Roger Daniels, "Words Do Matter: A Note on Inappropriate Terminology 

and the Incarceration of the Japanese Americans." In Louis Fiset and Gail Nomura, 

eds. Nikkei in the Pacific Northwest: Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians in the 

Twentieth Century. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005, pp. 183-207. 

© 2005 by Roger Daniels. Reprinted with permission of the author. 

 On or about August 2, 1979, I received a telephone call from Senator Daniel K. Inouye’s 

Washington office.1 One of his administrative assistants read me a draft of what became Senate Bill 

1647 calling for the establishment of a “Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of 

Civilians (CWRIC).” The call came because I had been advising the staff of the Japanese American 

Citizens League and others about the campaign for redress. After hearing the draft I commented that 

it sounded good to me except that the word “internment” was inappropriate and that “incarceration” 

was a more accurate term.2 She asked what the difference was, and I explained that “internment” 

was an ordinary aspect of declared wars and referred to a legal process, described in United States 

statutes, to be applied to nationals of a country with which the United States was at war. I pointed 

out that perhaps eight thousand Japanese nationals had been formally interned by the government 

during World War II, beginning as early as the night of December 7-8, 1941, and that, although a 

great deal of injustice accompanied this wartime internment, it was conducted legally, and those 

interned got a semblance of due process.3 What happened to most of the West Coast Japanese 

Americans in 1942, I continued, should not be described with a word describing a legal process, 

even though the phrase “internment” was widely used not only in the literature but by many 

Japanese Americans. After some discussion she said that the difference was clear to her and that the 

bill’s text would be changed. In a second phone call, the next day, she told me that, unfortunately, 

the senator had not waited for my vetting and had secured the agreement of a number of other 

senators to co-sponsor the bill and that he would not countenance any changes. 

Thus, not for the first time, inappropriate, euphemistic language was employed, officially, to 

describe what happened to West Coast Japanese Americans in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. 

Although, over time, the consciousness of Japanese and other Americans has been raised, most 

notably by the successful redress movement which resulted in the passage of the Civil Liberties Act 

of 1988, which eventually produced both an apology and a payment of $20,000 to more than eighty 

thousand survivors, most of the literature about the wartime events still uses language created 

during and immediately after World War II. In this essay I will first outline, briefly, the history of 

statutory internment in American history, and then trace and analyze some of the inappropriate 

language that has been used and try to show why it is important to call things by their right names 

and how the use of such language helped to mask the true nature of an American war crime. 

*****

Internment has long been recognized in both American and international law. By World War II it 

was regulated by a system of rules -- the Geneva Convention -- which governed the treatment of 

prisoners of war and was sometimes extended to civilian enemy nationals, including diplomats, 

resident in or captured by a belligerent nation. Although the first statute to use the term “alien 

enemy” was passed during John Adams’s administration, there was no formally declared war, and 

no internment occurred.4 The first actual internment by the United States government occurred 

during the war of 1812 when some resident British, mostly merchants, were ordered to remove 
2

themselves fifty miles inland. British merchants in New York City, for example, were interned, but 

left at liberty up the Hudson at Newburgh.

The United States next resorted to the process during World War I. At that time there were 

about half a million unnaturalized resident aliens of German birth in the United States who were 

proclaimed “alien enemies” as soon as the United States declared war in April 1917. Some eight 

thousand enemy aliens -- the vast majority of them Germans and almost all the rest subjects of 

Austria-Hungary -- were arrested under presidential warrants, but nearly three-quarters of them 

were released within a short time. Only about 2,300 enemy nationals resident in the United States 

were actually interned, 90 percent of them German and all but a few of them male.5

During World War II, internment of Germans and Italians began more than two years before 

the United States formally entered the war in December 1941. A few seamen from German vessels 

stranded in U.S. ports were interned shortly after the outbreak of war in September 1939, as were, 

after June 1940, perhaps a thousand Italians, seamen and a group of food workers from the Italian 

exhibition at the New York World’s Fair of 1939-40.6 All of these were persons without permanent 

resident status; no resident aliens were interned in the period before the United States went to war.

Shortly after the fall of France, Congress passed the Alien Registration Act of 1940,7 which 

required, for the first time in American history, that all resident aliens register annually at post 

offices and keep the government apprised of any change of address. Among the several million 

registrants were 695,363 Italians, 314,715 Germans, and 91,858 Japanese, so that, after the United 

States went to war, there were about a million unnaturalized natives of the Axis powers resident in 

the United States, all of whom were, according to both American and international law, potential 

internees.

When war came President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed three similar public proclamations 

on December 7 and 8, 1941, which, under the authority of sections 21-24 of Title 50 of the United 

States Code, declared that Japan, Germany, and Italy were at war with the United States and that, 

accordingly, in the language of the law, “all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of [those 

countries], being of the age of fourteen years and upward, who shall be in the United States and not 

actually naturalized,8 shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien 

enemies.”9 Austrian and Korean resident aliens, who had German and Japanese nationality 

respectively, were not declared enemy aliens.10

The Roosevelt administration never intended to intern any sizable percentage of those 

million alien enemies. Attorney General Francis Biddle, a civil libertarian of sorts, and his staff in 

the Department of Justice wanted a minimal program and were aware of the gross injustices 

suffered by German and Italian resident aliens in Winston Churchill’s Great Britain.11 In preparation 

for war, various federal security agencies, military and civilian, had prepared Custodial Detention 

Lists, better known as the “ABC Lists,” master indexes of persons who were, allegedly, potentially 

dangerous subversives.12 The “A” list consisted of persons identified as “known dangerous” aliens; 

the “B” list contained individuals who were “potentially dangerous”; and the “C” list was composed 

of people who merited surveillance due to pro-Axis sympathies or propaganda activities. As is 

common for internal security lists, they were largely based not on investigations of individuals, but 

on “guilt by association,” as most of the names came from membership and subscription lists of 

organizations and publications deemed subversive. 

It is not yet possible -- and may never be -- to give precise figures for either the total number 

of persons interned or how many there were of each nationality. Several civilian agencies, chiefly 

the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), 

and the military authorities made arrests, and the surviving records are incomplete. Until spring 
3

1943, civilian internees were largely under military custody; most were then transferred to the INS, 

which had held some civilians since early in the war. At various times the INS reported, with what 

seems like studied vagueness, on the number of persons it held, but its reports do not always make 

clear what categories of persons were being counted. In late 1944 J. Edgar Hoover reported that 

14,807 enemy aliens had been taken into custody by the FBI, of whom nearly two-fifths had “been 

ordered interned by the Attorney General and the military authorities.”13

Hoover’s seemingly precise figures leave room for doubt: early in the war many individuals 

were arrested by various local authorities and held under military auspices in places like Camp 

Forrest, Tennessee,14 and they probably were not included in his totals. Given the current state of 

our knowledge, the best “guesstimate” of the total number of persons actually interned is something 

under 11,000, broken down as follows: Japanese, perhaps 8,000; Germans, perhaps 2,300 

(coincidentally about the same number as in World War I), and only a few hundred Italians. Many 

more had been arrested and held in custody for days and even weeks without being officially 

interned. In addition, the United States government brought more than 2,264 Japanese (chiefly from 

Peru), 4,058 Germans, and 288 Italians into the United States from a total of fifteen Latin American 

countries, and interned them.15 And finally, more than 3,100 Japanese, initially incarcerated by the 

War Relocation Authority (WRA), were later turned over to the INS for internment.

When the internment program started in 1939 there were no existing internment camps. 

Many of the first, pre-Pearl Harbor German and Italian internees were housed for a time at Ellis 

Island, Angel Island, and aboard their own ships; others were sent to INS camps set up in existing 

permanent army barracks and other federal buildings, where conditions were often more 

comfortable than in the later purpose-built or converted camps. Most of the prewar Italians, for 

example, were sent to Fort Missoula, Montana, where they lived in brick barracks with steam heat. 

Eventually most internees wound up in INS internment camps, primarily in Louisiana, Texas, and 

New Mexico.16 The facilities and living conditions in all of these camps for enemy aliens were 

superior to those in the concentration camps in which Japanese American United States citizens 

were held, partly because the U.S. State Department insisted that Geneva Convention conditions be 

maintained in them in the hope that the Axis powers, or some of them, would reciprocate.17

Once war actually came, the often-competing American security agencies, civilian and 

military, constantly raised the number of persons to be interned. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, for 

example, had a pre-Pearl Harbor list of 770 Japanese aliens who would require detention in case of 

war.18 Yet, a little over two months after Pearl Harbor, it had managed to find almost three times 

that many -- 2,192 Japanese -- to intern.19 And so it went. Almost certainly very few of those 

interned were really threats to American national security. To be sure, many if not most of them 

were rooting for their native lands, but the same could be said for many of the million plus 

uninterned alien enemies. Many others were simply torn by conflicting loyalties, such as the Italian 

immigrant who had written President Roosevelt shortly before Pearl Harbor that “since Italy is my 

mother and the United States is my father . . . I don’t want to see my parents fighting,” and got 

interned for his pains.20

Often, especially early in the war, alien enemies were arrested in their homes in the dead of 

night, told to pack a bag, and hauled off to the nearest custodial facility, usually a local jail. 

Sometimes their families did not hear from them for days or even weeks. But many of those arrested 

were released relatively quickly, and, as the numbers cited earlier indicate, only a minority of those 

taken into custody was actually interned. Many, perhaps most, internments fragmented families, as 

in many cases the interned man -- and all but a minuscule percentage of resident American internees 

was male -- was the only breadwinner in the household. In a number of such cases, wives and minor 
4

children, some of them United States citizens, voluntarily joined the family held in internment. One 

INS camp, in Seagoville, Texas, was chiefly for women and children, and eventually another at 

Crystal City, Texas, was set up for families.21

In the case of the Japanese Americans, so many male leaders were seized that not just 

families but entire ethnic communities were decapitated. In addition, since many Japanese 

Americans kept their money in American branches of Japanese banks, their liquid assets were 

frozen as the Treasury Department seized and closed all enemy-owned banks.22 Eventually families 

were allowed to draw up to $100 a month of their own money.

Those who were actually interned had some recourse. Enemy Alien Hearing Boards, 

composed of three or more citizen volunteers, were established in every federal judicial district. 

Each internee had the right to have his or her case reviewed by such a board, which could 

recommend parole or internment -- but the attorney general was not obligated to accept board 

recommendations. The internee could have a relative, friend, or agent attend the hearing, but was 

not allowed to have legal counsel. Evidence of loyalty, testimonial letters, etc., could be presented to 

the board, but the internee was not entitled to know the nature of any charges against him or her or, 

in cases resulting from denunciations, the name of the accuser or even the existence of an 

accusation. Except for anecdotal evidence –(see below), we know next to nothing about such 

boards, the persons who staffed them, how they operated, the number of cases they reviewed, the 

results of such reviews, or how their recommendations were treated by the Department of Justice. 

The review boards helped to ameliorate the internment process, as large numbers of their hearings 

eventually resulted in release. And, even if the review board hearing did not result in release -- the 

internee was not informed of its recommendation -- internees could forward appeals with supporting 

documents to the attorney general. However, some interned aliens did not want to be released, but 

instead signed documents indicating that they wished to be returned to their native lands as quickly 

as possible, which usually meant after the war.

As noted, Geneva Convention conditions generally applied. Diplomatic officials from the 

various “protecting powers” who looked after the interests of enemy nations within the United 

States inspected the internment camps regularly and made note of internee complaints. In addition 

to food, housing, and recreation, internees were entitled to free mail services within the United 

States and access to mail and parcels from their mother countries, supervised by the International 

Red Cross but subject to censorship.23

Thus internees had a very different kind of existence from that of most Japanese Americans. 

While the decision to intern an individual may not have been just, internment in the United States 

generally followed the rules set down in American and international law. What happened to those 

West Coast Japanese Americans who were incarcerated in army and WRA concentration camps 

was simply lawless.

***

In discussing language, perhaps the best place to start is with the three- and four-letter epithets that 

were all but universally used to describe persons of Japanese birth or descent. While it was common 

until very recently for most Americans to use ugly words to describe persons of color and others 

deemed to be “lesser breeds without the law” -- nigger, kike, wop, spic, chink, greaser, etc. -- none 

was more universally used than Jap or Japs. One cannot imagine, for example, a respectable 

politician using any of the other terms in the title of a magazine article, but Franklin Delano 

Roosevelt could propose to call a 1923 essay -- actually intended to minimize trans-Pacific 
5

antagonisms -- “The Japs -- A Habit of Mind.”24 Even a casual perusal of pre-World War II 

American newspapers and magazines shows that in both headline and text the word was often used 

to describe: 1) the Japanese government; 2) the people of Japan; and, more rarely except on the 

Pacific Coast, 3) Japanese Americans. One does not have to be a student of semiotics to understand 

the dehumanizing effect of such continuous and casual usage. And, of course, once the United 

States and Japan were at war the usage multiplied. The language and visual contexts of World War 

II movies made in the 1940s and 1950s -- and which still pollute our TV channels -- make it quite 

clear that while the actions of Germany and of most Germans were evil, a distinction was often 

made between “good” and “bad” Germans. The actions of the Imperial Japanese Government and 

the actions of not only its people but of persons of Japanese ethnicity anywhere were treated as the 

deeds of an evil race. Perhaps the most notorious example of the casual demonization of Japanese 

persons were the mid-December 1941 companion pieces in the two Luce news magazines, Time and 

Life, which purported to tell Americans “How to Tell the Japs from the Chinese” or “How to Tell 

Your Friends from the Japs.”25 The Life article was illustrated by Milton Caniff, creator of the 

widely syndicated comic strip “Terry and the Pirates.” Almost two months later, on February 13, 

1942, just six days before FDR signed Executive Order 9066, another popular cartoonist, Theodor 

Suess Geisel (1904-1991), a.k.a. Dr. Suess, drew a particularly vicious editorial cartoon for the leftwing New York City newspaper PM showing an endless stream of identical, grinning Japanese men 

coming from the Pacific Northwest to a building on the California coast labeled “Honorable 5th 

Column” to receive packages marked “TNT,” while atop the headquarters another of what we 

would now call the clones looks out to sea through a telescope. The cartoon is captioned “Waiting 

for the Signal From Home . . .” Popular culture had so infused the complex image of the “Jap” into 

the American mind that no further explication was necessary.26 It is possible to pile up similar 

examples ad infinitum.27 Government officials were well aware of this. Geisel, for example, was 

later commissioned as a captain in the Signal Corps and sent to Hollywood to help film director 

Frank Capra make propaganda films and cartoons to indoctrinate American servicemen and 

women.28 This well-established mind-set made it easy for government officials to use carefully 

chosen words to blind Americans to the fact that their government was systematically stripping 

some American citizens of their most basic rights by fiat.

Before examining that process in some detail, it might be well to remind ourselves of the 

conclusion of the CWRIC:29

The promulgation of Executive Order 9066 was not justified by military necessity, and the decisions 

which followed from it -- detention, ending detention and ending exclusion -- were not driven by 

analysis of military conditions. The broad historical causes which shaped these decisions were race 

prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership. Widespread ignorance of Japanese 

Americans contributed to a policy conceived in haste and executed in an atmosphere of fear and 

anger at Japan. A grave injustice was done to American citizens and resident nationals of Japanese 

ancestry who, without individual review or any probative evidence against them, were excluded, 

removed and detained by the United States during World War II.

The stripping of rights began long before President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 

on February 19, 1942. Within hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, U.S. Attorney General Francis 

Biddle, in addition to arranging for and enforcing the statutory proclamations affecting “alien 

enemies” as set forth in sections 21-24 of the United States Code, also ordered that the borders be 

closed to alien enemies and “all persons of Japanese ancestry.”30 Biddle, although he regarded 

himself as a protector of the rights of Japanese Americans and, at the eleventh hour protested 
6

ineffectively against mass incarceration, in practice allowed the rights of citizens of Japanese 

ancestry to be violated with impunity. Under pressure from the War Department and, according to 

his memoir, somewhat overawed by the elder cabinet colleague who headed it, Henry L. Stimson, 

the attorney general agreed, in memoranda exchanged between the departments on January 6, 1942, 

that, in effect, the Fourth Amendment rights of American citizens of Japanese ancestry living on the 

West Coast to “be secure . . . against unreasonable searches and seizures” were null and void. The 

memoranda agreed that Department of Justice agents would make warrantless searches merely on 

verbal requests from military authorities. One short paragraph began by stating that “The term ‘mass 

raid’ will not be employed by the Attorney General” but ended with the statement “all of the alien 

enemy premises in a given area can be searched at the same moment.” A prior paragraph recognized 

that there were “mixed occupancy dwellings” inhabited by native-born citizens and their alien 

parents or other relatives and treated these as “alien enemy’s premises.”31 Although Biddle and his 

deputy, Assistant Attorney General James J. Rowe, who signed the memorandum, would never say 

-- as Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy did -- that the Constitution was “just a scrap of 

paper,” what they agreed to, despite their protestations, effectively nullified it.32

Executive Order 9066, drafted in the War Department sometime after February 11 when 

Roosevelt gave Stimson “carte blanche,” and signed in the White House on February 19, is a 

wonderful example of Aesopian language. It has neither ethnic nor geographic specificity, and were 

it to be discovered in the year 3001 without other documents giving its context, the future historian 

might reasonably conclude that it was a relief measure. Its official title, almost never used, is 

“AUTHORIZING THE SECRETARY OF WAR TO PRESCRIBE MILITARY AREAS.” After 

authorizing the Secretary of War and “Military Commanders” he might designate to create “military 

areas . . . from which any or all persons may be excluded,” it further authorized the secretary “to 

provide for residents . . . such transportation, food, shelter, and other accommodations as may be 

necessary . . . until other arrangements are made.”

We now know the whole chain of events which this order set off. A second executive order, 

9106, established the War Relocation Authority on March 18, 1942, and ordered its director to 

“formulate and effectuate a program for the removal . . . of the persons or classes of persons 

[designated under Executive Order 9066] and for their relocation, maintenance, and supervision.” 

He was further ordered to “provide for the relocation of such persons in appropriate places, . . . 

provide for their needs [and] for the employment of such persons at useful work in industry, 

commerce, agriculture, or public projects. . . .”

Other parts of Executive Order 9106 authorized the use of the United States Employment 

Service and established a War Relocation Work Corps in which persons would be “enlisted.” The 

work corps proved to be a phantom that was never activated.33 These words misled the first director 

of the War Relocation Authority, Milton S. Eisenhower, into believing, until he met with western 

governors at Salt Lake City on April 7, that the “relocation centers”34 could evolve into something 

more like the New Deal’s subsistence homesteads and less like the concentration camps that they 

became. (It must be remembered that the mass expulsion and incarceration started only at the end of 

March.)

Even as the mass round-up of West Coast Nikkei began, with an isolated group on 

Bainbridge Island, a short ferry ride from Seattle, the government’s wordsmiths were inventing new 

language. A “Civilian Exclusion Order” dated March 24, 1942, signed by Gen. John L. DeWitt and 

ominously numbered “No. 1,” directed all “Japanese persons, both alien and nonalien” to report to 

the ferryboat landing on March 30 for “temporary residence in a reception center elsewhere,” 

bringing with them only what they could carry, including “blankets and linens . . . toilet articles . . . 
7

clothing . . . knives, forks, spoons, plates, bowls, and cups for each member of the family.”35 Unlike 

most later orders, which moved persons first to neighboring, temporary enclosures called 

“Assembly Centers,” the 257 Bainbridge Islanders were sent by train to Manzanar in southern 

California, as no camp in the Pacific Northwest was ready for occupancy.36

Thus began the wartime incarceration of the West Coast Japanese Americans, an 

incarceration that would last, for some, almost four years. Begun under military auspices and 

subject to some military control throughout its existence, the incarcerated people whom I have 

called prisoners without trial were, during the course of the spring and summer of 1942, turned over 

to the civilian War Relocation Authority. The WRA was staffed at the top and in most of its middle 

management by persons who would not have instituted the kind of repressive program that they 

were called upon to execute. Its second and last director, Dillon S. Myer, who was less liberal than 

many of his staffers, wrote in his memoir that:

I believed, and still believe, that a selective evacuation of people of Japanese descent from the West 

Coast military area may have been justified and feasible in early 1943 [sic -- he surely meant 1942], 

but I do not believe that a mass evacuation was ever justified; furthermore I believe that there was no 

valid argument for the continuation of the exclusion orders beyond the spring of 1943, as indicated 

by our letter to Secretary Stimson in March of 1943.37

The WRA accepted the army’s nomenclature and generally tried to put the best possible 

face on what it did. The captive Japanese had been “evacuated,” a word associated with rescue. The 

people who were in “relocation centers” were “residents,” not inmates. Like other government 

agencies, it conducted a public relations campaign that tried to emphasize the positive aspects of 

what it did. Its photographs show “happy campers”; its press releases hailed military volunteers and 

ignored, as much as possible, the protesters and especially the draft resisters. So relatively 

successful was this wartime government propaganda that, as late as 1969, two liberal authors 

thoroughly opposed to the incarceration and exile could identify Heart Mountain, where the draft 

resistance began, as a “happy camp.”38 The WRA and its administrators particularly resisted the 

notion that they were in charge of “concentration camps.” 

The first WRA director, Milton Eisenhower, in his 1974 memoir, is explicit about this. A 

specialist in “information” -- his next assignment would be to the Office of War Information -- he 

wrote:

We called the relocation centers “evacuation centers.” Never did we refer to them as concentration 

camps.

39

Similarly, his successor, Dillon S. Myer, like Eisenhower, also from the Department of Agriculture, 

wrote in his 1971 memoir that:

Relocation centers were called “concentration camps” by many writers and commentators, but they 

were very different from the normal concept of what a concentration camp is like.

40

Lower down in the WRA hierarchy the same kinds of postwar views existed. One of the 

most determined literary attacks on the notion that Japanese Americans were placed in 

concentration camps came from Harold S. Jacoby, a member of the sociology faculty at the College 

of the Pacific who, in March 1942, concerned by what he saw as unjust treatment of Japanese 

Americans, sought and achieved employment with the WRA, first at Tule Lake and then in Chicago 
8

as assistant supervisor of resettlement there. He was clearly one of what psychiatrist Alexander 

Leighton called approvingly the “people-minded” WRA administrators.41 In his 1996 memoir he 

attacked vigorously the notion that the WRA establishments were concentration camps. Part of his 

argument was that the concentration camps of the Nazis and the Soviets were much worse places. 

Another is that only the books published after 1967 called them concentration camps. And, finally, 

he argued that inmates were sometimes allowed to leave for work.42 (He might have added that 

others were allowed to leave the camps to go shopping in nearby towns, etc.)

Language usage was not just a postwar concern of WRA leaders. Thomas Bodine, a Quaker 

activist who was an important and effective staff member of the National Japanese American 

Student Relocation Council, remembered in May 2000 that during the war “we couldn’t use the 

[term concentration camps] during the work we did or the Government might have cut off 

granting leaves to the students we were helping.”43

But higher up in the government hierarchy there were people who were willing to call a 

spade a bloody shovel. Franklin Roosevelt himself called the camps for Japanese concentration 

camps on more than one public occasion,44 and Associate Justice Owen J. Roberts, dissenting in the 

Korematsu case, which, in effect, said the incarceration of American citizens was constitutional, 

insisted that:

This is not a case of keeping people off the streets at night as was Hirabayashi. . . . It is a case of 

convicting a citizen . . . for not submitting to imprisonment in a concentration camp solely because of 

his ancestry. . . .45

More prosaically, an anonymous cataloguer at the Library of Congress established the subject 

heading “Concentration Camps -- United States of America” which, so far, contains only items 

about the wartime incarceration of the Japanese Americans and its sequelae.46

But the general practice, especially after the liberation of the Nazi death camps, was to avoid 

the blunt term. Before the spring of 1945 the term concentration camp was not synonymous with 

death camp. The term was first applied to camps set up for noncombatants -- as opposed to 

prisoners of war -- by the British during the Boer War of 1899-1902.47 The reason that Eisenhower, 

Myer, Jacoby, and others associated with administering the camps reacted so strongly against using 

the term concentration camps is that such usage made them, by extension, concentration camp 

keepers and seemed to put them in the same category as notorious Nazis and Japanese, and, 

eventually, Adolf Eichmann.48

Incarcerated people themselves sometimes used the term concentration camp while they 

were in confinement, especially while protesting against aspects of government policy. For 

example, in a meeting at Heart Mountain in February 1943 during the “registration crisis,” one 

speaker said:

Although we have yellow skins, we too are Americans. We have an American upbringing, therefore 

we believe in fair play. Our firm conviction is that we would be useless Americans if we did not 

assert our constitutional rights now; for, unless our status as citizens is cleared and we are really 

fighting for the perpetuation of democracy, especially when our fathers, mothers, and families are in 

concentration camps, even though they are not charged with any crimes.49

I suspect that the term was not commonly used, but since the major sources for 

contemporary inmate perceptions, the camp newspapers, were published under the watchful eyes of 

WRA staffers, its nonuse there is not significant. I have read a large number of letters written from 
9

the camps. My distinct impression is that the term was not much used in them, but since the 

question of nomenclature had not yet become significant to me when I was reading them in various 

archives, I did not keep track of its occurrence.

What is clear is that once the war was over and for decades afterwards the prevailing term 

among the mainland Nisei was “camp,” although “evacuation,” “relocation,” and, to a lesser degree, 

“internment” were all used more or less interchangeably. When two Nisei met for the first time, an 

all but inevitable question was “What camp were you in?” When the past was discussed, two 

parameters were constant: “before the war” and “after camp.” The ambiguity of the word “camp” 

makes it possible to argue that it was short for “concentration camp,” but I am certain, but cannot 

demonstrate, that in the vast majority of cases it was short for “relocation camp” or “evacuation 

camp.” In nearly a thousand interviews and conversations with Nikkei before the redress campaign 

began, I can remember only a few instances in which the term “concentration camp” was used by a 

community member. On the other hand the only Nikkei I can remember complaining about my use 

of the term was Mike Masaoka in 1971 or 1972. On several occasions Caucasian Holocaust 

survivors similarly complained. This ambiguity, plus the notorious reluctance of the Nisei to talk 

about their wartime experiences with their children and grandchildren, led more than one Sansei to 

believe that “camp” stood for some kind of summer vacation that their parents used to go on.50

*****

When one examines the postwar printed record, whether memoirs by former inmates and officials 

or accounts by scholars and others, the result is pretty much the same. The terminology used by the 

government -- evacuation and relocation -- prevails, plus, for almost all the Nikkei authors and some 

scholars, the ambiguous “camp.” Nothing better exemplifies the difference between expressed 

Nikkei attitudes just after the war and three to four decades later than successive editions of two 

outstanding Nisei memoirs. 

 The first, Miné Okubo’s pioneering 1946 illustrated text, Citizen 13660, dealt only with 

wartime and told of evacuation from Berkeley and confinement at Tanforan -- in a horse stall -- and 

at Topaz. The soon-to-be ubiquitous “camp” was the most common term, but otherwise standard 

government terminology -- including relocation and evacuation -- was used. Identical words 

punctuate the preface to the first reprint edition, dated May 1, 1978, but by the time of the second 

reprint edition just five years later, Okubo had testified before the CWRIC, and her preface speaks 

of “Americans and Alaskan Aleuts who had been forcibly removed from their homes and 

incarcerated in concentration camps” (xi), but in the rest of the new text reverts to the old standard 

language. In addition, the word “internment” and the phrase “internment camp” have been added to 

her vocabulary in describing what she endured, whereas in the original such language had been 

reserved for the process undergone by many Issei, as in “Father had been whisked away to an 

internment camp” (11).51

 A similar pattern may be discerned in the two editions of Monica Sone’s 1953 memoir, 

Nisei Daughter, which deals with a Seattle girlhood and devotes its final two-fifths to uprooting 

from Seattle, life in the Puyallup Assembly Center and the Minidoka Relocation Center, and 

resettlement in Chicago and at an Indiana college. Its text uses only terminology that the WRA 

would have approved. But in her preface to the 1979 edition, the second, one-sentence paragraph 

shows clearly that consciousness-raising had taken place:

The ten concentration camps, which received 120,000 of us in 1942, were finally closed in 1946. 

(xv)52
10

Since I have reviewed the first three decades of scholarly literature about the wartime 

incarceration elsewhere, it will not be repeated here.53 By that time (1975) the broad outlines of 

what can be called a “master narrative” had emerged. Most scholars had generally agreed that the 

wartime incarceration was needless and would have endorsed the 1982 CWRIC conclusion cited 

above. Even earlier, in 1967, when Harry Kitano and I organized the first academic conference 

devoted to the wartime experience of the Nikkei, held at UCLA, we found it impossible to find 

anyone willing to defend the actions of 1942. 

But that early scholarly consensus that the incarceration of the Japanese Americans had been 

wrong did not mean that historians paid much attention to it. In what was perhaps the outstanding 

American history textbook of the immediate postwar decades -- and certainly the most liberal --

Richard Hofstadter, William Miller, and Daniel Aaron in a text of 758 pages could say only this in 

their section on “Civilian Mobilization” in what was not yet the “Good War”:

Since almost no one doubted the necessity for the war, there was much less intolerance than there 

had been in World War I, although large numbers of Japanese-Americans were put into internment 

camps under circumstances that many Americans were later to judge unfair or worse.54

Note that the term “internment camp” has somehow, as they say, crept into the language, where it 

has remained.

This down-playing of the negative aspects of the wartime experience was a corollary of 

what can be called American secular triumphalism, which affected people on the left as well as 

those who liked Ike and were wild about Harry. Even today, the topic of conscientious objection, for 

example, is little discussed.55 It is not an accident that the first scholarly critique of the rationale for 

the incarceration, the courageous essays by Eugene V. Rostow, wrote off the event as a “mistake” 

rather than as a logical outgrowth of centuries of racism.56 And, as late as the mid-1970s, I could 

lecture about the wartime incarceration at an elite college, such as Hobart and William Smith, and 

have students ask me afterwards if that “really happened.” 

By that time, two books about the incarceration had appeared that used the term 

concentration camps in their titles.57 These works gave an increased credibility to the use of the 

term, a credibility, as we have seen, that was challenged not only by persons like McCloy, 

Eisenhower, and Myer, who had been accessories to the incarceration, either before or after the fact, 

but also by three other categories of persons:

(1) A whole spectrum of conservatives and self-styled patriots who were simply appalled 

that such a dreadful term could be applied to their country. The reactions of this group ranged from 

mild annoyance to absolute frenzy on the part of a few zealots, such as the incarceration denier 

Lillian Baker.58

(2) A sizable number of Holocaust survivors and their supporters who resented deeply the 

term being used for anything as “mild” as the American incarceration. Some clearly felt that the 

term belonged to them. The most celebrated instance of this occurred in 1998, when a protest by 

some Jews against the use of the term “concentration camp” in the title of an exhibition from the 

Japanese American National Museum, scheduled to open on Ellis Island, caused such a controversy 

that the National Park Service superintendent in charge cancelled the exhibition until her superiors 

intervened.59

(3) And finally, there are those, such as historian Alice Yang Murray, who, while fully 

understanding the arguments for using the term, nevertheless feel that:
11

while I agree that places like Manzanar and Tule Lake fulfill the dictionary definition of a 

“concentration camp,” I personally can’t accept the designation. The term “concentration camp” may 

once have been a euphemism for a Nazi “extermination camp,” but I think that over time the two 

kinds of camps have become inextricably linked in the popular imagination. In other words, I believe 

the meaning of the term “concentration camp” has changed over time. During World War II, officials 

and commentators could say Japanese Americans were confined in concentration camps without 

evoking images of Nazi atrocities. I don’t think that this is true today.

60

Given this widespread resistance, it is clearly unrealistic to expect everyone to agree to use the 

contested term concentration camp, even though I believe that it is the most appropriate term.

But it seems equally clear to me that it is not unreasonable to expect scholars to cease using 

both the incorrect prevalent term “internment camp” and the stock phrase “the internment of the 

Japanese Americans.” There are two very good reasons to suggest this.

In the first place, while there were surely injustices involved in the internment process, as 

there always are when compulsion is involved, it did follow the forms of law and was a recognized 

legal procedure dating back in American law to the War of 1812. The eleven thousand or so persons 

who were interned in the United States during World War II have not, until quite recently, been the 

subject of much historical scrutiny. What has to be remembered is that those persons were taken 

into custody because of their status: all were alien nationals of a nation against which the United 

States was at war, each was seized for reasons supposedly based on his or her behavior, and each 

was entitled to an individual hearing before a board. No one who reads the fine study by Louis Fiset 

of the internment process as it affected Iwao Matsushita can conflate his circumstances with those 

of Japanese Americans incarcerated under authority of Executive Order 9066.61

In the second place, the conflation of the two processes has allowed some authors to write as 

if what happened to a tiny minority of unnaturalized Italian and German residents was somehow 

equivalent to the mass incarceration of some eighty-thousand American citizens of Japanese 

ancestry and some forty-thousand Japanese nationals who were barred from naturalization by race.62

As I have tried to show, there has been a long history of using euphemistic language about the 

wartime atrocity that was wreaked upon the Japanese Americans of the West Coast during and after 

World War II. Begun with malice aforethought by government officials, politicians, and journalists, 

it has been continued, largely in thoughtless innocence, by scholars. As we are in the seventh decade 

after the promulgation of Executive Order 9066, it is high time that scholars begin to call things by 

their right names. Let us hear no more about the “internment of the Japanese Americans.”63
12

NOTES

I wish to thank the editors, the anonymous reader for the press, and, above all, Max Paul 

Friedman for thoughtful and intelligent suggestions which have, I think, improved this essay.

1

 Unfortunately, I have no contemporary record of that call. I have dated it by referring to 

Mitchell T. Maki, Harry H. L. Kitano, and S. Megan Berthold, Achieving the Impossible Dream: 

How Japanese Americans Obtained Redress (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

2

 I also had -- and have -- objections to the term “relocation.” “Exile” is more appropriate.

3

 See Roger Daniels, “The Internment of Japanese Nationals in the United States During 

World War II,” Halcyon 17 (1995): 66-75; “L’Internamento di ‘Alien Enemies’ negli Stati Uniti 

durante la seconda guerra mondiale,” Àcoma: Rivista Internazionale di Studi Nordamericani

(Rome; Estate autunno 1997): 39-49; and Kay Saunders and Roger Daniels, eds., Alien Justice: 

Wartime Internment in Australia and North America (St. Lucia, Queensland: University of 

Queensland Press, 2000).

4

 Aliens Act of June 24, 1798 (1 Stat. 570). The lack of a declared war prevented any 

internment -- or treason trials -- during the Korean and Vietnam Wars or in such shorter actions 

as Desert Storm. 

5

 See Jörg Nagler, “Internment of German Enemy Aliens in the United States during the 

First and Second World Wars,” in Alien Justice, ed. Saunders and Daniels, 66-79. For those who 

read German, his massive Nationale Minoritäten im Krieg: “Feindliche Ausländer” und die 

amerikanische Heimatfront während des Ersten Weltkriegs (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 

2000) is a must for an understanding of the roots of the modern internment of alien enemies by 

the United States. Two scholarly publications about American World War I internment camps 

are Raymond K. Cunningham, Jr., Prisoners at Fort Douglas: War Prison Barracks Three and the 

Enemy Aliens, 1917-1920 (Salt Lake City: Fort Douglas Military Museum, 1983) and William 

B. Glidden, “Casualties of Caution: Alien Enemies in America, 1917-1919” (Ph.D. diss., 

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1970).

6

 John Joel Culley, “A Troublesome Presence: World War II Internment of German 

Sailors in New Mexico,” Prologue 28 (winter 1996): 279-95, and Carol Van Valkenburg, An 

Alien Place: The Fort Missoula, Montana Detention Camp, 1941-1944 (Missoula, Mont.: 

Pictorial Histories Publishing Company, 1995).

7 The act, also known as the Smith Act, was 54 Stat. 670. It had three titles, the first of 

which dealt with “interference with the military or naval forces of the United States,” the second 

with “additional deportable classes of aliens,” and only the third with the “registration and 

fingerprinting” of aliens. Title I was used in the Cold War era to convict many leaders of the 

American Communist Party. For an illuminating discussion of Titles II and III, see Richard W. 

Steele, “The War on Intolerance: The Reformulation of American Nationalism, 1939-1943,” 

Journal of American Ethnic History 9 (fall 1989): 9-35. The registration provisions, unenforced for 

decades, were applied selectively after 9/11 by the Department of Justice to deport a variety of 

immigrants, mostly Muslims.

8 Except for a handful of World War I veterans, Japanese were not eligible for naturalization 

until the law was changed in 1952. Anyone, regardless of race or ethnicity, born in the United States 

is a citizen thanks to the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, adopted in 1868.

9 Proclamation No. 2525, December 7, 1941, and Proclamations No. 2526 and No. 2527, 

December 8, 1941. Similar control over Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Rumanian aliens was covered by 
13

Proclamation No. 2563 of July 17, 1942; the handful of aliens interned under the last are ignored in 

the remainder of this essay.

10 For some of the uses to which Koreans were put during the war, see Hyung-Ju Ahn, 

Between Two Adversaries: Korean Interpreters at Japanese Alien Enemy Detention Centers 

during World War II (Fullerton: Oral History Program, California State University,2002). 

11 One of Biddle’s wartime speeches, for example, was titled “Identification of Enemy 

Aliens: Let Us Not Persecute These People.” Vital Speeches of the Day 8 (February 15, 1942): 279-

80. For Britain in World War II, see Peter and Leni Gillman, Collar the Lot!: How Britain Interned 

and Expelled Its Wartime Refugees (London & New York: Quartet Books, 1980), and A. W. Brian 

Simpson, In the Highest Degree Odious: Detention without Trial in Wartime Britain (Oxford: 

Clarendon Press, 1992). For a historical survey, see Colin Holmes, A Tolerant Country? 

Immigrants, Refugees and Minorities in Britain (London: Faber, 1991).

12 The organizations creating the lists were primarily the Federal Bureau of Investigation 

(FBI), the Special Defense Unit of the Department of Justice, the Office of Naval Intelligence 

(ONI), and the Intelligence Branch (G-2) of the army. Obviously, the lists were only as good as the 

persons compiling them. They were filled with errors of omission and commission, particularly with 

regard to Japanese aliens, as, to the best of my knowledge, only one American naval intelligence 

official, Lt. Comdr. Kenneth D. Ringle, could read Japanese. For his activities, see my Asian 

America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850 (Seattle: University of Washington 

Press, 1989), 183, 210-13. The controversial Ellis Mark Zacharias, who was fluent in Japanese, was 

out of favor and not involved in intelligence work at the outbreak of war. The best single work 

dealing with any part of the U.S. intelligence apparatus before and during the war is Jeffrey M. 

Dorwart, Conflict of Duty: The U.S. Navy’s Intelligence Dilemma, 1919-1945 (Annapolis: Naval 

Institute Press, 1983). See also Marc Gallicchio, “Zacharias, Ellis Mark,” American National 

Biography Online, February 2000, at <http://www.anb.org/articles/07/07-00340.html> 

13 J. Edgar Hoover, “Alien Enemy Control,” Iowa Law Review 29 (1941): 396-408, at 403. 

Other commonly cited figures are: “by February 16, 1942, the Justice Department had interned 

2,192 Japanese, 1,393 Germans, and 264 Italians,” from a Justice Department press release cited in 

Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC), Personal Justice 

Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians

(Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1983), 284; and “the total number [taken into custody] has not exceeded 

fifteen thousand. . . . fewer than ten thousand ‘alien enemies’ have been in custody at any one time, . 

. .” from Earl G. Harrison, “Civilian Internment -- American Way,” Survey Graphic 33 (May 1944): 

229-33, 270 at 229-30. Harrison was commissioner general of the Immigration and Naturalization 

Service (INS). A government history of the INS reports 9,920 enemy aliens in custody in mid-1943 

and 7,364 in mid-1945. Congressional Research Service, History of the Immigration and 

Naturalization Service (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1980), 49-50. 

14 In Tennessee, for example, “some ‘civilian aliens,’ mostly Japanese immigrants, were 

interned at Camp Forrest until May 1943, when they were transferred to North Dakota.” James A. 

Crutchfield. Tennesseeans at War: Volunteers and Patriots in Defense of Liberty (Nashville: 

Rutledge Hill Press, 1987), 145. See also Ann Toplovich, “The Tennesseean’s War: Life on the 

Home Front,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 51 (1992): 19-50, at 48 n. 30. 

15 C. Harvey Gardiner, “The Latin American Japanese and World War II,” in Japanese 

Americans: From Relocation to Redress, ed. Roger Daniels, Sandra C. Taylor, and Harry H. L. 

Kitano (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 142-45; and Gardiner, Pawns in a 
14

Triangle of Hate: The Peruvian Japanese and the United States (Seattle: University of 

Washington Press, 1981). See also Thomas Connell, America’s Japanese Hostages: The World 

War II Plan for a Japanese Free Latin America (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002). An important 

book, Max Paul Friedman’s Nazis and Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign against the 

Germans of Latin America in World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), is 

the source for the precise numbers. Seiichi Higashide’s Adios to Tears: The Memoirs of a 

Japanese Peruvian Internee in U.S. Concentration Camps, 2nd ed. (Seattle: University of 

Washington Press, 2000), is the best personal account available in English.

16 The best published accounts of wartime internment camps generally are in essays by 

John Joel Culley: “World War II and a Western Town: The Internment of Japanese Railroad 

Workers in Clovis, New Mexico,” Western Historical Quarterly 13 (1982): 42-63; “Trouble at 

the Lordsburg Internment Camp,” New Mexico Historical Review 60 (1985): 225-48; “The 

Santa Fe Internment Camp and the Justice Department Program for Enemy Aliens,” in Japanese 

Americans: From Relocation to Redress, ed. Daniels et al., 51-71; and “Enemy Alien Control in 

the United States during World War II: A Survey,” in Alien Justice, ed. Saunders and 

Daniels,138-51. The essay on Lordsburg describes homicides committed by guards. Culley is 

engaged on a major work provisionally titled “Interned for the Duration: Alien Enemy 

Internment and the Japanese during World War II.” 

17 For the State Department’s concern for Americans in enemy countries, see P. Scott 

Corbett, Quiet Passages: The Exchange of Civilians between the United States and Japan during the 

Second World War, (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1987).

18 Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: Free 

Press, 1987), 239. 

19 Press release cited in CWRIC, Personal Justice Denied, 284. 

20 Jerre Mangione, An Ethnic at Large: A Memoir of America in the Thirties and Forties

(New York: Putnam, 1978), 344-45. 

21 Many of those brought by the government from Latin America were in family units. 

Karen L. Riley, Schools Behind Barbed Wire: The Untold Story of Wartime Internment and the 

Children of Arrested Enemy Aliens (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), describes the INS 

family camp at Crystal City, Texas. Roger Daniels, “Educating Youth in American’s Wartime 

Detention Camps,” History of Education Quarterly 41 (spring 2003): 92-103, reviews the literature 

on education in WRA and INS camps.

22 Incarcerated Japanese Americans had no such recourse as they were incarcerated not for 

suspected subversion or memberships, but because of their ethnicity. There were, however, 

government programs that enabled many Japanese Americans to leave the camps for work, military 

service, and education. 

23 Louis Fiset, “Wartime Communication: Red Cross Key to U.S.-Japan Mails,” 

American Philatelist 104 (1990): 228-34; Fiset, “Censored!: U.S. Censors and Internment Camp 

Mail in World War II,” in Guilt by Association: Essays on Japanese Settlement, Internment, and 

Relocation in the Rocky Mountain West, ed. Mike Mackey (Powell, Wyo.: Western History 

Publications, 2001) 69-100; and Fiset, “Return to Sender: U.S. Censorship of Enemy Alien Mail 

in World War II,” Prologue 33 (spring 2001): 21-35. 

24 William L. Neuman, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and Japan, 1913-1933,” Pacific Historical 

Review 22 (1953): 143-53, at 148. FDR’s essay was published as “Shall We Trust Japan?” Asia

23 (1923): 475-78, 526, 528, and was sanguine about future relationships.
15

25 The Life version is first. Both are dated December 22, 1941, but were on the 

newsstands and in the mail the previous week. Despite prompt refutation, e.g., “No Certain Way 

to Tell Japanese from Chinese,” Science News Letter (December 20, 1941), this nonsense was 

widely believed.

26 This cartoon was, I believe, first republished in Paul Milkman, PM: A New Deal in 

Journalism, 1940-1948 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997). For some two 

hundred of Geisel’s PM cartoons, see Richard H. Minear, Dr. Suess Goes to War (New York: The 

New Press, 1999). Those and two hundred others may be seen on a University of California, San 

Diego website: <http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dspolitic/Frame.htm> UCSD has a “Dr. Suess 

Collection” in its Mandeville Special Collections Library. The only book-length study of Geisel’s 

work, Ruth K. MacDonald’s Dr. Suess (Boston: Twayne, 1988), mentions his PM career in passing, 

noting only “his most notable contribution being his anti-Nazi cartoons ridiculing Hitler” (8). 

27 See, for example, Dennis Ogawa, From Japs to Japanese: The Evolution of Japanese 

American Stereotypes (Berkeley, Calif.: McCutchan, 1971).

28 Charles W. Carey, Jr., “Geisel, Theodor Suess,” American National Biography Online,

February 2000 (published by Oxford University Press), at: <http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-

03303.html>. 29 CWRIC, Personal Justice Denied, 18. A 1997 University of Washington Press reprint 

is definitive as it contains important materials, including specific recommendations for redress, 

that were issued by the commission in 1983 and thus not included in the original. CWRIC, 

Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of 

Civilians (Seattle: University of Washington Press and the Civil Liberties Public Education 

Fund, 1997).

30 Proclamations 2525, 2526, 2527. They may be conveniently consulted in Roger 

Daniels, ed., American Concentration Camps, vol. 1 (New York: Garland, 1989). Biddle’s 

comments on the internment process are in his autobiographical In Brief Authority (New York: 

Doubleday & Company, 1962), 207-9. Although he distinguishes between the selective 

internment and the program under E.O. 9066, he calls the latter “mass internment.” His statistical 

data are erroneous. 

31 The memoranda may be found conveniently in United States. War Department. 

Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast, 1942 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1943), 4-6.

32 For McCloy, see Roger Daniels, Concentration Camps, USA: Japanese Americans and 

World War II (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 55-56. 

33 Both executive orders are reprinted in Daniels, American Concentration Camps, vol. 1.

34 It is not clear who dreamed up that innocuous term or its predecessor, assembly center, 

but the most likely suspects are Col. Karl Robin Bendetsen, the army lawyer who managed the 

expulsion of the Nikkei from the West Coast, and/or a Census Bureau bureaucrat, Dr. Calvert L. 

Dedrick. For the latter, see Roger Daniels, “The Bureau of the Census and the Relocation of the 

Japanese Americans: A Note and a Document,” Amerasia Journal 9 (#1 1982): 101-5. Work in 

progress by demographer William Seltzer and Margo Anderson, the leading historical authority 

on the census, will throw more light on Dedrick. See William Seltzer and Margo Anderson, 

“After Pearl Harbor: The Proper Role of Population Data Systems in Time of War” (paper 

presented at the Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America, Los Angeles, March 

2000), and Seltzer and Anderson, “The Dark Side of Numbers: The Role of Population Data 

Systems in Human Rights Abuses,” Social Research 68:2 (summer 2001): 481-513. The former 
16

is summarized in Steven A. Holmes, “Report Says Census Bureau Helped Relocate Japanese,” 

New York Times, 17 March 2000.

35 Civilian Exclusion Order No. 1 and accompanying instructions are reprinted in 

Daniels, American Concentration Camps, vol. 1. 

36 War Department. Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast, 1942. Table 47, 363. One 

additional Bainbridge Islander is reported as being sent to an unspecified relocation center.

37 Dillon S. Myer, Uprooted Americans (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1971), 285-

86.

38 Audrie Girdner and Anne Loftis, The Great Betrayal: The Evacuation of the JapaneseAmericans during World War II (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 247. For the best account of 

Heart Mountain, see Douglas W. Nelson, Heart Mountain: The Story of an American 

Concentration Camp (Madison: Wisconsin State Historical Society, 1976). Eric Muller’s Free to 

Die for Their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), is a fine legal history. See also the 2000 video 

“Conscience and the Constitution” by filmmaker Frank Abe. Its web site is: 

<<www.resisters.com>>

39 Milton S. Eisenhower, The President Is Calling (New York: Doubleday, 1974), 122. 

40 Myer, Uprooted Americans, 291. The WRA photographs used in Myer’s book illustrate 

nicely the comment about “happy campers” in the text above.

41 Alexander H. Leighton, The Governing of Men (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 

1946), 81-88.

42 Harold S. Jacoby, Tule Lake: From Relocation to Segregation (Grass Valley, Calif.: 

Comstock Bonanza Press, 1996), xii, 9, 54-57, 60-61.

43 Thomas Bodine to Allan W. Austin, 17 May 2000. Austin shared this letter with me. A 

revised version of his excellent doctoral dissertation, “From Concentration Camp to Campus: A 

History of the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council, 1942-1946” (University of 

Cincinnati, 2001), is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press. 

44 See, for example, Press Conference 982, November 21, 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt 

Library, Hyde Park, New York.

45 Korematsu v U.S., 323 U.S. 214. 

46 There is also what the Library of Congress calls a “narrower heading”: “Japanese 

Americans Evacuation and Relocation, 1942-45.” 

47 Both the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, and the Merriam Webster 10th 

Collegiate Dictionary give 1901 as the first usage. But utilization of a digitalized database of the 

New York Times to examine all issues during 1898 produced eleven “hits” for the phrase 

“concentration camps.” All, however, were without pejorative implication and described camps 

in which various U.S. Army units were concentrated before deployment overseas. One such 

example, on June 1 began: “The Quartermaster General’s Department, in response to the 

complaints coming from the various concentration camps of the delay in securing supplies and 

equipment. . . .” For the latest scholarship on the South African concentration camps, see the 

essays by Shula Marks and Elizabeth van Heyningen in Greg Cuthbertson et al., Writing a Wider 

War: Rethinking Gender, Race, and Identity in the South African War, 1899-1902 (Athens: Ohio 

University Press, 2002). 

48 It may well be that Dillon Myer’s negative reaction to being so characterized in 

Richard Drinnon’s Keeper of Concentration Camps: Dillon S. Myer and American Racism
17

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), drove him into the arms of Lillian Baker, a 

vociferous opponent of any kind of amelioration for the wartime and postwar injuries that 

Japanese Americans endured. Too ill to appear at the CWRIC’s Washington hearings, Myer 

authorized Baker to read a statement opposing the idea of an apology. For Baker, see her 

Dishonoring America: The Falsification of World War II History (Medford, Oreg.: Webb 

Research Group, 1994).

49 As quoted in Myer, Uprooted Americans, 73, no source given, but probably from 

government surveillance of the speaker (Kiyoshi Okamoto?).

50 A book by Prof. Alice Yang Murray, which is to be published soon, reveals that 

internal WRA memoranda warned against the use of the term “camp.”

51 Miné Okubo, Citizen 13660 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946; 2nd ed., New 

York: Arno Press, 1978; 1st pbk. ed., Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1983).

52 Monica Sone, Nisei Daughter (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953; 2nd ed., Seattle: 

University of Washington Press, 1979), xv (page citation is to the 1979 edition). (Actually, all 

but one of the camps, Tule Lake, had closed before 1946).

53 Roger Daniels, “American Historians and East Asian Immigrants,” in The Asian 

American: The Historical Experience, ed. Norris Hundley (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Clio Press, 

1976), 1-25

54 Richard Hofstadter, William Miller, and Daniel Aaron, The United States: The History 

of a Republic (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1957), 694. There is no index reference to 

either Japanese Americans or internment.

55 I have commented on this general phenomenon in “Bad News from the Good War: 

Democracy at Home during World War II,” in The Home-Front War: World War II and 

American Society, ed. K. P. O’Brien & L. H. Parsons (Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 1995), 157-

71.

56 Eugene V. Rostow, “The Japanese American Cases -- A Disaster,” Yale Law Journal

54 (July 1945): 489-533, and Rostow, “Our Worst Wartime Mistake,” Harper’s 191 (August 

1945): 193-201.

57 Allan R. Bosworth, America’s Concentration Camps (New York: Norton, 1967), and 

Daniels, Concentration Camps, USA. 58 I am in the process of writing an essay about Baker and the relatively rare phenomenon 

of denial that any kind of punitive detention of Japanese Americans took place. I went to the 

Baker manuscripts at the Hoover Institute thinking that I might find links between her and the 

California-based group of Holocaust deniers centered around the so-called Institute for Historical 

Research. I found only negative connections. Baker affirmed the Holocaust, and I have mused 

that if there had been gas chambers at the American camps, she might have stopped complaining 

about what she liked to call “The Concentration Camp Conspiracy.”

59 The controversy is treated in the following sources, which include an editorial and 

letters to the editor, all from the New York Times: Somini Sengupta, “What Is a Concentration 

Camp? Ellis Island Exhibit Prompts a Debate,” 8 March 1998; “Debate on Camps Goes Back to 

War; Japanese Atrocities,” 10 March 1998; Somini Sengupta, “Accord on Term ‘Concentration 

Camp’,” 10 March 1998; “Words for Suffering,” 10 March 1998; “Exhibition on Camps,” 13 

March 1998; and Clyde Haberman, “Defending Jews’ Lexicon Of Anguish,” 13 March 1988. For 

a scholarly review of the exhibit, see David K. Yoo, “Captivating Memories: Museology, 

Concentration Camps, and Japanese American History,” American Quarterly 48 (1996): 680-99.
18

60 From a book by Alice Yang Murray which is to be published soon. Used with 

permission.

61 Louis Fiset, Imprisoned Apart: The World War II Correspondence of an Issei Couple

(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997.

62 Examples of this unfortunate genre include: Stephen Fox, The Unknown Internment: An 

Oral History of the Relocation of Italian Americans during World War II (Boston: Twayne, 1990); 

Fox, America’s Invisible Gulag: A Biography of German American Internment & Exclusion in 

World War II (New York: Peter Lang, 2000.); Timothy J. Holian, The German-Americans and 

World War II: An Ethnic Experience (New York: Peter Lang, 1996); Arthur Jacobs, The Prison 

Called Hohenasperg (Parkland, Fla.: Universal Publishers, 1999); and Lawrence DiStasi, ed., 

Una Storia Segreta: The Secret History of Italian American Evacuation during World War II

(Berkeley, Calif.: Heyday Books, 2001).

63 There seems to be a slight lessening in the use of “internment.” Greg Robinson, who 

wrote By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of the Japanese Americans

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), writes in the April 2003 American Historical 

Review of “mass incarceration without trial of American citizens of Japanese ancestry (to which 

the phrase ‘wartime internment’ is universally, if inaccurately, held to refer).” American 

Historical Review 108 (April 2003): 541.