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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the gener ous support of the Philip E. Lilienthal Asian Studies Endowment Fund of the Univer sity of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift fr om Sally Lilienthal.
R A CE F OR EMP IRE
Takashi Fujitani, Series Editor
1. Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times, by Miriam Silverberg
2 Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific, by Shu-mei Shih
3. The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea: Education, Labor, and Health, 1910–1945, by Theodore Jun Yoo
4 Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the Nineteenth Century, by John D. Blanco
5. Tr opics of Savager y: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame, by Robert Thomas Tierney
6 Colonial Project, National Game: A History of Baseball in Taiwan, by Andrew D. Morris
7. Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II, by T. Fujitani
8 The Gender of Memor y: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past, by Gail Hershatter
9. A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation State, 1900–1949, by Tong Lam
T. Fujitani ·
RA CE FOR E M P IRE
Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II
University of Califor nia Press
Berkeley Los Angeles London
University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more infor mation, visit www.ucpress.edu
University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd. London, England
© 2011 by The Regents of the University of Califor nia
Librar y of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fujitani, Takashi.
Race for empire : Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II / T. Fujitani.—1 p. cm.—(Asia Pacif ic modern ; 7)
Includes bibliographical references and index. isb n 978-0-520-26223-2 (hardback)
1 World War, 1939 –1945—Participation, Japanese American 2. World War, 1939 –1945—Participation, Korean 3 World War, 1939 –1945—Social aspects— United States 4. World War, 1939 –1945—Social aspects —Japan. 5. Nationalism —United States— History—20th centur y. 6. Nationalism—Japan— History—20th centur y. 7. Racism —United States History—20th centur y. 8. Racism —Japan— History—20th centur y. I. Title
d 769.8.a 6f 798 011
940.53089'956073—dc23 2011019924
Manuf actured in the United States of America
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% postconsumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manuf actured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified
List of Illustr ations vii
Pref ace and Acknowledgments ix
Note on Romanization and Naming xix
Commonly Used Acronyms xxi
Intr oduction Ethnic and Colonial Soldier s and the Politics of Disavowal 1
pa rt o n e fro m vulgar to polite ra ci sm
1. Right to Kill, Right to Make Live: Koreans as Japanese 35
2. “Very Useful and Very Danger ous”: The Global Politics of Life, Death, and Race 78
par t t wo japa nese as americans
3. Subject to Choice, Labyrinth of (Un)freedom 125
4. Reasoning, Counterreasonings, and Counter-conduct 163
5. Go for Broke, the Movie: The Tr answar Making of American Her oes 206
part thre e ko reans as japa nese
6. Nation al Mobilization 239
7. Nation, Blood, and Self-Deter mination 299
8. The Colonial and Nation al Politics of Gender, Sex, and Family 335
Epilogue “Four Volunteer Soldier s” 375
Notes 387
Selected Bibliogr a phy 447
Index 469
F IGU RES
1 Photogr aph, camp maternity ward 113
2 Photogr aph, “free individuals” arriving by train at Granada Relocation Center 145
3 Photogr aph, mother receiving son’s posthumous Distinguished Service Cr oss 201
4. Film still, Go for Broke 225
5 Film still, Go for Broke 228
6 Diagr am, pre-induction education and training of potential Korean military conscripts 276
7. Film still, Suicide Squad at the Watchtower 308
8 Film still, Suicide Squad at the Watchtower 309
9 Film frames, Suicide Squad at the Watchtower and Beau Geste 312
10 Film still, Suicide Squad at the Watchtower 313
11. Film frame, Beau Geste 316
12. Film frame, Bataan 318
13. Photogr aph, Koma Station fr onted by its Korean guardian deities 326
14 Film still, Suicide Squad at the Watchtower 344
15. Film frame, Volunteer Soldier 355
16 Film frame, Volunteer Soldier 356
17 Film frame, Korea Strait 357
18. Film frame, Korea Strait 358
19. Film frame, Korea Strait 359
20 Film frame, Korea Strait 360
21. Film frame, Hell to Eter nity 382
22 Film frame, Hell to Eter nity 383
TABLES
1 Korean Special Army Volunteer s and Entrants into Training Center s 246
2. Survey by Age of Motives of Army Special Volunteer Soldiers for Volunteering (1941) 247
3 Survey of Mental State of the Volunteer s for the Army Special Volunteer s (1941) 248
4 Survey of Assets of Volunteer s for the Army Special Volunteers (1941) 249
5. Survey of Educational Backgr ounds (of Trainees) 263
6 Survey of Occupations (of Tr ainees) 264
MAPS
1. The Far East and the Pacific: The Imperial Power s, 1 September 1939 2
2. “Labyrinth of (Un)freedom”: The Japanese American internment complex 126
Many year s ago I began to write a book on the militar y and its effects in modern Japan that would have had much less to say about race than does this volume While this book reflects some of the concerns I had at that time, the racial politics of the mid- to late 1990s derailed that project, at least for a while. In the United States and especially in Califor nia, where I have taught for many years, the anti-immigrant movement, the widespread attack on affirmative action, and the steadily growing rant against consider ations of r ace in opening opportunities for historically underre presented minorities in employment, education, and other arenas of life pushed me to rethink my research agenda. Above all, I was most struck and offended by the virulence and self-righteousness of a type of racism that presented itself as its opposite namely, as antiracist. Using slogans such as “ reverse racism” and pegging as racist even the most modest policies intended to help rectify the effects of centuries of racial discrimination, the movement obviously has a longer history (including within the period that concer ns this book) and certainly continues into the present in our postObama age—an age that some mistakenly or disingenuously regard as “post-racial.”
But in the mid- to late 1990s, the movement’s hysteria reached a peak.
At such a time I wanted to lear n more about the modern histories of racism and its varieties in the United States, initially less as a scholarly pursuit than as a means to better engage in discussions and activism around the ongoing problem of racial justice. An unexpected opportunity to write on the topic emerged in conversations with Geoffrey M. White and Lisa Yoneyama as we planned a major international ix
conference on memories of the Second World War in the Asia-Pacific Having grown up in Califor nia, I had long been str uck by the discour se on Japanese American war her oes, both in the mainstream media and in Japanese American communities. I had intense memories of aging and often frail Japanese American men donning clothing, insignia, and ca ps from the U.S Army uniforms that they had originally worn as much as half a century earlier, even when the occasion had no immediately apparent relationship to war, nationalism, or military commemoration Since I wanted to know more about the history of these veter ans and to understand how in the politics of race the figure of the Japanese American soldier had come to achieve such visibility in mainstream and Japanese American memories of the war, I decided to research this area for our conference. It seemed a way for me to approach the momentous subject of r ace in America from an angle with which I already had some organic familiarity, even though at the time I had no idea that I would pursue the topic beyond the conference paper.
In the paper I explored the connections between Japanese American militar y service, the World War II disavowal of racial discrimination even in the context of Japanese American internment, the inextricable relationship between racism and nation alism, the constr uction of Ja panese Americans as the foremost model minority, the postwar emergence of Ja pan as what I began to call the model minority n ation, and scholar ship in Japanese studies. Eventually this paper was published in the volume Perilous Memories: The Asia Pacific War(s), which I co-edited with my conference co-organizers.1 The ideas that I first sketched out there can be found in various places thr oughout this book, but especially in chapter 5. I would like to thank Geoff and Lisa fir st of all, for the collaborative thinking that we did for the conf erence and volume. So many of my perspectives began to take shape through our intense discussions.
During and soon after the conference many individuals offered criticism and encour agement on the paper, as well as on subsequent presentations based on the essay. I want to mention in particular George Lipsitz, the late Yuji Ichioka, and Lisa Lowe. George helped allay my hesitation to cross over fr om Asian into American studies and br ought me up to speed on the emerging scholarship, including his own, concerning African American engagements with imperial Japan I am convinced that the sensitivity that he and Ishmael Reed (in a brief conversation) gave me on the ties between African American and Japanese histor y helped me under stand the significance of archival documents that I subsequently discovered concerning wartime f ear s of a global alliance of the “darker races” with the Japanese, and how such a race panic contributed to the wartime decision first to suspend Japanese Americans
x · pr ef ace
from military service, and then to begin accepting them as volunteers. I met Yuji for the first time with some tre pidation, since as a pioneer in Asian American studies he had devoted a lifetime of research to Japanese American histor y while I was admittedly somewhat of an “undocumented worker” in his field. But in addition to offering encouragement he “schooled me, ” as he might have put it, on thinking about World War II pr opaganda. Not only have I learned tremendously from Lisa’s now c lassic book, Immigrant Acts,2 and her multiple recent projects, but I have through many years been the beneficiar y of her rare intelligence, generosity, commitment to social justice, encour agement, and friendship.
I had known for some time that minorities and colonials had also served in the modern Ja panese military, and in the book mentioned in the opening of this preface I had planned to consider the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centur y inc lusion of nation al minorities within the military. But as I explored this topic with regard to Japan, it gr adually became evident that a study of Korean soldiers in the Japanese military during World War II could be paired with one on Japanese Americans in the U.S Ar my. I began to think that a comparative and transnational perspective on these “soldier s of color” might contribute in some way to larger discussions about r ace, n ationalism, colonialism, gender, total war, and more on both sides of the Pacific. I also felt that I had neglected researching such questions in Japanese histor y for f ar too long, especially considering the ongoing neo-nationalism, sexism, anti-immigr ant movements, and (more or less) veiled racism in Japan that were no less offensive to me than what was going on in what Lipsitz called “Califor nia, the Mississippi of the 1990s.”3
I thank the Nation al Museum of Ethnology in Senri, Japan, which offered me, at the Taniguchi Symposium in late 1997, one of my fir st opportunities to present some thoughts on the wartime discour se on Korean soldiers in the Japanese army. There I focused on the issue of gender and particularly masculinity in wartime literary and cinematic representations of Korean soldiering, a problematic that r uns through sever al sections of this book (especially chapter 8).4 At the same time, I did encounter some obstac les and resistance The conventional disciplines of histor y and area studies—with their tendencies to limit the boundaries of research to those that fit neatly into nation-states—tend to militate against a transnational project such as mine. In fact, one colleague chided me for “dabbling” in U.S. histor y. What, after all, was a historian of modern Ja pan doing speaking and writing on race in America as more than an avocation? On another occasion an eminent Japanese studies prof essor at a major U.S. university fiercely condemned me in public for suggesting that there was any likeness between Japan and the United States during the war.
prefac e · xi
But many other individuals as well as colleagues in collaborative projects pushed me to explore the possibilities of the comparative and transn ational book that I was only beginning to consider. They also seemed persuaded by one of my central arguments— namely, that while we tend to think of the U.S. and Japanese total war regimes as opposites, they in fact shared many common features, including their heightened disavowal of racial discrimination and simultaneous shift toward an inclusion ary for m of racism. I need to mention here the encouragement and guidance I received over many year s from member s of the Nichibei KyOdO Kenky[kai (the Ja pan/U.S. Joint Research Group), headed by Hirota Masaki and Car ol Gluck; most of these scholar s were also engaged in postn ationalist studies of Japan. I want to especially thank Narita Ry[ichi, who has played a central role in the transnational circulation of cutting-edge scholarship on Japan, and Naoki Sakai, whose critical works have inspired so many and whose friendship and guidance over the years have been invaluable to me. In 1998–99 the Institute for Research in the Humanities, Kyoto University, supported my research Affiliation at the Institute first made it possible for me to conduct extended archival research on Koreans in the Japanese military. Not only could I utilize the f antastic resources available at the Institute and Kyoto University, but the Institute’s support enabled me to explore numerous archives and libr aries in Ja pan and Korea, to interview several Korean veterans, and to learn fr om Japanese scholar ship on colonialism. Most of all, I want to thank Mizuno Naoki for being as much a teacher as a friend, and for generously sharing rare materials fr om his per sonal librar y.
In 1999 and 2000 f unding fr om the Humanities Center and the Academic Senate at the University of California, San Diego made it possible for me to take multiple trips to conduct research at the Library of Congress and in the National Archives in Washington, D C., and College Park, Maryland. Through a stroke of luck, on my first day of research in College Park I discovered a document titled “Memorandum on Policy towards Japan,” which had been authored by Edwin O Reischauer in September 1942. The memorandum was something of a smoking gun in that it showed that almost three year s before the conflict would come to an end, Reischauer—one of the preeminent architects of postwar Japanese studies as well as U.S. ambassador to Japan fr om 1961 to 1966—had cr afted a plan to maintain the Japanese emperor as a “puppet” in postwar Japan. But just as suggestive for my project, his plan called for the mobilization of Japanese Americans as soldiers as part of a global strategy for managing what he called the “yellow and br own peoples” of Asia. The document demonstrated, among other things, that policy makers and their advisers such as Reischauer always under stood the necessity of seeing connections between do-
mestic and global politics, as well as of forging policies for Japan from a br oader global vision that explicitly inc luded considerations of race. Because of the historical and contemporary importance of this find, I quickly wrote an artic le focusing on the document and its contexts for the Japanese journal Sekai; the piece was then translated into Korean in Silch’Qn munhak, and I subsequently revised and expanded it into an article in Critical Asian Studies. I thank the publishers of these journals for providing opportunities to share my an alyses with multiple audiences, and I am also grateful to the many scholars who commented on various versions of the piece.5
I could not have written this book without the support and the often constr uctive skepticism of other scholar s and institutions whose work focuses primarily on Korea or on Koreans in Japan. Early in my research on Korean soldiering Higuchi Y[ichi and I tr aded some of our archival findings, but I benefited far more from the exchange, for he has been the pioneer on the topic and he provided much-needed guidance. Im Jon-hye, a tr ailblazer in the study of liter ature written in Ja panese by Koreans in Ja pan, graciously shared her knowledge of the liter ar y aspects of Korean soldiering. In 2001 I had the good fortune of participating in a conference at the University of Michigan, “Between Colonialism and Nationalism: Power and Subjectivity in Korea, 1931–1950.” A number of participants at the conference, including its organizer, Henry Em, brought to our discussions perspectives that challenged nationalist historiography and helped invigorate my scholarship I thank the conference participants, but especially Henry, Jin-ky ung Lee, and Kim Chul all of whom have continued to contribute to my thinking on Japanese colonialism in Korea.
In my investigations, I soon discovered that a sur prisingly large number of feature films had been made on the theme of Koreans in the Japanese military and that a good number had many elements in common with Hollywood movies. Although I had already been speaking and writing about this topic, in 2003 I had a ver y fortun ate opportunity to present some of my thoughts on these late colonial films to specialists on Korean film at the symposium “Aesthetics and Historical Imagination of Korean Cinema,” which was sponsored by the Institute of Media Art (Yonsei University) and the Goethe Institute.6 I thank the organizers of that symposium and especially Baek Moon Im, who has continued to offer constructive criticism of my work on colonial cinema. I am also indebted to Han Suk-jung, who invited me to present a version of this paper at Dong-a University in Pusan and who shared many of his ideas with me, and to Im SQng-mo, who provided useful comments on that occasion When I fir st began to analyze colonial films, almost no scholarly work on them existed and it was nearly impossible to view them. I was able to locate only
pref ac e · xiii
three relevant films housed in the U.S Librar y of Congress. Recently, more scholar s have begun to research and write on colonial cinema, and much of this new wave of investigation has been enabled by the highly capable staff of the Korean Film Archive, who have rediscovered a number of films produced in the colonial period and made sever al of them available online and in DVD format. On a more person al note, I am very gr ateful to the Archive’s staff for inviting me to participate in a 2008 intern ational symposium, “Repatriation or Sharing of Film Heritage.” Not only did I receive valuable f eedback on my presentation at the symposium, but the staff also f acilitated my research in their state-of-the-art archive and made it possible for me to re produce sever al stills that are included in this book.
I regret that owing to my poor Korean language skills, I have been able to read and employ only a very limited number of primar y and secondary texts written in that language. But what I have managed to accomplish in Korean has been enabled by a grant from the Japan Pr ogr am at the Social Science Research Council and the tutors whom the grant allowed me to hire (and exhaust): most importantly, Moonhwan Choi, “Okky” Choi, Ji Hee Jung, and Su Yun Kim I have read the Korean texts cited in this book and tr anslations are my own, but I asked Ji Hee to check almost all of my readings for accuracy. I thank my tutors and the Council.
I am likewise deeply indebted to the Japanese American and Korean individuals who shared their Second World War and postwar memories with me. While I have cited only a f ew of them in the book, their stories and their gener osity in meeting with me have served as constant reminder s of the ongoing stakes involved in my project and the need to constantly reflect on the ethical and political implications of my research Among the Japanese American veter ans, draft resisters, and community activists of that gener ation with whom I have communicated over the years, I am especially grateful to Cedrick Shimo, Frank Emi, and Paul Tsuneishi I have marveled at their unique perspectives and their commitment to producing alternative histories of Japanese American wartime experiences. I have likewise benefited fr om long conver sations with several Korean veterans of World War II, especially Kim SQng-su; Mr Chang, along with his wif e Mrs. Yun (pseudonyms), in the Pacific Northwest; and ChQn Sang-yQp. Their resilience and honesty have helped me write narratives that I believe are both truer and more complex than the ones I would probably have written had I had access only to written and visual documents from the colonial period.
The difficulty of conducting research in multiple countries and of developing a method and fr amework for this pr oject has considerably lengthened the process of completing this book. Without multiple small gr ants from the Academic Senate of
the Univer sity of California, San Diego as well as several major f ellowships that en abled me to take time off from teaching, I would have taken far longer to finish the book. In addition to the already-mentioned sponsorships, I received generous f ellowships fr om the John S. Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Lear ning Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities (summer stipend), and the Stanford Humanities Center (SHC). I spent a luxurious year under the competent and generous care of the staff of the SHC, where my only obligations were to spend time with brilliant colleagues fr om multiple disciplines and to devote myself to the book. I want to single out John Bender, the Center’s director at the time, for our extended discussions about several philosopher s and theorists who have infor med my work, and my colleague at the Center, Gordon Chang, for thoughtprovoking conver sations on Asian American histor y and other topics. While I was visiting at Stanford, Gi-Wook Shin, Kären Wigen, and members of the Asian America’s Workshop invited me to sever al academic and social occasions, allowing me to lear n from them and helping me to f eel a part of the wider Stanford community.
I have been the beneficiar y of an extraordinarily large number of opportunities to conduct research or present my work in Japan, Korea, the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and continental Eur ope. So many institutions and individuals in these places have assisted me in such a variety of ways that it is impossible to name them all. But in addition to those already acknowledged, I want to especially thank (in alphabetical order) Eiichiro Azuma, Dani Botsman, Leo Ching, Carter J Eckert, Jon athan Hall, Jeff Hanes, Im Chong MyQng, Itagaki Ry[ta, Kim Jae-yong, Kim KyQng-nam, Kitahara Megumi, Komagome Takeshi, Eisei Kurimoto, Colleen Lye, Ethan Mark, Achille Mbembe, Moon-Ho Jung, Nishikawa Nagao, Nishikawa Shin, Nsawa Masachi, Nta Osamu, Vince Rafael, Chandan Reddy, Andre Schmid, Shu-mei Shih, the late Miriam Silverberg, Stephanie Smallwood, Serk-Bae Suh, Takagi Hiroshi, Alan Tansman, Tomiyama IchirO, Sandra Wilson, Sam Yamashita, and Jun Yoo At UC, San Diego, many colleagues gave me the gift of camar aderie, welcomed the unconventional, and demanded rigor and relevance: most especially, Luis Alvarez, Jody Blanco, Fatima El-Tayeb, Yen Espiritu, Rosemary George, David Gutierrez, Todd Henry, Sar a Johnson, Curtis Marez, Roddey Reid, Nayan Shah, Shelley Streeby, Stefan Tan aka, and Danny Widener. This is a rare group of scholars, all of whom work acr oss national boundaries and conventional disciplinary formations. For many year s I’ve subjected numerous cohorts of gr aduate students in histor y, liter ature, ethnic studies, and several other departments at UCSD to repeated explanations of my understanding of histor y, theory, and much else. I’m gr ateful that they have responded not only with a pparent interest and ques-
prefac e · xv
tions but also by alerting me to additional materials and insights I might incorporate into the book. Andrew Bar shay, Bruce Cumings, Harry Harootunian, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, and David Palumbo-Liu all read the penultimate version of the entire, ver y long manuscript, and provided a host of useful suggestions for revision.
Although none of the chapter s in this book is a reprint of earlier publications, I thank the many publisher s in Japan, Korea, and the United States who have allowed me to publish pieces of my research along the way and who have permitted me to inc lude materials fr om these publications in this book. In addition to the publishers already cited, I want to express my gratitude to Iwanami Shoten and especially the editor s Kojima Kiyoshi, Baba Kimihiko, and Hara Ikuko for their long-term support of my pr ojects and for publishing my work in Sekai as well as in two of their lecture series.7 At the University of California Press, Reed Malcolm, Kalicia Pivirotto, and Emily Park provided the type of excellent guidance and encouragement that I have gr own accustomed to as editor of the series in which this book appears. Alice Falk did another superb job of copyediting for me. I also thank Ryan Moran for skillf ully compiling the index
From the above it is obvious that I could not have written this book without the support and input of a myriad of individuals and institutions located throughout the world, but I’ve reserved my final message of gratitude for those who have lived most closely with me (literally, figur atively, or both) through many years. To my friends in the East Bay, thanks for always uplifting me with humor and even for ridiculing me when I’ve been unable to convince you that what I do is real work. Although my parents must have wondered why it takes so long for me to write books, they ’ve always taken an interest in my career; my father at the age of eighty-seven even “googles” me to find out what I’ve been up to when I haven ’t been filial enough to tell them myself. They also managed to feed me with the most amazing local foods in their hometown ever y time I visited, even after my mother’s dec lining health slowed her down fr om her glory days of cooking. Thank you many times over. To Mari, Kenji, and Yuri, thanks for many years of helping me become more than a brother. Toshiko and the late Toshinao Yoneyama have been as much friends and adviser s as in-laws. Thank you for the fun and excitement. Although En has sometimes only pretended to take an interest in my work, I’m grateful for the constant interest he has always manifested in me, and for his ability to entice me away fr om my desk Most of all, I cannot begin to adequately thank Lisa, my partner of more than a quarter of a century, whose ideas, support, activism, and constructive criticisms have sustained me thr oughout. I’m sure that she and others will accuse me of stealing her ideas, and I will have to admit to each and ever y charge and more. No
mere academic citations can amply credit her for the ways that this book and my lif e have benefited from her companionship and our learning to think together.
As I bring this pref ace and my acknowledgments to a close, I will repeat the cliché that all err ors and clumsy interpretations are my own. But I will add that as much as I am convinced that I am overturning some conventional historical interpretations and methods, I have built on a remarkable local and translocal community of scholarship and support. I can only hope that readers will find something of value in these pages that is remotely worthy of the embarr assment of riches I have been privileged to receive
pref ac e · xvii
NO
AN D N AMI N G
Person al n ames of those who reside or have resided primarily in China, Japan, or Korea are written with the surname preceding the given name, while the rever se order is followed for all others. In romanizing Korean and Japanese, I follow the McCune-Reischauer and modified Hepburn system (as used in Kenky[sha’s dictionaries), respectively. Exceptions have been made for proper nouns for which there are standard renderings in English (for example, Tokyo, Seoul, Pak Chung Hee), as well as when individuals have indicated that they prefer other romanizations. I have tried to exercise sensitivity toward the politics of n aming and transliteration, but have not avoided the terms or practices in common usage in the places and during the periods studied With regard to the Japanese American camps, many activists and scholar s have long emphasized that the term “relocation center” as applied to the ten main sites is a euphemism that obscures the coercion and violence of evacuation and inter nment. I agree with this criticism However, since one of the arguments of this book is that fr om the government’s point of view the camps were supposed to embody the values of liber alism, I rarely use the term “concentration camp” to refer to them. Also, although I believe that the Nazi concentration camps and the U.S. camps for Ja panese Americans emerged out of a shared modern political r ation ality, they should not be conflated, because, as I will argue, the former led directly to extermin ation of the confined and the latter to assimilation of the segregated into white America, at least in principle and despite targeted expressions or threats of violence In most cases I therefore employ either the official terms xi x
designating specific types of camps thus, “assembly center or camp,” “relocation center or camp,” “segregation center,” and so on—or the more generic term “inter nment camp” to refer to the various types of wartime camps that confined Japanese Americans. The reader should not assume that I in any way condone the official namings.
How one names Koreans and Korean places is an extremely sensitive political issue. Not only did the Japanese colonial government attempt to force all Koreans to adopt “Ja panized” names, but the Japanese government continued to pressure resident Koreans to do the same after the war. However, consistent with my decision to critically examine the most common naming practices of the relevant periods and places r ather than substitute an achronistic ter ms that seem preferable today, I use the contemporary appellations in the following ways. (1) I privilege the Korean readings of Korean names whenever possible (2) When the names are voiced in films, I have given them as heard, whether in Korean or Japanese. In late colonial films Koreans were commonly called by the Japanized voicings of the kanji characters making up the Korean names. When this is the case, I have rendered this pronunciation but also included the Korean version in parentheses, at least on its first appearance, if possible (3) When Korean n ames exist only in written texts, I have generally privileged the Korean pr onunciation even though it is quite possible that Japanese readers may have voiced the kanji in Japanese. (4) In some cases—Korean assimilationist writer s, for example— it is quite likely that authors referred to themselves by the Japanized reading of their n ames. When I know or have conjectured that this would be the case, I have followed their practice, because such a transliteration best captures the subject position that they were trying to constitute for themselves as Ja panese fr om Korea. Thus, for example, I most commonly refer to the Korean writer Chang HyQk-chu as ChO Kakuch[ when he writes as a Japanese author. In addition, when Korean author s identified themselves with their adopted Japanese names and used them regularly in their writings, I have not altered the name.
xx · ro man iza ti on a nd naming
COM MON L Y US ED
ACR ON YMS
For abbreviations used in the notes, see the bibliogr aphy.
ac of s assistant chief of staff
a s w assistant secretary of war
cig Counter Intelligence Gr oup
g gk Gover nment-Gener al of Korea
i r inf antr y regiment
jab Japanese-American Branch
ja cl Japanese American Citizens League
jajb Japanese-American Joint Board
mid Military Intelligence Division
mis Military Intelligence Service
oni Office of Naval Intelligence
opm g Office of the Provost Marshal General
owi Office of War Information
wdc Wester n Defense Command
w r a War Relocation Authority
