After Camp - Greg Robinson

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to start a war with Japan [but] Japan might readily provoke a quarrel whose proportions could attain war. The Japanese on the Western coast [are] placed in an embarrassing position. They are not wanted back in overpopulated Japan, where, if they visit, they are more ostracized than by Americans on this continent. The Nipponese here cannot escape westernization. Native Japanese detect this easily and shun the visitors.16

      He expanded on these warnings in summer 1941 in a long article, “The American-Born Japanese and the World Crisis,” which, like his previous contributions, was based on a paper delivered at a professional conference. In his text, LaViolette pointed out that the growing war climate between Japan and the United States was forcing Japanese Americans to choose sides more clearly, a process that could also clarify the marginal position the Nisei held in both American and Japanese communities by making American nationalism more salient in determining the actions of Japanese Americans than family sentiment toward Japan. “This means that individuals are now more fully committed to being Americans. It means a more definite incorporation into the American social system.”17 However, LaViolette was well aware of the threats to the community that still loomed in case of war, and he was prophetic on the potential consequences:

      By Japanese novelists the second generation has been portrayed as a tragic character, neither fully Japanese nor accepted by Americans but yet expected to fight for America. Rumors have it that the nisei would be the first to be sent to the front; others say they will be sent to concentration camps. One nisei told the writer that he was “fattening” himself up for the “long lean days behind barb wire.”18

      LaViolette was midway through his second year of teaching at McGill when the United States and Canada went to war with Japan. Although military service was out of the question, as he was nearly thirty-eight, overweight, and medically unfit because of his ulcer, he drew from his youthful radio training and volunteered his services teaching evening radio physics classes to the Royal Canadian Air Force in addition to his regular duties. In marked contrast to this patriotic activism, LaViolette remained startlingly disconnected from the removal of 113,000 West Coast Japanese Americans and 22,000 Japanese Canadians from their homes during 1942 and their confinement in government camps in the interior of their respective countries. Despite his predictions of harsh consequences for Japanese Americans if war broke out in the Pacific, he remained publicly silent as pressure mounted on the Pacific coast of the United States and Canada during spring 1942 for mass action against their ethnic Japanese populations. LaViolette did not join the tiny group of liberal academics who publicly protested mass removal or formed Fair Play Committees. While he corresponded with numerous Nisei friends from Seattle, there is little record that he offered them financial or logistical assistance. (Frank Miyamoto, hired by University of California sociologist Dorothy Swaine Thomas as a “community analyst” for the Japanese Evacuation Research Study, spent the early war years in the Tule Lake camp.)19

      Nor, however, did LaViolette line up immediately in support of the government, either with supportive public comment or with assistance to the War Relocation Authority, the civil agency created to operate the Japanese American camps. Although the WRA was desperate to recruit social scientists with experience among Japanese Americans to be camp administrators and community analysts (so much so that John Embree was named the WRA's chief reports officer largely on the basis of his having written “Suye Mura,” a short anthropological study of a village in Japan), LaViolette evidently either was not asked to join the WRA or refused, for he remained in Montreal throughout 1942. In contrast, in May 1943 LaViolette took a leave from McGill and entered the Heart Mountain Relocation Center. Over the following six months, he served there as an administrator and community analyst for the WRA (LaViolette also took a collection of stark photographs of the camp's guard towers and facilities). He clearly saw his role as one of an intermediary, trusted by both sides, between the camp administration and the Japanese “residents,” someone who could facilitate communication and community stability. He noted in one of his first memos:

      It may not be obvious but I think we can see utility in the assumption that the Japanese community is tending to reconstruct itself somewhat along old lines. It should be helpful if we look to see what is likely to be missing due to certain limitations. In pre-evacuation days there were certain white functionaries who represented one of the few points of accommodation between the white and Japanese.…In spite of what we do, it is rather evident that the process of reconstruction is under way and that stability is coming, Here I think community analysts will be vital [in such accommodation]. First, we shall have to more and more make use of, cooperate with, these reconstructed and emerging patterns.20

      LaViolette added that he hoped to train schoolteachers and others to fit that role. “It is my guess that we should plan seminars for [schoolteachers] in which we would educate them about the Japanese, about the world in which we live, and also take then into a more active part of WRA program.”21 Given his emphasis on education, he was outraged when he discovered that Japanese American schoolteachers were being issued only restrictive teaching certificates by the Wyoming state school board, with the result that they were forbidden to teach elsewhere in the state following resettlement. “Obviously, this is discrimination,” LaViolette fumed. “But it is the same sort of discrimination which had such a large part in determining the entire evacuation. [However,] there is no evidence that the WRA is partner to this discriminatory action.”22

      During his residence at Heart Mountain, LaViolette spent much of his time meeting with inmates and compiling reports on inmate opinion. His goal was to encourage Japanese Americans to make plans to resettle outside camp. During this period, the WRA undertook the large-scale segregation of those the government adjudged “disloyal” (based on a hastily designed and egregious “loyalty questionnaire”) in a separate high-security camp at Tule Lake, and established procedures for granting “leave permits” (a politically expedient form of parole) so that those the government adjudged to be “loyal” could leave camp. LaViolette's chief contribution to the process was a confidential statistical study of those who had given negative or unsatisfactory answers to the questionnaire. His conclusion was that many Nisei acted from confusion, a result of being forced into a stark choice between family demands (the views of parents in prewar Japanese communities being law) and the instructions of the government. To his credit, LaViolette dismissed the influence of pro-Axis agitators, on whom other WRA officials had placed blame for the “wrong” answers by Nisei on the questionnaire. On the other hand, his writings also ignored the very real and swelling protest against confinement that had already led dissident inmates to form the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee and would climax the following spring in its organized campaign of resistance to conscription.23

      LaViolette left Heart Mountain in December 1943. His public comments after his departure reveal an odd (and mendacious) defensiveness. In an interview he gave to the Toronto Globe and Mail, he stated, “Conditions are now so good in relocation centers that there are practically no grievances.” Food conditions were “highly satisfactory, and in every other respect the evacuees are carefully looked after.” The barracks, he contended, “have been constructed to provide adequate shelter during even the most extreme weather conditions.”24 At the end of 1944, he published a review of Carey McWilliams's book Prejudice. LaViolette lauded McWilliams's book as a study of the irrationality of American social organization. However, he minimized McWilliams's description of the treatment of Japanese Americans as a particularly “un-American” phenomenon, and his strictures against West Coast whites, by saying that violent attacks of one kind or another on minority groups, particularly racial minority groups, were a long-standing feature of American history. Nowhere in his review did LaViolette even mention the central point of McWilliams's book: that Issei and Nisei were being confined en masse in camps. Instead he underlined the government's effort to atone for the “American wrongs” of evacuation by its concentration on assimilating Japanese Americans, which he contrasted positively with the “slower way of reconstruction” prevailing in Canada.25

      His mental block about discussing the camps was thrown into even sharper relief the following year when the Canadian Institute of International Affairs brought out LaViolette's book Americans of Japanese Ancestry: A Study of Assimilation in the American Community, adapted from his Ph.D. dissertation.

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