A witch hunt is like a, contagious disease that eats away the tissues of good sense and fair play, leaving behind ugly and dangerous sores of prejudice, hatred and/or paralyzing fear.
A witch hunt softens a great many individuals by gnawing at their innards and tearing at their guts. It becomes, in an atmosphere of fear and hysteria, a vicious weapon of despots and the unscrupulous.
Thus, the FBI keeps in its files such reports as the one which an individual made of his neighbor. As I recall, the informer had said his neighbor was off his beam and a red suspect because he was seen walking naked in his house. The informer, who apparently was a Peeping Tom, should have been put on the carpet or have had his head examined. But the FBI kept the report in its files, unevaluated as to facts, and the unsuspecting neighbor of the informer got on the FBI list.
This information came to light, despite the efforts of the Justice Department to keep it suppressed, during the Judith Coplon trial a couple of years ago. And one wonders how many people have been fingered in such a manner? Does one know what his dossier looks like in the FBI files?
During the last war I was a member of a group which was a principal target for witch hunts. We learned our lesson then. I came to appreciate more fully at that time what it must be like to live as a Negro in the South, or as a Jew in various parts of the U.S.
I thought of how our people, the immigrant Oriental parents, were treated in Hawaii and particularly on the Mainland, where they were put in railroad cars and told never to return to the communities the white men said were their own. And I considered the position of the political minorities who were harassed and persecuted in this country of democratic traditions because of the programs they advocated and tried to effect, and which planks later became accepted as part of our laws, customs and practices. I thought also of religious minorities and persecution.
On the Liberty ship going to India in the spring of 1944, we experienced a. wave of hysteria and witch hunting which I will never forget. We had a month of surface travelling between Australia and India and the trip was monotonous. Besides the ship's crew and the navy gun crew, we had on board the ship about a dozen OSS "cloak and dagger" men, their two second lieutenants and my 10-man team.
On some clays the talk of Japanese submarine activity brought a tense atmosphere on the ship. We stood alternate watch around the clock and this helped to occupy us. Gambling, however, was a favorite past-time.
Yasui Became Unpopular Because He Took Money Away
Sergeant Kenny Yasui, a member of my team, was a skilled gambler and he had won his reputation back in our military intelligence training school. On the ship he patiently taught other members of our team who had never gambled in their lives, the rules governing dice and card games. He cleaned out the wallets of my team members. He loaned them money and won that back. He won from the OSS men, from the ship's crew and the gun crew. Some were envious of him and others resentful, because Yasui was often rude and impatient during gambling sessions.
I began hearing rumors about Yasui. I heard attacks against his loyalty. Several of my team members reported to me that OSS officers and men suspected Yasui because he reminisced about his experiences in Japan. They asked me to caution Yasui because an attack against him was the concern of the whole team.
Yasui Became a Suspect Because He Voiced His Appreciation of Scenic Japan
We Nisei were all sensitive about criticism of our loyalty and went out of our way to prove that it was unquestionable. I believe almost all Japanese Americans felt the same way. It was a time when an average Caucasian believed he was doing us a favor when he said: "You are a good Jap and not like the other Japs."
Yasui was a man with independent thinking. He spoke of Japan as a tourist. He had studied at Waseda University. He spoke of the scenic spots he said he would visit after the war. He said he had seen more beautiful places in Japan than in the whole United States.
Actually there was nothing wrong with Yasui's thoughts. He merely spoke of good times he had enjoyed in various Japanese amusement centers, of his work with a movie company, and experiences like that. I was convinced that he was anti-Japanese militarist.
That was what I had told the FBI agents who questioned me about my team members before we left for overseas duty. They asked me if I would go into combat zones with Yasui and four other members of my team who had received education in Japan. I said I would.
The Lieutenant Seemed To Be Carried Away By Hysteria
One morning when I came off my watch, my team members informed me with considerable excitement that Yasui had been put in the brig in the forward part of the ship. I rushed to the ship's security officer, who was a second lieutenant.
He informed me that Yasui had been asleep on watch "last night." The officer said he and the other officers had decided to put Yasui on a bread-and-water ration for two weeks. I asked him if he would give the same punishment to the others. We all knew Yasui was not the only one who had slept and the OSS officer knew it too. Their men had also been caught dozing on watch.
As I explained to the officer that the punishment was too harsh, he revealed the real reason for his action. He said Yasui had expressed "pro-Japan sympathies." The OSS men had reported to their officers and they in turn, had told the lieutenant.
Yasui Had a Healthy View Toward Japan
He said in a serious manner that Yasui might light a match on deck some night on the blacked-out ship and we might all be blown to pieces by Japanese torpedoes. I asked him if he believed all this and he seemed almost hysterical.
I gave Yasui's background, our background and what we were trying to do. As we argued the officer completely ignored the original charge of "dozing" and I told him that this was used by others merely to pin something on him.
Yasui was being punished, not for dereliction of duty, but because he appreciated certain aspects of life and culture of the Japanese. And this appreciation was a healthy tiling. Our enemy was the Japanese militarist, not the people. I indicated that Yasui's crime resulted from his winning in the daily gambling games and that we all knew why he had become unpopular.
The security officer reluctantly reduced the two-week sentence on bread and water to two days. The "cloak and dagger" men and their officers were displeased.
History Condemns the Hysterics and the Bigoted
At that time, on that small Liberty ship which zigzagged every moment of the day, not one of us expected that Yasui would be the hero among us all. Months later, when the Japanese soldiers holding out stubbornly on a tiny island in Burma's Irrawaddy River refused to surrender, Yasui swam across the river and brought 13 of them back. A lieutenant tried to kill himself and Yasui, but the latter survived. In the China-Burma-India theater Yasui became known as the "Nisei Sergeant York."
To me, he is Sergeant Kenny Yasui, a victim of a witch hunt on a Liberty ship, who built a record that condemns the hysterics and the bigoted.
Today's hysterics, who are whipped up by war profiteers, redbait, Soviet-bait, call peace campaigns "subversive," intimidate and try to silence all non-conforming views—all this as part of the program to push the unpopular war mobilization. Peace will set them back on their heels and encouragingly, day by day, the anti-war sentiment is growing in America.