Few wartime problems have remained as puzzling to the average U.S. citizen as that of the West Coast's uprooted Japanese. This week, in a new book, The Governing of Men, Lieut. Commander Alexander H. Leighton, a Navy Medical Corps psychiatrist, suggested a key to better understanding. After 15 months at Arizona's vast Poston Relocation Center as a social analyst, Commander Leighton concluded that many an American simply fails to remember that U.S. Japanese are human beings.
The Governing of Men (Princeton University Press; $3.75) is a full report on Poston, which—because of censorship —was the subject of many a wild rumor in the early days of the war. To Commander Leighton's detached eye, the war was only a minor cause of Poston's troubles. Many of those troubles sprang from the universal resentment men feel at being confined against their will, and from the universal conflict which results when different types of people are thrown closely together. For the 18,000 Japs at Poston were of all types. There were Christians and Buddhists, bankers and fishermen, farmers and shopkeepers. By birth and background they fell into three basic groups:
¶The oldest, the Japanese-born Issei, were reserved, puritanical people, who clung to an old country belief in hard work, personal integrity and obedience to tradition. They felt a sense of loyalty to Japan and had grave misgivings about the flipness, the new and careless attitudes of U.S.-born Nisei. Pearl Harbor had filled them with indecision. Many wanted Japan to win the war, but they did not want the U.S.—the country in which their children would go on living—to lose. ¶The Nisei had grown away from the Japanese beliefs that they had been taught as children, felt superior to their parents and a little ashamed of the Issei's bowing manners and broken English. They were full of protest at the idea of evacuation, afraid they were being stripped of their rights as citizens. Their faith in U.S. fairness was shaken. But they were still unconvinced by their parents' talk of the greatness of Japan.
¶The Kibei, young Japanese born in the U.S. but educated in the old country, found themselves in conflict with both Issei and Nisei. Most older Japanese considered them dissolute, domineering upstarts. Nisei, fresh from U.S. schools, considered them foreign-minded people.
To all the evacuees Poston (a conglomeration of cheerless wooden barracks on the unshaded desert) seemed like a concentration camp. The sun was cruel; dust was everywhere. The hospital had little medicine, food was often badly cooked; there was overcrowding, lack of privacy, discomfort. The camp's overworked administrative staff had been thrown together as hastily as the buildings.