of several generations with Western people and by being educated in Western universities, have developed their brain cells.
Colonel Hazzard also covered the subject of the importance in Japanese culture of the idea of "saving face":
We run up against a lot of things which are difficult to understand in conducting these hearings and trying to evaluate their answers. ... Face-saving is just the result of a training that they have had since childhood -- a very primitive training which is more or less mechanical and which does not develop individually because with the exception of those two or three thousand Japanese leaders you will find very little individuality among the Japanese people.
With this expert training under their belts, the officers went out and continued the exclusion of more than 10,000 U.S. citizens from the West Coast as security risks.

"Good night and good luck" indeed.

Posted by Eric at December 7, 2005 6:43 AM

Comments

"Good Night and Good Luck" was an excellent reminder that some of our leadership, then and now, "have not yet developed that particular group of brain cells" necessary to reflexively protect our human rights.

Unfrotunately, of course, there's nothing congenita l about this civic cowardice but rather more of a "result of a training that they have had since childhood". Though one wonders what kind of training results in a philosophy of indefinte detention, "extreme rendition", torture, etc.

Sad state of affairs...then and now...

Posted by: WillR at December 7, 2005 8:54 AM

Wow. Oh, wow. And there are apologists for this sort of stuff showing up in mainstream media? Wow.

Posted by: The Subversive Librarian at December 7, 2005 1:23 PM