The Interrogator

TL;DR: The chapter explores the transformation of Japanese Americans from "enemy aliens" to interrogators of Koreans during the Korean War, reconstructing the types of interrogation rooms they invented and highlighting the contrast with past practices.

Abstract: This chapter begins the story in the Japanese American internment camps of World War II, and follows how the Japanese American subject moved from being an “enemy alien” under surveillance to laboring as an interrogator of Koreans during the Korean War. It reconstructs the types of interrogation rooms these Japanese American interrogators invented, what they resisted, and what they reinterpreted. In contrast with the interrogation rooms of the past that were cloaked in darkness, secrecy, and violence, the US military interrogation room was now supposedly an idealized site of regulated and willing exchange between the interrogator and the interrogated prisoner.