Asian Americans and Censorship

Description: Americans of Asian origin or descent

Significance: Asian Americans have been subject to many subtle forms of censorship

Throughout much of American history, the silencing of Asian perspectives has been so complete that there have been few occasions for open and official acts of censorship against Asians. Asian Americans have been talked or written about; rarely, until recent times, have they been allowed the opportunity or the means to talk or to write for themselves.

It is true that Asian Americans have always addressed one another, in print as well as in speaking, from the earliest days of Asian immigration. In 1854 Chinese Americans founded the Golden Hill News, featuring reports from China. Such forms of expression, however, were of little interest, at that time, to the larger society.

Official, conscious censorship is a form of recognition. It involves recognizing that views are important enough to be banned. Asian Americans, however, have been largely invisible and inaudible in American history. To hear Asian voices, one must turn to sources such as the poems scratched into the walls of detention cells and benches in places such as Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. The censorship of Asian American voices has not, for the most part, involved laws forbidding individual pieces of writing. It has been the consignment of an entire segment of the American population to silence.

On occasion the majority population and the government have taken active steps to take away the voices of the Asian minority. In 1854 the California Supreme Court, in People v. Hall, barred Chinese witnesses from giving testimony in court, preventing Chinese people from testifying against a white man accused of murdering a Chinese man. The court declared that the Asians were “a race of people whom nature has marked as inferior, and who are incapable of progress or intellectual development beyond a certain point.” Since Asian Americans have been such a small and silenced part of the population, there have been only a few occasions in which they have been subject to open censorship. During World War II, it may be argued that Japanese Americans became the most censored segment of the American population in the twentieth century in the United States. Not only were portrayals of Japanese people required to conform to the standards of propaganda, Japanese American publications were subjected to rigorous oversight and the Japanese Americans of the West Coast were placed into camps where censorship was a part of everyday life.

Two topics dominate contemporary issues of censorship relevant to Asian Americans. First, it may be contended that the English-only movement, which seeks to require by law that English be the only officially allowed language for elections and other public events, is actually a form of censorship. Since so many Asian Americans speak languages other than English, this would deprive many of them of the ability to make their voices heard. Second, as a minority group, Asian Americans have an interest in “positive censorship,” or efforts to discourage or forbid stereotypical, racist portrayals of minorities.

Japanese in World War II

At the beginning of World War II, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall asked the famous Hollywood director Frank Capra to make a series of orientation films for American soldiers. Known as Why We Fight, the purpose of the series was to inform the soldiers about the war and to inspire them with a sense of mission. The entire series was under the control of its sponsor, the War Department, and the War Department used its power of censorship to ensure that Capra’s films were conveying the desired messages. Each script had to be approved by about fifty military and civilian agencies in Washington, D.C.

The series became popular even in the civilian population. In the first film the Japanese Army was shown as a group of brutal subhumans marching down Pennsylvania Avenue after a Japanese victory. The final film was made after the war in Europe was ending and the US had turned its full attention to the Pacific, but plans for the film had been made as early as 1942. The last film was delayed because of disagreements between the scriptwriters and the army censors about how the Japanese should be portrayed. Many of the scriptwriters favored casting the military leaders of Japan as the real enemy and presenting ordinary Japanese people in a sympathetic light. The US Army, on the other hand, preferred showing all Japanese as enemies. The War Department rejected script after script as too sympathetic to the Japanese people. In the end, the Japanese were shown largely as stereotyped, mindless masses, subservient to the will of their military overlords. The film, however, was taken out of circulation immediately after it was released. The censors had delayed its making for too long, and shortly after its completion the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan and the war came to an end.

As the American military image of the Japanese changed from one of invading subhumans to one of obedient little brothers under the occupation, the goals of control of expression changed. General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters ordered the film withdrawn from circulation. It did not become public again until the 1970s, when film buffs discovered it.

Internment

During World War II, Japanese Americans became perhaps the most completely censored people in the United States. Part of this censorship was aimed at Japanese language publications in the United States. Under the Espionage Act, which had been passed during World War I, the US Post Office had the power to inspect all materials to be mailed for subversive contents and to reject as unmailable any judged to be unacceptable. Foreign-language publications, especially those published in Japanese, German, or Italian, came under close inspection. In February of 1942, the postmaster of Fresno, California, wrote his superiors to tell them that he was requiring The Japanese Times of California, a small Japanese-language weekly newspaper, to furnish translations of all articles appearing in each issue. These translations had to be accompanied by a signed affidavit from the editor swearing that the translations were accurate.

Unlike German or Italian Americans, however, Japanese Americans became subject to much wider and more intrusive forms of government control and censorship. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox claimed, without any evidence, that the success of the Japanese attack had been due to information provided by Japanese Americans acting as spies. The War Department suggested that all Japanese Americans should be interned.

Popular opinion on the West Coast supported the relocation of Japanese Americans. Newspapers, radios, and other forms of media fanned popular anti-Japanese American sentiment. Although government studies of the attitudes of Japanese Americans, such as the Munson Report, indicated that these citizens were overwhelmingly loyal to the US government, these studies were suppressed. In February, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which provided for the evacuation and detention of Americans of Japanese ancestry.

In these concentration camps, called “relocation centers,” Japanese Americans lived under the complete control of military authorities, and all means of public expression were censored by these authorities. Camp newspapers, such as the Tanforan Totalizer at the Tanforan Assembly Center, had to clear all stories before publication. At this same center, when the children of the camp junior high school chose red and white as their school colors, the Federal Bureau of Investigation immediately declared the colors “subversive,” since they were the same as the colors in the Japanese flag.

English-Only Movement

The languages of Asian Americans helped to silence their voices during much of American history. In recent years, a movement to make English the only legal language in official American public life has threatened to silence them once again. The 1990 US census showed that 44 percent of Asian Americans living in New York City did not speak English well. Adoption of an enforced official language can effectively censor such Asian Americans by making it impossible for them to express themselves in a manner that can be heard. In the 1992 presidential election, about 30 percent of Chinese American voters used bilingual ballots in casting their votes. If English were to become the only language allowed for public activities such as voting, many if not all of these voters would have been unheard and the Chinese American vote would have been much less. If languages other than English are forbidden in courtrooms, this could have the effect of the People v. Hall decision in nineteenth century California: It could provide a barrier to the participation of Asian Americans in the nation’s legal system.

Positive Censorship?

Limits on freedom of expression are usually looked upon as undesirable by Americans. However, it may be important to distinguish between truthful expression and false expression, between honest opinions and slander. Freedom of speech is never absolute: those who knowingly publish false and damaging statements about others can be convicted of libel under US law. Moreover, there is a close connection between violence in speech or writing and acts of violence.

During the 1870s, tirades against Chinese immigrants in newspapers and by politicians were followed by widespread acts of assault against these early Chinese Americans, including anti-Chinese riots in San Francisco and in other cities. Contemporary anti-Asian speech and violence has not been as dramatic, but the connection between the two seems to continue to exist. Stereotypes and caricatures of Asians, especially of Japanese, have become more common since the downturn of the American economy in the 1980s. These stereotypical images may, in part, be responsible for the rising level of hate crimes against Asians, which reached about nine thousand reported crimes in 1992, according to statistics compiled under the federal Hate Crime Statistics Act.

The forbidding of hate speech against Asian Americans, as well as against other groups, has had its critics. One of the most vocal critics of the forbidding of hate speech on college campuses, Dinesh D’Souza, is an Asian American born in India. In his book Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (1991), D’Souza accuses universities of censoring speech and writing assumed to be offensive to women and members of racial minorities. This form of political correctness, D’Souza claims, limits free discussion on college campuses and actually makes them more intolerant places.

Among the cases of politically correct censorship described by D’Souza is the case of an Asian American college student, Nina Wu. In 1989 Wu was expelled from her dormitory at the University of Connecticut after she put up a humorous poster on her door listing categories of people who were unwelcome. The poster contained a reference to gay people that the university found unacceptable. Wu was allowed to reenter her dormitory only after she filed suit.

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