Words Matter: The Language of the Japanese American Incarceration in World War II

How we name a historical injustice shapes how we understand it. In 2021, the National Park Service — which preserves Japanese American confinement sites such as Manzanar, Minidoka, Tule Lake, Honouliuli and the Aleutian Islands — published guidance on the words its staff use for the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, so as not to repeat the government’s wartime euphemisms or later terms that understate the injustice done to more than 120,000 people.

What happened

On February 19, 1942, after Japan’s December 7, 1941 attack on Hawaiʻi and decades of discriminatory laws aimed at Japanese immigrants and their children, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, directing the Secretary of War to “prescribe military areas … from which any or all persons may be excluded.” Under it, General John DeWitt directed the forcible removal of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans — U.S.-born citizens and their immigrant parents — from their West Coast homes. They were rounded up and held in remote, harsh, overcrowded camps run by the War Relocation Authority (WRA). By war’s end the government had incarcerated 120,000 Japanese Americans.

Throughout the war, government newsreels and press coverage portrayed all this benignly, with carefully chosen words: “evacuation,” “relocation,” “evacuee,” “relocation center.” Later, a second campaign urged the same people to leave the camps and “relocate” outside the western states.

An unsettled debate

There is no universal agreement on terms, and the debate — running since the war and prominent during the Redress Movement of the 1960s and 1970s — still stirs strong feelings. Scholars and community voices including Roger Daniels, Sue Kunitomi Embrey, Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, Yoshinori H. T. Himel, James Hirabayashi and Raymond Okamura, the Japanese American Citizens League and Densho have all written about it.

The NPS approach is interpretive: use accurate words, explain their history, respect that people who were incarcerated may describe their experience however they choose, and keep the conversation open.

Places

Concentration camp. Scholars who have studied the question broadly agree the term is accurate for these sites. In 1998, ahead of an exhibit at Ellis Island, the Japanese American National Museum and the American Jewish Committee issued a joint statement defining a concentration camp as a place where people are imprisoned for who they are, not for any crime — and noting that in every case, those in power removed a minority and the rest of society let it happen. From 2018, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum published statements that seemed to push back. NPS staff may use the term with context, understanding how deeply it affects people.

Internment camp. “Internment” is a term of international law: the Department of Justice and the Army interned selected non-citizens from Japan, Germany, Italy and a few other nations, generally under the Geneva Conventions. Applying it to the mass, race-based incarceration of mostly American citizens misuses it. The NPS distinguishes those internment camps from the 10 WRA confinement sites.

Imprisonment vs. incarceration. Imprisonment implies conviction for a crime; incarceration simply means confinement, with no judgment of guilt — so the WRA sites can accurately be called incarceration or confinement sites.

Movement

• Evacuation: today it means moving people out of harm’s way, but the Army and officials like DeWitt and Col. Karl Bendetsen used it for logistics. The NPS should not call the forced removal of more than 110,000 people an “evacuation.”
• Relocation: used for two movements — the forced removal into the camps, and, from early 1943, the WRA’s push to send people to the Midwest and East. Avoid it for the removal.
• Say instead: forced removal, expulsion, mass removal; for leaving the camps, resettlement.

People

Labels like “evacuee,” “internee” and “incarceree” reduce people to what was done to them. Prefer phrasing that respects their humanity:

Other terms describe people by heritage and generation: Nikkei (people of Japanese ancestry), Issei (first generation), Nisei (second), Kibei (Nisei educated in Japan who returned), and Sansei (third).

Sources

Based on "Terminology and the Mass Incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II," National Park Service (2021); a work of the United States government in the public domain, with the quoted views of scholars and organizations rewritten in hubnx’s own words. The source’s “American Holocaust Memorial Museum” is corrected, from its own bibliography, to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and its misspelling “Owen’s Valley” to Owens Valley.