Soldiering through Empire - Simeon Man American Crossroads

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U.S. officials about the seductive dangers of international communism and illuminated a global alliance of color forged through the military. This racial menace, ironically, doubled as a military asset. During World War II, U.S. campaigns against fascism and white supremacy had demanded the inclusion of racially suspect populations into the armed services. Japanese Americans were tested for their loyalty in concentration camps to allow the “good” ones to showcase their patriotism through combat. Similarly, the Office of War Information targeted African Americans to support the war effort and to demonstrate their patriotic manhood by enlisting in the segregated military.52 After the war, the utility of racial minorities in the military would continue and expand. In September 1946, the War Department ordered the army to assign “all inductees or enlistees of Japanese ancestry” to Japan for occupation duty, where they would serve as interpreters and translators for U.S. military and civilian agencies and continue their wartime function as “ambassadors of democracy.”53 Mobilizing “race for empire” in these ways left uncertain perils for the United States in the post–World War II Pacific.

      The task of monitoring these racialized subjects in the military fell to the U.S. Army’s Office of Intelligence (G-2). More than any other institution at the time, G-2 was at the forefront of producing racial knowledge about the decolonizing Pacific. Its case files of individuals, many of them rendered in great detail, hint at the complex lives of these subjects and, for some of them, even their desires to pursue a politics beyond U.S. objectives. At the same time, they also reveal the determination by U.S. military intelligence agents to diminish the very complexities of these individuals. These reports illustrate the impossible double bind in which these men and women found themselves. They were a military asset or a racial peril who invariably degenerated from one to the other.

      The case of Misao Kuwaye is revealing in this sense. Kuwaye was of “Okinawan descent” from Honolulu, and had arrived in Tokyo in October 1945 as a Department of the Army Civilian Employee. She was assigned to the Press Section of the Civil Censorship Detachment (CCD), in which her primary duty was to censor Japanese mail. Kuwaye was one of fourteen “Nisei” women from Hawai‘i recruited before the war to form the CCD, and they were the first Nisei linguists to arrive in Occupied Japan.54 Kuwaye was part of this exemplary cohort and valued for her Japanese-language ability, but her employment record betrayed her talents. Soon after her arrival, the CCD discovered that Kuwaye “did not meet the qualifications as a linguist” and was, in the opinion of authorities, a “troublemaker.”55 At first, what this meant exactly was unknown, but it soon became clear.

      In January 1947, military intelligence confirmed that Kuwaye had been an organizer and “a regular attendant” of the Honolulu Labor Canteen, a radical alternative to the United Service Organizations formed in August 1945 that brought together leftists in Hawai‘i, including GIs, plantation workers, and labor organizers.56 This initial discovery prompted an investigation that uncovered Kuwaye’s mobility across multiple worlds of radicalism. Subsequent reports found that Kuwaye had been “closely associated” with communists and “Communist sympathizers” in Hawai‘i, and that she had used her military assignment in Japan to build connections with radicals in Japan and Okinawa, which included members of the Japanese Communist Party and the League of Okinawans. In September, when she requested approval to transfer jobs from Japan to Okinawa, authorities found in her possession a letter from one of her associates in Honolulu urging her to obtain information about military installations on the island. On November 2, upon her return to Honolulu, customs agents confiscated “a number of documents, including press releases concerning communist activities and Japanese Women’s Suffrage,” loose pages of the Confidential Training Program for Censorship, and maps of “major cities in Japan, classified as Restricted.”57

      Despite all signs of Kuwaye’s “leftist inclination,” authorities did not pursue her case further due to a “lack of conclusive proof that subject was subversive,” but her case had sufficiently alarmed officials.58 Kuwaye’s associations with leftists in Hawai‘i, Japan, and Okinawa raised questions about the loyalty of Nisei subjects employed by the U.S. Army, and it illuminated the porous boundaries of the radicalizing Pacific. The agent assigned to her case had determined, “The damage inflicted by persons of this ilk upon the occupation effort is by no means limited to their activities while in this theater [the “Far East”]. As was recently demonstrated in another case, these people return to the United States as ‘experts’ on occupation policy and set about undermining Japanese policy to any group that will listen or read their leftist ‘exposé.’” In short, the military had become a vehicle for individual and collective radicalization to undermine the U.S. empire. “The solution to this situation,” the agent concluded, “appears to be more careful investigation prior to employment and more effective means for immediate removal of such persons from employment with the occupation.”59

      It was precisely this fear of subversion within the U.S. Pacific empire, even in the absence of “conclusive proof” of it, that drove G-2 to locate and determine the loyalty of Asian subjects in the military. The line between “good” and “bad” Asians never had been easy to decipher, but it nonetheless became more and more important to demarcate as the United States pursued its global war against communism. Another report on Calvin Kim, for example, revealed that the Korean American officer who was ordered to the Military Intelligence Service Language School in 1945 because of his Korean-language ability was later found to have engaged in questionable political activities, including signing two petitions in 1948 to have the Independent Progressive Party placed on the California State ballot and for an equal-housing initiative, both of which were “circulated by a known CP member.” In 1952, the army conducted a polygraph on Kim to determine his political affiliations, and the agent concluded, “There is no information to indicate that Kim has ever embraced foreign ideologies or that his racial background makes him vulnerable to Communist propaganda.” As for Kim’s earlier political involvements, “[h]e was apparently duped by the IPP in 1948, as were many politically naïve people.”60

      From one report to the next, G-2 probed the political pasts of army personnel to determine their loyalty, especially those of a particular “racial background.” Another report in 1953 sought to determine if a “Charles Kim” stationed in Pusan, Korea, was the son of Diamond Kimm, the Korean leftist from Los Angeles who was then facing deportation charges for his political activities.61 Indeed, if the “foreign-born” had emerged as particular targets of the burgeoning anticommunist regime of the early 1950s, which sought to monitor and exclude “subversives” from the nation, then the army came under scrutiny for channeling in such large numbers of Asians and foreign nationals over the years. “The over-riding necessity to make maximum use of all available manpower” during World War II, a report stated in 1954, had led to “the liberalization of policy toward Communists in the Army.” Accordingly, Senator Joseph McCarthy urged the Secretary of the Army to do everything to “wee[d] out … the misfits, the incompetents, the Communists and the fellow travelers who infiltrated the Army during the twenty years of Communist coddling.”62

      Determined to root out subversives hiding in plain sight, G-2 with its case files in fact accomplished something else entirely: it reinforced and reproduced the fear of racialized Asian subjects plotting against the U.S. empire. Although rare, when G-2 uncovered “conclusive proof” of actual subversion, it only confirmed the reality of this fear. The case of Yi Sa Min was one such case that elicited the intervention of the State Department in January 1950. According to the U.S. embassy in Seoul, Yi, an American citizen, traveled to Pyongyang in December as a representative of the Korean Democratic Front of North America and sought to secure the group’s membership in the North Korean Democratic Front. At a press conference, Yi stated the following: “The American people and Koreans residing [in the United States] are supporting the unified independence of Korea and her democratic development. Because we live in America, we know very well what kind of country America is and what kind of fello[w] Rhee Syngman … [is].” He minced no words as he condemned the American “invasion” of “the southern half of our fatherland,” and castigated Rhee and “his stooges” for “selling our country” to the Americans. “We will consolidate our efforts and fight for our Republic and for the unification of the North and South, and we will not permit American

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