The "loyalty" questionnaire had many unintended consequences, particularly because the WRA simultaneously borrowed the form to initiate its own loyalty investigation of female Nisei and adult Issei without adequate revisions to the form. Question number 27 asked if Nisei men were willing to serve on combat duty wherever ordered and asked everyone else if they would be willing to serve in other ways, such as serving in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps. Question number 28 asked if individuals would swear unqualified allegiance to the United States and forswear any form of allegiance to the Emperor of Japan. Both questions caused a great deal of concern and unrest. Citizens resented being asked to renounce loyalty to the Emperor of Japan when they had never held a loyalty to the Emperor. Japanese immigrants were barred from becoming U.S. citizens on the basis of race, so renouncing their only citizenship would be problematic, leaving them stateless. Young men worried that declaring their willingness to serve in combat units of the army would be akin to volunteering.
Issei organized their own resistance to registration and succeeded in forcing the WRA to change the form before they would be required to respond. The title of the form had been "Application for Leave Clearance" implying that Issei had voluntarily requested the form. It was changed to read simply "Questionnaire." An alternative question was also provided so that Issei would not risk the possibility of losing all citizenship if they renounced allegiance to the Emperor of Japan and declared loyalty to the United States. On February 12, 1943, the WRA announced that they had revised the loyalty question for the Issei. Issei would be asked simply, "Will you swear to abide by the laws of the United States and take no action which would in any way interfere with the war effort of the United States?"
Since Nisei were being required to fill out their forms as a part of the Selective Service process, their requests for a clarification of their citizenship rights, complaints about the segregated combat team created for Nisei, and discussion about refusing to fill out the form until complaints and demands for a full restoration of citizenship rights were met resulted in threats that Nisei who refused to comply with this Selective Service process would be prosecuted with violating the Espionage Act.
Even though WRA revisions to Issei questionnaires and legal threats against Nisei who refused to comply seemed to crush organized resistance against registration, individuals continued to find ways to express their discontent with not only registration, but segregated combat service for Nisei and the entire program of exclusion, incarceration, and relocation of Japanese Americans regardless of citizenship and with a total disregard for due process of law. Only 1,208 people, fewer than 6 percent of eligible Nisei, enlisted in the military voluntarily from the camps as a whole. This number fell far short of the quota the War Department had set for itself in creating the all-Nisei combat team. It was hoping for at least 2,000 initial volunteers. Seventeen percent of all registrants and approximately 20 percent of all Nisei answered "No" to the loyalty questions number 27 and 28. Most shocking to WRA administrators was the sharp rise in applications for repatriation and expatriation. By 1943, the number of requests had surpassed nine thousand, and most new applicants were citizen Nisei. The trend continued into 1944, when the number of requests topped out at nearly twenty thousand, or 16 percent of the total incarcerated population. Of 19,963 Nisei of military age, only 6 percent had volunteered; approximately 800 of the 1,181 volunteers passed the loyalty tests and their physical examinations and were inducted into the original
442n . By contrast, 24 percent answered "No" to question 28, for a total of 4,783. An astonishingly high 50 percent answered "No" at
Manzanar. By contrast, only 2 percent answered "No" at
Minidoka. Overall, 6,700 answered "No" to question 28, and an additional 2,000 qualified their answers. Sixty-five thousand responded with an unqualified "Yes."
