Victimized Twice:
The
Stockholm Syndrome, Kibei, and the Model Minority in America’s Concentration
Camps
Part 2 of 4: American Citizen Rights; Kibei;
“No-win” Scenario
What about the second choice, the choice to exercise your right as
an American citizen to protest and resist illegal and unjust actions? In the early 1940’s, this option for
the Japanese Americans was inverted and used to create a “no-win” proposition. If a person of Japanese ancestry were
to question the illegal forced removal and incarceration predicated on the
preposterous grounds of ethnic origin, the act of raising this question became
irrefutable “proof” of disloyalty. Adding absurdity-to-absurdity, hyper-loyal elements of the
Japanese American community, including the JACL, would adopt and implement this
“no-win” strategy by mimicking the rhetoric of racism. These hyper-loyal elements insisted that the only way
to for Japanese Americans to prove loyalty would be to not oppose injustices being
heaped upon them and by passively complying with the insults and injustices of
incarceration.
The US government devised a plan to use the above construct that
would evolve into William Peterson’s framework for the “model minority.” This plan was to divide the people of
Japanese ancestry into two groups and pit them against each other. The “loyal” factions (the “model
minority”) would remain compliant and submissively in the concentration camps and
the “disloyal” elements (the resisters) would be ferreted-out (with the help of
FBI collaborators in the camps), discredited, and again be forcibly removed to,
and isolated at the “Tule Lake Segregation Center.” This was the strategy that Mike Masaoka and the JACL accepted and adopted. This
segregation methodology tore the Japanese American community asunder and
created factions that have remained un-reconciled to this day.
Tule Lake concentration camp still carries a stigma among the
Japanese Americans today. Many members
of the Japanese American community bought into the government propaganda, or
worse yet, they embraced the paradigms of loyal and disloyal. Many people in the
Japanese American community today still think in terms of the people in “Tule
Lake Segregation Center” (aka Concentration Camp) as trouble makers, disloyal,
and as an embarrassment to the quiet and compliant “model minority” image of
Japanese Americans. The reasons
for people being at Tule Lake were as varied as the people incarcerated there
themselves. As part of the
segregation process, the vocal elements within the Japanese American community had
been radicalized by the abuses of political power that had deprived them of
their civil and human rights. The
dreaded Kibei element (the American born, American citizens who received part
of their education in Japan) were feared and marginalized by both the US
Government and the hyper-loyal Japanese Americans. The surviving documentation
of Kibei meetings, however, illustrates that the Kibei were: 1) well-educated,
2) openly discussing American ideals and justice, and 3) outraged about the
violations of civil and human rights that they and their families were
experiencing at the hands of the very same government dedicated to human and
civil rights. In the best sense,
the Kibei were being upstanding examples of American ideals.
Sending children to be educated overseas, was in the 1930’s even
much more expensive than it is to day.
The Kibei represented the wealthier and better educated elements of the
Japanese American community. As
militaristic Japan and Nazi Germany of the 1930’s discovered, the best way to
control people and deprive them of their rights is to discredit, marginalize,
and imprison the intellectual community first so as to set an example of the
dangers of questioning the power structure. This was exactly what the US government did with the
Japanese communities on the West Coast and later in the concentration camps. Initially the US government marginalized
and criminalized the intellectual components of the people of Japanese Ancestry
by arresting all the Issei leaders on the West Coast immediately after the
attack on Pearl Harbor. Later the
same government silenced and discredited the Kibei in the camps by blaming them
for all distention and conflict. The
US government was highly successful in this action because six decades later, “Kibei”
is still a dirty word within a significant portion of the Japanese American
community. Within the interviews archived at Manzanar National Historic Site,
the frequency in which all the troubles, problems, and issues within the
concentration camps were blamed on the Kibei element is very disturbing.
Chad Montreaux
Newell, CA
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