How The U.S. Classified Japanese Americans During WW2

From the blog Is That Legal?, via Ornicus:

If you have ever been on, say, an admissions committee or a hiring committee, you will quickly recognize the problem that the JAJB (“Japanese American Joint Board”) faced. It had tens of thousands of loyalty files to review, but it lacked the time and manpower carefully to review each file. So it did what admissions and hiring committees do in these situations: it tried to come up with a template that would allow it to process the files without having to review each one. […]

So, for example, a Japanese American who was a Christian got a plus-2; a Japanese American who was a Buddhist got a minus-1. If he was “an instructor in Japanese hobbies or sports” such as judo, he got a minus-2; if he was “an instructor in [an] American sport or hobby,” he got a plus-2. For each Japanese-American periodical he received, he got a minus-1. If he’d never traveled to Japan, he got a plus-1. One trip to Japan earned him a minus-1. Two trips to Japan got him a minus-3. More than three years in a Japanese-language after-school program in the United States got him a minus-3. And so on.

You get the idea.

For reasons that the archival record does not disclose, the JAJB ditched the point system after a while and shifted instead to a system that looked for particular patterns of factors and then broke the files into three large groups – a “white” group that merited an automatic stamp of loyalty, a “black” group that merited an automatic stamp of disloyalty, and a “brown” or “tan” group that required case-by-case scrutiny of files. (Yes, that’s right: the color between “black” and “white” was not “gray” but “brown.”)

The blogger is the author of a book on the subject: American Inquisition, The Hunt For Japanese American Disloyalty In WWII. Sounds interesting, in a horrifying sort of way. (Curtsy to Ornicus).