Performance in the wartime archive : Michio Ito at the Alien Enemy Hearing Board

Abstract

The day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the recently formed Federal Bureau of Investigation ordered the incarceration of 770 Japanese and Japanese American “alien enemies.”1 These arrests came two months before Executive Order 9066, which infamously called for the mass incarceration of 110,000 people of Japanese descent on the West Coast of the United States.2 Among these initial 770 alien enemies was the modernist dancer and choreographer Michio Ito. In the documents establishing his detention, the Alien Enemy Hear-ing Board found Ito to be “an artist of artistic temperament, striking appear-ance, fine manners, cultured, educated and capable of any and all sorts of pro-paganda, espionage and sabotage.”3 In this essay, I interrogate this sentence’s central conjunction, the grammatical choreography that links art, culture, and education to propaganda, espionage, and sabotage.