Postwar Exports

They were born in the U.S. and, until Pearl Harbor, had therefore enjoyed all the blessings of citizenship. They had gone to the public schools, voted, earned a living. Some of them had friends or relatives in the U.S. armed forces. But last week these 6,000-odd U.S. Japanese were busy renouncing their citizenship to swear allegiance to Emperor Hirohito.

By & large, they were the fanatical, troublemaking variety of Nisei segregated at Tule Lake, Calif., for disloyalty. Until a year ago change of allegiance was so difficult to achieve that a Nisei had to commit treason or desert from the armed forces to make it. Now, thanks to a recent act of Congress, anybody can renounce his U.S. citizenship if the U.S. Attorney General finds it is not contrary to the national defense.

Some of the Nisei who have got or are getting a chance at renunciation are afraid that to be returned to the hostile Pacific Coast would be worse than being re-interned as aliens. But the majority of them dearly want to go back to Japan--even though they can see from their newspapers how their future homeland is being devastated by the U.S., how close it is to defeat. After the war is over they will be sent back to what is left of the land few of them have ever seen.

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