Case Study 1: Japanese Loyalty Questioned

Imagine living in a free country for your whole life, a country where your parents moved to try and build a new life for their family. You are a hard working family, pay your taxes, and don’t do anything wrong. Now imagine one day you hear that because the country that your parents came from are a threat to your current country of residence, you are going to be swooped up and sent to concentration camps because you are believed to be disloyal. This was a reality for over 100,000 Japanese Americans, no matter how perfect of an American citizen they were. The internment process was due to a question of Japanese-American loyalty, and although the United States government thought they were containing a problem, they were really creating one: racial tension. Japanese-American families that had been living in the United States for decades were all of a sudden being questioned about their loyalty to the United States after Japan became a huge threat, and this question of loyalty became a huge issue. The War Relocation Authority (WRA) came up a document that all adults were required to answer in these concentration camps, and this document became informally known as the “loyalty questionnaire”. (Lyon 2013) Most of the questions were basic information questions, such as name, date of birth, address, etc., but then once you got down to questions 26-28 things began to become a little controversial. The image below shows these last few questions: 

Figure 1: Questions #27-29 of an original Loyalty Questionnaire

The loyalty questionnaire caused a lot of resentment in Japanese-American citizens. As shown in question #28, they were asked to forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor. Most of these people had never held any form of loyalty to the Emperor of Japan, and also since Japanese immigrants were not legally allowed to become U.S. citizens based on race, renouncing their citizenship from Japan would leave them stateless. These people also worried that answering #27 with a “yes” would be equal to volunteering for the position. (Lyon 2013)  Basically, Japanese-Americans that were already forced into internment camps against their will were now being forced into forswearing allegiance to someone that they had never had any allegiance to! Japanese-Americans were starting to become very angry about these circumstances, and this was a large factor into the increased racial tension when they were released from internment camps. But this is only the Japanese opinion, there was still a whole other side: American society.