The Evacuation of Japanese-Americans from Washington State During World War II: A Study in Race Discrimination

In 1964 Congress passed a major civil rights bill designed to give equal rights to all Americans regardless of race, but there was a time when that same government under pressures of war, denied civil rights to citizens as well as non-citizens strictly because of race. Going back twenty-three years, one can study the racial discrimination practiced by the United States government towards another minority group--the Japanese-Americans. This paper will cover: (1) Why the Japanese-Americans were evacuated during World War II; (2) How they were evacuated; (3) The consequences of their evacuation. Because of the vast program of relocation of all the Japanese-Americans on the Pacific Coast, this study will be limited to the 14,565 Japanese-Americans of Washington State

Fear, Racism, Agriculture: The Drive for Japanese Internment

The focus of this dissertation is the timing of the forced evacuation of the ethnic Japanese population from the West Coast in 1942. This work focuses on three key factors driving the timing of the evacuation: racism, security concerns, and agriculture. Racism has been studied and written about extensively; however, an overview of this factor is critical as it directly influenced the removal of Japanese American citizens in addition to Japanese immigrants. This dissertation will focus on the intellectual origins of racism and prejudice by focusing on key figures and tracing the ideas and beliefs and how they influenced the laws that directly affected the ethnic Japanese and their removal. Security concerns for the West Coast stem from the actions of Japan after WWI when they expanded their territory virtually unchecked throughout the South Pacific. The violent nature of this expansion was front-page news in every major city in the United States for two decades before WWII. These actions by Japan fed the West Coast security concerns and fear of a potential fifth column living among the citizens on the West Coast. The final straw was the attack on Pearl Harbor; this act by the Japanese brought to the forefront the fear, racism, and intolerance that had been building on the West Coast since the late 1800s. This dissertation takes all of these factors into account and focuses on the timing of the evacuation as it pertains to the spring growing season in 1942. The ethnic Japanese were deliberately evacuated during the spring growing season so their absence would not hinder the crop production of their farms and allow enough time for the Farm Security Administration, Wartime Civilian Control Administration, and the Department of Agriculture to find replacement farmers before the spring harvest. The Department of Agriculture fully implemented the Food for Freedom program months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and this program, run by the Department of Agriculture, dictated the amount and type of crops each farm in America needed to produce. These assignments aimed to fulfill the Lend Lease obligations of the U.S. to its European allies and feed America. The Japanese farmers on the West Coast commanded a strong presence and contribution to the food supply. Although the total farms owned and operated by ethnic Japanese farmers numbered less than 7,000, they contributed over 50% of specific crops and almost 100% of others to local markets throughout the state. Due to the need for food production and the Japanese influence and contribution to the local food supply, the evacuation timing was explicitly built around the spring growing season to eliminate any potential for lost crops grown on Japanese farms

Intangible Investment in Japan: New Estimates and Contribution to Economic Growth

The purpose of this paper is to measure intangible assets, to construct the capital stock of intangible assets, and to examine the contribution of intangible capital to economic growth in Japan. We follow the approach of Corrado, Hulten, and Sichel (2005, 2006) to measure intangible investment using the 2008 version of the Japan Industrial Productivity (JIP) Database. We find that the ratio of intangible investment to GDP in Japan has risen during the past 20 years and now stands at 11.6%, which is lower than the ratio estimated for the United States in the early 2000s. The ratio of intangible to tangible investment in Japan is also lower than equivalent values estimated for the United States. In addition, we find that, in stark contrast with the United States, where intangible capital grew rapidly in the late 1990s, the growth rate of intangible capital in Japan declined from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. In order to examine the robustness of our results, we also conducted a sensitivity analysis and found that the slowdown of the contribution of intangible capital deepening to economic growth and the recovery in Multi-Factor Productivity (MFP) growth from the second half of the 1990s observed in our base case remain unchanged even if we take on-the-job training and Japanese data with respect to investment in firm-specific resources into account.intangible investment, labor productivity, growth accounting

Japanese data strategies, global surveillance capitalism, and the “LINE problem”

This paper situates data practices in Japan in a diffractive genealogy of surveillance capitalism. It puts data conceptualized in three ways into focus: real data, data in information banks, and data of the super app LINE. While technology embodying these concepts of data is mainly used in Asia, this technology is entangled with discourses and legislation in Europe and practices of U.S. American surveillance capitalism in important aspects. This article empirically traces these entanglements and demonstrates how discourses around data sovereignty, geopolitical shifts, historical background, global political and economic trends, and international policies intermingle in contemporary accounts of data and digital sovereignty in Japanese context. Decolonial theory is consulted in order to account for Japan’s recent past as a non-Western territorial empire and the privileged position that Japanese experts on data have in the drafting of international data policies