For many hundreds of years the lowest position in Japanese social structure has been occupied by the eta, a hereditary outcaste group which performed necessary but despised work. The presence, in the United States, of a con siderable number of persons of eta descent was revealed rather dramatically when the American Government obliged the evacuated Japanese Americans to answer a questionnaire designed to determine whether or not they were loyal to America. When an attempt was made to correlate affirmative or negative answers to the question naire with place of residence before evacuation, it was discovered that evacuees coming from certain California communities were almost unanimously loyal to America and obviously had no desire to return or go to Japan. Later the possible reasons for this unanimity were inves tigated, and it was found that these sections of California had been rather heavily populated by Japanese of eta descent. The data to be presented were collected under rather peculiar circumstances.1 The Japanese Americans had recently been removed to reloca tion centers, an experience which involved great hardship and discomfort to all of them and great economic loss to most of them. Life within the centers tended to weaken the social and economic distinctions which had existed before the evacu ation. All persons, regardless of their status, were obliged to eat in crude, common mess halls, use the public latrines, and conform to a large degree to the rough and ready mores which developed in this extremely crowded and public environment.2 We have here then data on a traditionally mis treated and scorned outcast group, obtained at a time when the majority group was itself suffering from marked discrimination and ill treatment. Following the simple psychological theory that a group which is persecuted by another group too strong to resist will turn its aggression on some convenient and relatively helpless scapegoat, we might expect that ill treatment of the gia. would be revived and strengthened in this situation. On the other hand, if we choose to view human beings as predominantly rational, we might hypothesize that because they themselves suffered discrimi nation, the Japanese Americans would become more kindly disposed toward the eta. In point of fact, the latter process did occur to some degree. A much moresalientphenomenon, however, was the turning of anger on a relatively new scapegoat group, the informers those Jap anese Americans suspected of reporting pro Japanese or anti-administrative activities to the administration. The significance of this develop ment will be treated in some detail in the