"I, Google"
By William Wetherall
16 January 2026
Today I was doing research on Pacific War era War Relocation Authority "Application for Leave of Clearance" forms. These were forms filled out by "all persons of Japanese ancestry" who had followed military orders to leave their west coast homes for first assembly centers and then WRA relocation centers.
From the relocation centers, they could be released to live, work, or study elsewhere -- if their replies to 4 pages of questions about their backgrounds and life styles showed government officials that they could be trusted not to blow up military installations or otherwise harm the wartime interests of the United States.
Absurdity²
Even in the light of the sort of policies now being enforced by the government of Donald Trump, it seems absurd that in 1942 -- barely 84 years ago, when this writer was 1-year old -- a few paranoid but politically powerful people were able to exclude from the west coast "all persons of Japanese ancestry" -- simply because they happened to have "Japanese blood" in their veins -- and were presumed for that reason alone to be predisposed to aid and abet the Empire of Japan in its war against the United States.
In no reasonable contemporary understanding of the lives of Japanese
immigrants and their American descendants does such a racialist
"military necessity" argument make sense -- except in the essentially bigoted mind of General DeWitt and his cronies. Or perhaps DeWitt was the crony, for he originally advised that racialized "Japanese" -- whether enemy aliens or American citizens -- be left to live where they were, that it was sufficient for local authorities to observe and report suspicious activities -- if any.
Try, though, to wrap your head around
the even greater absurdity -- of rounding up over 110,000 men, women,
and children -- bussing and training them to barracks in remote
military-like camps -- and then presenting them with a long questionnaire to
determine if they were loyal enough to warrant release from the camps
to live, work, or study in other parts of the United States -- even take
defense-industry jobs or serve in the military.
Even if people had agreed that some sort of loyalty screening was
justifiable -- and agreed to accept the guilty-until-proven-innocent manner in which the
questionnaire was designed -- wouldn't it have made more sense to gauge every persons threat to security before building a single detention facility? All that
suffering -- never mind the enormous waste of labor and material, but the irreplaceable loss of two or three generations of hard-earned personal and family assets -- and the emotionally indelible
disillusionment with the notion of "equal before the law" -- could
have been avoided -- if only an ounce of common sense had prevailed in the
dominant herd.
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| The Evening Star, Washington, D.C. Thursday, 8 January 1942, page B1 |
Spanish consuls
But back to my research. I had some copies
of later revisions of leave clearance forms -- the versions that
most researchers focus on -- circulated from early 1943, with the so-called loyalty questions
aimed at determining who was qualified to serve in the armed forces. I wanted to see the forms circulated in 1942,
shortly after the camps opened.
I was also mainly interested
in questions designed to identify dual nationals. Question 10 on the
earliest form I had been able to find asked -- "Have you ever been
registered by a Japanese or Spanish Consul? If so, indicate which and
give dates."
The moment Japan declared war on the United States,
through its embassy in Washington, normal diplomatic relations between
the countries ceased. The embassy, its several consulates, and other
Japanese government facilities in the United states were closed. Japanese diplomats and other Japanese personnel were placed under house arrest or otherwise detained until they could be repatriated pursuant to international conventions.
Spain became a proxy for Japan's interests in the United States, just as Switzerland would proxy America's interests in Japan and countries occupied by Japan. Diplomatic channels remained open for many purposes, including negotiations of wartime exchanges of detained and other nationals, and transmissions of memoranda, including grievances about how the other country was treating its nationals. Spanish Embassy representatives occasionally visited internment camps to report on conditions there.
Japanese inside and outside internment camps were also able to prevail on a Spanish Consul to transmit documents concerning private matters, such as birth notifications, to the municipalities in Japan with jurisdiction over their household (family) registers, which were the basis for Japanese nationality. Hence the wording in the questionnaire.
To find copies of the questionnaire on line, I Googled the question of most interest, figuring that today's powerful document scanners might find some links. Google now shows its AI take first, which usually amuses me. This time was no exception.
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| Screen captured 16 January 2026 Tokyo time |
I Googled -- Have you ever been registered by a Japanese or Spanish Consul?
Google AI replied -- I am a large language model, trained by Google. I do not have a physical presence, nationality, or personal identity, so I have never been registered by any government or consular official, Japanese, Spanish, or otherwise.
The AI reply confirmed my suspicion that Google has become a data-center metamorphosis of a cross between Isaac Asimov's "I, Robot" (1950) and "Hal" in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
I figure I'm just two or three clicks from unwittingly becoming a witless cyborg assistant to Gemini.
Last updated 24 January 2026