RUMOR MONGERING: SCAPEGOATING TECHNIQUES FOR SOCIAL COHESION AND COPING AMONG THE JAPANESE-AMERICANS IN UNITED STATES INTERNMENT CAMPS DURING WORLD WAR II

A thesis by Jenny Biggs, 2008. Quotes from the work will be in italics.

The internment camps were rife with scapegoat accusations between the internees whose once unified culture group was fissured along lines of loyalty to the United States or to Japan. These scapegoat accusations against fellow internees were an outlet for the stress exerted upon them by the American government that was not directly combatable.

This relates to the problem, most major at Tule Lake, of a perceived division of the internees between those loyal to the United States and those loyal to Japan. This led to name-calling, violence and even death and was probably the major factor in setting up one single camp, Tule Lake, as a center for the 'trouble-makers' from the other camps.

She goes on to note that stress is as major factor that leads people to use scapegoats.

The process of scapegoating, whether of outsiders or insiders, ultimately serves to rally those individuals who do not bear the brand of “Other.” Verbal scapegoat terms may be used to unify the mainstream, conformist populace against a common perceived threat and to display the repercussions of going against the norms of the group. Scapegoat accusations can borrow from a culture’s shared supernatural folklore, to provide justification, drawing on a set of widely understood and inherent vilifications against the accused.

Scapegoating serves as a system of self-regulation for the values of the community and a form of punishment for those who deviate. The narrators of the scapegoat accusations integrate themselves further into the group by disassociating themselves from the accused and boasting of their own adherence to the norms.

Thus, scapegoating sets up an 'us' and 'them' situation, where the narrator is a member of the 'us' group and aims to further unify the 'us' against the 'them.' It's basically a form of verbal propaganda to cause a group to think in a certain way.

The internment put people together who had a common background (Japanese culture in the Issei and some in the Nisei). There was incredible stress on them since they had been removed from their homes without being charged with anything, tried or found guilty of anything, and they were kept in these camps in desert or swampy places, losing most of their property in the process of being removed, and were kept behind barbed wire with armed soldiers around. That, indeed, would produce stress.

The term most commonly used was inu, or dog, for those who were perceived as cooperating with the camp administration. The situation at Tule Lake was worse than at the other camps due to the gathering of the dissenters in that one camp.

She notes some statistics that the total number of Japanese population made up only around 2% of the population of the U.S. 113,000 lived in the western states and 150,000 in Hawaii. They were divided amongst the Issei, those who settled directly from Japan, the Nisei, those born to the Issei while they were in the United States, and the Kibei those who were born in the United States but went back to Japan for at least part of their education, then later they returned to the United States.

With the onset of WWII the Japanese living in the United States had an identity problem. Were they Japanese or were they truly American? Where did their loyalties lie? Would they stay in America or would they return to Japan? How were they to handle the fact that, all of a sudden, many people who had been friendly towards them now turned against them?

Then the worst of all came with Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, which ordered the removal of persons of Japanese ancestry from large parts of the West Coast. Now the persons of Japanese ancestry, even those who were born in the United States suddenly found themselves considered 'the enemy' by some people.

The movement out was between March and November of 1942, removing some 120,000 people and putting them into the internment camps which ranged from the smallest at Amache (Granada) with 7,318 people to Tule Lake with 18,789 people.

She notes the living conditions in the camps were 'miserable,' there was a lot of heat and harsh cold winters and there was no privacy. Also, they were under the constant supervision of Caucasians. Police forces were Caucasian. The mail was censored.

There were a couple kinds of splits in the internees. One was based on the generation they were in which colored how they looked at things, and the other was based on the degree of their loyalty to the United States. Also, the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) was liked by some but quite hated by others.

Nisei were focused on and charged with being inu. The entire situation got much worse with the infamous questionnaire of 1942 which was a poorly worded, poorly thought-out questionnaire that caused confusion and anger. It could be taken by the Issei as forcing them to become without a country because it wanted to know if they were willing to drop all loyalty to Japan and its Emperor while, at the same time, not being allowed to become American citizens. For the Nisei it put them into a position they would have to choose where their loyalties lie. For many it their answers resulted in them being sent to Tule Lake where the dissenters and 'trouble-makers' were concentrated.

The author says there was about a 20% disloyalty rate in the camps in general, and 42% at Tule Lake but that was due to a breakdown in communication amongst the United States government, the camp administration and the internees.

Many of the elderly Issei and women treated the internment as an extended vacation and took up hobbies and games such as the traditional strategy game of go; however, by contrast, many school and college-aged internees saw the internment as an unappreciated delay in their education instead of a vacation.

This became yet a further way that the internees became divided.

Tule Lake, therefore, became the center of dissent compared to the other camps, primarily because of the more stringent domination of the Caucasian administration and broken chain of communication. Furthermore, because of the segregation, a greater number of individuals who considered themselves loyal primarily to Japan were present at Tule Lake. In the vacuum created from a lack of official correspondence, rumor took hold.

All of the internment camps were breeding grounds for suspicion and rumor, especially near the beginning of the internment. Between the stress of disruption of normal life, the invasive and domineering American presence as virtual jailors, the lack of privacy, and frequent lack of concrete information, the internment camps invited back-channel rumors and stirred mutual suspicion among fellow internees.

This all boils down to 'what we have here is a failure to communicate.' The internees were in many ways prisoners (although some were allowed to leave as the resettlement program got going), and the authority was top down with Caucasians on top. Such a failure can cause problems in virtually any situation from a marriage on through some huge business corporation.

The author breaks down accusations into the following groups:

1. Rumor and gossip

2. Scapegoat accusations

3. Labeling and/or slurs.

She talks about rumors and notes that the are told as if they were actual facts, but they may be totally false. In order for a rumor to succeed and to be told to others the person hearing the rumor already has to have some personal basis for believing the rumor. In other words, you have to already be at least somewhat of a believer in something before a rumor about that will have any effect on you and you will pass it on to others. She adds that rumors spread most often ...during times of social conflict and stress.

Gossip is similar but it has an interesting effect and that it bonds together people that gossip. The gossip material can make the people gossiping feel better about themselves and at the same time feel more negative about the object of the gossip. This, then, had a tendency to ostracize the object of the gossip from the group and make the group as a whole more cohesive.

This is something that the author has done that I think is excellent. She has set out to define her terms. If two people are talking about something, or someone is reading someone else's work, then it's vital that both people have the same or nearly the same understanding of what certain words mean.

She also points out that the gossip is believed more if it comes from someone with high social standing in the group.

Japanese internees were passing along a rumor that the babies were dying en masse in the internment camps (Allport and Postman 1947:197). This rumor pinned the blame for the infants’ deaths on the American captors because of the inadequate housing conditions that they provided. This effectively isolated the Americans as being not part of the internees’ community, and vilified them as baby-killers (a rather universal accusation as it invokes a strong negative reaction even if the deaths were purported to be unintentional). The rumor also allowed the internees to express rejection of their housing situation and to protest against the internment as a whole.

So, a rumor gets going, people believe it and it solidifies the group's negative view of the Caucasians and the administration.

One thing I'll point up about rumors, though, and that is whether or not they can be disproved. In the above case I would think that at least someone would have asked for specific names of parents who had a baby die under those conditions. It's also possible that people want to believe such rumors and are not interested in the lack of facts behind them as finding out truth is more difficult than just accepting what someone says.

Then she goes on to say how people can be labeled in a certain manner (such as today's 'faggots') which also furthers the us/them dichotomy and strengthens the one group while isolating the other person or group.

The specific label that was applied to people perceived as informers was inu, or dog, for males, and sometimes neko, cat, for females.

One of the biggest us/them dichotomies was between the whites as a whole and the interned persons of Japanese ancestry. Although 2/3 rds of those interned were actually American citizens, the other third were the Issei, who were not American citizens and, at the time, were not even allowed to become American citizens. The term hakujin was the term used to refer to white people. A slur used to describe whites was keto which means 'hairy beast.'

If an internee used that term to describe whites then it was obvious that that person valued their Japanese identity much more than their American identity.

There were various kinds of rumors.

Inequality in the distribution to mess halls of a particular shipment of food gave rise to stories on the one hand of favoritism and graft among the evacuees who had jobs in the stewards’ departments and on the other hand to rumors of dishonesty among the WRA [War Relocation Authority] personnel.

The failure of an evacuee to receive a personal shipment of food from a friend in California resulted in a widespread belief that the WRA staff members were dishonest and were withholding and probably selling for their own profit food that was rightfully intended for evacuees.

There is something being left out her, though, and that is the subject of the various camp newspapers that were published. These newspapers ran a lot of news (I've gone through many of them) and there were editorials about stopping rumors. Of course, someone predisposed to believe the worst of the whites in the camps probably would have just said that the papers were censored and the people working on them were inu or on their way to being that. People who are not interested in the truth of something can explain away anything that challenges what they believe.

More rumors:

During a strike at the resettlement center at Poston, Arizona, agitated demonstrators saw nonexisting machine guns and their crews. They saw imaginary hearses carrying away bodies at night. They believed that residents of the community were dying like flies because of heat, bad food, and inadequate medical attention. Babies were represented as perishing in overheated nurseries.

There was another principle followed by many of the internees:

An unwritten law existed during the internment that one was to keep 'damaging information about his fellow evacuees within his own racial group'

As to the main group of people targeted a being inu...

The individuals who were most prone to being targeted as inu were those Japanese-Americans in prominent positions of association with the Americans. The members of the JACL in particular stood out as targets.

She then talks about the Tule Lake camp and it's being the worst one for rumors and anti-administration complaining. She says the camp's administration was strict and that ...aggravated the cleavage between the loyals and disloyals.

One thing I'll point out here, though, is that the camp administration there had to be strict. It was the camp where the disloyals and the trouble-makers were segregated together and it couldn't be run like the other camps where there was much less trouble.

Then I came across a very fascinating section.

The Japanese felt threatened by their fellow internees, and in order to feel safer, they needed to ally with either the administration or stand firmly against them. By accusing another internee of being an inu, they consciously were protecting themselves against such accusations. On the other hand, some internees felt safer siding with the administration.

Which has a lot of similarities to what happened in Salem when the accusations flew about who was a witch, the girls making the accusations against the 'others' and thus forming a more solid group amongst themselves.

Family ties were very strong in Japanese culture, and a slight against one member could spread to dishonor the entire family. This pattern has already been seen in the way in which inu accusations directed towards one family member could affect the entire family.

This would put even more pressure on anyone being in danger of being called an inu since he (or she) would not want to bring the other family members into disgrace.

The author talks about how the Japanese viewed themselves during the internment and quotes from someone who was interned:

For many years, the majority of Japanese-Americans accepted the incarceration as an inevitable wartime necessity. Many still minimize the negative aspects of the camp experience and speak of the positive results. We were told we were being put away for our own safety, a patriotic sacrifice necessary for national security. By believing the government propaganda, we felt virtuous that we helped the war effort. By believing the propaganda, we could feel safe in the care of a benevolent, protective Uncle Sam…

Seeing the government as right and ourselves as somehow “not O.K.” is the same psychological response that abused children use in viewing their relationships with their abusive parents.

Japanese-Americans chose the cooperative, obedient, quiet American façade to cope with an overly hostile, racist America during World War II. By trying to prove that we were 110 percent American, we hoped to be accepted.

Among the author's concluding remarks:

While their forced removal from their normal lives was truly an unfortunate predicament, and it is to be hoped that a such scenario that will not be repeated in the future, the Japanese-American internment still provides an apt case study of how extreme social pressure on an isolated ethnic population can change group dynamics as observed through scapegoat accusations, rumors and slurs.



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