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September 12, 2007

American Inquistion: Questions and Answers, Part 3

I
n about a month, the University of North Carolina Press will publish my new book "American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II." It tells the story of the enormous system of bureaucratic tribunals that the government created between 1943 and 1945 to decide which Japanese Americans were "loyal" and which were "disloyal."

The Press has released a Q-and-A about the book. I'm periodically publishing excerpts from the Q-and-A here at IsThatLegal. The first excerpt was here and the second here. Now comes the third:

Q: What were the "point systems" used in the [loyalty] questionnaire?

A: The "point systems" reflected the attempts of bureaucrats to take the internees' answers to the loyalty questionnaire and convert them to number values, so that each internee would have an ultimate loyalty "score." The point systems were absurdly oversimplified and dependent on cultural assumptions: practicing judo earned a negative score, while little-league baseball earned a positive; Buddhism was a negative and Christianity a positive.

Q: What penalties were invoked when a man or woman was considered to be disloyal?

A: A charge of disloyalty could force an internee's transfer to a special segregation camp where conditions were harsher and the atmosphere more turbulent. It could bar an internee from securing permission to leave a camp for a job in the country's interior. It could block an internee from obtaining a job that the government deemed too sensitive for the war effort in any way. And, as the war wound down and the mass exclusion of Japanese Americans from the West Coast ended, a finding of disloyalty meant that a Japanese American could not return home to the West Coast.

Posted by Eric at September 12, 2007 9:04 AM