Japanese spies / concentration camps

[badlands]

Why did the Americans believe that all Japanese citizens even little kids were spies? Why didn’t they make concentration camps for Germans or Italians? Wouldn’t they have been better spies and more of a threat? Didn’t Japanese think spying on one’s enemies dishonorable?

[Michael]

Well, that's a complicated story and I don't know most of it.

But my understanding is that much of the suspicion was founded on the fact that people of Japanese descent were different from people of European descent. That is the foundation of racism in all societies: that some group is different, and those differences are magnified (usually by people in power, who need to channel their followers' fears) into a bogeyman.

Villification is one of the easiest ways to divide people. It happens on the Internet all the time. The first person to villify someone else often succeeds in diverting attention away from their own shortcomings and bad behavior.

So when wealthy and political elites villify minority groups in their societies, they divert attention away from their own greed and corruption.

I think that is probably what happened to Japanese Americans during the Second World War. They were quite loyal citizens, and many of them served honorably in our armed forces. But that wasn't good enough to overcome the suspicion and hatred that had been stirred up by people in positions of influence and authority.

[august]

Yep. All of the above. With extra, nearly unique additions:

- physical differences - a child of recent German or Italian immigrants physically looked similar to a child of families of English or French or African heritage who had been in the US for centuries. So, ignorant assumptions based on surface appearance, or racism.

- Japanese immigrants had been in the US for only a few generations, and most people didn't know any of them. So an American might have grown up in Steuben or DeKalb County, had a teacher named Schultz or Schwartz, played with a kid named Amelia Earhart or Ike Eisenhower or Richard Kleindienst or John Ehrlichman or Bob Haldeman, or listened to records by Enrico Caruso or Luisa Tetrazzini, or had an Italian parish priest or bishop, or a neighbor named Antonin Scalia or Samuel Alito. So again, the idea that Japanese were somehow "other."

- the Italians and Germans had been fighting with the French and English for several years without any major attack on the US. (For that matter, the Romans, Teutons, Gauls and Britons were fighting over land 2000 years earlier without any attacks on the Cherokee or Sioux. 😉 ) So when Pearl Harbor happened, all Japanese were blamed, just as plenty of ignorant people blamed all Muslims or Middle Easterners (which ended up meaning Christian Egyptians and Lebanese, Indians, Sikhs etc. too) for 9/11.

As for what Japanese might believe about honor....the average American in 1941 could barely read, let alone know what foreign cultures believe.