In his March 16 letter, "Leave immigration to Darwin," William Wetherall tackles the subject of ethnic Koreans and Chinese being stripped of their Japanese nationality after World War II by emphatically stating that "[t]he loss of Japanese nationality by some former subjects after World War II was not based on ethnicity but on the territorial affiliation of registers."
Was it simply a matter of "territorial affiliation of registers"? Or was race foremost in the minds of Japanese lawmakers in the aftermath of the war contemplating the status of resident ethnic Koreans and Chinese after the end of the American Occupation?
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning history, "Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (pages 393-394)," John Dower says that while the Americans and the Japanese were haggling over related details in Japan's new constitution: "the government and subsequently the Diet succeeded in eliminating equal protection under the law, thus undermining GHQ's original intent. . . . the Americans had intended to affirm that 'all persons' are equal before the law, and included language in the GHQ draft that explicitly forbade discrimination on the basis of race and national origin. . . . [b]y interpreting 'kokumin' as referring to 'all nationals. . . . the government succeeded in denying equal civil rights to the hundreds of thousands of resident ex-colonial subjects, including Taiwanese and especially Koreans.
"The blatantly racist nature of this revision was subsequently reinforced by 'terminological' revisions during Diet deliberations, and this provided the basis for discriminatory legislation governing nationality passed in 1950."
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