Lessons in Loyalty: The Contradictory Path of Japanese Language Schools during World War II

The trajectory of Japanese language schools in America was never linear, but it traveled in two opposing paths during World War II. Language schools maintained popularity before the war, in part, by emphasizing the American citizenship of the U.S.-born Nisei generation. More than one hundred schools belonged to the Southern California Japanese Language Association by 1930, when its president published a language textbook that translated Americanization lessons into Japanese. Yet that president was one of the first Japanese Angelenos arrested by the FBI when Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941. Most of his former students were sent to internment camps, where Franklin Roosevelt’s War Relocation Authority had banned Japanese language schools. This changed after the “loyalty incident” in 1942, when thousands of interned Japanese citizens refused to sign oaths proclaiming their loyalty to the U.S. After segregating these “disloyals” from their interned compatriots, the WRA decided that allowing them to open new Japanese language schools was the simplest way to soften their disloyalty. At the same time, young Nisei men found that the best way to escape internment camps was to sign up for the Military Intelligence Service, which was recruiting Japanese-Americans to translate stolen documents from Japan’s enemy army and interrogate Japanese prisoners of war. More than six thousand Nisei graduated from the MIS Language School, where they studied Japanese while helping their native country (the U.S.) defeat their parents’ nation of origin (Japan). This paper will examine how the simultaneous banning and opening of Japanese language schools in 1942 illustrated the tenuous nature of Japanese-American citizenship during World War II—as well as the ways that both sides used the Japanese language to prove (or disprove) Nisei loyalty.