In the late fall of 1943, almost a year after my enlistment into the army, I received a sudden notice for overseas assignment. The Office of War Information had requested the army intelligence training school at Camp Savage for a 10-man combat psychological warfare team. I was put in charge of this team of writers, newspapermen, an artist, translators and interrogators.
I was told by the commandant of the school that this was entirely a new task for graduates of the school. He asked us to prepare a leaflet to be be shown to the OWI and government officials who were considered experts in this line, reportedly well versed in "Japanese psychology." This we did and were told our product was satisfactory.
We did not realize then the complexities of the war of nerves. Because most of us had been raised by parents who spoken-Japanese and because we were familiar with Japanese customs and mores, we thought we knew the Japanese soldiers' minds and could understand their behavior. Five members of my team had gone to Japan in their childhood, and had lived and studied there for years. One was a graduate of Waseda University. Another had been jailed in Japan during his youth because he had participated in the organizing of printers.
We were to discover that our knowledge of Japanese militarism was shallow, and that the Japanese prisoners of war were about the best study material for us. Their minds were brutalized — to hate and fear all white men, to worship the emperor, to fear any unorthodox views not conforming with emperor worship and the views of the Japanese militarists, to sacrifice their lives for the emperor whose wishes were "Asia for the Asiatics," and "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere."
But as many today who mouth "freedom," "democracy," and super-patriotic slogans — while generally behaving otherwise — the Japanese soldiers whose minds were drilled and molded by the militarists and big industrialists to fight for a "free" Asia, regarded and treated the Chinese, Koreans and other Asian and Pacific people with sardonic disdain.
I see much the same pattern today in Korea, where the Korean people are called "gooks," in Japan where MacArthur or Ridgway and his staff are first citizens and the Japanese are segregated in their own country. They cannot visit beaches marked off only for foreigners. In many areas they cannot use the same toilet facilities used by Americans. This is one of the worst of American behaviors of the Dixiecrat South planted and cultured in Japan. How much different is this from the Japanese militarist attitude and behavior in China and the Philippines, where deep hatred and burning resentment still remain with the people?
On a larger scale, the current burning of thousands upon thousands of Koreans from the air with jellied gasoline, the "shoot everything that moves" policy, the support of British imperialism in rubber-rich Malaya and of the French in Indo-China, where everything is done in the attempt to crush the aspiration and endeavor of the native people for freedom, full stomachs, decency and independence — all these do not differ essentially from the Japanese rape of Nanking and Gumbatsu Japan's conduct to establish an empire throughout the Far East.
The Behavior of White Imperialists Speaks Out Loud
Japan used the slogan "free" Asia. Today "freedom" is again abused by Western imperialists in the attempt to keep down the surge of the downtrodden millions for liberation. This people's resistance to colonialism and exploitation in Malaya, Indo-China, Egypt, Iran or Tunisia is propagandized as a movement against freedom by the Western press. And communism and the Soviet Union, both painted in the worst light by the press, are blamed for the liberation movement, which, in effect, is commendation.
Americans are proud of the Spirit of '76.
Today, the main enemy of "freedom" is pictured as the Soviet Union. The Nazis, Fascists and the Japanese militarists propagandized along similar lines.
People Are All Basically Alike
Back in 1943, when we were assigned to psychological warfare tasks, Washington was full of American experts on Japan who had built and supported myths that the Japanese militarists and the people were incomprehensible, unpredictable, fanatic, treacherous and so on. There was an extreme type of specialist who even tried to prove that the Japanese were unknowable. We were happy that we did not receive briefing from the OWIs Japan experts. We felt that the psychology and behavior of the Japanese militarists were understandable.
The attitudes of the "experts" were slices of Hollywood movies that picture the Orient as exotic, mysterious and even eerie. People are people everywhere — they acre peasants, workers, landlords, employers, intellectuals, etc.
With my team I moved to California. I wanted to see Taeko and Linda, our four-month-old daughter who was born behind barbed wire. We obtained four-day passes at the staging area. I went to Los Angeles and as I walked the streets I swelled with exuberant triumph. I was back again on this coastal strip from where we had been banished months before.
What Segregation and Persecution Do To People
I kept reminding myself about this. Never mind if this stay was temporary. Never mind if I had to come back in army uniform. I was back just the same. And this was made possible by the people of Japanese ancestry on the Mainland and in Hawaii, fighting for their constitutional rights, fighting against imperialism abroad — all this with democratic-minded Americans of other ethnic and national stock.
From deep curiosity, I went to the former "Little Tokyo" and saw Negro families living there. They had come from the South, tearing themselves loose from farm tenancy and servile tasks to seek wage labor in war plants. I enjoyed talking to them and went into restaurants where Negroes largely congregated. Deep within me I felt that they had open minds and hearts, because they have suffered much more than we have through man's inhumanity to man. I thought how Negroes must feel all the time, or the Jews. There is no peace of "mind or feeling of freedom for the persecuted.
My Home Was Behind Barbed Wire
I felt that the propaganda against us before, during and after the evacuation, had deeply poisoned the minds of the white people generally. Because there were almost no people of Japanese ancestry on the coast except Nisei in uniform passing through for overseas duty, we stood out quite conspicuously. I felt this and at that moment an invitation by a Jewish family to make ourselves at home was a moment some of us would not forget. One of the team members was married to the daughter of the family. There were white people, friendly people, there as guests. This was at a time when it was still unpopular for the whites on the West Coast to befriend people of Japanese ancestry.
I took a bus at Los Angeles for Manzanar. I was going home, I said to myself. Home was Manzanar, where Taeko and Linda lived in a tar-papered barracks. Home was behind barbed wire and watch-towers.
Still An "Oakie" After Years In California
The bus stopped to pick up a man in soiled clothing. The bus operator called him "Oakie" and behaved insultingly toward him. The white man said nothing and later on, as the seat beside me became vacant, he sat there. I tried to talk to him and he opened! up slowly. He had come from the dust bowl area of Oklahoma and he was now a migratory laborer.
How terrible, I thought that this white man can be so easily identified as an "Oakie" years after his migration from the dust bowl. He was, in a way, like the poor whites of the South. In many ways he was like us and the Negroes, only he was discriminated against, not by color, but by harsh economic stratification.
"Tobacco Road" Is a Wide Global Highway
He travelled the wide belt road which Mrs. Ira S. Caldwell, author Erskine Caldwell's mother, described to me as the "Tobacco Road," the poor people's road that crosses international lines. I had travelled that road too, particularly in Kona, Hawaii, and now I was heading for Asia where no one can escape the terrific impact of "Tobacco Road" conditions. And I wondered what were the solutions to all this.