Please post one paragraph of critical questions and/or analysis for each provided article

T W O

The Internment of Anthropology:

Wartime Studies of Japanese Culture

On the one hand we dogmatically insist that anthropology rests on ethno-

graphic research involving personal, prolonged interaction with the Other. But

then we pronounce upon the knowledge gained from such research a discourse

which construes the Other in terms of distance, spatial and temporal. The Oth-

er’s empirical presence turns into his theoretical absence, a conjuring trick . . .

to keep the Other outside the Time of anthropology.—Johannes Fabian, Time

and the Other

In War Without Mercy, historian John Dower’s 1986 book on the racial discourses that informed the war between Japan and the United States, there is a fleeting but vitally important point about the terms of the na- tional perception of Japanese Americans.1 ‘‘The treatment of Japanese Americans,’’ Dower begins, ‘‘is a natural starting point for any study of the racial aspects of the war, for it reveals not merely the clear-cut racial stigmatization of the Japanese, but also the oªcial endorsement this received’’ (79). He then concludes that the key to understanding the terms of their treatment rests in the oªcial program of ‘‘community analysis’’ or ethnographic study that the War Relocation Authority (wra) ‘‘established in the ten camps in which Japanese-Americans were incarcerated’’ (79). Although Dower does not elaborate on the possible implications of community analysis, the ambitions of com- munity analysts were well documented at the time, and they revolved around using interviews with the internees in an e¤ort to develop theo- ries of Japanese behavior that would be useful after the war when the United States occupied Japan. Thus, anthropology’s central role in the

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

44 A N A B S E N T P R E S E N C E

‘‘treatment’’ of Japanese American internees begins to suggest some- thing of the truth of Johannes Fabian’s argument quoted in the epi- graph to this chapter—that anthropology makes its Other (in this case, Japanese Americans) by using information gathered from ‘‘personal, prolonged interaction’’ in an e¤ort to set the Other beyond the spatial and temporal realm of the examiner (in occupied Japan) and, thus, ‘‘keep the Other outside the Time of anthropology.’’2 The work of the mostly liberal, white camp anthropologists or ‘‘community analysts,’’ as they were oªcially known, was beset with problems peculiar to the national and institutional politics of the war, a fact that complicates the ways in which Japanese Americans were ultimately constructed as ra- cial Others. American anthropological studies of internment became not just another example of the American propensity for seeing Japa- nese Americans as Japanese aliens, but more important, the studies be- came a clearinghouse for certain transitions in the deployment and power of anthropological theories about Asian Americans that were to have serious, long-term e¤ects on the self-concept and political status of Japanese Americans. Beneath the circuits of influence and layers of obfuscation, community analysis programs allowed liberal, white an- thropologists unparalleled power to reconstruct the Nisei in particular.

Government records indicate that during the early years of World War II the wra, which was initially established to administer intern- ment or relocation camps housing more than one hundred thousand West Coast Japanese Americans, created the community analysis pro- gram to assist in the administration of the internment camps. Termed the ‘‘community analysis section,’’ it began at Poston camp in Arizona and eventually involved the assignment of social scientists as govern- ment agents in each of the ten internment camps.3 Most of the social scientists involved were anthropologists whose chief qualification was their knowledge of and interest in Japanese cultural and behavioral pat- terns, although only a handful had ever actually visited Japan.4 As com- munity analysts they were primarily responsible for ensuring the smooth operation of camp life. But while stationed in the camps they were also explicitly encouraged to utilize Japanese American internees as informants on Japanese culture in the hope that the data collected might prove useful not only to the ongoing war e¤ort against Japan but also to the postwar e¤ort as well. The government hoped for insights useful for the control of both international and domestic Japanese com- munities: the reformation of Japan in the postwar period as well as the resettlement of Japanese Americans after the war.5 Or, as Dower puts

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

T H E I N T E R N M E N T O F A N T H R O P O L O G Y 45

it, ‘‘observations based on work with these persecuted and uprooted Americans were superimposed upon the growing collective portrait of the Japanese enemy, and several social scientists who worked in the camps went on to participate directly in psychological-warfare plan- ning pertaining to Japan.’’6

In truth, however, the relationship between the data drawn from community analysis and theories of Japanese character was even more complicated. Once the project was underway, some anthropologists be- gan to recognize that the recruitment of dispossessed Japanese Ameri- cans as informants on Japanese culture occurred under such unique domestic conditions of suspicion and uncertainty that the uses of com- munity analysis in postwar Japan must, at the very least, be compro- mised. The anthropologists’ reservations about simply transferring methods of regulating camp life to the occupation of Japan were often explicit, especially as they begin to see their job as that of correcting misconceptions about Japanese Americans by highlighting their dif- ficult ordeal during the war and promoting their chances for successful reintegration after the war. Ultimately, the relationship between Japa- nese Americans and Japanese cultural studies departed significantly from its founding intentions. Rather than simply using the internees as a resource for information on Japan, the anthropologists very quickly became invested in drawing conclusions about Japanese behav- ior that could be applied to a program of readjustment for Japanese Americans. Community analysts paradoxically found themselves will- ing to concede that the population was an ‘‘alien’’ culture in order to develop an acceptable argument for their assimilability. Thus, despite the obvious dilemmas posed by this loose exchange and substitution of data, the anthropologists continued to pursue the assumption that theories of Japanese behavior and policies for reforming Japan after the war might be confirmed and tested through ‘‘prolonged’’ analyses and observations of imprisoned Japanese Americans. The immediate, his- torical reasons for the liberal anthropologists’ willingness to view the terms ‘‘Japanese’’ and ‘‘Japanese American’’ as interchangeable also followed in the tradition of early national sociological studies of ‘‘the oriental problem,’’ which represented the peculiar American founda- tions of managing national anxieties about the ‘‘oriental’’ Other by reconstructing this ‘‘inscrutable’’ presence as an American in the making.

Scholars have only just recently begun to piece together the elabo- rate politics of internment anthropology that I synopsize here. Despite

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

46 A N A B S E N T P R E S E N C E

the fact that the cultural anthropologists’ participation in the adminis- tration of the Japanese American internment was public knowledge during the war years, it is only in the past decade that this fraught part of the history of American anthropology has been deemed a watershed in the conceptualization of the Japanese American subject.7 Peter Su- zuki’s work in the early and mid-1980s was groundbreaking in this re- gard, because he was the first to catalog the ethical and scientific prob- lems suggested by thewra’s administration of the camps. In a series of essays on the role of internment politics in the development of wartime anthropology, Suzuki argues, among other things, that ‘‘anthropology in the wra camp was misapplied because it was largely used to control and manipulate the inmates.’’8 Suzuki’s work was followed by Orin Starn’s 1986 essay, ‘‘Engineering Internment: Anthropologists and the War Relocation Authority,’’ a thoughtful and comprehensive over- view of the motivations, processes, and results of the anthropologists’ misguided attempts to help Japanese American internees. Although Starn acknowledges that the analysts were stationed in the camps in order to gather data against Japan and to identify potential problems, he also focuses on the paradoxical means by which the anthropologists tried to use their positions to speak on behalf of the incarcerated. He concludes that despite ‘‘their good intentions of improving camp con- ditions and defusing anti-Japanese public opinion,’’ (700),wra anthro- pologists ultimately produced work and followed policies that ‘‘unin- tentionally’’ promoted racial stereotypes about the Japanese and, by implication, the Japanese Americans as well. Starn’s impressive analy- sis remains indispensable for its synthesis of the evolution of the an- thropologists’ work in the internment camps. In his essay he also reit- erates Suzuki’s contention that the scholarly neglect of the meaning of camp analysis has deprived American anthropologists of the opportu- nity for important insights into the development of postwar theories of culture and behavior:

It continually struck me how little the basic views of wra ethnographers

about their role in relocation have altered over the years. Historical

changes have not inspired the kind of public self-examination found, for

example, in the discussions of British anthropologists about their rela-

tion to colonialism. . . . Continued convictions of having contributed to

Japanese-American well-being in troubled times and to the war e¤ort

more generally would have to be the starting points for such an analysis.

(717)

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

T H E I N T E R N M E N T O F A N T H R O P O L O G Y 47

Echoes of Dower resound in Starn’s description of the anthropologists’ treatment of Japanese Americans as ‘‘starting points’’ for the under- standing of American attitudes about the Japanese. Starn seems to sug- gest that Americans must come to grips with the extent of the anthro- pologists’ participation in projecting Japanese Americans as an ‘‘alien’’ ethnic group in need of reformation, an enterprise that evokes an ear- lier, Western colonial paternalism.

Around the same time that Starn’s work was published, Yuji Ichioka organized a two-day conference on the internment titled ‘‘Views From Within: The Japanese American Wartime Internment Experience,’’ held at the University of California at Berkeley, the center for the origi- nal Japanese Evacuation and Resettlement Study (jers). The book that came out of the conference gathered a wide-ranging series of essays on the politics of camp anthropology, essays that testify to the fact that the impact of community analysis is still being felt, although it is not by any means fully accounted for.9 Like Dower, Suzuki, and Starn, Ichioka and the conference participants found themselves focused on the an- thropological studies conducted in the camps as ‘‘the basis of a rich so- cial history of concentration camp life’’ (22), but they also revealed the diªculty of categorizing the e¤ects of community analysis. ‘‘It goes without saying,’’ Ichioka concludes, with his characteristic cynicism, ‘‘that jers was not a research project in the service of a political cause on behalf of Japanese-Americans. To say that it should have been is to engage in wishful thinking; to criticize it for not having been is to be naı̈ve’’ (23). Although the disastrous e¤ects of the tendency to view Japanese American culture as Japanese have been widely noted and have enriched numerous histories and memoirs of the period of Japa- nese American internment, postwar and Asian American critics have clearly just started to address the impact of anthropology’s study of Jap- anese Americans’ internment and resettlement.10

Still, as noted earlier by Dower, the underlying implications of the fact that theories of Japanese behavior were explicitly confirmed or tested by the administration of Japanese American internees remain unspoken. It is time to explain how the liberal anthropologists’ confla- tion of Japanese American and Japanese culture allowed them not just to use an imprisoned population as a scientific resource but also to show how their reports from the camps reiterated earlier notions about Asians as ‘‘oriental Others’’ in America in an e¤ort to revitalize the be- lief in an assimilable Japanese Other. More specifically, scrutiny of the

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

48 A N A B S E N T P R E S E N C E

work of the camp anthropologists suggests parallels between the ear- lier focus on Asian Americans as ‘‘marginal men’’ and the wartime ob- session with the split character of the Japanese American Nisei. De- spite their stress on presentism and their suspicion of historicism, cultural anthropologists recast the concept of the Asian American as the ‘‘marginal man’’ as one of Japanese ‘‘duality.’’ According to Robert Park, who coined his definition in 1928, the ‘‘marginal man’’ was the result of global movement and cross-cultural contact, which created the conditions for the emergence of the alienated immigrant individual caught between two distinct cultures.11 This concept metamorphosed into the wartime anthropologists’ concerns with Japanese ‘‘duality,’’ [the peculiar presence of warring impulses in an individual,] as they tried to show how the dualistic Japanese American might be pushed further toward the American pole. Community analysts argued that the presence of a tense generational struggle between Issei and Nisei internees was caused by the vestiges of a lingering, archaic Japanese character typified by the Issei, which the Nisei had to turn away from in order to progress toward full assimilation. As a result, the anthropol- ogists determined to utilize the ancient filial piety of Japanese culture as a means of spatially and temporally fixing the problem of Japanese Americans, a problem that, thus parsed, inevitably necessitated their forced movement toward another more modern and thus American ex- istence. Not coincidentally, this process of othering a group in space and time in order to create the imperative of colonial reformation was similarly deployed in occupied Japan, where the aim was to break the old, patriarchal Japanese traditions and replace them with a model of American democratic capitalism. In the end, however, the community analysis project was ultimately responsible for extending the ‘‘prob- lem’’ of Japanese American di¤erence by aªrming the resilience of Japanese culture and, thus, maintaining the constructed alienation of the Nisei.

‘‘Experience in Such Colonies’’: Establishing the Camp Analysis Project

Mass hysteria in the wake of Pearl Harbor provoked widespread sus- picion of Japanese Americans. Historian Michi Weglyn reveals that in February 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, thereby acting against the findings of the prewar Munson Report,

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

T H E I N T E R N M E N T O F A N T H R O P O L O G Y 49

which had determined that ‘‘there is no Japanese problem on the Coast.’’ This order designated much of the West Coast a ‘‘military area,’’ and hence extended to the military carte blanche the power to remove any and all individuals of ‘‘a potentially dangerous’’ nature. Even though the order did not specify Japanese Americans for special scrutiny, they emerged as the order’s intended target and remain the only ethnic group evacuated en masse under suspicion of disloyalty.12

Ronald Takaki concludes that in signing Executive Order 9066 Roose- velt had in e¤ect ‘‘signed a blank check, giving full authority to General DeWitt to evacuate the Japanese and place them in assembly centers and eventually in internment camps.’’13 Despite the fact that almost two-thirds of the evacuees were U.S. citizens—Nisei who had been born and, in many cases, reared on the West Coast—a number of high- ranking government oªcials urged Roosevelt forward in the belief that, as Secretary of War Harry Stimson put it, ‘‘their racial characteris- tics are such that we cannot understand or trust even the citizen Japa- nese.’’14 Within a year, virtually every West Coast Japanese American was sent to one of several remote relocation centers where he or she was oªcially quarantined and questioned to determine if imprison- ment in even more isolated internment camps, reserved for those deemed disloyal and a threat to national security, was warranted. Ten relocation centers, often called ‘‘camps’’ even though they were sup- posed to be merely holding centers, were eventually established.

A central part of the task of assessing and containing Japanese American internees fell to the group of government social scientists who became part of the wra’s administration of the camps. As com- munity analysts and as part of the Camp Analysts Section, or cas, their explicit duties in the camps were to assess levels of residual ‘‘Japanese attitudes,’’ including and especially the evacuated population’s varying levels of loyalty to the United States; to recommend and direct govern- ment administration of the camps, including future plans for perma- nently relocating evacuees away from their lifelong homes in the West; and, later, to study the viability of training and using Japanese Ameri- cans as go-betweens in occupied areas of the Pacific.15 Archival evi- dence reveals that the decision to place analysts in the camps was ratio- nalized not only as a domestic necessity for the purposes of discovering how to deal with the unique problems represented by Japanese Ameri- cans, but also as a means of studying and confirming theories of Japa- nese behavioral patterns.

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

50 A N A B S E N T P R E S E N C E

In an early memorandum from John Embree, the anthropologist who ran the cas from Washington, D.C., to General J. L. DeWitt, Em- bree writes: ‘‘It is believed that various evacuees in the Japanese reloca- tion centers possess information regarding Japanese social, political, economic and labor conditions which can be of great value in the prose- cution of the war.’’16 Although Embree clearly refers to Kibei, those Jap- anese Americans who had been born in the United States but educated in Japan, camp analysts regularly dealt with and depended on others in the camps as well. By 1944, Embree had broadened the initial focus on the Kibei to state simply that the evacuees were used as resources for camp analysts from ‘‘the time the administration was first set up.’’ He also became more specific about the general uses of the data collected in the camps, saying, ‘‘the section was expected not only to be informed on social conditions in relocation centers but also on the social organi- zation of the West Coast Japanese before the war, and on that abstruse phenomenon called ‘Japanese psychology’ ’’ (278).

Here, the emphasis on historical context, on the specific social con- ditions a¤ecting Japanese Americans, is in large measure the enduring legacy of Franz Boas, who established the terms for cross-cultural analysis as early as 1887 when, in response to Otis Mason’s Social Dar- winist view of the evolution of all cultures as governed by natural or biological laws, Boas argued for the necessity of historical specificity in assessing the culture of any people.17 It is interesting to note that even Boas was not immune to such views. He entertained the validity of the physiological basis for comparison of cultures in his early theories of race and culture, even once acknowledging that some races were, at least in the then present day, ‘‘inherently’’ inferior to others. At the close of his career, however, he would adamantly insist that cultural di¤erences were ‘‘dependent upon historical causes, regardless of race.’’18 Although Boas and those who studied with him accepted that historical and social forces were the ultimate source of cultural di¤er- ences, the debate did not entirely eliminate the resort to racial stereo- typing in some cases. Embree’s and perhaps others’ willingness to con- sider that Japanese Americans might represent both a unique culture and yet remain direct symbols of a distant Japanese culture was indi- rectly influenced by this tendency in American social scientists’ work on race and culture. John Embree saw no conflict between his Boasnian adherence to the historical foundations of culture and his casual asser- tion that with Japanese Americans ‘‘recommendations on labor rela-

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

T H E I N T E R N M E N T O F A N T H R O P O L O G Y 51

tions, mess operations, etc., to be accepted, usually had to be made in terms of Japanese psychology rather than of prosaic labor-management relations.’’19 The implementation of Japanese Americans as a resource for the study of Japan continued to develop under the auspices of Em- bree and anthropologist Alexander Leighton, the very first analyst in- stalled at one of the camps. When unrest broke out in the Poston, Ari- zona, camp in 1942, it was decided that cultural anthropologists might be useful in resolving the di¤erences between camp administrators and camp residents.20 Thus, Embree’s approach to the so-called prob- lem of Japanese American status was shaped by his unselfconscious application of Boas’s earlier arguments about racial di¤erences.

Yet Embree, and Alexander Leighton in particular, were also com- pelled by the work of those social scientists who followed in Boas’s wake to develop new theories that further explained the social and cul- tural origins of interracial contact and also suggested how solutions to the problem might be achieved. Chief among these problems was the question of the future role of Asian immigrants in American society. In a recent work, historian Henry Yu points out that ‘‘the ‘oriental prob- lem’ in the 1920s created a set of ideas that structured the way that Asians were understood and the way they were given a meaningful place in American society.’’21 Robert Park was the most influential pro- ponent of ‘‘the oriental problem,’’ which he perceived as a prob- lem of assimilation because ‘‘the ‘oriental’ in America was still an ex- otic oddity, foreign and seemingly unassimilated.’’22 According to Yu, Park theorized that such ‘‘an enormous cultural distance separated Western culture from ‘Oriental’ culture’’ that the universal cycle of contact, competition, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation was not allowed to develop.23 Thus, the greatest task facing the social scien- tist was to determine how to move the ‘‘oriental’’ Other further along in the cycle so that he or she might achieve full assimilation.

More than any other single camp analyst, Alexander Leighton was vital to enunciating a set of strategies for dealing with the perceived ‘‘assimilation problem’’ of the Japanese American subject. He spent fifteen months, from June 1942 to September 1943, at Poston, a camp in Arizona in the Colorado River Valley, which was the first to use social scientists to observe Japanese American camp behavior. Not surpris- ingly, Leighton was also among the first to suggest publicly that ana- lysts’ experiences in the camps should play a major role in the nation’s administration of the postwar reconstruction of Asia. John Embree, as

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

52 A N A B S E N T P R E S E N C E

head of the wra, viewed Leighton’s anthropological project at Poston as the model for the installation of community analysts in every one of the camps housing evacuated Japanese Americans.24 Because commu- nity analysis in the camps hinged on the presumption of the direct use- fulness of Japanese Americans as informants on Japanese culture, Em- bree and Leighton were often compelled to focus on the similarities between internment and the expected postwar dislocation of Japa- nese citizens. Any conclusions they might draw about the cultural dif- ferences that Park had theorized as preventing Asian Americans’ as- similation in America had to be applicable to the occupation e¤ort in postwar Japan. Although camp analysts did not in practice mistake Jap- anese Americans for Japanese, in theory they did rely from the start on viewing the government’s administration of Japanese American dis- placement as a direct analogue for the military’s later occupation of Ja- pan. As a result of this reliance, the anthropologists’ observations and opinions regarding the administration of internment were later quite influential in developing and confirming theories of the best way to manage Japanese di¤erences and, as a ‘‘natural’’ extension, the best means of restructuring Japanese American subjectivity to achieve Park’s final stage of assimilation.

In hindsight, the disastrous e¤ects of such a fundamental oversight seem glaring, and it is important to recall that these ramifications were barely considered in the first public description of the camp analysis project and its aims. Although the project may now appear a rather ob- vious instance of social engineering, one that seems stamped with the imperialism of an earlier age, Leighton—perhaps also reflecting impe- rialist rationalizations—believed his work would ultimately achieve the liberation of his subjects. In July 1942, Leighton published an essay titled ‘‘Training Social Scientists for Post-War Conditions,’’ just as he was assuming his position at Poston. In this work, he outlines an opti- mistic plan for the use of social scientists during and after the war, in which he cites the invaluable benefits of the ‘‘practical application’’ of their results.25 After providing a synopsis of his experiences in ‘‘an Es- kimo village in Alaska’’ as an example of how the social scientist could be ‘‘both an observer and a social doctor to a community’’ and utilize the information gathered toward ‘‘the development of better living and better relations,’’ he suggests that ‘‘there are many similar opportuni- ties in the United States under the widespread administration of the Oªce of Indian A¤airs’’ (27–29). His statement refers to the Poston

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

T H E I N T E R N M E N T O F A N T H R O P O L O G Y 53

camp, which, because it had been established on Indian land, was the only camp to come under the administration of the Oªce of Indian A¤airs. He concludes his essay by rendering a sketchy portrait of the nature and meaning of the camp analysis project: ‘‘Colonies of Ameri- can Japanese have been formed,’’ he o¤ers, with the belief that ‘‘experi- ence in such colonies can naturally lead to positions in reorganizing the Pacific areas when the war is over’’ (emphasis added) (29). Leighton only briefly questions the applicability of ‘‘experience in such colonies’’ when he cautions against compromising social science by placing the scientist ‘‘under pressure to deliver goods of immediate value or cease to exist’’ (25). The significance of this early wartime piece rests in its prescience: it anticipates the profound influence government social sci- entists would have on postwar foreign policy in Japan; it predicts that the camp analysis project will play a vital part in realizing that future; and it projects the latter two ambitions at the expense of considering the ethical and procedural obstacles inherent in the use of ‘‘colonies of American Japanese.’’ Yet despite the early optimism over the cross- cultural uses of community analysis, in a very short period of time Leighton’s faith in the postwar benefits of wartime social science would be tempered by his growing knowledge of the unique situation of Japa- nese Americans and the problems inherent in collecting and assessing data in the uncertain environment of the camps, and by an implied rec- ognition of the manipulation of time and space that would prove to be an integral part of social science’s approach to the ‘‘oriental’’ unassimi- lability of Japanese Americans.

‘‘Groping in the Dark’’: Patterns of Erasing Japanese American Culture

Although Leighton had originally expressed tremendous confidence in the potential of the Poston project, by 1943, less than a year later, his commitment to the cas would increasingly be shadowed by an aware- ness of the diªculties in identifying evacuees’ attitudes in the camps as universal to all dislocated Japanese. In ‘‘Assessing Public Opinion in a Dislocated Community,’’ Leighton peppers with caveats and dis- claimers his argument for seeing the administration of the camps as an analogy for postwar occupation of Japan.26 The essay looms now as an illustration of the contradictions and generalities that beset early at- tempts to use the internment as a corollary for occupation as well as

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

54 A N A B S E N T P R E S E N C E

the means by which the anthropologists eventually rationalized their e¤orts in the face of mounting doubts about their mission.

‘‘Applied social science has no magic formula with which to provide infallible answers,’’ Leighton begins, ‘‘no matter what is done, there will be groping in the dark.’’ Although he retains hopes ‘‘to reduce both the groping and the darkness’’ (653), Leighton remains ambivalent throughout the essay about the advisability of using for international purposes information gathered under extraordinary domestic circum- stances. In his report on the community analysis project, wra chief John Embree confirms that ‘‘because of special local problems in estab- lishing rapport with the Poston community there was a reluctance on the part of the research unit to communicate its findings directly to the Washington oªce of the wra.’’27 Yet Leighton ironically finds a way to resolve his dilemma by highlighting rather than obscuring in his essay the ‘‘special local problems’’ encountered by analysts; that is, by em- phasizing rather than by ignoring the purely functional aspects of the specific conditions shaping internment resistance. Focusing on the most extraordinary events in camp history—the strikes and protests that occurred in several camps early in the internment—Leighton re- casts their particularity as emblematic not of distinctive historical and political contexts unique to U.S. domestic culture but of the universal problems of dislocation. He suggests that the general benefits of com- munity analysis lay in the lessons learned at these critical times of cri- sis, and he specifically argues that the methods employed by commu- nity analysts to quell Japanese American dissent could be used just as e¤ectively by occupation leaders in postwar Japan dealing with similar episodes of resistance by a ‘‘hostile’’ people of Japanese descent.

The outbreak of ‘‘special local problems’’ chronicled by Leighton re- sulted from the daily psychological pressures of incarceration on Jap- anese Americans, two-thirds of whom were citizens under constant involuntary surveillance, as well as from the heterogeneity of the evacuated population, a fact that often made it diªcult for camp ana- lysts to pinpoint the essence of Japanese American much less Japanese di¤erence. Leighton early concludes that the evacuees at Poston ‘‘var- ied greatly in background’’ and that there was a prevalence of ‘‘much conflict of opinion and a breakdown of the previous forms of social con- trol’’ (654). At times, ‘‘di¤erent pressure groups sought power,’’ he reports, ‘‘each trying to convince the government that it alone rep- resented the feelings of the people’’ (654). Despite the fact that the

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

T H E I N T E R N M E N T O F A N T H R O P O L O G Y 55

Japanese American Citizens League (jacl) was oªcially acknowledged by the administrators as the voice of Japanese Americans, ‘‘the trans- mission of information and point of view in both directions was a prob- lem of first magnitude’’ (655), because the administration was equally at sea in their treatment of evacuees. Although some ‘‘looked upon the people being governed as enemies to be punished and never trusted, others emphasized the oªcial policy of rehabilitation. The net result was a marked inconsistency of action with consequent confusion’’ (654–55). The evacuees in turn responded with ‘‘a community attitude of hostility toward any form of investigation or inquiry’’ (656). Those few who did participate with the analysts in the collection of informa- tion, mostly younger jacl members or their sympathizers and not nec- essarily Kibei, were under the stigma of being doubly marked as ‘‘infor- mants’’ because they were viewed by a substantial number of Japanese Americans who refused to cooperate with what they considered their illegal incarceration, as having ‘‘reported names to make money, to set- tle grudges, or to ingratiate themselves with the law enforcement agen- cies’’ (656–57).

Leighton’s published account of the problems at the Poston camp suggests that the community analysts’ assignments to collect and interpret the responses of Japanese American evacuees were plagued from the very beginning by overt administrative hostility, the evac- uees’ resulting apprehension of government agents, and reliance on a pool of informants distrusted by most in the camp. Leighton’s descrip- tion of the early camp period as a tense and even volatile environment is born out by the written record of subsequent events in other camps as well. Position alone witnessed a major strike by evacuees over food and living conditions and the later indictment of 101 young Nisei men for refusing to volunteer for military service.28 Resistance was also en- countered at, notably, the Manzanar and Tule Lake camps in California, where the rigors of incarceration, interrogation, and, in isolated cases, violence, precipitated major episodes of protest later reconstructed in the memoirs of Japanese Americans held there.

Remarkably, what Leighton proposes in his article is that the orga- nized resistance encountered in the camps at these times, although specific to the domestic conditions of internment, is most instructive as an example of the tensions inherent ‘‘in a variety of administrative problems in countries where human life has been severely dislocated and where the people are very di¤erent from the average American in

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

56 A N A B S E N T P R E S E N C E

racial descent, traditional values, and predominant attitudes.’’29 Not- withstanding liberal anthropology’s arguments against biological de- terminism, the chief point of comparison between wartime intern- ment and postwar occupation is the shared racial origins of the two populations. In the case of Japanese Americans, Leighton tries to com- plicate this fact by suggesting that the resistance often resulted from the mutually perceived racial and cultural di¤erences between those of Japanese descent and ‘‘average Americans,’’ di¤erences that made communication diªcult. ‘‘The greater the ethnic di¤erence between the governing and the governed,’’ Leighton asserts, ‘‘the greater be- comes this diªculty’’ (652). Here Leighton recalls the conclusions of the United States Immigration or Dillingham Commission, which was established in 1907 to explore the impact of and suggest solutions to the perceived problems of immigration. In its introduction the com- mission focused on ‘‘an inquiry into the assimilation of the immi- grants with the American people as far as the form of the body is con- cerned.’’ Drawing on Franz Boas’s work for the commission article, ‘‘Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants,’’ which ar- gued that over time the immigrant’s body was transformed by Ameri- can life,30 the commission found that the ‘‘oriental’’ would probably find it impossible to adapt to American life because their extreme racial and physiological di¤erence from white or ‘‘native’’ Americans would render such transformation impossible.31 The Social Darwinist influ- ence is undeniable here.

Although Leighton warns against ‘‘transferring too literally the les- sons learned in one to the other,’’ particularly in situations such as in- ternment ‘‘where social relations are largely artificial and everything has an air of being temporary,’’ he simultaneously suggests that the cultural motivations of the strikes and the specific techniques used to circumvent the strike at Poston in November 1942 should logically carry over to occupation policy with other Japanese.32 Believing that ‘‘the community attitude of hostility toward any form of investigation or inquiry,’’ ‘‘one of the toughest problems’’ faced by camp analysts, was a ‘‘universal’’ quality that ‘‘went far back in Japanese culture,’’ Leighton concludes that internees’ hostility ‘‘was a parallel of what must be met in occupied areas’’ (emphasis added) (656–57). Leighton’s suspicion of historicism resulted in the neglect of the political and ma- terial conditions motivating Japanese Americans’ ‘‘hostility’’ in favor of a functionalist approach that ends up reinforcing the very racism

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

T H E I N T E R N M E N T O F A N T H R O P O L O G Y 57

that Boas and his liberal successors decried. The problem of using the dislocation of Japanese Americans to provide theories about Japanese behavior meant that Leighton and others working with him subtly rein- forced the belief in racial di¤erence as a means of collecting and orga- nizing knowledge. Leighton’s argument e¤ectively reconfigures the in- ternees as dislocated Others who are removed both spatially and temporally from the national situation; in e¤ect, they became indistin- guishable from the Japanese peoples whom military administrators would later encounter in Japan. This gesture is, as Johannes Fabian points out, a feature of ‘‘modern anthropology’’ that ‘‘constructs its Other in terms of topoi implying distance, di¤erence, and opposition’’ in the interest of constructing ‘‘ordered Space and Time—a cosmos— for Western society to inhabit, rather than ‘‘understanding among cultures.’’33

Yet at the same time Leighton makes a strong argument for the eªcacy of peaceful negotiation in dealing with any dislocated Japanese populace. The decision of the administration to handle the Poston strike by initiating a negotiation with the strikers and allowing for the venting of limited grievances is o¤ered as an illustration of what might be done in Japan in the event of a similar phase of resistance. ‘‘Even in the occupation of enemy territory, the chief aim of the agents of a democracy will not be to out-Fascist the Fascists, but, after the neces- sary housecleaning, to rehabilitate the country,’’ according to Leigh- ton, who o¤ers Poston as an illustration of the benefits of negotiation over force with enemy peoples.34 The community analysts at Poston had rightly predicted that ‘‘if the [Poston] Administration negotiated carefully, it would come out of the situation with much better influence in the community than it had previously wielded’’ (663). Furthermore, the use of peaceful methods by the administration at Poston compared favorably with the use of military force at Manzanar in the face of a sim- ilar internee strike, a strike that subsequently resulted in two deaths, months of turmoil, and ‘‘a marked increase in operating expenses’’ (663). The aversion to the use of force in administering ‘‘hostile’’ groups is ‘‘nothing but the consistent application of common sense,’’ Leighton confesses, and he acknowledges that its use ‘‘is far from new’’ (667). Here Leighton more explicitly traces the Poston administra- tion’s reliance on negotiation with the Other to the late-nineteenth- century colonial structures developed by sympathetic colonialists such as T. E. Lawrence, whose words close the article and, at least for Leigh-

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

58 A N A B S E N T P R E S E N C E

ton, encapsulate the methods of control developed in the camps: ‘‘They would follow us, if we endured with them, and played the game ac- cording to their rules. The pity was, that we often began to do so, broke down with exasperation and threw them over, blaming them for what was a fault in ourselves’’ (667).

Although the ‘‘exasperation’’ plaguing the camp analysts resulted from a very specific set of domestic and institutional struggles, the ex- isting literature on Japanese or ‘‘oriental’’ behavior clearly influenced their interpretations of the meaning of their conflicts and negotiations with internees. Henry Yu points out that Robert Park’s concept of the ‘‘marginal man’’ was one that came to exert a powerful influence on not only white, liberal social scientists but also on Asian American in- tellectuals who drew on their theories as a concept of their positive function in American society.35 Park’s description of the ‘‘marginal man’’ as ‘‘the stranger in the community’’ who ‘‘learns to look upon the world in which he was born and bred with something of the detach- ment of the stranger’’ appealed to social scientists because it explained the modern condition of ‘‘cosmopolitan’’ alienation.36 It appealed to Asian American writers and intellectuals because, according to Yu, Park had ‘‘celebrated this new social type, the ‘marginal man,’ as being freer and more creative, released from the bonds of custom and tradi- tion . . . a cosmopolitan ability to move among and understand di¤er- ent cultures.’’37 Yet the celebration of this concept as one that helped to redeem the perception of Asian Americans in general was premature, as David Palumbo-Liu notes, because the Asian American as ‘‘mar- ginal man’’ is relegated to a di¤erent, although progressive, plane of consciousness, an act that e¤ectively maintains the distancing of the Japanese American as Other: ‘‘Sometimes racial others are read as syn- onymous with the general exotica of modern forms; at other times, they are markers of a ‘racial frontier’ that cannot be crossed without cost.’’38

In addition, because the ‘‘marginal man’’ was described as lacking national identity, a person ‘‘without direction and control,’’ he would also find it virtually impossible to complete the process of assimilation as Parks described it. Although Park points out that ‘‘the chief obstacle to the cultural assimilation of races is not their di¤erent mental, but rather their divergent physical traits’’ that prevent them from being fully accepted by the dominant white society, elsewhere he promotes the importance of ‘‘mental’’ activities in achieving assimilation.39 In

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

T H E I N T E R N M E N T O F A N T H R O P O L O G Y 59

Old World Traits Transplanted, published in 1921, Park lays out the ‘‘psychology of assimilation’’ as one in which ‘‘a certain identity of ex- periences and memories between immigrants and Americans is of main importance.’’40 The ‘‘marginal man’’ by virtue of his characteris- tic ‘‘detachment’’ is naturally unable to give himself over completely to a common stock of cultural memories; he must, on some level, remain apart. To embrace uncritically the concept of the Asian American as a ‘‘marginal man’’ is, then, to prolong rather than resolve the alienation of Asians in America.

The psychic or sentimental remove of the ‘‘oriental’’ as ‘‘marginal man’’ was also projected in spatial terms. Anthropologist Conrad Arensberg, a friend and fellow analyst of Leighton’s who was stationed with him at Poston, advocated for the rights of Japanese Americans even as he expressed a belief in their immutable and inherent di¤er- ence from white Americans. In an essay on conditions at Poston, he argued that, as Japanese by origin, the Japanese Americans were natu- rally accustomed to di¤erent treatment and that the administration was wrong to treat them as aliens.41 Most interesting is Arensberg’s vi- sualization of an entirely di¤erent relationship to space and thus social relations. He conjectures that although ‘‘for a Caucasian group much of this might perhaps be extraordinary . . . the Japanese, both rural and urban, have a long history of living in crowded conditions and sub- jecting one another to strong conventional controls’’ (8). Sympathetic to the futile e¤orts of Japanese Americans ‘‘to bust the shackles’’ of their incarceration, Arensberg nonetheless chooses to view their daily reactions and immediate impulses as falling under the umbrella of Japanese conventions described in John Embree’s late 1930s study of life in a small Japanese village, Suye Mura. Arensberg’s recognition of the unique psychological hardships of internment follows a dead end that leads one back to the unavoidable di¤erence of Japanese Ameri- cans parsed as ‘‘the paramount importance of the local group’’ (8). He was typical of many wra camp analysts in that he consistently vacil- lated between both obscuring and acknowledging the racism that cre- ated the camps as the situation demanded. In the end, as Arensberg readily admits, he was obligated to view the internment ‘‘from the van- tage point of Mr. Burge’s oªce [as camp director]’’ with the purpose of separating ‘‘cooperative evacuees from those who were not’’ (8).

In addition to the work of Park and Boas, Conrad Arensberg, like most other wra anthropologists including Alexander Leighton, had

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

60 A N A B S E N T P R E S E N C E

been deeply influenced by a 1930s structural-functionalist approach. According to Orin Starn, this view occasionally moved him to regard the camps as ‘‘a complete functional system’’ threatened by the intern- ees’ resistance, and thus ‘‘in all seriousness [he] termed the camps ‘communities’ in need of stabilization.’’42 In later decades, Leighton referenced British anthropologists’ theories of the ‘‘functional variabil- ity of social institutions’’ and systems as concepts that framed his own approach to internment camp life, which he concluded merely ‘‘laid bare the existence of these systems’’ for anthropologists.43 Expressions of liberal sympathy on the part of camp analysts, who wanted to tran- scend the racialist views of a U.S. government suspicious of Japanese American di¤erence, eventually came to embrace the universality of functionalism. Functionalism, in turn, realized the needs of bureau- cratic eªciency. Unlike British anthropologists of the early twentieth century, such as Bronislaw Malinowski and especially A. R. Radcli¤e- Brown, who likened cultures to naturally functioning organisms that followed their own laws and allowed little room for individual agency, Leighton and his colleagues in the camps wanted to learn how to alter and redirect the internment camp societies and subjects they studied.44

They sought to learn how to make the camps—and by extension occu- pied postwar Japanese culture—work as normal communities that might nurture the residents rather than punish them.

Like Leighton, Arensberg encouraged administrators to adopt a pro- gram of outward sympathy for Japanese Americans’ complaints on the grounds that the best way to control ‘‘emotional outbursts’’ is ‘‘to let such emotion play itself out harmlessly and to deflect the released ener- gies to other things, after emotion has been discharged.’’45 This argu- ment for a policy of tolerance of cultural di¤erence became common in the reports of camp analysts who hoped to sustain a progressive vi- sion while also carrying out their duties as government agents commit- ted to controlling the internees in their charge. Yet pleas for tolerance of Japanese American resistance eventually played into the designs of the government, because reports from camp analysts became less a means of acknowledging the unique dilemma of the internees than an argument for understanding internees’ problems as natural manifes- tations of Japanese behavior coming into conflict with the norms of (white) American society. The implied purpose of social scientific work with the ‘‘oriental Other’’ remained the task of discovering the hidden means by which to a¤ect the Americanization of the Other. And al- though this task was certainly shaped by earlier theories in American

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

T H E I N T E R N M E N T O F A N T H R O P O L O G Y 61

social science, it was equally, at least, a¤ected by the changing wartime status of anthropology as an American institution.

Virginia Yans-McLaughlin’s comment on Margaret Mead’s wartime ‘‘compromises with scientific objectivity’’ might also apply to the camp anthropologists’ reasons for downplaying the cultural uniqueness of Japanese Americans: ‘‘A nation at war could not be a nation divided. In a nation of immigrants, the immigrants were now given short shrift.’’46 In the face of the seemingly greater threat posed by Hitler’s Third Reich, anthropologists who were hired to help in the war e¤ort were forced to suspend any vigorous critique of ethnic Americans’ ex- periences. More often than not, under pressure to deliver goods useful in the war e¤ort against Japan, community analysts resigned them- selves to making their arguments, as John Embree initially described it, in terms of ‘‘that abstruse phenomenon, called Japanese psychol- ogy.’’47 Johannes Fabian o¤ers a similar assessment of American an- thropology in the first half of the twentieth century as a ‘‘conflict be- tween evolutionary-genetic (time-centered) and structural (timeless) theories of explanation.’’48 Rejecting the eugenics-based research of early social science, wartime social scientists opted for a cultural rela- tivist approach that might do away with ethnocentric conclusions. Yet, as Fabian observes, if the influence of structuralism-functionalism meant that social scientists ‘‘showed disregard for Time (i.e., for Time as past) this does not mean that anthropology ceased to serve as a time machine. . . . The denial of coevalness becomes intensified as time- distancing turns from an explicit concern into an implicit theoretical assumption’’ (39). Social science, in other words, continued to view the Other in terms of a premodern or ‘‘primitive’’ time, often by focusing on the Other’s existence in a completely separate temporal and spatial sphere, so that ‘‘whatever happens behind the walls [of relativism] oc- curs in a Time other than his’’ (52). The cultural relativism that defined the work of community analysts followed this pattern. More specifi- cally, their insistence on avoiding the historicism they associated with Social Darwinism guaranteed that they would favor universalizing cultural models for explaining the confusion that marked Japanese American experience in the camps. Increasingly, this model became grounded in the perception of an unpredictable and even erratic Japa- nese behavioral pattern, a behavior deeply ingrained by early childhood and later reinforced by cultural practices peculiar to those of Japanese descent.

The chief proponent of this theory of Japanese character was the

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

62 A N A B S E N T P R E S E N C E

British anthropologist Geo¤rey Gorer, who worked for the Oªce of War Information (owi) during the war as well as for the British govern- ment, and whose theories were widely influential for anthropologists attempting to develop theories of Japanese behavior in the absence of direct access to Japanese culture. In early 1941, Gorer presented his findings in a talk at Yale University in which he proposed that a series of antagonistic preoccupations and responses constituted what he then called ‘‘Japanese character structure.’’49 As a proponent of the culture and personality school of anthropology, which believed in deploying the tools of psychoanalysis on nations or cultures in order to map na- tional character types, Geo¤rey Gorer provided a scientifically based model by which Westerners might explain Japanese behavior. Adopt- ing a childhood deterministic approach common in psychoanalysis, Gorer eventually expanded on his 1941 talk to pen an analysis of Japa- nese child-rearing practices for the owi titled ‘‘Themes in Japanese Culture.’’50 The report became immensely influential, finding that the observed preoccupation with order and ritual in Japanese life could be traced to the supposedly harsh and repressive toilet training and the withholding of maternal a¤ection characteristic of Japanese culture. The result of these childhood influences was ‘‘a deeply hidden, uncon- scious and extremely strong desire to be aggressive’’ (285) that was con- strained only by equally severe social prohibitions against such desires. The illustrative e¤ect was observed in an individual who is caught be- tween controlling these extreme desires and an unresolved infantile re- sentment against them.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Gorer’s study of Japanese character is that he, like the camp anthropologists, tested at least some of his theories and conclusions about Japanese character through inter- views with Nisei informants. He furthermore admits to having dis- carded any information given by Nisei that contradicted ‘‘practices not reported by others’’ on ‘‘the theoretical ground that the individuals ob- served were probably aberrant’’ (275). Although we can draw many con- clusions from Gorer’s study, seen strictly within the framework of wartime work on Japanese character this famous essay reveals that a circular logic linking Japanese American and Japanese behavior ex- isted even before the camp analysis project was begun. And, like the camp analysts, Gorer sought to refine knowledge of the conflicted or ‘‘dual nature’’ of Japanese character structure as part of a progressive historical thrust, long recognized in cultural anthropology. Again, like

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

T H E I N T E R N M E N T O F A N T H R O P O L O G Y 63

his liberal American colleagues, Gorer’s work was part of ongoing e¤orts within anthropology to replace racist views of cultural di¤er- ences as fixed and physiological with a more humane understanding of the fluid, culture-based origin of those same di¤erences. Beginning with Franz Boas’s e¤orts to counter the racial eugenics of the late nine- teenth century and extending to the generation of anthropologists that included Americans educated in that tradition—such as Robert Park, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Conrad Arensberg, and even Geo¤rey Gorer (who, although he was an Englishman, was deeply influenced by American culture and personality techniques)—cultural anthropolo- gists of the 1940s followed in the liberal tradition set forth by Boas, which meant maintaining, however subtly, the Othering of racialized peoples. It is not hard to see, for instance, how Gorer’s concept of Japa- nese ‘‘duality’’ takes up and recirculates the notion of the ‘‘oriental’’ as a ‘‘marginal man’’ caught between two realms.51

The influence of Gorer’s conclusions on other anthropologists’ de- veloping theories of Japanese character is undeniable. Ruth Benedict cites his study as pivotal to her own conceptions of Japanese behavior in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.52 And, although he could not have anticipated it, Gorer’s famous essay also provided a means for community analysts to explain Japanese Americans’ behavior as the unresolved vestiges of childhood without ever needing to factor in the complicated politics of camp administration. The popularity of Gorer’s concept of Japanese ‘‘duality’’ was a move vital to American anthropol- ogy’s continuing practice of Othering the mostly native-born Asian American population.53 Suggestive of colonialism’s view of Others as premodern races, the widespread acceptance of Japanese ‘‘duality’’ as a sign of a lack of development is casually reiterated in Leighton’s article on dislocated communities, where he describes the ‘‘confusion’’ of in- ternees as ‘‘emotional complexes similar to those of the child who has unpredictable parents and who never knows whether he will receive ap- proval or a slap.’’54

Within the camps, the resort to Gorer’s prototype of Japanese char- acter, together with the turn toward a universalizing functionalist view of dislocation and resistance, sometimes resulted in the repeated pa- thologizing of evacuees’ behavior and, more particularly, of Japanese American culture. Extreme in this respect was the work of anthropolo- gist Weston LaBarre, who while stationed at the Topaz camp in Utah appeared to ignore altogether the hardship of incarceration for Japa-

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

64 A N A B S E N T P R E S E N C E

nese Americans as he gathered data for his confirmation of ‘‘character structure in the Orient.’’55 LaBarre never doubted that his forty-four- day period of observation of confused behavior in many evacuees was proof of the inherent ‘‘duality’’ in Japanese character structure that Gorer had previously described. In addition, he felt no reservations about uniting his studies of camp behavior with his later interviews with Japanese prisoners of war; both sets of interviews were treated as pieces of the same Japanese puzzle. In Japanese American evacuees La- Barre cataloged behavior that to him underscored the compulsive, neu- rotic core traits of the Japanese character structure: ‘‘Secretiveness, hiding of emotions and attitudes; preservation and persistence; consci- entiousness; self-righteousness; a tendency to project attitudes; fanati- cism; arrogance; ‘touchiness’; precision and perfectionism; neatness and ritualistic cleanliness; ceremoniousness; conformity to rule; sado- masochistic behavior; hypochondriasis; suspiciousness; jealousy and enviousness’’ (322). Years later LaBarre continued to defend his meth- ods and conclusions in the study, arguing in another essay that ‘‘an- thropologists and sociologists, plainly upset by its analytic clinical ap- proach, have long found it a convenient target as a presumably ‘early impressionist’ culture and personality study, without any method be- yond hunch-ethnography. It was not’’ (23). He maintains that con- temporary critics ‘‘failed to discern the method,’’ to comprehend the careful ‘‘listing of all the traits which clinical work indicates are characteristic of the compulsive personality’’ and the careful attempt ‘‘to ascertain whether there was a deductive matching between the clinical and the ethnographic’’ (24). ‘‘There was,’’ LaBarre concludes the Japanese Americans he observed at Topaz; ‘‘qed, I thought . . . the Japanese are surprisingly compulsive.’’56 Faced with the complex ten- sions and levels of distrust that pervaded the camp, LaBarre deployed Gorer’s thesis of a duality in Japanese character structure to make sense of Japanese Americans’ behavior. In so doing, he helped to se- cure the further applicability of Gorer’s thesis to a functionalist camp analysis in cases that tended to ignore the environmental and cultural roots of internees’ behavior. In this way, Japanese ‘‘duality’’ was imple- mented in the camps as an essential behavior possessed by all persons of Japanese descent.

The expressed reliance of the community analysts on functional- ism, along with its more obscured roots in Park’s work on ‘‘orientals,’’ conditioned the analysts to be confident that Gorer’s thesis of Japanese

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

T H E I N T E R N M E N T O F A N T H R O P O L O G Y 65

duality would once more deploy scientific explanations of the ‘‘Japa- nese character’’ of internees to forego the discussion of domestic rac- ism and the politics of social science, just as the concept of the ‘‘mar- ginal man’’ had done earlier in the century. The tendency to ignore how the pressures of internment might have a¤ected their own views of the camps, to say nothing of how such pressures a¤ected the views of Japanese Americans held there, obviously undercuts the camp an- thropologists’ attempts to advocate for cultural tolerance on behalf of the interned community. According to Orin Starn, ‘‘the culture and personality approach tended to lead to ‘scientific’ restatement of con- ventional stereotypes’’ that ‘‘helped produce extraordinarily ahistorical analyses of camp society’’ as ‘‘a timeless manifestation of Japanese character and culture.’’57 The anthropologists assumed that the repro- duction of Japanese American trauma as an emblem of Japanese dual- ity that transcended historical and social arguments ultimately pre- pared the way for acceptance of the possibility for assimilation of Japanese Americans, but by nationally and historically dislocating the Japanese American subject the community analysts ultimately sealed the Japanese Americans’ continuing fate as ‘‘oriental’’ Others. If they could not share space and time with modern Americans, then they could not share in the cultural memories and nationalist sentiments so critical to assimilation. The temporal and spatial processes of Othering Japanese Americans were most visible in arguments about the genera- tional conflict between Issei and Nisei. In the e¤ort to make way for a new generation of Americanized Japanese, the community analysts would designate the Nisei as the future of Japanese America, with the Issei doomed to symbolize the archaic reservoir of Japanese memories and experiences that must be amended. In much the same way, finess- ing the role of powerful patriarchal figures in Japan would prove criti- cal to the success of the American occupation.

Turning It to Good Account: Saving the ‘‘California Japanese’’

Writing in late 1942, after less than three months at Poston, Conrad Arensberg stated: ‘‘I believe it is well not to exaggerate the importance of the Issei-Nisei conflict’’ given that ‘‘there is not an immigrant group, and very few regional and class groups either, in the United States that does not face intergenerational conflict.’’58 Arensberg’s cautionary words did not, however, keep him from concluding that ‘‘the whole

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

66 A N A B S E N T P R E S E N C E

wra will have to learn to live with that conflict among the Japanese and to turn it to good account’’ (9). In large measure, the wra anthropolo- gists’ attempts to help the Japanese Americans by preparing them to be integrated into the postwar world derived from their attempts to do just as Arensberg suggests, to turn the Issei-Nisei conflict ‘‘to good account.’’

Most published community analysis reports were particularly con- cerned with the role of the relationship between Issei and Nisei males in a¤ecting camp attitudes toward the administration. Despite the fact that the authority of Issei fathers had been clearly damaged by their ini- tial exclusion from participation in camp councils, an act that also tended to destabilize relations within the family as a whole, within a relatively short period of time the camp analysts witnessed a ‘‘reemer- gence of patriarchal control.’’ In spring 1946, Edward Spicer’s closing report on the history of community analysis states that ‘‘the decision of the older people’’ was consistently responsible for ‘‘the response that the younger people felt impelled to make’’ in regard to the infamous loyalty oaths required of all Japanese Americans in 1943.59 Although a few ‘‘resisted parental pressure for some time,’’ in the end most as- sented, according to Spicer and his sta¤, because of ‘‘the feeling of loyalty to the old people’’ (22–23). By ‘‘the old people’’ Spicer clearly means to indicate Issei men, noting that ‘‘the women will follow their lead’’ (26). Influence in the interned family, and especially over the de- cisions of the majority of the Nisei men who were often merely spokes- persons for their fathers, ‘‘was the last as well as the strongest refuge of this older generation, the only spot where the word and advice of the [male] elders still carried weight and authority’’ (23). Like Arensberg four years before him, Spicer warns that ‘‘the price of neglecting this fundamental social fact is evacuee resistance to administration’’ (26).

What the wra anthropologists proposed was not a rejection of the power of traditional patriarchal figures, but an acceptance of its limited future in America without the hybridizing influence of the Nisei. Ac- cording to Arensberg, they believed that the Nisei’s inevitable transcen- dence would mark the transition to a new kind of Japanese American and that it would ‘‘reflect itself in political development, where it has already made its appearance at Poston.’’60 The primary shortcoming of community analysis is that ‘‘nothing has been done to enlist the skills of the older people and the forms of authority and expertness that are theirs’’ (11). Although this report appeared quite soon after the estab-

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

T H E I N T E R N M E N T O F A N T H R O P O L O G Y 67

lishment of the community analysis sections, and well before the an- thropologists had worked out the oªcial means of enlisting ‘‘the forms of authority’’ held by Issei fathers, Arensberg nevertheless conjectures that the solution might be to utilize father figures and their spokesper- sons, the Nisei men, in ‘‘roles very like those of the ‘white man’s In- dian’ among the Indians.’’ ‘‘The administration must ask itself,’’ he continues, ‘‘if that is not one of the prices it will have to pay, if the Japa- nese Americans are to be taught the forms of American municipal gov- ernment’’ (11). Despite its obvious colonialist perspective, this descrip- tion of the necessity of the merging or sharing of responsibilities and duties between distinctly di¤erent individuals owes more to Robert Park’s belief that assimilation of American cultural memories did not mean the denial of previous cultural memories for immigrants.61 ‘‘Any fine fund of feeling is valuable,’’ Park concludes, ‘‘in identifying the present with the past’’ (286) because ‘‘the values and attitudes he brings with him from his old life, is the material from which he must build his Americanism’’ (280).

According to Edward Spicer, in an attempt in summer 1943 to cut down on rising levels of ‘‘insecurity in the centers’’ and to procure the internees’ good faith in the administration’s plans to relocate and reset- tle Japanese Americans in the Midwest away from historical Japanese American communities, the wra anthropologists suggested ‘‘embody- ing approaches to the evacuees through Issei leaders and through fam- ily discussion.’’62 Their proposal for relying on the power of loyalty to paternal authority to influence camp sentiments immediately became a part of the oªcial program of the wra.

Once again, complex circuits of influence linked anthropological concepts of Japanese American and Japanese culture. The wra’s view of paternal authority and its emphasis on understanding the signifi- cance of paternal control was immediately derived from Geo¤rey Gor- er’s previous prewar theories regarding the layers of paternal authority constituting Japanese society. In Japanese culture, attitudes toward au- thority were almost exclusively framed as relations between males, ac- cording to Gorer, as ‘‘from the Emperor (with his divine ancestors as his superiors) to the newborn infant (with the outcasts as his inferiors) every male has his exact place in this male world that gives orders and expects obedience.’’63 The thought of breaching this system of male ob- ligation and filial obedience was unimaginable, and ‘‘no Japanese can feel safe and secure unless the whole environment is understood and

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

68 A N A B S E N T P R E S E N C E

as far as possible controlled’’ (289). In particular, Gorer argues, ‘‘the Japanese can never feel safe unless, as some of their more bombastic military leaders have proposed, the Mikado rules the whole earth’’ (290). Any social hierarchy attempting to encompass Japanese subjects therefore must necessarily include some version of this order of pater- nal authority, because without it the anthropologists predicted that the Japanese individual would be at sea and all administrative designs ren- dered moot. Gorer would reiterate this belief in the power of the em- peror in the final months of the war, when he, along with other anthro- pologists, advocated retaining the emperor rather than destroying his position in Japanese culture. They relied primarily on Gorer’s findings that the father figure was indispensable to the functioning of any Japa- nese society. But their belief in the wisdom of this approach also gained support from Park’s earlier injunctions that the ‘‘attitudes and values’’ from ‘‘the old life’’ are ‘‘the material’’ of Americanization for both Jap- anese postwar subjects, and as their domesticated screens, Japanese Americans.64

The strategy of utilizing a stabilizing paternal symbol to limit resis- tance in any dislocated community was also concurrent with a pro- gram to relocate selected Nisei away from Japanese American enclaves, to produce in e¤ect a geographical and spatial mapping of the theoreti- cal Othering of Japanese Americans. The divisive cultural e¤ects of the Issei fathers’ influence on the younger internees’ suspicions of reloca- tion were evident at Poston from the beginning, when Arensberg re- ported that ‘‘fears among the Japanese of the ‘breakdown’ of family life and family authority’’ often led to resistance and even delinquency on the part of younger internees, who represented the majority of the camp population.65 The Issei men’s resistance to their geographic relo- cation disrupted the discourse of Othering practiced by the commu- nity analysts by denying its realization both spatially and temporally. Spicer would later conclude that the occasional crises precipitated by food shortages or the infamous loyalty oaths only reinforced the need of Japanese Americans to cling to traditional forms of authority and ‘‘increased their hesitation to re-establish themselves elsewhere’’ and thus to develop a full sense of their place in American life.66 Heart Mountain, Wyoming, anthropologist Asael Hansen concurred with Spicer when he reported that ‘‘in crises . . . di¤erences between Issei and Nisei tended to fade. The community as a whole assumed an anti- administrative stance’’ that presented problems for the community an- alysts.67

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

T H E I N T E R N M E N T O F A N T H R O P O L O G Y 69

The anthropologists quickly recognized the usefulness of paternal authority to camp administrators. Spicer maintained that ‘‘through their leadership and their parental relationships they [Issei fathers] can council their children in favor of relocation,’’68 while Hansen observed that ‘‘during 1945, when some Issei informants of long standing began to relocate,’’ their decisions ‘‘helped a great deal’’ in establishing mean- ingful contacts and authority for the anthropologists.69 In light of Alex- ander Leighton’s related argument for the success of negotiation over forceful measures as a means of controlling internees in the camps and Japanese citizens in occupied Japan, the wra anthropologists began to experiment with manipulating Issei authority to influence Japanese American culture from within. At both Heart Mountain and Poston, the sta¤ actively sought to rely on paternal authority to convince the camp as a whole to go along with the administration’s plans for them by agreeing to their literal reinscription in the landscape and history of the American nation.

This line of reasoning about the administrative benefits of paternal symbols in ruling Japanese American subjects would be mirrored in arguments for retaining the emperor during the occupation. ‘‘As the father of his people,’’ the emperor o¤ered a way to control the nation’s actions in a time of crisis and transition. ‘‘It seemed to us,’’ asserted Alexander Leighton and Morris Opler in a 1946 essay taken from a pre- vious report titled ‘‘Applied Anthropology in Psychological Warfare Against Japan,’’ that ‘‘resistance both in battle and on the home front could be lowered by a clear and repeated statement declaring that the fate of the Emperor’’ would be left to the Japanese.70 Drawing on their work in the camps during times of crises, they predicted that ‘‘attacks on the Emperor would remind the people of their allegiance and tighten their grip on their belief at a time when other aspects of morale might be giving away’’ (258). Although this recommendation gave the appearance of respecting Japanese traditions, in truth its aim was to deploy the emperor as a kind of puppet figure, one who might subtly ventriloquize U.S. goals for the reformation of Japan. Policy makers in Japan would benefit from recognizing that ‘‘the Emperor can serve the welfare of men, self-government and good international relations’’ (260). Or, as Leighton would reiterate in his 1984 essay on applied an- thropology, ‘‘the problem was to facilitate this [change] by appealing to those value elements within Japanese culture that would encourage the transition from hold out to surrender.’’71 Believing along with Leigh- ton and Opler that the emperor ‘‘can fulfill the needs of very di¤erent

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

70 A N A B S E N T P R E S E N C E

sorts of persons,’’ Ruth Benedict would argue even more explicitly for relying on the emperor as a titular monarch or ‘‘secular chief’’ existing alongside MacArthur to e¤ect MacArthur’s rapid preeminence as the new ‘‘blue-eyed American Mikado.’’72 Benedict would cite the Japanese army and navy’s historical use of ‘‘his name to force through their mea- sures’’ (91) as a precedent for U.S. policy in this regard. Whether in the United States or in Japan, the posture of reasoned concern for main- taining cultural di¤erences, although vital to postwar liberal anthro- pologists’ successful promotion of their particular brand of cultural tol- erance as simply the most judicious means of maintaining the peace while encouraging the evolution of relations, more often than not veiled an agenda of cultural assimilation that, in the case of Japanese Americans, exposed American anthropology’s Othering of the nations’ immigrant ‘‘orientals.’’

The advocacy of cultural tolerance resulted in e¤orts to deny the his- torical and legal restrictions that maintained the Japanese Americans’ racial di¤erence, because it was vital to the future of American excep- tionalism and the promise of postwar renewal. Although it is also true that most camp analysts sympathized with and tried to assist the evac- uees in getting hearings for their political objections to the ordeal of internment, the e¤orts of the analysts often merely e¤aced Japanese Americans’ claims to rights and justice by simultaneously embracing them within and then distancing them from the national agenda. The problem of Japanese American internment was thus e¤ectively turned away from questions of camp conditions and, beyond that, of civil rights, to proving that Japanese Americans could somehow merge their Japanese behaviors with American traditions and thereby foster the flowering of a new generation or type of Japanese American. But this vision depended on Japanese Americans’ submission to the pater- nalism of the state and its institutions in a manner that banished them from full participation in the political discourse vital to their agency as citizens.

Alexander Leighton, while continuing to project the problem of Jap- anese American identity as a problem of Japanese reformation, also en- couraged authorities to remember the unique wartime position of all the evacuees ‘‘that their relocation was a forced one which they inter- preted as discrimination and rejection.’’73 Yet Leighton’s earnest artic- ulation of the need to rectify the injustices directed against Japanese Americans resided with a reluctance to critique those tenets of Ameri-

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

T H E I N T E R N M E N T O F A N T H R O P O L O G Y 71

can social science that promoted the scientist as the best arbiter of the lot of subjected peoples. He held on to the hope that liberal social sci- ence might yet be the answer to the hostilities of society by instructing Japanese Americans how to operate in a mainstream, European-based U.S. culture. In a very real sense, then, in their suggestion that the Ni- sei take on new American mentors in the postwar period the wra an- thropologists indirectly substituted their leadership for that of Issei pa- triarchs. By defending Japanese Americans as ‘‘good Americans’’ in ‘‘The Japanese Family in America,’’ one of his final wartime reports, Leighton makes a last revealing plea for filial obligation in achieving the reformation of Japanese Americans.74 In his report Leighton an- nounces that ‘‘after spending months in the centers, about 10,000 [Jap- anese Americans] were resettling in the Middle Western states, hoping to become reabsorbed in the life of the Nation’’ (15). In pursuit of their successful reconversion, he o¤ers a sympathetic portrait of Japanese Americans’ wartime trials, attempting to explain ‘‘the special adjust- ment problem of the Japanese’’ by contrasting their feelings of postwar uncertainty ‘‘with the war worker or soldier, who is rewarded for his discomforts and sacrifices by a feeling of fuller participation and accep- tance in the national life and an increase in prestige, if not in income’’ (151). The problem, as Leighton understood it, was the marginalized ‘‘status’’ of Japanese Americans in the United States, a position that he argues derives from the belief ‘‘that racial heredity is more important than the factor of culture’’ (152) in determining the Americanness of immigrant groups. In the tradition of liberal anthropology, Leighton holds up social science as a field of thought opposed to such racist argu- ments by asserting that ‘‘it is a basic postulate of social science that no inherent di¤erences in biological stocks of the human species exist that make it impossible for individuals of one stock to assimilate the culture practiced by another’’ (151). And because there is no racial or biological reason why Japanese Americans may not assimilate into the ‘‘melting pot’’ of U.S. cultures that Park had forecasted as an inevitable process, there is thus little to be gained by ‘‘walling it o¤ in society’’ (152–53). Be- cause many anthropologists actually viewed the camps as ‘‘a new stage in the modernization of Japanese Americans’’ (153), as ‘‘ideal cities’’ wherein the prewar pathology of Japaneseness residual in Japanese Americans might be reformed, Leighton’s perspective was influenced by the idea that the camps, while objectionable, might also provide an opportunity to a¤ect Japanese Americans’ inclusion as Americans.

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

72 A N A B S E N T P R E S E N C E

As an anthropologist committed to applying the results of data on living communities, Leighton sought to light the path to acculturation into mainstream European culture, which was never considered as less than a move toward progress and enlightenment. Never did Leighton or any of the other anthropologists who favored this renewed accultura- tionist strategy of bringing Japanese Americans into line with the dic- tates of mainstream Anglo culture stop to consider the costs of ‘‘inclu- sion’’ to the community.75 Indeed, before we can fully account for the e¤ects of community analysis, we must recognize that they found con- firmation and sanction for this policy of acculturation from among leaders in the internee population, whose views of themselves bore the legacy of Park’s theories about the ‘‘oriental problem,’’ as Henry Yu notes.76 Given Park’s sympathies with the ‘‘orientals’’ he wrote about, and his clear intention to privilege their ‘‘marginal’’ status as a benefit, Asian Americans hoping to claim their place in America embraced his theories. Yu’s description of the e¤ects of Park’s theory on the Asian American anthropology students who worked for him may also de- scribe the situation of wartime Nisei: ‘‘For them, the marginal man theory was like a release from bondage, naming them as the future and giving them the most important role in race and cultural relations. Ac- cordingly, the concept had a profound impact on their self-identity’’ (199). The ramifications of Yu’s argument are profound, for he sug- gests that the Asian Americans’ views of themselves may be more a¤ected by the ethnocentrism of white, liberal social science than has been previously recognized.77 In addition to this historical phenome- non in ethnic self-conception, the inordinate power of community analysts to set policy for dealing with Japanese Americans ensured that the internees would be especially vulnerable to accepting their con- clusions.

For years the jacl had been active in trying ‘‘to better the status of their own minority in the U.S.’’78 They had early on in the internment process recommended a ‘‘route of superpatriotism’’ for Japanese American evacuees, advising that they ‘‘obediently allow themselves to be relocated in order to better prove their allegiance to the U.S.,’’ and, in addition, that they ‘‘vehemently disavow all things Japanese’’ (255). Not surprisingly, jacl members worked most closely with camp ad- ministrators such as Leighton to weed out disloyal elements, a practice that earned them the label inu, or dog, the camp name for a collabora- tor. Years later, Wayne Collins, the San Francisco attorney who argued

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

T H E I N T E R N M E N T O F A N T H R O P O L O G Y 73

the cases of many Japanese American resistors against the Justice De- partment, continued to condemn the jacl in no less vivid terms as the group ‘‘that pretended to be the spokesman for all Japanese Americans but . . . wouldn’t stand up for their people. . . . They led their people like a bunch of goddamn doves to the concentration camps’’ (255). Al- though the jacl promised the internees that their patriotism and per- severance would be rewarded after the war, the Japanese Americans who returned to their communities found that their homes and busi- nesses had been confiscated and sold by the government, and, in many cases, that they were excluded from renting property and holding jobs out of a persistent view that somehow they were still more like Japanese enemies than American ‘‘superpatriots.’’

Following the jacl’s lead in many respects, in a plan that would pro- long financial ruin and social alienation for many Japanese Americans in the early postwar years, Alexander Leighton strongly advised against the maintenance of ‘‘Japanese customs,’’ citing the ‘‘natural and often unconscious attempts [of Issei] to pass on their culture to their chil- dren’’ as helping to create ‘‘definite barriers to assimilation.’’79 Re- jecting historical fears of and restrictions against miscegenation, fears that would be widely maintained by many white Americans well be- yond the 1940s as later struggles to integrate southern society and northern schools would testify, Leighton promoted limited interracial relations, specifically the social mixing of Nisei with white peers, as in- tegral to any program of successful acculturation for Japanese Ameri- cans. He argued that ‘‘it was largely from such white friends—who were in a sense patrons—that the Japanese children acquired their goals and ideals in American life, as well as manners and language’’ (153). In the process of acculturation, contact with whites worked to break up ‘‘a kind of family that is protective, reactionary, and atavistic’’ while maintaining ‘‘filial duty’’ as ‘‘a trait of Japanese family life’’ that may be ‘‘a potent force for the creation of good citizens’’ (156). The im- plied new head of this reformed ‘‘California Japanese’’ family would be the so-called white patrons, a term derived in fact from the Latin ‘‘pa- ter,’’ or father. These new white patrons inherited the responsibilities previously assumed by Issei fathers, who were now deemed an obstacle to postwar acceptance.

Leighton’s argument suggests that, paradoxically, it is di¤erence it- self that must be eradicated in order to realize a world of respect for cultural di¤erence. But because Japanese di¤erence is seen as cultur-

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

74 A N A B S E N T P R E S E N C E

ally and not biologically encoded, one need only reconfigure and redi- rect the strains of a culture and not do away with the actual bodies of persons. This strategy of retaining certain habits of ethnic cultural or familial life as a means of recasting political manipulation and submis- sion as cultural encounter and negotiation finds a correlate in devel- oping postwar arguments for the retention of the emperor.

In September 1946, occupation policies were beginning to turn to ‘‘steering a middle course’’ in dealing with the former imperial power. By the end of 1946, even the Pentagon submitted that now Japan was deemed a partner with the United States rather than an exenemy. Ruth Benedict’s work served to bolster these attitudes by reassuring Ameri- cans that it was not too late for a benevolent relationship with Japan, that the United States ‘‘has not impeded that course by insisting on us- ing techniques of humiliation.’’80 Although political observers argued about whether the occupation was too ‘‘hard’’ or too ‘‘soft,’’ Benedict addressed the debate by insisting that ‘‘the real issue was not between hard and soft [peace terms]’’ (299). The real task was to ‘‘break up old and dangerous patterns of aggressiveness and set new goals. . . . The means to be chosen depend upon the character of the people and upon the traditional social order of the nation in question’’ (300). General Douglas MacArthur and others in charge of occupation policy consis- tently viewed Japan as a country of naughty children in need of a new, better father figure, so that the job of occupation was ‘‘the job of rearing seventy million problem children’’ (302). Reflecting prewar and war- time anthropology’s emphasis on the childhood origins of Japanese character structure, MacArthur testified before a senate subcommit- tee, ‘‘they [the Japanese] would be like a boy of 12 as compared with our development of 45 years.’’81 Certainly descriptions of the erratic nature of Japanese character structure suited this view of Japanese culture as one of puerile adolescents in need of adjustment and guidance. Mac- Arthur’s stated approach to reforming Japan indirectly echoes Leigh- ton’s arguments on behalf of Japanese American acculturation, as well as Leighton’s adherence to colonial logic, the Lawrencian belief that ‘‘they would follow us, if we endured them,’’ if we ‘‘played the game according to their rules.’’82

Alexander Leighton’s project is representative of the means by which liberal anthropology’s desire to critique American ethnocen- tricity, and the white racism that often fueled it, ultimately resecured the Asian Americans as ‘‘oriental’’ Others. The rejection of ethnocen-

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019

T H E I N T E R N M E N T O F A N T H R O P O L O G Y 75

tric biases was the explicit goal of every liberal anthropologist in the postwar period. ‘‘One of the handicaps of the twentieth century,’’ writes Benedict, ‘‘is that we still have the vaguest notion and most bi- ased notions, not only of what makes Japan a nation of Japanese, but of what makes the United States a nation of Americans.’’83 She reminds her readers that ‘‘a course of action is not necessarily vicious because it is not the one we know’’ (13). U.S. citizens must recognize that in Japan ‘‘western arrangements will not be trusted tools with which to fashion a better world, as they are in the United States’’ (303). By following an approach designed to contain and manipulate identifiable Japanese di¤erences, Leighton is caught between two irreconcilable desires: the need to speak for the right of the Japanese to rebuild their country after their own concerns and purposes and the resurfacing tendency to find that inherently Japanese social pressures, ‘‘no matter how voluntarily embraced, ask too much of the individual,’’ that ‘‘they have to repress too much for their own good.’’84 Thus, despite Park’s injunction against the loss of the values of ‘‘the old life,’’ Japanese Americans must finally concede to be remade in the image of white American ide- als, what cultural critic Christopher Shannon rightly arraigns as a por- trait of the Other ‘‘equally endowed with the capacity to value western ideals of individual freedom.’’85

In terms of Japanese American identity after World War II, the work of the wra anthropologists seems to suggest that future examinations must take account of the presence, however dubious or obscured, of Japanese American internment politics in the development of postwar theories about the Japanese. As much of the historical record reveals, the anthropological approach to redeeming Japanese di¤erences was tested, at least in part, within a program ultimately designed to assimi- late Japanese Americans. In addition, because anthropologists ad- vising on occupation policies in postwar Japan honed their plans while attempting to administer an internment process most of them felt was unjust, U.S. postwar policy toward Japan inevitably reflected a brand of anxious liberal paternalism that derived from the anthropologists’ misguided e¤orts to improve the lot of disenfranchised Japanese Americans by managing them as the distant and familiar ‘‘oriental’’ Other.

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/88386/9780822380832-003.pdf by University of California Santa Cruz user on 29 May 2019