The University of California Japanese evacuation and resettlement study: A prolegomenon

Suzuki, Peter T.

doi:10.1007/bf02343105

Cited by 9 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…Furthermore, studies of the many anthropologists who worked for the U.S. government during World War II have established how state imperatives undermined their ability to uphold disciplinary imperatives. Anthropologist Peter T. Suzuki (, ), who was himself imprisoned in the camps as a boy, has pointed out some egregious ethical lapses on the part of anthropologists who conducted research in the camps. Suzuki recognizes that the social scientists involved in that research insisted that that their goal was to understand group social conditions, and they actively sought to differentiate their research from intelligence‐gathering activities.…”

Section: Perspectives On Ethics Science and Governmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Japanese‐American confinement and scientific democracy: Colonialism, social engineering, and government administration

Rosemblatt

Benmergui

2018

J History Behavioral Science

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During World War II, the U.S. Indian Service conducted social science experiments regarding governance among Japanese Americans imprisoned at the Poston, Arizona, camp. Researchers used an array of techniques culled from anthropological culture and personality studies, psychiatry, psychology, medicine, and public opinion research to probe how the personality traits of the confined Japanese-Americans and camp leaders affected the social interactions within each group and between them. The research drew on prior studies of Indian personality in the US Southwest, Mexico's Native policies, and indirect colonial rule. Researchers asked how democracy functioned in contexts marked by hierarchy and difference. Their goal was to guide future policies toward US "minorities" and foreign races in post-war occupied territories. We show how researchers deployed ideas about race, cultural, and difference across a variety of cases to create a universal, predictive social science, which they combined with a prewar romanticism and cultural relativism. These researchers made ethnic, racial, and cultural difference compatible with predictive laws of science based on notions of fundamental human similarities.

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Section: Perspectives On Ethics Science and Governmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Japanese‐American confinement and scientific democracy: Colonialism, social engineering, and government administration

Rosemblatt

Benmergui

2018

J History Behavioral Science

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“…footnote 61. 89 The following is mainly based upon [Suzuki, 1986], [Suzuki, 1989], and [Murray, 1991]. 90 Different from the Japanese staff members, he could freely move.…”

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confidence: 99%

Thomas C. Schelling and James M. Sakoda: The Intellectual, Technical, and Social History of a Model

Hegselmann

2017

JASSS

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Abstract:The Journal of Mathematical Sociology (JMS) started in 1971. The second issue contained its most cited article: Thomas C. Schelling, "Dynamic Models of Segregation". In that article, Schelling presented a family of models, one of which became a canonical model. To date it is called the Schelling model -an eponym that affixes the inventor's name to the invention, one of the highest forms of scientific recognition. In the very first issue of JMS, James Minoru Sakoda published an article entitled "The Checkerboard Model of Social Interaction". Sakoda's article more or less went unrecognized. Yet, a careful comparison demonstrates that in a certain sense the Schelling model is just an instance of Sakoda's model. A precursor of that model was already part of Sakoda's 1949 dissertation submitted to the University of California at Berkeley. A substantial amount of evidence indicates that in the 1970s Sakoda was well known and recognized as a computational social scientist, whereas Schelling was an unknown in the field. A generation later, the pattern of recognition almost completely reversed: Sakoda had become the unknown, while Schelling was the well-known inventor of the pioneering Schelling model. This article explains this puzzling pattern of recognition. Technical and social factors play a decisive role. Some contrafactual historical reflection suggests that the final result was not inevitable.

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“…Such rifts only exacerbated the difficulties that participant observers—as such data collectors were called—faced as part of their work. Indeed, scholars of Asian American history have documented the problems associated with this kind of work, including with respect to internment (see among others, Suzuki, , , ; Ichioka, ; Hirabayashi, ; Yu, ). Less familiar, however, are the subsequent career trajectories of some of these original Japanese American researchers, as well as the accounts of ways that their experience of internment continued to inform their work.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

JAPANESE AMERICAN WARTIME EXPERIENCE, TAMOTSU SHIBUTANI AND METHODOLOGICAL INNOVATION, 1942–1978

Inouye¹

2012

J History Behavioral Science

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A case study of how wartime internment reverberated in the life and work of Japanese American intellectuals, this essay discusses the career and interests of Tamotsu Shibutani, a sociologist who began his training as part of Dorothy Swaine Thomas' Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study (JERS). Though recent scholarship has noted some of the ethical problems that attended the use of Japanese American participant observers during the war, this essay concentrates instead on how interned intellectuals responded to their double role of both researcher (and intellectual) and object of study. I argue that in the case of Shibutani, his circumstances and identity shaped his scholarship, both as an academic endeavor and a political project. By tracking Shibutani's postwar scholarly activities, I show that his wartime experiences--as an internee, military officer, and participant-observer--reverberated in his sociological publications long after the war's end.

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The University of California Japanese evacuation and resettlement study: A prolegomenon

Cited by 9 publications

References 2 publications

Japanese‐American confinement and scientific democracy: Colonialism, social engineering, and government administration

Japanese‐American confinement and scientific democracy: Colonialism, social engineering, and government administration

Thomas C. Schelling and James M. Sakoda: The Intellectual, Technical, and Social History of a Model

JAPANESE AMERICAN WARTIME EXPERIENCE, TAMOTSU SHIBUTANI AND METHODOLOGICAL INNOVATION, 1942–1978

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