Toshio Yatsushiro, Ph.D. (1917–2015) was born in Hawaii to Japanese immigrant parents. He had a long career that spanned sociology and anthropology in academic and government research environments. But his professional life began during what should have been his college years, which were spent in an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II.
Yatsushiro was studying sociology at the University of Redlands when the US entered the war. In February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, forcing Japanese Americans out of their homes and into internment camps, where they were imprisoned for the remainder of the war. Yatsushiro, with his uncle’s family from California, were ordered to the Colorado River War Relocation Authority (WRA) camp in Arizona, more commonly known by the name of the town where it was located: Poston. Physically the largest of the camps, over seventeen thousand people were incarcerated there.
The land where the camp was established was part of the Colorado River Reservation, which the WRA had commandeered despite the objections of the Tribal Council with authority over the area. But the Office of Indian Affairs had plans for infrastructure development on the reservation. The camp provided a source of free agricultural and other labor.

Poston, Arizona. Highway leading to the War Relocation Authority center for evacuees of Japanese ancestry on the Colorado River Indian Reservation. National Archives (ID: 536010)
In November 1942, Japanese Americans protested injustice at the camps with a well-organized general strike. Eventually negotiations ended the strike but concerns about how to manage the camp led to the establishment of the Bureau of Social Research (BSR) under the management of Dr. Alexander Leighton, a sociologist and psychiatrist. He was charged with using emerging research methodologies to understand the camp prisoners, and, like most of the work of the camp, his staff was primarily drawn from the incarcerated camp residents. Among his first recruits for the new research group was Toshio Yatsushiro.
BSR developed a broad research agenda that included intensive interviews, analysis of administrative data, and public opinion polls. The research team, consisting largely of inmates in the camp, received intensive training from Harry Field and Gordon M. Connelly of NORC, then at University of Denver, which had been conducting surveys since the war began primarily for the surveys division of the Office of War Information.
With Imao Isino, another prisoner at Poston, Yatsushiro traveled to Denver to learn the craft of polling. There they conducted a small survey of 72 Japanese Americans in Denver from an estimated population of 600. Their visit made the front page of The Sampler, NORC’s newsletter.
NORC, The Sampler, 1(2), p 1.
Upon their return to Poston, PORC (Poston Opinion Research Center) was established. The Center conducted four surveys in the camp, two each among the Japanese-speaking and English-speaking resident populations, on the topics of resettlement and the Poston agricultural program. The former formed the basis for a 1944 article in Public Opinion Quarterly (POQ) entitled “The Japanese-American Looks at Resettlement.”
The POQ article minced no words in its description of the camps Yatsushiro had been both researcher and inmate:
In small rooms measuring twenty by twenty-five feet, in Army-type barracks, five to eight persons – often several families – had to make their new “homes.” Privacy was nil. Through the cracks in the walls and floor seeped the all-pervasive dust. In the summertime, the thermometer reached 128 Fahrenheit in the shade; during most of the first winter, a lack of stoves intensified suffering from the cold. Both the quantity and quality of food were sources of anxiety. For a time, health facilities were inadequate, and rumors circulated that babies were dying from “dehydration.”
Before the war ended, Yatsushiro moved with Leighton into the Office of War Information. There they both worked on the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, a large-scale effort to understand the aftereffects of war in the Axis countries that included surveys with leaders and the public. Yatsushiro’s involvement with this project had been hoped for from the beginning of his training at NORC. In the report on the Denver survey, the motivation for the research was described as two-fold: to better understand the Japanese-American city residents and to train the two researchers in preparation for roles in the future: “[s]hould this experimental survey prove successful, Yatsushiro and Ishino may conduct surveys in war relocation centers and later in conquered foreign territories.”
When his work on the Strategic Bombing Survey was completed, Yatsushiro conducted research for the Department of the Interior and the MIT Research Center for Group Dynamics before being recruited to Cornell University by Leighton, who had become a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology there. Yatsushiro completed his Ph.D. at Cornell and went on to a professorship at McGill University, where he worked on a government-sponsored research project on Inuit residents of Baffin Island. His analysis was critical of government policies towards the community. The government later removed him from the project.
In 1962, Yatsushiro left McGill to conduct research for the United States Information Agency in Southeast Asia, where he once again took professional risks with his forthright critiques of U.S. government policies. After six years, he returned to his home state of Hawaii, where he served as faculty at University of Hawaii until 1980.
He utilized multiple methodologies in his research, seeing quantitative and qualitative approaches as complementary. As he wrote in a review of Douglas Mendel’s book The Japanese People and Foreign Policy: A Study of Public Opinion in Post Treaty Japan:
Although the validity or usefulness of poll results may be doubted by some, perhaps because of the tendency of public opinion to fluctuate or to be uninformed, scientifically conducted polls are far more reliable measures of true public attitudes than the shrewd guesses of politicians, government officials, or political experts. And when poll results are complemented by relevant data derived by other means - for example, intensive interviews with key informants representing different interest groups, and general observation - the resulting analysis can be extremely informative as to the true nature of public sentiment.
In the earliest years of survey and public opinion research, under the horrific oppression faced by Japanese-Americans in the year during and after the war, Yatsushiro made major contributions to research in service of the very government that had imprisoned him. Over his career, he conducted critically important research focused on marginalized and colonized populations and never shrank from presenting even those findings and analyses that implicated the policies of his funders.
Resources:
Hirabayashi, Lane. Toshio Yatsushiro. (2024, September 10). Densho Encyclopedia. Retrieved 10:25, October 25, 2024 from https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Toshio%20Yatsushiro.
Inouye, Karen. Bureau of Sociological Research, Poston. (2024, June 23). Densho Encyclopedia. Retrieved 10:24, October 25, 2024 from https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Bureau%20of%20Sociological%20Research,%20Poston.
Japanese American Relocation Center Records, 3830, Boxes 2 and 3, Cornell University Library Special Collections, https://catalog.library.cornell.edu/catalog/2070054.
Leighton, Alexander H. The Governing of Men: General Principles and Recommendations Based on Experience at a Japanese Relocation Camp . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1945.
Yatsushiro, T., Ishino, I., & Matsumoto, Y. (1944). The Japanese-American looks at resettlement. Public Opinion Quarterly, 8(2), 188-201. https://doi.org/10.1086/265680
Yatsushiro, T. (1962). The Japanese People and Foreign Policy: A Study of Public Opinion in Post-Treaty Japan. By Douglas H. Mendel, Jr. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1961. Pp. xv, 251. Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique, 28(4), 630-631.