Abstract:
From internment camps to military barracks, the U.S. employed Japanese American citizen-soldiers during World War II as the material and ideological basis of its claim to being a non-discriminatory global leader in the project for imperial hegemony in Asia and beyond. The achievement of this new world order necessitated the suppression of Asian war memories and the use of the “Model Minority” identity to destabilize Japanese American masculinity in deference to the established national white heteropatriarchy. Meanwhile, Japan’s status as the U.S.’ “Model Minority” nation consistently informs a perceived failure of masculinity reflected in postwar bilateral relations of domination and subjugation. For Japanese (Americans) under the current U.S.-dominated racial and gendered order, this category of subjugation continues to serve as a pervasive form of effective governmentality and control. By invoking the politics of memory and the economy of apology and forgetting from Yoneyama (2016), this paper argues that U.S. liberalism on race and ethnicity that constructed this particular racialized masculinity bypasses apology to achieve forgetting for both Japanese Americans in the U.S. and Japanese residents on the Japanese archipelago.
Keywords: subalternity, gender, racial hierarchy, redress, World War II
Subaltern identities are not so easily shed, since the formations of power that dictate the conditions of their existence persistently attempt to use the same confining apparatuses to keep the relations of domination and subjugation in place. “Subaltern” is a term that indicates exclusion from belonging, particularly that of legitimate citizenship status and its corresponding rights to the services of the state;[1] however, the emergence of the “citizen-subaltern” in the postcolonial context complicates this straightforward relationship with the ruling power, as relations of exclusion are the foundations of maintaining a hegemonic relationship.[2] The figure of the Japanese American internee-turned-interrogator operating as a United States (U.S.) soldier in the Korean War is one such example of this consistent power dynamic between a legally accepted racialized Other and the American nation-state. Monica Kim (2019) introduces Sam Miyamoto and the genealogy of his conflicting positionality in the U.S. national imaginary from being an unassimilable outsider incarcerated and expelled from his home country to a loyal citizen-soldier employed as a representative of the American army and nation in the interrogation rooms of the Korean War.[3] However, this intimate meeting of the Japanese American interrogator and the Korean Prisoner of War (POW) within the U.S. military context demonstrates the incongruencies of freedom and agency of these two figures—while the interrogator is legally emancipated unlike the POW, the latter holds more visibility and political leverage against the U.S. on the international stage and is thus able to construct themselves as an assertive choosing subject.[4] This kind of self-determination was not an option for the Japanese American internee during World War II. From WWII and beyond, the U.S. racial hierarchy is consistently maintained even as the strategy for domestic ethnic representation has shifted from segregated expulsion to conditional inclusion.[5] In particular, this paper explores Kim’s (2019) argument that the U.S. instrumentalized Japanese (American) masculinity during the Second World War as the material and ideological foundations of its imperial hegemony in Asia and beyond, the achievement of which resulted in its inherent insecurity under peacetime in domestic American and Japanese contexts. Moreover, by invoking the racialized figure of the “Model Minority” from Lowe (1996) in the politics of memory and the economy of apology and forgetting from Yoneyama (2016), this paper argues that U.S. liberalism on race and ethnicity that constructed this particular “citizen-subaltern” category bypasses apology to achieve forgetting for both Japanese Americans in the U.S. and Japanese residents on the Japanese archipelago.
Even the term “Japanese American” conceals the myriad of legal prohibitions enacted by the state to regulate the boundaries of its citizenry. Lowe (1996) argues that in the last century, the American citizen has been defined against the Asian immigrant in legal, economic, and social terms, and even Asians born on U.S. soil are always positioned as a “foreigner-within”.[6] This is reflected in the Immigrant Act of 1924 that barred Asians from achieving naturalization, and the 1940 census that segregated “Japanese” as a race of people unable to exist within the American social imaginary and which was used as a basis to evacuate Japanese people from the West Coast into internment camps.[7] Fujitani (2011) affirms that it was during a time of total war in early 1943 that the U.S. state-administered mass efforts to recruit and integrate the Japanese American population into its national community.[8] In this context, the U.S.-born male Japanese internee, also referred to as Nisei, was the key bio-political figure considered by the state for the dual purpose of providing military manpower through wartime and ideological value in propagating the U.S.’ non-discriminatory image for its imperial ventures after the end of the war.[9] Through the repeal acts starting in 1943, Asian males—but not their female counterparts—were now able to attain legal citizenship, aligning with Japanese American military and ideological instrumentalization; through this example, one can ascertain that masculinity is a key factor in overcoming the barrier of race and proves itself to be the standard prerequisite to citizenship.[10] With their entrance into the intimate space of the national body, Nisei males during this transition were construed as being trustworthy enough to be employed in the army yet incited anxieties about the formation of a revolutionary alliance of Japanese with Black or Muslim communities against White supremacy, which was expressed through fear for interracial sex.[11] Thus, the established U.S. racial hierarchy identified the Japanese American masculinity as a force to be suppressed and regulated, which manifested in the arrest of accused Japanese-Negro propaganda networks after Nisei men were approved for military service.[12] These soldiers were enlisted in special segregated combat units to showcase their national loyalty as ethnic representatives and to function as living proof of America’s disavowal of racism.[13] The fact that these Japanese American men were separated from the rest of the army reveals a clear structural barrier to their racial and social integration, thus verifying that “the American soldier, who has in every way submitted to the nation, is the quintessential citizen and therefore the ideal representative of the nation, yet the American of Asian descent remains the symbolic ‘alien’”.[14] Edwin O. Reischauer was a major proponent of the Nisei soldiers’ value as propaganda for winning the war and achieving U.S. hegemony in Asia as early as 1942, where he advocated for the importance of establishing a “puppet regime” using the Japanese emperor Hirohito as the model for compliance with postwar American stewardship.[15] This is relevant as this strategy unabashedly echoes Japan’s previously unsuccessful imperial approach towards China for the U.S.’ neocolonial ambitions[16] while endeavouring to exploit yet another figure of Japanese masculinity as the material for enacting this process. In effect, the U.S.’ approach towards its citizen-soldiers of Japanese descent was to invoke nationalism for the sake of imperialism; internment camps were closed down, and Nisei internees were provided with the right to live on the condition of demanding Japanese American soldiers’ death in service.[17] This kind of stratified, conditional inclusion built upon Japanese (American) masculinity persisted well beyond WW2 to the peacetime era in both the American domestic and U.S.-dominated Japanese contexts.
Japanese American integration into the national society came with the expectation of conforming to postwar orthodox U.S. narratives that effectively erased Asian war memories. For Asians in America, it was essential to prove one’s ability to assimilate by ensuring that “the discrepant memories of U.S. military involvement in Asia that immigrants have transported to the American public sphere are re-membered and re-enacted so as not to disrupt the imperialist myth of liberation and rehabilitation”.[18] Lowe (1996) identifies that most Asian immigrants in the U.S. hail from the countries deeply affected by its imperial and military endeavours; she argues that “the material legacy of the repressed history of U.S. imperialism in Asia is borne out in the ‘return’ of Asian immigrants to the imperial center”.[19] The irony in the structural and social acceptance of these subjects into the nation is that the process requires the disavowal of the existence of an American imperial project and a denial of “private” histories.[20] In the case of the internee-turned-interrogator Sam Miyamoto, his lived experience in a racialized U.S. domestic incarceration system was not recognized while his enlistment into military service became his defining role in American national history.[21] Incorporating Japanese American soldiers into the military and the nation became a self-evident motion of non-discrimination in U.S. liberalism, and the issue of race was marked as resolved; Kim (2019) highlights that “the Japanese American soon became the model figure for the successful assimilation and internalization of American values—a discourse of liberal individualism was mobilized to focus attention on the dynamism of American democracy, rather than the dynamism of racial hierarchical orders”.[22] The figure of the “Model Minority” that is built upon the erasure of Asian memories remains a reification of domestic apprehensions about the racialized Other[23] and serves as a form of governmentality for this subpopulation to defer to the established ethnic order, particularly for Asian American males who are expected to uphold the myth of a non-racist American society even as white heteropatriarchy threatens their masculinity.[24] Similarly, in the Japanese context, conservative historical revisionist movements to reinvigorate a perceived failure of masculinity are compelled to stay within the confines of the postwar U.S.-Japan relations of domination and subjugation[25] to maintain its status as the U.S’ “Model Minority” nation. For example, Yoneyama (2016) examines the Japan Society for History Textbook Reform, otherwise known as the Reform Society, and their tirade against a supposedly “self-flagellating history view” of post-1990s redress activists that destroys Japan’s honourable image.[26] This kind of neo-nationalist revisionism is founded upon the perceived loss of Japanese masculinity and its corresponding sexualized and gendered nationalism.[27] For instance, one of the Reform Society’s tribulations with Japan’s peacetime formation is the loss of its military and the sovereign right to wage war under Article 9 of the peace clause,[28] which is a major deprivation of its national masculine might. The conservatives making up this group “argue that Japan’s war atrocities and colonial exploitation should not be singled out, and that those who ceaselessly call attention to Japan’s dishonourable pasts have marred the nation’s image”.[29] These offenders of national (masculine) honour include queer feminist activists who advocate for institutionalized gender equality or “gender-free” educational materials and those that call for the condemnation of Japan’s military comfort women system.[30] The extent to which the state and civil authorities align with the Reform Society’s ideals of military-centred heterosexual masculinity was exposed in 2000 with the controversial censorship and modification of NHK’s domestic broadcast of the ‘Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery’.[31] This unofficial Women’s Tribunal, supported by international authorities such as the United Nations, consisted of 64 testimonies from former “comfort women” and a challenge against state actions for resolution and reparation such as the monetary compensation of the Asian Women’s Fund and the Kōno statement of recognition and regret as being inadequate.[32] In its final transmission, NHK delivered a redacted version of the Tribunal that framed the system of military comfort women as a commercially conducted business, thus revealing the powerful inclinations of Japan’s political leaders for conservative masculinist revisionism.[33] However, as formidable as masculinist Japanese revisionists may seem, these yearnings continue to be confined within the transpacific postwar arrangements dictated by the U.S., a fact that is self-recognized as “the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty” is described to be “Japan’s lifeline”.[34] These postwar narratives for national pride are thus tamed, and the issue of Japanese masculinity remains forever insecure in the context of Japan’s subjugation by the new American imperial hegemon.[35] The status of the “Model Minority” persists for both the Japanese and their co-ethnic Americans under U.S. racial liberalism, the embodiment of which requires the forgetting of the individual or national histories and relinquishing the right to acknowledge, contest, and redress this very process.
The genealogy of Japanese (American) masculinity from the Second World War to the contemporary peacetime context is also a story of U.S. imperial aspiration, achievement, and forgetting. By inserting Japanese American male bodies into its military, the U.S. was able to simultaneously elevate its productive labour power and to propagate itself as a paragon of anti-racism. Thus, Japanese American masculinity played a vital role in “creating the geopolitical basis for the postwar world order that would take place under America’s ‘protective’ aegis”.[36] After the war and under the new context of a singular hegemony over the Asia-Pacific region, Japanese (Americans) in the America and Japan alike were faced with the issue of negotiating their particular histories, such as domestic racialized incarceration or internally divided topics of wartime sexual exploitation, with the dominant narratives and geopolitical conditions decreed by the United States. In this unequal relationship of the hegemon and its subjects, Japanese and Japanese American masculinity was necessarily suppressed and made inherently insecure. Hence, this specific racialized masculinity comprises the historical foundations of the “Model Minority” identity in America, which forfeits the right to receive apology and to engage in redress; for Japanese (Americans) under the U.S.-dominated racial order, this category of subjugation continues to serve as a pervasive form of effective governmentality and control.
Kana Minju Bak is a Korean-Canadian academic whose interest lies in the movement of bodies and subjectivities across the Asia Pacific region. She is eager to pursue further studies in the various political economies of Southeast Asia and East Asia.
Bibliography
Fujitani, Takahashi. “’Very Useful and Very Dangerous’: The Global Politics of Life, Death, and Race.” In Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II, 78-109. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
Kim, Monica. “The Interrogator.” In The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History, 123-168. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2019.
Lowe, Lisa. “Immigration, Citizenship, Racialization: Asian American Critique.” In Immigrant Acts: on Asian American Cultural Politics, 1-36. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.
Thomas, Peter D. “Refiguring the Subaltern.” Political Theory 46, no. 6 (2018): 861–84.
Yoneyama, Lisa. “Chapter 3. Sovereignty, Apology, Forgiveness: Revisionisms.” In Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes, 111-146. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
Yoneyama, Lisa. “Chapter 4. Contagious Justice: Asian/America.” In Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes, 147-176. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
[1] Peter D Thomas, “Refiguring the Subaltern,” Political Theory 46, no. 6 (2018): 861-2.
[2] Thomas, “Refiguring,” 875.
[3] Monica Kim, “The Interrogator,” in The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2019), 125.
[4] Kim, “The Interrogator,” 79-168.
[5] Takahashi Fujitani, “’Very Useful and Very Dangerous’: The Global Politics of Life, Death, and Race,” in Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
[6] Lisa Lowe, “Immigration, Citizenship, Racialization: Asian American Critique,” in Immigrant Acts: on Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 4-6.
[7] Fujitani, “Very Useful,” 78-79.
[8] Fujitani, “Very Useful,” 80.
[9] Fujitani, “Very Usefyl,” 85.
[10] Lowe, “Immigration,” 11.
[11] Fujitani, “Very Useful,” 87-88.
[12] Fujitani, “Very Useful,” 91.
[13] Fujitani, “Very Useful,” 93-94.
[14] Lowe, “Immigration,” 6.
[15] Fujitani, “Very Useful,” 95-96.
[16] Fujitani, “Very Useful,” 97.
[17] Fujitani, “Very Useful,” 108.
[18] Lisa Yoneyama, “Chapter 4. Contagious Justice: Asian/America,” in Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 164.
[19] Lowe, “Immigration,” 16.
[20] Lowe, “Immigration,” 26-27.
[21] Kim, “The Interrogator,” 147.
[22] Kim, “The Interrogator,” 148.
[23] Lowe, “Immigration,” 19.
[24] Lisa Yoneyama, “Chapter 3. Sovereignty, Apology, Forgiveness: Revisionisms,” in Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 136.
[25] Yoneyama, “Chapter 3,” 114-115.
[26] Yoneyama, “Chapter 3,” 111-113.
[27] Yoneyama, “Chapter 3,” 111-115.
[28] Yoneyama, “Chapter 3,” 114.
[29] Yoneyama, “Chapter 3,” 112.
[30] Yoneyama, “Chapter 3,” 113-114.
[31] Yoneyama, “Chapter 3,” 122.
[32] Yoneyama, “Chapter 3,” 122-125.
[33] Yoneyama, “Chapter 3,” 127-128.
[34] Yoneyama, “Chapter 3,” 141.
[35] Yoneyama, “Chapter 3,” 141.
[36] Lowe, “Immigration,” 17.
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