The Matrix

I have the deluxe 10 disk boxed set of the trilogy.  I watched them again recently.  It got me to thinking.

"The Matrix", the original film in what eventually turned out to be a trilogy, was a trend setter and a huge box office success.  Its success was what enabled the subsequent two movies to be made.  Although they made a lot of money, chapters 2 and 3 (go ahead, try to remember their titles) did not have the impact the first movie did.  Why?

The Matrix movies fall into the general category of "Action Movie".  As such there are three components, the plot, the babe, and the action.  A good action movie will have all three in the appropriate balance.  The long running "James Bond" franchise is a classic example of the action genre.  So I will use them to examine these components in a little more detail before moving on to the Matrix movies.

The Bond series highlighted the role of the babe.  There is such a thing as a "Bond Girl".  I even have a book devoted solely to Bond Girls.  Most Bond movies have only one but several have two or three.  Being a Bond Girl has been the high point of many an actresses' carrier.  Ursula Andress, one of the early ones, is almost entirely unknown outside of her Bond Girl persona.  And the quality, for lack of a better term, of the Bond girls in the various films, has been erratic.

The Bond series is also noted for its "set piece" action sequences.  Typically a Bond movie opens with one.  In one movie Bond is chased from what turns out to be a mountain chalet.  He is chased on skis down a steep mountain slope by the bad guys.  Finally he literally skis off a giant cliff.  After what seems like an eternity watching our hero fall through space, finally a parachute in the pattern of a British Union Jack flag opens and we cut to the opening credits.  For obvious reasons, this scene is still burned into my retinas even though the movie came out decades ago.  Other action sequences are peppered though each movie.  One standard set piece type is the chase.  It can be in cars, under water in SCUBA gear, in at least one case in space, and on skis as it was in my example.  Another action sequence type is the fight between Bond and the villain or his henchmen.  Finally, most Bond movies end with a giant explosion or series of explosions, which destroy the villain's lair.

Finally, there is the plot.  Early Bond films had elaborate plots.  Later the series settled on a standard plot.  The villain is trying to take over the world.  Bond first discovers this, then tracks the villain to his lair, and finally blows the place up, foiling the plot.  Usually Bond and at least one Bond Girl are thrown together and romance ensues.  Since it is important to be able to move on to the next Bond Girl in the next movie, a depressing number of Bond Girl characters are killed off.

The early Bond films were very successful and eventually the Bond films became the prototype that most action movies followed.  The "take away" for Hollywood was that the plot was not very important, the babe needed to be beautiful but was otherwise disposable, and action was king.  So the Bond films maintained a high standard in their action sequences throughout the series.  The Bond Girls were beautiful for the most part, but generally unmemorable.  There were usually given little to do but hang around looking beautiful.  And the plots were allowed to deteriorate.  You had the villain du jour implementing the "plot to take over the world" du jour.  No one, even fans, paid any attention to the plots of the later movies.

This formula worked very well for many years.  The first Bond movie came out in the early '60s and the films were reliable money makers for decades.  But by 1999, when "The Matrix" came out, the formula looked vulnerable.  A lot of action movies with a non-existent plot, a great babe, and the usual number of well executed action sequences were no longer doing well at the box office.  And, since the action sequences were expensive to create, action movies need a large box office to be profitable.  For several years, Hollywood could count on foreign revenue to close the gap.  Action movies, with little dialog to translate and not much in the way of story that might not go over well in a foreign culture, did well in the foreign market.  You might have to cut back on the violence and/or sex to cater to a specific foreign market segment but that was easy to do.  Eventually the foreign market saturated out too leaving some to believe that the action genre had run its course.  And then along came "The Matrix" in 1999.

I am going to delay talking about plot and talk about the second component first.  In the case of the Matrix movies the babe was "Trinity", played by Carrie-Anne Moss.  Some commentators say she was not beautiful enough but I disagree.  And for the "matrix" parts of the movies (you know what I am talking about if you have seen any of them, and as for the rest of you . . .) she was dressed in a shiny bondage style outfit.  She made a real and positive impact on me and that's what the babe is supposed to do.  And, unlike the Bond movies, the Matrix movies stuck with the same babe through all three movies.  And Carrie-Anne turned in solid performances in all three movies.  I know of no action movie that has been made or broken solely by the babe.  If Carrie-Anne was weak in the second and third movies, she was weak in the first one.  So she wasn't the deciding factor in why the first movie has a much better reputation than the other two.

Moving on to action, here I see a decided difference between the first movie and the last two.  (It should be noted that the last two were made at the same time and are best seen as two parts of the same movie).  "The Matrix" came out in 1999.  This was a period of great advances in CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) capability.  A lot of the action in "The Matrix" was made or augmented by CGI.  This allowed not only new effects but a seamless integration of CGI effects with "practical" effects, effects using camera tricks and effects based on mechanical devices.  An example of a camera trick was "bullet time".  This was done by positioning a hundred or more still cameras and then setting them off in a precisely timed sequence.  When the still pictures were assembled a frame at a time into the movie it was as if a fast moving movie camera had been used.  This resulted in several dramatic "swoop around" and slow-motion scenes that were highly effective.  For mechanical devices think R2D2.  For many scenes there was a man inside the "robot" operating the various appendages.  With good editing this resulted in a very lifelike R2.

By 1999 the cost of an elaborate CGI sequence had plunged.  CGI takes vast amounts of computer processing power.  By 1999 the CGI people had figured out how to hook together a large number of relatively cheap computer workstations.  It might take hours to do the computations necessary to create one frame of film.  But with many processors it became possible to do many frames in one overnight run by distributing the work across many processors.  Cheap processing power also made it possible to move to digital editing.  There is a limit to how many separate components can be used in one frame if you use traditional film techniques.  If you look at the original "Star Wars" move, not the cleaned up reissue, there are several places where you can see lighter or darker squares where a space ship image is laid into a complex scene.  So many images were combined that it was not possible to maintain a uniform black background.  Digital processing does not have this problem.  You can combine a virtually unlimited number of images into one frame without anyone being able to tell where the component from one source meets a component from another source.

The Wachowski brothers did a brilliant job of understanding that these new capabilities allowed action sequences to be taken up a notch in "The Matrix".  They designed and implemented a number of memorable sequences.  They also integrated the action sequences in a seamless manner.  In the early days of sound the typical Musical would move along doing the usual dialog and story thing.  Then it would stop and do a musical number.  Then it would go back to story and plot.  Action movies often used the same structure.  You could almost see the transitions between the normal movie and the action sequence.  With CGI advances and digital editing the Wachowski brothers were able to integrate CGI effects into what appeared to be the normal part of the movie.  So there was no sharp boundary between the "normal" part of the movie and the "action" part of the movie.  So one of the things that made "The Matrix" such a success was the outstanding action sequences that did not stand out from the rest of the movie.

The two sequels that completed the trilogy were released in 2003.  With the success of the original the Wachowskis were given a boat load of money.  The state of the art in CGI also advanced.  Computer workstations continued to get cheaper and more powerful.  So the amount of computer power that could be deployed in support of the second and third movies was far greater than that available for the first one.  And again the Wachowskis designed and implemented action sequences that took advantage of this additional capability.  They raised the bar.  The action sequences are more complex and more elaborate than the ones in the first movie.  But in spite of, and I argue because of, these very advances the action sequences in the second and third movies are less satisfactory than the now primitive looking action sequences found in the first one.  Why is this?

One problem with the sequences in the latter movies are that they are generally "more" rather than "better".  The villain in the first movie is called Agent Smith and is played brilliantly by Hugo Weaving.  Smith is also carried forward to the second and third movie.  In the first movie Nero, played woodenly by Keanu Reeves in all three movies, battles one Smith.  In the second movie he battles several then hundreds of identical Smiths.  By the time of the grand finale at the end of the third movie he is battling one Smith while thousands of Smith clones watch, presumably ready to step in to help if the "Hero Smith" needs it.

There is so much going on in the action sequences in the last two movies that it is hard to follow them and they seem to go on forever.  In the second movie there is a big chase scene.  It starts out in a nightclub.  Then it moves to a garage.  Then it moves to outside streets.  Then it moves to a freeway.  On the freeway we dodge between cars while people shoot at each other.  Then there is the Samurai sword fight on the top of a truck.  Then there is a motorcycle chase.  Then there is a big scene where two "18 wheeler" trucks slam into each other head on.  It's just too long and complex.  We start out excited.  Then we become worn out.  Then we just become bored.  When can we get back to the plot?  It's a bad sign when you are waiting for an action scene to end because you are bored.

In the third movie there is an epic battle for the dock (it doesn't matter what the dock is).  In this case we have the usual rag tag band of good guys.  But there are about 250,000 bad guys.  I'm not going to run you through another "first this happened then that happened" description of the scene.  Instead let me do some math.  There are a bunch of good guys shooting at the bad guys with machine gun-like weapons.  Let's say they are shooting 250 rounds per second and they manage to hit a bad guy with every single round.  Now this is a stretch, even for a world in which the good guys are inevitably good shots and the bad guys are inevitably bad shots, but stick with me.  At this rate it would take 1,000 seconds, or almost 17 minutes to kill all the bad guys.  Just how long can you stay interested in a good guy grimacing and going rat-a-tat-a-tat. In my case, and I imagine in yours too, its far less than 17 minutes.  While the titanic battle is going on the movie cuts back and forth to another scene.  But it's the usual "can the good guys make it through the gate before the bad guys get them" stuff.

Now from a technical point of view both scenes are brilliantly done.  It is wondrous how the zillions of bad guys are realized in the "dock" stuff.  It really looks like there could be 250,000 of them.  But that's just too many.  Similarly, there are too many bad guys chasing the other group.  And there is only so much "swoop and shimmy" as they are chased around obstacle after obstacle.  And just how many parts can you knock off a vehicle as you cut it too close time after time, and still believe the vehicle will not be put out of action?  It's all just too much of a good thing.

There's another way to look at it.  In the first movie most of the action is fights.  And most of the fights are mano a mano, say Neo against one Smith.  In the other fights it's one good guy against a few bad guys, say three, or a small number of good guys against a roughly equal number of bad guys.  All this is human scale.  We can develop a rooting interest in our hero.  And in the early part of the first movie it's established that the bad guys are more powerful than the good guys.  So you have a number of scenes where a good guy will end up fighting a bad guy.  Then when things start going badly the good guy will break off and run away.  All this creates dramatic tension.  Now let me create some dramatic tension myself by breaking off and talking about plot.

Frankly, one of the things a good plot does is justify the action.  The plot should logically force the hero to come into opposition to the villain and be forced to fight him (or chase or be chased or blow stuff up).  That's kind of the minimum the plot is required to do.  In the later James Bond movies we took it as a given that Bond was a hero and the bad guy was a villain and that Bond's job was to stop him.  So the minimum requirements were barely met.  Unconsciously we knew the plot was just going through the motions and that diminished the whole endeavor, which in turn made watching the movie less of a pleasure, which finally resulted in diminished box office grosses.

The plot of "The Matrix" was not any kind of minimalist effort.  It was inherently interesting and it did a great job of justifying the action.  The core of the plot was of all things a philosophical question:  What is reality?  In "The Matrix" it turns out that what appears to be the real world is actually a computer construct.  But it is so cunningly constructed that it is essentially impossible to tell that it is a construct, the Matrix of the title.  It turns out that if the construct is done cunningly enough it is literally impossible to show that it is not actual reality.  Of course the Matrix is flawed in small ways, allowing the good guys to know that it is a construct.  If the Matrix was perfectly constructed we wouldn't have a movie.  And the reason why any one or any thing would feel the need to construct such an elaborate illusion is a complete joke.  Supposedly human beings make great batteries.  In reality the laws of Thermodynamics require that human beings make lousy batteries.  You end up putting many in times the energy in the form of food into them than the amount of energy you could possibly get out of them.  But that's nit picking.  A cool movie always demands a certain amount of suspension of disbelief.

Since the Matrix is artificial, if you are in the know you don't have to follow those pesky laws of physics.  Instead you can have fun.  And specifically, you can be a way cool Kung Fu fighter.  And, again for reasons that are best put into the "suspension of disbelief" bucket, the best way to defeat the bad guys is to be a much better and cooler Kung Fu fighter than your normal bad guy.  So there's our justification for lots of cool Kung Fu fighting. And this "you can bend the laws of physics" thing permits and justifies all kinds of jumps across impossibly large distances, action with cool automatic weapons, action with helicopters, in short, lots of really cool mayhem.

And there are a number of other small pieces of philosophical conundrums thrown in, each in a very entertaining manner.  There is a really nice short bit where Neo knocks over a vase.  The philosophical problem results from the fact that Neo would probably not have knocked over the vase if the Oracle (another character) had not said "watch out for the vase" first.  So there is a nice "cause and effect" puzzle pulled off in about 30 seconds of film time.  These bits add gravitas to the movie.

Of course the whole thing is a bit of "I only read Playboy for the articles".  Hugh Hefner was smart enough to realize that by putting those articles in side by side with pictures of pretty unclothed ladies it would give his magazine some gravitas which would provide some measure of cover justifying more young males buying more copies of his magazine.  To see what I mean let's take the core of the Matrix premise seriously for the moment.

Neo is a computer hacker.  The Matrix is a computer construct.  By applying his knowledge that it's not real combined with that fact that it is computer generated, combined with his computer skills, Neo should be able to seriously bend the rules.  The problem is: what rules to bend.  Let's take a quick journey into the land of computers using Unix as our example.  (Don't panic -- this is not going to get very technical).  Unix uses something called "shells".  Shells fall into three general categories in terms of power.  The shell with the least power is called a "restricted shell".  It is only allowed to do a few things and the whole idea is that a restricted shell is not supposed to be able to break out into the wide world of the full Unix environment.  As the name implies, a "standard shell" has normal powers.  It can can navigate through the wide world of the full Unix environment but it is not supposed to be able to get into the guts of the system and break it.  The "root shell" is all powerful.  It can do anything it wants to do including change or destroy any or all of the system.  The root shell exists so the system itself has enough power to build and maintain itself.

In the Matrix world Neo starts out as a restricted shell.  He doesn't have enough power to see the real system so he presents no threat to the real system.  When Neo breaks out into the "real" (as opposed to the artificial "Matrix") world it's like he has graduated from being a restricted shell to being a standard shell.  He is not powerful enough to destroy the core system (called the Kernel in Unix-speak) but he can at least see it.  Any hacker worth his salt who is given standard shell capability tries to find a "back door" that gets him "root shell" power.  There is some business with the "key maker" in the second and third movie that is analogous to this.  If you go through the right door (a back door, perhaps) you disappear into the guts of the system.  In the movie this is represented by a hallway that is invisible to the normal Matrix environment.

In the movie Neo spends a lot of time doing cool stuff (e.g. Kung Fu, playing with cool guns, etc.) rather than going straight for the "root".  This makes the movie much more fun for the audience.  We get to see cool fights, chases, etc.  But those are not the thoughts and actions of a true hacker.  So the cool stuff (Kung Fu fights, playing with cool guns, etc.) is the Matrix equivalent of pictures of the Playboy unclothed pretty girls whereas the philosophy stuff is the equivalent of the Playboy articles.  Now in my callow youth I used to read Playboy.  I read the articles and I looked at the pictures.  And I enjoyed both.  I probably even enjoyed the pictures more because the articles were there.  But the articles without the pictures?  No!  I wouldn't have read that magazine.

And this is demonstrated by the other two movies.  The plot of the other two movies has to do with saving Zion.  It's a classic "save the town (western) or the neighborhood (modern cop movie) or the world (James Bond movie) from the bad guys" plot.  It's just not that interesting.  We've seen this plot enough times that we know that the "whatever" will be saved in the nick of time just before the closing credits.  And there's another problem with the second and third movies.

By the end of the first movie Neo has effectively become Superman.  In fact he flies using the exact same "right fist pumped in the air" style made famous in the Superman movies.  There's even a direct reference to Superman in the dialog.  The problem with being Superman is that taking on normal baddies is just not fair or interesting.  As numerous writers of comic books, TV shows, and movies have learned, if you have a Superman as a good guy you need a super-villain as a bad guy.  Now we learn that Smith has had "upgrades" early in the second movie.  That, combined with the fact that there are now Smith clones all over the place, is supposed to make for a super-villain.  But it just doesn't work.  But wait, there's more.

The problem with super-anything is how do you kill it?  This shows up most clearly in the climax fight at the end of the third movie.  Neo beats the crap out of Smith.  Smith beats the crap out of Neo.  But, since they are supermen, this does not kill or even seriously injure either of them.  So how do you wrap things up?  Well, first you have another action sequence that goes on for far too long while they try unsuccessfully to kill each other.  Then finally they decide that it's not important who wins the fight.  In a big letdown Neo ultimately gets inside Smith and all of his copies and explodes them from the inside then dies himself.

To wrap it all up, it's harder to make a good action movie than it once was.  In fact, it's just plain hard.  The first Matrix move was and still is a great action movie.  That's because it gets the balance right.  It has a truly interesting plot.  The plot has ideas and a great justification for the action.  It has a great babe, at least in my opinion.  The romance never works for me.  I think that's a result of weak writing of the romantic components combined with a wooden performance by Keanu Reeves.  But Carrie-Anne more than makes up for this by being a great action babe.  She looks great doing jumps and fights in the action stuff and is easy on the eyes the rest of the time.  Finally, the action scenes are great.  They are human scale, draw the audience in and cause you to root for the good guys.  They are also very creatively done.  With all three components in balance the movie rocks.  The other two movies in the series are not so good.  The most obvious defect is the plot.  It's just not that interesting.  The babe/romance is no better but also no worse in these movies.  And finally, in spite of the fact that they are technically far superior, the action sequences in the other movies are inferior to the first movie as entertainment.  The Wachowski brothers spent too much effort putting "more" into the sequences and not enough effort making them entertaining and human scale so they would draw us in.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

This is a book written by Jamie Ford that I recently finished reading.  If you are looking for a review of the book, look elsewhere.  What I want to talk about is the history covered in the book.  Most of the action takes place in 1942.  The rest of the action takes place in 1986 where we find out what happened to the main character.  I will focus on the 1942 activities.

The main character is a Chinese boy who is 12 years old at the time.  He falls in love with a Japanese girl who is a few months older.  Most of the action takes place in Chinatown and Japantown in Seattle during the early part of World War II.  A key point is the hostility between the Chinese and Japanese during this period.  Towards the end of the book the girl is sent to an internment camp in Idaho.  Before this happens one of the impediments to the romance is the boy's father.  The father hates the Japanese.  The father is not aberrant.  This is an opinion that was broadly shared within the Chinese community.  The book spends some time on why this was so but I want to get into this in more detail.

The cause is both the result of domestic politics within the U.S. and also of international politics.  And funnily enough you can get another look at this issue in an entirely different book.  The book is, of all things "Charlie Chan" by Yunte Huang.  The center of the Chan book is the fictional detective named in the title.  Charlie Chan was immensely popular (6 books, a couple of dozen movies) between 1925 and the late '40s.  The author takes pains to set the Chan the phenomenon in the context of the Chinese, and to some extent the Japanese experience in the U.S.  There were no orientals in the U.S. in any numbers until California businessmen imported Chinese to work originally in the Gold fields and later on the railroad.  At some point the need for labor to work in these industries dried up.  The the same businessmen who had originally supported Chinese immigration reacted by stirring up "yellow peril" trouble and causing anti-Chinese immigration laws to be passed.  This caused other businessmen to turn to the Japanese as a source of cheap exploitable labor that got around the Chinese exclusion laws.  So almost from the beginning the Chinese and Japanese were put into competition with each other.

And this competitive situation was a microscopic version of what had been happening in Asia for millennia.  The Chinese have been the dominant culture in Asia for thousands of years.  The Chinese influence on Japanese language, writing, and culture is so strong that it can't be ignored. So a major aspect of the Japanese experience has been the effort by the Japanese to differentiate themselves from the Chinese.  So while Japanese writing is superficially similar to Chinese there are many differences in the details.  The same is true of Japanese architecture.  There are overlapping themes and motifs but at a detailed level there are many differences.  And so it goes through all of Japanese culture.  The Japanese swim in an ocean of Chinese culture but, where they can, they try to build in some distance.  This long battle for a separate identity results in a certain amount of resentment by the Japanese toward the Chinese.

And the modern (last 500 years) history of the two countries has diverged quite a bit.  Both countries spent a lot of time initially rejecting western influences.  Over a long period of time various assaults by Europeans weakened the Chinese to the point that by about 1900 the country as a whole was a basket case.  The Japanese also followed a course of rejecting western influence.  But eventually they too were forced to abandon this course.  The Japanese response was to do a complete reversal.  They embraced western culture particularly western business and military methods.  This was so successful that in 1905 the Japanese scored a military victory against a traditional western power in the Russo-Japanese War.  They did it by using traditional western technology operated in the usual western manner.  In the 1920's the Japanese were a party in the 5-5-3 Naval treaty, a very big deal at the time.  By this time they were seen as having a completely modern and western navy and the third largest in the world.  So during the run up to World War II you had China, effectively a third world basket case as opposed to Japan, now a major power and one of the largest.  This was a complete reversal of fortunes.  Japan was now culturally, economically, and politically the premier Asian power.  This could have engendered a great deal of resentment by Chinese with respect to Japanese.

But there was a much more powerful and more specific basis for bitter resentment of Japanese by Chinese.  In the summer of 1937 Japan invaded China.  China at this time was too weak to represent a political, economic, or military threat to Japan.  It was a pure and simple power grab, a colonial annexation, if you will.  And the war was particularly viscous.  China was much larger in terms of both physical size and of population.  The only way Japan could pull it off, and do so cheaply, was to use its much superior military to intimidate the Chinese population into submission and acquiescence.  An example of Japanese tactics was the so called "Rape of Nanking", which involved the wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of Chinese civilians.  To be effective in intimidating the rest of the Chinese population the rest of the Chinese population needed to be aware of what was going on.  And what was going on inevitably made its way to the overseas Chinese population in places like Chinatown in Seattle.

So by 1942 Chinese communities in places like Seattle were very familiar with the tactics the Japanese were employing in China.  And U.S. politics forced Chinatowns and Japantowns to be adjacent to each other in city after city.  Seattle was no exception.  So it is entirely understandable that in 1942 the average Chinese as exemplified by the main character's father in the "Hotel" book would fear, hate, and resent the Japanese living a couple of blocks away in Japantown.

With all the history that has happened since the 1930s and early 1940s the war between China and Japan has been largely forgotten outside of China and Japan.  Things have evolved to the point where the Nazis pretty much fully occupy the role of WW II villain and the Japanese misbehavior, to use a perhaps too mild term, is far less prominent in our consciousness.

Now that I have explained why a Chinese man in 1942 would very reasonably have not wanted his son to have anything to do with a Japanese girl let me widen my scope and take a more nuanced look at things from the Japanese perspective.  (Spoiler alert:  The book has a happy ending).  As the Chan book admirably points out, by well before 1942 the U.S. perspective had broadened out.  It wasn't just the Chinese that were subhuman and undeserving of "full human" status, it was any member of "the yellow races", what we would now call Asians.  In most situations, whites saw no reason to differentiate between Chinese and Japanese.  And the very idea that there might be still other kinds of "yellow devils" like Koreans, Viet Namese, etc. had just not entered anyone's consciousness.

I have already alluded to an example of this sort of racism in action and directed specifically at the Japanese.  The 5-5-3 Naval treaty was ostensibly about avoiding an arms race.  The Battleship was the super weapon of its era.  By the 1920's there had been several generations of Battleships and each generation was substantially more expensive than the previous generation.  For instance the Dreadnought, the original Battleship, was built by the British in1906 and was considered obsolete by 1912.  Battleship construction was consuming larger and larger chunks of military budgets.  If this kept on too long bankruptcy seemed the inevitable result.  So the idea of the 5-5-3 treaty was to cap the rate of construction of Battleships.  The British and Americans would be allowed to build equal amounts of tonnage (5 to 5) and everyone else would build less.  So why couldn't the Japanese build the same amount of tonnage as the Brits and the Americans?  Simple racism and because at the time the Brits and the Americans could force the Japanese to accept lesser status and only get to build 3 for every 5 the Brits and the Americans could build.

And, of course, the seminal event around which "Hotel" is built is the internment of people of Japanese descent in the early days of WW II.  The measure was justified on military grounds - "they be spies and saboteurs".  But that's nonsense.  All you have to do is to look at what happened to the other two nationalities on the WW II "enemies" list: the Germans and the Italians.  In all the years since the war and even during the war there was precious little evidence of spying and sabotage by Japanese-Americans.  All the intelligence work done leading up to Pearl Harbor, for instance, was done by Japanese diplomatic people or by people brought in from Japan by the Japanese government specifically as spies.  No Japanese-Americans living in Hawaii were involved in spying.  And there is no evidence of spying by Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast either.

Contrast this with the German community.  By the late '30s there was a large network of "bunds", clubs formed to support Hitler and to agitate for Nazi interests.  Hollywood made numerous "B" movies about the FBI breaking up German spy rings in the run up to the war.  There were well known and prominent Nazi sympathizers like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh.  Yet there was no general roundup of people of German origin and no action against prominent Nazi sympathisers.  Of course, all these Nazi sympathisers and people of German origins all came out as "100% all American" after war was declared.  But there is little or no evidence that Japanese-Americans were ever anything except "100% all American" at any time and large numbers of them volunteered to sign various pledges immediately after hostilities broke out.  And although the Italian pro-Mussolini forces were never as active as the German pro-Hitler people, the Italian model generally followed the German one.

Finally, I want to note a small and, as far as I know now completely forgotten, piece of Washington State history.  I had a paper route while I was in High School.  My father helped me out on Sunday when the papers were particularly overwhelming.  I distinctly remember a story on the car radio during one of these Sunday excursions with my dad.  There was about an Initiative on the ballot.  If approved it would again make it legal for people of Japanese descent to own real property in Washington State.  Some time during WW II the state had passed a law making it illegal for people of Japanese origin to own property even if they were U.S. citizens.  This heinous law effectively made it legal for white people to steal land, etc. from the poor Japanese people who had been bundled off to the internment camps.  In the early '60s an effort was made to get this horrible law off the books.  The State Legislature and State Courts had apparently been too gutless to do it themselves.  So at some point an Initiative campaign had been launched.  The campaign for the initiative was deliberately kept low key so as to avoid stirring up anti-Japanese racism.  Fortunately, the campaign worked and the law was finally gotten off the books.

My experience with this initiative (at the time I know nothing of the background and was mystified about why the original law existed) and other experiences since have convinced me of something.  All peoples, Europeans, Asians, Africans, Americans, whoever I have left out, are capable of wickedness at least some of the time.  And all peoples are capable of goodness some of the time.  I don't buy the argument that some person or group of people are evil (or good) because of who they are.  I try to judge them by what they do.  And I expect that I will judge anyone to have at times done evil and at other times to have done good.  Google's slogan is "Don't be evil".  I think most of the time they live up to that slogan.  But not all of the time.  The great villain of our time is Osama bin Laden.  Certainly he has done a lot of evil.  But I am sure he has done good some of the time.  But don't get me wrong, I'm glad he is dead.