Talk:Internment of Japanese Americans/Archive 2

message: The discussion moved from Brilliant prose candidates
*Japanese American Internment. Nominated by Taku 03:40, 29 Sep 2003 (UTC)
thread_title: Is the article brilliant?

message: How about the following structure in place of the existing History section:
* Military context:  Brief timeline of Japanese military victories in early 1942; discussion of security concerns.  This section would be confined to (1) decisions made by political and military authorities; and (2) discussion of the perceived and demonstrated security risks.  
* Social and political context:  Discussion of actions by civilian authorities and citizens' groups to advocate for exclusion/relocation/internment.  
* Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor:  Arrest and detention of community leaders; reactions to the war.
* [Name TBD]:  Description of evacuation-->assembly centers-->camps.
Others?
--ishu 05:00, 23 Oct 2003 (UTC)
replies: text: FYI, I've started Hypenated American and welcome your additions/edits. Fuzheado 03:17, 19 Nov 2003 (UTC)
thread_title: Restructuring the article

message: This article is definitely reliant on apologist sources.  The section on conditions at the camps states simply that they had "a high live birth rate!"  The author(s) need to consult some Japanese American accounts of the internment.  My mother and father and all four grandparents were interned as were the parents and grandparents of all my Japanese relatives and neighbors.  I can tell you that this article is NOT a fair representation of the events.
To call the reparations a "dole" is insulting.  The reparations are represented in this article as a dole paid without attempt to individually assess losses.  This is an apologist spin as there was no way to determine individual claims several decades later and with many of the oldest Japanese Americans having already died.  It might also be pointed out that nearly half of the internees died prior to the reparations and were not compensated in anyway.  
There are too many of these gaffs to list.  Please consult any of the numerous Japanese American accounts of this experience.
----
This is all pretty understandable and human and everything. The same phenomena is seen in other parts of the world, as for instance in Finland with regard to those Russian citizens of East Karelia that were "evacuated" and came to suffer in "hastily erected housing facilities" - by any normal person known as concentration camps. Unfortunately, this word has been that much colored by WWII-time propaganda, that it seems as English speakers prefer phony euphemisms. I think particularly in the introduction to the article this is detrimential. Call a spade for a spade! /Tuomas 09:07, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: If a person uses the word "concentration camp" to describe something, it will inevitably be compared to the original "concentration camps" in South Africa (where 28,000 women and children died), or to the Nazi Konzentrationslager. Mackerm 09:56, 18 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, and what's wrong with that? It could only reflect positively on the US. Using evasive euphemisms in the introduction, where by necessity there can't be much wording about formal definitions and so on, just works in the other direction - it contributes to, and enhances, an unfortunate Spin-tendency at many articles, that diminish the credibility of all of wikipedia and gives the reader a feeling of something really scandalous might be hidden behind the Newspeak. /Tuomas 05:52, 20 Jun 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: The main problem is that it diminishes the story of people who were in the Nazi or South African concentration camps. Mackerm 06:37, 20 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Please take out apologist tone 

message: In addition to being clearly apologist in tone, this article contains numerous factual inaccuracies and distortions in pretty much every section. What's especially bad is that the vast majority of the incorrect assertions and inaccurate numbers do not even cite a source, so it's impossible for a casual reader to evaluate the truth/falsity/bias in the article! It needs a serious working-over.
Take, for instance, these three paragraphs:
"Using different definitions of internment, you can arrive at different numbers of those affected. 
Only 9,009 people of Japanese ancestry from the US were interned under the Alien Enemy Act of 1798 (50 USC 21-24), compared to a total of 23,435 internees from America. Of those 9,009, most 8,004 were from the continental US. 
Of all American citizens who were descended from "enemy" ancestry (Italian, German and Japanese), the only recorded instances of American citizens asking for renunciation of their citizenship were of Japanese ancestry. 5,620 of these renunciants, who had asked to be repatriated to Japan, were not included in the general internment totals (which would otherwise be 14,629 out of 29,055 - not including any non-American residents)."
The numbers are problematic in that they (1) apparently mix together figures from several different detention regimes, authorized by different authorities; (2) are so poorly worded that it's hard to tell what various numbers refer to (e.g. what is the "total of 23,435 internees from America"?); (3) do not cite a source; and (4) if they refer to the populations which I think they refer to, some numbers are just plain incorrect!
And that's just the beginning... there are numerous other places in the article where highly suspect assertions are made without even citing a source. My guess is that many or most of these inaccurate allegations come not from primary sources, but from the small number of polemic writers who opposed the 1988 redress legislation. If this is the case, then the source REALLY needs to be noted!
Takei 19:19, 14 May 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: See below. The difference is that all Japanese Americans were excluded, while only individual German Americans and Italian Americans were interned. -Will Beback 23:12, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  This article is not at all reliable 

message: As per the Wikipedia:Manual of Style, this article should be moved to Japanese American internment, and this page should be made into the redirect.  Any objections? - DropDeadGorgias (talk) 17:24, Aug 3, 2004 (UTC)
:Please see the discussion in the archive and comment further. --Jiang 12:58, 21 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Japanese American internment]] 

message: To adequately report history,it might be helpful to the occasional reader to refer them to the Robinson and Muller books written on this subject in what appears to be a much more scholarly and less sendational approach to the subject at hand.  What I am looking for is history, not an editorial espousing an opinion.
: Please sign your posts as well. Above added by User:149.174.164.9. 218.102.221.248 05:42, 22 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Japanese American Internment 

message: The statement
:The relocation camps also had the highest live-birth rate and the lowest death rate in the US during the wartime period.
was added on October 27, 2003 by an anonymous user.  Since then, there has been no context or attribution for this statement.  The claim is vague (Higher than the U.S. aggregate?  Higher than for Newport, RI?).  There is no context (was the live-birth rate higher because the still-birth rate was lower, or because the pregnancy rate was higher, perhaps due to the presence of draft-age men?).  We can discuss and hopefully flesh out this claim here on talk, after which it can be moved into the main article.  
--ishu 18:56, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Live Birth Rate/Death Rate

message: I agree with those who dislike this article's apologetic tone. It gives a pro-internment POV. Just one example among many: all the harping on ships that got bombed, spies that got caught, and similar military issues seems to build up the US's case for internment. The typical Yankee redneck reader seeing all that will come to think that the internment was justified. Inadequate mention is made of the fact that only an insignificant number of victims of this oppressive policy had anything to do with the war and that people were rounded up on the sole basis of their ancestry.
There seems to be little mention of the forced acculturation that was very much a part of these camps. Nor is there a word about the hateful references to "Japs", often supplemented with hideous caricatures, that the US government disseminated.
Also, while I do not wish to diminish the experience of the leftists, Jews, Slavs, and others who were sent to Hitlerian "relocation centres", I feel that the term concentration camp is entirely appropriate. It is perhaps better, in a general piece such as this one, to use the standard term instead, but I am not happy with the insinuation that these US concentration camps were incomparably milder than the Nazi ones. That is entirely too easy to say from an armchair.
:How can you say that?  Adding up the lowest numbers on the Holocaust page, the death toll from Nazi concentration camps was around 8 million.  The only estimate I could find for the death toll from Japanese-American internment camps was 300,000.  That should be proof enough that they were very different.
It should also be mentioned that the people of the US have expressed strong support in polls for the internment of Arabs and that the US is already requiring annual registration, complete with photographs, fingerprints, and a questionnaire about political affiliations, of males from two or three dozen countries (mostly those in which Islam is dominant). I shall add some comments to this effect. Shorne 06:19, 1 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Candy-ass tone has a pro-internment POV 

message: I have found a large number of people who will strongly disagree with me on the fact of whether or not Japanese Americans in Hawaii were interned.  For the record there are some accounts of Japanese Americans being sent to internment camps on the mainland.  Not only have I read books on it, I have also spoken to a woman who was sent there and shown a "yearbook" that the inhabitants made while inside the camp.  While the imprisonment of Japanese Americans in Hawaii was nowhere near as severe as the treatment of the prisoners on the mainland were, they did exist.  The conditions however were much more favorable as the interned were given more time and warning in order to be sure to give or sell their property properly.  Most of those interned were allowed to give their property to family members for safekeeping, unlike most of the other Japanese Americans.  So for the record, not all Japanese Americans in Hawaii were spared, but there were not treated nearly as badly as those on the West Coast.
:: See the article for what went on in Hawaii. Gmatsuda 17:56, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  This section seems to be particularly marked by non-NPOV. While I would agree that racism played a substantial part in the internment as a whole, the events on Hawaii do not necessarily prove that military necessity was not a valid rationale for internment. Hawaiian Japanese made up a significant proportion of the agricultural labor force on the islands; these workers would need to be replaced in the event of internment. The two options discussed concerning Hawaiian Japanese internment were to build and maintain an internment camp somewhere in the island chain, or to transport the interned to the mainland where they could be placed in internment camps there. Clearly there are significant logistical problems with internment, and Robinson argues that Hawaiian Japanese internment was opposed by General Emmons, Army commander at Pearl Harbor at the time, for this reason. Robinson goes on to suggest that if there were truly a case of military necessity, FDR could have forced the policy through, which suggests military necessity was not the primary motivating factor. I argue that it is possible that logistical constraints made any realistic internment operation such an undertaking that significant time had to be devoted to the project just to work out the logistical details; by the time this could have been done, the Japanese Army was in retreat and military necessity was no longer a pressing issue. This fits well with the common conception of FDR as a pragmatist, held also by Robinson. To reiterate, I do not think that (realistic) military necessity justfied the internment, but it is possible that there was a perception of military necessity by important decision makers that was thwarted by real-life circumstances and limitations. I mention this to point out that the article as written probably ought to do a better job of discussing the possible motivating factors of internment; this section of the article merely has a more egregious acceptance of a controversial position than others. Ogthor 10:50, 13 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hawaii Japanese Americans 

message: I think it is imperative to include the significance of Michi Nishiura Weglyn's book "Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America's concentration Camps" as it provided the leverage needed to legally fight for the reparations.
I would edit this in myself, but I am not an expert in the field and someone else can provide a detail account.  However I refer you to this link which may prove useful: http://www.resisters.com/news/michi_obit.htm
:: While Weglyn's book is the seminal text on the history of the Japanese American Internment, it did not provide the "...leverage needed to legally fight for the reparations." The legal justification came in two parts: 1) The formation of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians and the hearings they held, listening to hours upon hours of testimony from former internees and; 2) The 1984 court cases of Fred Korematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi and Minoru Yasui.
:: All three were convicted of violating the evacuation orders during WWII and their cases went all the way up to the US Supreme Court, who in 1944 upheld their convictions. However, researchers discovered in the early 1980's that the government had perjured itself before the US Supreme Court in the 1944 cases. The evidence the government used to justify the internment had either been altered, falsified or destroyed.
:: As such, in 1984, the three men challenged their wartime convictions in Federal court on a Writ of Error Coram Nobis. This writ, which is rarely used, challenges a decision of a federal court when a plaintiff charges that the court committed a grievous error.
:: In the Korematsu case, the court ruled that in 1944, the US Supreme Court had only the information that the War and Justice Departments wanted it to have in 1944 and that much of it was falsified or altered. The rest of the story was either suppressed or destroyed.
:: The court vacated Korematsu's conviction, granted his petition for a writ of error coram nobis, and denied the government's motion to ignore it.  Hirabayshi's wartime conviction was vacated in a similar manner. Unfortunately, Yasui passed away before his case was to be heard, rendering his petition moot.
:: The 1944 convictions of these three men continue to be the law of the land because decisions of the US Supreme Court cannot be overturned by a lower court.  They can be vacated, but not overturned. But the 1984 cases gave the Japanese American community the legal standing it needed to push the redress movement to victory--Korematsu, Hirabayashi and Yasui are among the heroes of theredress struggle because of this.
:: *
:: * -- Gmatsuda 08:50, 19 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Redress Movement 

message: I did a cleanup pass of the article today.  It could still use work by volunteers who want to reorganize it, trim it down - shorter would be better - and, especially, provide sources.  It seems that people are adding criticism and miscellaneous notes throughout the article randomly - the "History" section was about half criticism rather than history.
I removed this because it was inappropriately present in the section about terminology:
:Also, many other things besides both internment and relocation are involved, among them:  individual and group exclusion from "military" zones, deportation, illegal detainment, de-naturalization, alien enemy registration requirements, curfews, travel restrictions, and property confiscation (including seizures, freezing, bond seizure, and restrictions) for those of foreign birth and/or of "enemy" ancestry.
:
:The individual exclusion zones were particularly onerous, as they were personally targeted, and very swift - allowing very little time to relocate.  Government agents continued to follow the excludees they couldn't convict of crimes and warn potential new employers, police, and people of their new towns on how "dangerous" they were.
:
:For example in Korematsu's case the Japanese population had 5 days from May 3, 1942 until 12 noon, May 8 (or 9th) to leave their hometown according to General DeWitt's Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34.
This sentence seems improbable to me, lists no source, and nothing depends on it, so I removed it:
:Of the 1.1 million aliens above the age of 14 who would be classed as enemy aliens, 683,259 were males of which 56,332 were Japanese.
This line is pure speculation:
:...and that just because Japanese consular officials said they were attempting to recruit Japanese-Americans did not necessarily mean that those attempts were successful.
...so I replaced it with more speculation based on implications in the article; I said there was no data indicating the success rate of this recruitment.
I removed the following lines because they are extraneous detail that doesn't directly deal with the internment:
:As of 11:00 AM, Dec 9th, 1,801 aliens were in custody, of which 1,221 were Japanese (376 of them in Hawaii) - the author of that memorandum "did not believe there would be very many more arrests of Japanese."
:Only 6,056 of the 16,811 foreigners arrested in security measures by the FBI between December 7, 1941 and June 30, 1945 were of non-European descent. 
I removed the following (otherwise good) paragraph because there was never a Secretary of War Darshan.  If anyone can validate the quote, it ought to be put back in with the correct attribution.
:On January 25, 1942, Secretary of War Darshan reported that "on the Pacific coast not a single ship had sailed from our Pacific ports without being subsequently attacked". Due to this, military authorities suspected possible espionage, although they found no links to Japanese-American civilians.
::This is a "real" quote. I believe it is attributable to Secretary of War Stimson, but I'll try and dig up the original source to confirm that. Ogthor 09:18, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Managed to find the quote, exactly as written. It comes from a memorandum from the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, to the Attorney General, Francis Biddle, dated January 25, 1942. This memo can be found in "American Concentration Camps, vol.2", edited by Roger Daniels, published 1989 by Garland Publishing. However, the context of the quote is vital. The full quote reads: "A few days ago it was reported by military observers on the Pacific Coast that not a single ship had sailed from our Pacific ports without being subsequently attacked." Note the use of weasel words; so far as I know these "military observers" have never been identified, and historians whose works I've read on the subject (Daniels, Robinson, others) claim that the quote is untrue. The specific memo that this quote can be found in is a commnication from Stimson to Biddle regarding the establishment of areas to be "restricted" (referring to the exclusion of alien enemies), under the provisions of FDR's proclamations 2525, 2526, and 2527. Seems to me this is a loaded quote, but still useful as it shows the tensions between the War Department and the Justice Department, as well as the dishonest way the case was being presented. Ogthor 20:25, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cleanup pass from today 

message: I'm kind of disappointed that no one noticed the vandalism which occured here about three weeks ago.  A lot of stuff was removed, so I'm just going to revert to that version.  In the future, please be sure to check things like if a long article is missing external links or categories, because that means it likely has been vandalized. --tomf688{talk} 02:40, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Vandalism 

message: I removed the following because it does not name a specific camp. This seems like exactly the kind of urban legend that pro-internment people like to throw in without evidentiary support:
::At one camp, the internees actually requested the barbed wire be raised an additional 10 feet, fearing local mob violence after a Japanese victory in the Pacific theater.:: Japanese American Internment camp
:Yes, that sounds dubious. -Will Beback 21:15, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Conditions in the camps 

message: Hello! I am a writer for the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Education and Museum Studies, which publishes Smithsonian in Your Classroom, a magazine for teachers.  An online version of an issue titled "Letters from the Japanese American Internment" is available for free at this address:
http://www.smithsonianeducation.org/educators/lesson_plans/japanese_internment/index.html
The issue tells the story of San Diego librarian Clara Breed and her correspondence with young San Diegans sent to Poston.  In lesson plans, students compare letters from internees.  They consider the prismatic nature of the historic record and the value of primary sources in understanding history.
If you think your audience would find this valuable, I wish to invite you to include it as an external link. We would be most grateful.
Thank you so much for your attention.
:That seems like an informative link. Thanks for creating it and teling us about it. Cheers, -Will Beback 00:33, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Add Smithsonian Education link? 

message: I would like to comment on this article's statement that there were no Germans or Italians in internment camps in the US during WWII.  If you use google and type "German Internment camps", there are many, many sources that show that both Germans and Italians who were US citizens were also sent to internmen camps. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.19.131.136 (talk • contribs) .
:Please read the article again, that is not what it says. The key distinction is that Americans of German or Italian ancestry were not interned, only German and Italian nationals. -Will Beback 21:28, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: You're wrong.  There were a number of American citizens of German and Italian descent interned in Texas.  The difference between those cases and the Nikkei was that those of European descent were arrested individually on suspicion of individual activities.  The Nikkei were rounded up en mass, because they were Nikkei (some unmarried, adult Nikkei avoided the problem by claiming to be Chinese or Korean).  Critic-at-Arms 10:08, 5 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That's not really internment though, is it?  If there was actually suspiscion of individual offences (although on second thoughts, it could depend if they were actually charged with an offence).  David Underdown 10:22, 5 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It was internment.  Internment is one of the words for imprisonment.  Those who feel that the internment of the Nikkei was somehow justified will point out that there were non-Nikkei who were sent to camps, just as the Nikkei were.  By knowing the truth, their arguments fall flat Critic-at-Arms 04:10, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Other nationals

message: Anything here worth incorporating?  (have posted complete text as links to these AP articles tend to be transient, feel free to delete altogether)
  Sue Kunitomi Embrey 
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Sue Kunitomi Embrey, who was interned with thousands of Japanese-Americans at Manzanar in World War II and later fought to have the camp declared a national historic site, died Monday. She was 83. 
Embrey died at a hospital of complications from bowel-obstruction surgery after a long illness, her son, Bruce, said Tuesday. 
Born Sueko Kunitomi in Los Angeles, Embrey was 19 when she, her seven siblings and widowed mother were taken to the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California's Inyo County under a 1942 presidential order to intern West Coast Japanese-Americans and resident Japanese after the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. 
The camp was ringed with barbed wire and guard towers, but internees tried to maintain a vibrant community. Embrey became a reporter and editor for the camp newspaper. She also supported the war effort and spent time sewing camouflage nets, her son recalled. 
  Both of her brothers served in the war. 
In 1969 she and others made headlines with a pilgrimage to Manzanar. At the time, there was a split in the Japanese-American community between older people who didn't want to discuss the internment and younger people who felt it was important to publicize the treatment of their people. 
She helped form a committee that began a decades-long campaign to have Manzanar recognized officially. In 1972, it was declared a California historic site and 20 years later became a National Historic Site.
:: A better obituary can be found on the Rafu Shimpo's web site, http://www.rafu.com/sue_embrey.html. Sue was an inspiration to many. I first met her back in 1987 when I was still a student at UCLA and I had the honor to work with her for almost 20 years with the Manzanar Committee. I also had the opportunity to serve with her as a member of the Manzanar National Historic Site Advisory Commission.  Without her energy, spirit and strength, Manzanar would still be little more than a barren patch of desert land instead of a National Historic Site. She is a legend in the Japanese American community and will be sorely  missed. Gmatsuda 07:58, 19 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Relevant obit? 

message: I have addde weasel tag to "Support for the internment, then and now". I think that section, especially, needs a cleanup regarding the choice of words and the way it is representing different points of view. Lots of "some might say", "many belive" and someone even "denies the fact that...". Just name the "fact" and let the readers decide whether it is being denied.Medico80 16:48, 19 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Weasel words