My first post on the subject of Michelle Malkin’s “In Defense of Internment” was a complaint about its cover. I objected to the visual comparison of a Japanese American man with Mohammad Atta, a comparison that I didn’t think inspired confidence that Malkin’s depiction of the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans would be fair and balanced.
At the time, I did not know that the Japanese American man on the cover was Richard Kotoshirodo, an American citizen who went on some scouting missions around the Hawaiian Islands in the months before Pearl Harbor on behalf of his employer, the Japanese consulate. Of course, in this I was not alone:
nobody looking at the cover could possibly know who this man was—and that was what led me
to worry that the cover would inevitably mislead people into thinking "that American citizens of Japanese ancestry presented World War II America with the same sorts of risks as al Qaeda does today."
Malkin responded that this was precisely her intent, but that it was not misleading: Kotoshirodo
was the Atta of his day, and a segment of the Japanese American community
was the era's al Qaeda:
As Eric notes, hardly anybody knows who Kotoshirodo is. That's exactly the point. Hopefully, I will have changed that by putting his face on the cover, highlighting his treacherous actions, and placing them in their proper national security context. (Eric, by the way, sent me a cordial e-mail soliciting the FBI files I used in my research of the Kotoshirodo case. I pointed him in the right direction and have offered to copy and send the files to him myself if need be. Perhaps after he reads them, he will come to a different conclusion about Kotoshirodo. But I doubt it.)
Now, do I suggest that some American citizens of Japanese ancestry presented WWII America with the same sorts of risks as al Qaeda in America today? Absolutely. That's the painstaking argument at the heart of my book. Kotoshirodo was not the lone example. He was emblematic, just as Atta is.
Malkin was, in fact, gracious enough to send me copies of the files she used. I read what she sent me.
Then I did some homework. I went and found the files on Kotoshirodo that Malkin
had never bothered to look for—even though they were at the National Archives in College Park, just a stone's throw from her home. And
those files revealed a different Richard Kotoshirodo from the monster who stares out from the cover of Malkin's book alongside Mohammad Atta.
The story of Michelle Malkin's makeover of Richard Kotoshirodo is a story worth telling, because it turns out that Malkin's use (and abuse) of Richard Kotoshirodo encapsulates everything that is irresponsible and dangerous in Malkin's book—its selective and shoddy research, its hysterical overstatement, and its malicious willingness to smear people's reputations in order to advance her agenda.
Who was Richard Kotoshirodo?He was a mail clerk in the Japanese consulate in Honolulu in the months leading up to December 7, 1941. Born in Hawaii, Kotoshirodo was an American citizen, but he had gotten his education in Japan.
Usually in a taxi driven by a Japanese man named Mikami, Kotoshirodo accompanied a Japanese official in the vice consul's office on a number of trips around the Hawaiian Islands, including several trips to Pearl Harbor. A few times Kotoshirodo was instructed to go to Pearl Harbor alone, and he did so. On these trips, the Japanese consular official and Kotoshirodo wandered around public places, looking at buildings and sometimes counting ships. They did so in the open, from public vantage points, although Kotoshirodo understood that what they were doing was gathering military information for Japan. The man from the vice consul's office assured Kotoshirodo that what they were doing was not illegal because they were just looking at things that anyone could see, and that in any event, all countries gather information on each other in this way. Kotoshirodo apparently believed this, and continued to go on these surveillance junkets until shortly before the Pearl Harbor attack.
The Man Malkin Wants Us to SeeMalkin includes just a few details about Richard Kotoshirodo beyond the basic facts of his scouting. She notes that in October of 1942, Kotoshirodo testified before an Internee Hearing Board that at the time he was working at the Japanese consulate and making his surveillance trips, he felt "100% Japanese." She also reports that he testified that he was not sure that he would have quit his job at the consul even if he had known that war was coming. In an appendix, Malkin reproduces just the three pages from the 57-page hearing transcript that substantiate these two things.
After sketching Kotoshirodo as a 100% disloyal American bent on helping Japan prepare for the Pearl Harbor attack, Malkin says this:
Despite the conclusion of a hearing board in Hawaii that Kotoshirodo was a willing collaborator …, despite the determination by FBI head J. Edgar Hoover that he should be charged with espionage, and despite Kotoshirodo's own confession of his involvement with the Honolulu spy ring, the U.S. Attorney in Hawaii blocked prosecution. Kotoshirodo and his wife were instead interned briefly in Hawaii, then were sent to relocation centers in Topaz, Utah, and Tule Lake, California."
What a perplexing turn of events: "The U.S. Attorney in Hawaii blocked prosecution." Why, the reader wonders, would the Justice Department not go after such a dangerous agent—the Mohammad Atta of his day—for giving (in Malkin's words) "extensive help . . . to Japan's espionage efforts in advance of the Pearl Harbor attack?"
This is a question Malkin never really answers. At one point she hints that the U.S. Attorney "blocked prosecution" because American espionage law did not actually criminalize information-gathering from public observation. (Ironically, here Malkin appears to believe what Kotoshirodo's Japanese superiors told him about his activities.)
But Malkin is quite vague on this question of why Kotoshirodo was never prosecuted. Reporting the story as she does, perplexingly dead-ending in the U.S. Attorney's Office, she is able to do two things: she can leave Kotoshirodo in the reader's mind as a Mohammad-Atta-like monster, an emblem of the "untold numbers of . . . suspected subersive ethnic Japanese" (p. 156) whom the enemy "routinely utilized" (p. 141) before and after Pearl Harbor. And she can plant that idea that American law then (hint, hint: just as today!) was full of loopholes that kept the government from protecting the American people.
The Real Richard KotoshirodoThe truth about Richard Kotoshirodo and his non-prosecution—had Malkin wished to know it—actually lay in a file at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, a few miles from her house. It is the file of the Justice Department lawyers who who handled Kotoshirodo's case. And it reveals that prosecutors filed no charges against Kotoshirodo not because what he did was legal—it wasn't—but
because their case was weak and they thought the prosecution wasn't worth the effort.One might have expected that a spy so loyal to the Emperor would have been reluctant to cooperate with the naval and FBI investigations into his espionage for the Japanese consulate, but it didn't turn out that way. Kotoshirodo was instead exceedingly cooperative with investigators. Within a short time of his arrest,
Kotoshirodo told investigators everything he knew not just about his own trips around Hawaii on behalf of the Japanese consulate, but more generally about "the espionage activities carried on by the consulate." (Here are links to the eight pages of the Office of Naval Investigation's ("ONI") report on the Kotoshirodo case in February of 1942:
page 1 page 2 page 3 page 4 page 5 page 6 page 7 page 8.)
What did this investigation reveal? It revealed a bit a simpleton—a man who, out of loyalty to his employer and to Japan, naïvely did what his superiors asked him to do, believing (as, ironically, does Malkin herself) that he was doing nothing illegal. It revealed a man who guilelessly confessed to ONI after he was caught—and who did so in a way that
made clear to his questioners that he was "not fully aware of the seriousness of his own situation."Malkin makes a great deal out of Kotoshirodo's admission at his hearing that he had felt "100% Japanese" while working at the Japanese consulate. She includes in the book's appendix the page from his hearing transcript where the admission appears. What she omits, however, from both her narrative and from the appendix, is
this excerpt from the same hearing:
Q. How is your feeling now? You said you were 100% Japanese when you were at the consul? Do you feel that you are loyal to Japan, or that you are an American?
A. Well, after the war broke out I thought it was terrible, and I thought it was a tragedy. I could not imagine what war really was until the war broke out. Of course, I do not have any feeling toward the Japanese government. I do not feel that if there was an attack on Hawaii that the Japanese should do their part for Japan or anything like that.
Q. You say you do not have that feeling?
A. No.
Q. Well, what is your feeling? Who do you want to win the war?
A. (hesitates) Well, I think I, myself, feel that according to the publications in the newspapers and magazines—I read a lot of articles about the point where the United States and the allies stand, I can say that Japan's action was treacherous and inhuman.
Naturally, a person considering Kotoshirodo's loyalties must recognize that when he made these statements, he was under arrest and had every reason to present himself positively to his interrogators. But of course, he had those same incentives when he described himself during the same questioning as having felt "100% Japanese" while in the employ of the consulate. On balance, the hearing—all of it, that is, rather than just the couple of pages that Malkin chose to reproduce in her appendix—reveals a gullible man of confused loyalties.
And what of the Justice Department's decision not to prosecute Kotoshirodo, which seemed so inexplicable in Malkin's telling?
A
document in the archived Justice Department files that Malkin did not bother to examine states the Department's rationale clearly:
"Lack of evidence to constitute a prima facie case especially in view of lack of Mikami's testimony through his permitted repatriation in August of 1943; [Mikami, the Japanese taxi driver who drove Kotoshirodo and his superior around the islands, was allowed to repatriate to Japan as part of a swap of nationals. With Mikami gone, all the government had on Kotoshirodo was his own statements, which revealed him as a none-too-bright lackey rather than a scheming saboteur.]
"Necessity of exclusive reliance on subject's statements;
"Early and continued detention of subject by military authority;
"The long period which has expired since the alleged offense;
"Inadvisability of the first espionage case in federal court at Honolulu being weak."
The U.S. Attorney for the Territory of Hawaii further explained his rationale for seeking no charges against Kotoshirodo in a
letter he
wrote on February 28, 1944, to Assistant Attorney General Tom C. Clark—another primary source that Malkin does not cite and presumably did not find. If Mikami, the taxi driver, had not been repatriated, the U.S Attorney said, the case against Kotoshirodo could have proceeded. "[B]ut lacking Mikami and the evidence which might be elicited from him, we have little of weight to present in establishing a prima facie case except his own statements." "I am of the opinion," said the U.S. Attorney, "that the first case of espionage to be instituted in this area should be one having more than an even chance to result in a conviction."
Assistant Attorney General Clark agreed.Think about this for a moment: This was Honolulu, 1944--Ground Zero, just two years after the sneak attack. The chief federal prosecutor, with Kotoshirodo's own full confession in hand, thought he had less than a 50-50 chance of persuading a jury to convict Kotoshirodo of espionage. And an Assistant Attorney General of the United States agreed. If Mohammad Atta had somehow survived the attacks of September 11, 2001, can you imagine the government's deciding to forego prosecution?
That tells us quite a bit, I think, about the
real Richard Kotoshirodo, as distinguished from the monster that Malkin invents in her book. He acted disloyally, to be sure, and he seems to have identified more as Japanese than American, at least before the war began. But he was a two-bit traitor and a fool—not the murderous zealot that Malkin wants us to imagine. More importantly, his activities on behalf of the Japanese consulate allow us to draw no inference about the loyalties and conduct of Japanese Americans generally, or about the existence of "vast networks" of Nisei spies.
Why did Malkin not learn the whole truth about Richard Kotoshirodo and about the Justice Department's reasons for declining to prosecute him? I assume she did not learn it because she did not go to the trouble of seeking out the readily accessible archival material on Kotoshirodo's case in the Justice Department files at Archives II in College Park, mere minutes from her home. Instead she relied on research performed and supplied for her by someone else, Robert B. Stinnett,
a journalist who served in the Navy in World War II and
who is best known for arguing that President Roosevelt knew of the planned Pearl Harbor attack in advance. What Stinnett sent Malkin was incomplete—but it allowed her to tell the story she wanted to tell.
So there you have it: Mohommad Atta and Richard Kotoshirodo.
A fair comparison? Or an hysterical exaggeration? In my view, it's an hysterical exaggeration—indeed, a repetition of the very hysteria that led to the Japanese American internment that Malkin defends, and that could one day lead to the Arab American internment that Malkin invites.
UPDATE:
This, by Dave Neiwert, is a must-read on Malkin's revisionism.FURTHER UPDATE (The "Non Sequitur" Edition): Michelle Malkin responds to this post:
Muller continues his attacks today, this time getting a link from Instapundit. Now Muller is kicking up a big fuss because he says he found documents which show that the prosecution's case against Richard Kotoshirido (the Japanese-American man featured on the cover of my book) was weak. Muller apparently considers this a blockbuster revelation. However, it is exactly the same point I made in my book on page 78, where I wrote, "many of those suspected of serving Japan had not committed any crime (remember that the gathering and transmission of intelligence information from open sources before the declaration of war, such as that performed by Richard Kotoshirodo, probably was not criminal)." I made the same point on page 140, where I wrote: "Some individuals working on behalf of Japan, it should be noted, provided Japan with information that was sensitive but unclassified. Though some advocated prosecution of Hawaiian Nisei Richard Kotoshirodo, for example, it was not clear that he violated any law." As I noted in my book, this is an argument for internment, not against it, since relying on criminal prosecutions in civilian courts would have left Kotoshirodo and other Japanese agents untouchable.
I guess it is asking too much to expect my detractors to actually read my book before launching into their critiques.
And I guess it is too much to expect Malkin to read the post she's replying to--or to know the law.
I pointed out in my post above that the notion that Kotoshirodo could not be prosecuted because the information he observed was unclassified was
false. In response, Malkin scolds me for not noting that she said in her book that people could not be prosecuted for passing unclassified information to Japan. I know she said that in her book (which, incidentally, I read--as she well knows). It was wrong there. And it's still wrong.
Under
the Espionage Act, it was (and still is) illegal to supply
any defense-related information, classified or unclassified, to a foreign nation so long as the person has the intent or reason to believe that the information is to be used to the detriment of the United States.
Saying something false more loudly doesn't make it true.
The case against Kotoshirodo
was weak, but not because his conduct was legal.
At first, Professor Forbes was just giddy about it all. He boasted that he'd bought ten copies of the magazine to send to his friends "as proof." (At this point, I think it's safe to say that he saw them as proof not of his horrendous judgment, but of the presence of nude young women in his house!) Here's a photo that appeared in the newspaper of Professor Forbes glancing down at, uh, the table just in front of UNC student and Playboy covergirl Evelyn Gery at a publicity event.
Now 
Michelle Malkin's revisionist telling of the story of the Japanese American internment turns crucially on one supposed military fact: Franklin Roosevelt and his top military brass feared a Japanese assault on the West Coast. This, she claims, rather than prejudice, panic, or economic or political pressure, explained their decision to uproot American citizens of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast, while taking no programmatic action anywhere against identically situated Americans of German or Italian ancestry. And, she argues, it explains why Roosevelt and his Secretary of War and Assistant Secretary of War took so seriously a couple of ambiguous references in top-secret decrypted Japanese diplomatic messages referring to the recruitment of "second generation" Japanese spies.
