In its official history of thirty years of Japanese rule in Korea, the Government-General of Korea noted that a fundamental transformation in the state’s understanding of “population” had taken place since the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. Previously, the population problem had been understood as a matter of an excess—that is, concerned with such issues as the imbalance between a surplus population, on the one hand, and available food and employment on the other. However, because of the wartime need for “human resources” and future demands for “limitless [population] growth,” this worry had been totally reversed. “In...

Perhaps it goes without saying that in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, even the feeble signs that some Japanese Americans were becoming full-fledged members of the national community rapidly collapsed.¹ Throughout the prewar years the Japanese minority had been more outside than inside the national community. And technologies of human accounting, such as the census, had operated as much to exclude them from society, in fact to defend society from them, as it had worked to include them within the nation. It might be said that they had been incorporated within the larger American bio-political regime, but in large part...

The analogy of separating Japanese American goats from sheep that circulated so widely among civilian and military administrators points to another aspect of the shift from “vulgar” to “polite” racism that I have touched on but not adequately analyzed in the previous chapters: namely, that the new modality of governing this minority could no longer operate through repressive or negative means alone but needed in addition to urge them in a positive way and guide them toward making voluntary choices, including the decision to enlist in the military. The new political rationality would deploy an assemblage of positive practices that...

In the previous chapter I charted the shift in modality of governing Japanese Americans toward a complex governmentality that mobilized exceptions and force precisely for the purpose of enabling liberal rule. As Dillon S. Myer put it in response to aggressive questioning in the Senate about the need to more strictly police the internees, “it is a question whether we are going to make more fifth columnists by one kind of treatment”—that is, by severity—“or whether by another type of treatment we are going to make more good citizens.”¹ Yet in the process I have only in passing...

Despite the failure of the Japanese American volunteer program to produce a large number of volunteers from the mainland United States, by commonsense standards those eventually inducted into the army from Hawaii and the mainland United States (mainly through the draft) cumulatively performed astonishing feats of military heroism while sacrificing their lives and bodies in numbers out of all proportion to their presence in the military. Perhaps most famously they served as combatants in Europe, first with the 100th Infantry Battalion, an outfit originally made up of Hawaiian Japanese, and then with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team.¹ When war broke...

U.S. psychological warfare during the Second World War had as one of its key strategies the exploitation of class, racial, and regional divisions within the Japanese nation and larger colonial empire. While most Americans in the postwar United States have tended to believe that the Japanese are a homogeneous people, and wartime propaganda represented the Japanese as just like so many “photographic prints off the same negative,”¹ to use the filmmaker Frank Capra’s famous phrase, U.S. intelligence agencies understood that the enemy’s façade of unity veiled a nation and colonial empire fractured by deep cleavages. Even as U.S. propaganda tried...

The concerted disavowal of racism in the Japanese colonial empire during the late war years operated through media other than the documents and directives produced by the civil and military branches of the state. Newspapers, magazines, cinema, radio, literature, music, and other media also circulated stories about Japan’s empire of equality throughout not only Korea but also the metropole and other places within the Japanese imperium. Already in the late 1930s, the Japanese media in the metropole—paralleling liberal efforts among the Allies to discontinue use of blatantly racist terms such as “nigger” and “Jap”¹—conspicuously began to avoid the...

In recent years some of the most incisive scholarship on the cultural politics of empire has emphasized that the management of families, gender, and sex was not of secondary concern for colonial and imperial powers, but was central to and implicated in the constitution and maintenance of larger structures of exploitation and domination. Thus, as Ann Stoler has put it, she has been concerned to interrogate “how and why microsites of familial and intimate space figure so prominently in the macropolitics of imperial rule,” a problematic that echoes with other feminist calls for attentiveness to why “gender dynamics were, from...