Talk:Internment of Japanese Americans/Archive 6

message: I'd like to preface this by stating that I am relying on memory for much of my comments. My primary source is "American Concentration Camps, vol.2", edited by Roger Daniels, published 1989 by Garland Publishing, which I used recently as primary source material for a research project. I no longer have this book in my possession.
* In the introduction, the article states that "President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the internment with United States Executive Order 9066, which allowed local military commanders to designate "military areas" as "exclusion zones", from which "any or all persons may be excluded.""
:This sentence obscures the fact that internment of non-citizens (specifically, those from Japan, Germany, and Italy) was authorized much earlier by Roosevelt in Presidential Proclamation Nos. 2525, 2526, and 2527. The article mentions these Proclamations later, but does not explain their significance. Executive Order 9066 was significant because 1) it extended the power of internment to include citizens, and 2) it transfered all responsibility and authority for such action to the War Department.
* In the History section: "Authorities also feared sabotage of both military and civilian facilities inside the United States. Military officials expressed concerns that California's water systems were highly vulnerable, and there were concerns about the possibility of arson — brush fires in particular.
:"Administration and military leaders also doubted the loyalty of ethnic Japanese..."
:This use of weasel words is significant because it conceals the division within the Roosevelt administration concerning the possibility of internment. Directly citing these "authorities" and "military officials" would be excellent; qualifying them as principally within the War Deapartment would be a step in the right direction.
:In addition, citing or quoting the Munson Report would be helpful here, as it displays evidence that Japanese Americans as a group were not a threat in terms of sabotage or espionage. The Munson report is also significant because it was evidence of Japanese loyalty which Roosevelt personally had possession of before signing Executive Order 9066 (specifically, Roosevelt had the Munson Report no later than November 8, 1941). The Munson Report is quoted later in the "Criticisms, then and now" section of the article, but I think should be referenced in the "History" section as well.
:Source: C. B. Munson to John Franklin Carter, 7 November 1941, American Concentration Camps: July, 1940 – December 31, 1941, vol.1, Roger Daniels, ed. (New York: Garland, 1989).
* In the Hawaii section: "The vast majority of Japanese Americans and their immigrant parents in Hawaii were not interned because the Government had already declared martial law in Hawaii and this allowed it to significantly reduce the risk of espionage and sabotage by residents of Japanese ancestry. Also, since these individuals comprised over 35% of the territory's economy, it was not prudent to remove them. They were laborers in the sugar cane and pineapple fields and canneries, and also merchants, restaurant owners, etc. In fact, scholarly research has shown that government and military officials realized that removing and interning all people of Japanese ancestry from Hawaii would completely destroy the territory's economy. This was a major factor in their decision that no mass removal and internment program was needed."
:There were also significant logistical challenges to interning Japanese Americans in Hawaii which contributed to the eventual failure to intern there. Debate occured within the administration concerning possible internment, with discussion stuck on whether to intern Japanese Hawaiians somewhere on the island or whether to ship them to the mainland and intern them somewhere in the continental U.S.. Both options presented difficulties; internment on the islands would have required stationing guards at a facility of little strategic value, whereas shipping over 100,000 people from Hawaii to the mainland would have required a significant allocation of naval resources. Roosevelt repeatedly expressed a desire to intern Japanese Hawaiians, but General Emmons (in command of defenses on the Hawaiian islands at the time) opposed such action due to logistical difficulties. These difficulties continued to be an obstacle even up to the Battle of Midway, indicating that even if military necessity was perceived as warranting internment, by the time it was possible to actually do so the perceived necessity may have largely vanished. Clearly if there was stronger evidence of an imminent Japanese invasion of the Hawaiian islands, logistical difficulties would not have stood in the way of military operations, but the importance of logistics should be mentioned as a factor in the ultimate outcome in the consideration of whether to intern Japanese Hawaiians.
:Source: Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).
* Also, this article lacks any discussion of factors which led Roosevelt to decide to issue Executive Order 9066. Much of the historical analysis of this topic which I have researched has tended to paint the internment largely as a project designed and lobbied for by the War Department, which Roosevelt acquiesced to; this perspective ignores the rivalry between the War Department and the Department of Justice over internment between December 7 1941 and February 19 1942. I believe a mention of this rivalry is appropriate because it clearly shows Roosevelt as having access to information which might suggest mass internment as unnecessary.
* Finally, there was some discussion on this page implying that Japanese American internment could be regarded as a sort of sacrifice, comparable to the sacrifice made by American servicemen. I agree with Gmatsuda that this is an inapropriate comparison: although there were attempts made at the time to paint internment as a patriotic sacrifice, and indeed sentiments expressed by Japanese Americans (especially by the JACL) which supported this viewpoint, internment was a significant violation of civil rights which was almost certainly unconstitutional. In contrast, involuntary military service was specifically authorized by law. In addition, the comparison ignores the stigma attached to Japanese Americans as a result of the internment, as opposed to the aura of heroism afforded to those who served in the military.
--Ogthor 20:59, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Clarifications and Additions 

message: 207.207.79.202 added the following: "The roots of the internment may run back to the turn of the 20th century, the Russo-Japanese War and the rise of Japanese Ultra Nationalism during the Showa Era. Tensions between Americans and a the large influx of newly arrived Asians in California had begun to increase in the 1880s when a series of laws were passed. They were initially the result of union pressure on the government to keep American's wages high because immigrants would work for half the price."
That replaced the following (don't know who wrote it): "The roots of the internment run back to the turn of the 20th century. Tensions between Caucasian and Japanese immigrants in California had begun to increase in the 1890s, then a series of laws were passed, aimed at discouraging Japanese immigration, prohibiting land ownership by Japanese and even denying entry to Japanese women seeking to join their husbands in America."
::I wrote it.  My interested in the Japanese American internment is relatively recent, so I came into it from the whole issue of how Asians were treated in California from 1860 - 1960. 68.178.65.194 03:43, 15 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  History Section 

message: EXTERNAL LINKS: This section needs to be cleaned up.  There are many databases available to the public and to those affiliated with educational institutions or any place that purchases subscriptions to large electronic research databases.  As such I would like someone to test out the following link:   That is a link to the Japanese American Relocation Digital Archives, and is supported through the California Digital Library.  I feel this resource will adequately replace most of the links already present since the archive brings together all the major holdings on JA Relocation in the  country.  
SEE ALSO: Conversely this section needs some beefing up.  I know that the objective of the wiki media project is to bring together information through a synthetic process, however I still believe the greatest asset this program can offer is to act as a bibliographical source.  Hence the SEE ALSO section should be re-titled "further reading" or "related works" and should include PUBLISHED WORKS, including the books the contributors themselves referenced.  Since the standard practice is to create links to other references within wikipedia itself in the text i feel that topics such as Gentlemen's Agreement and Chinese Exclusion should be removed.  
:::: For example the works widely accepted as the preeminent text on the subject of Relocation might be mentioned in the discussion but are no where found in the main article.  Michi Weglyn is an exception to this and I appreciate her work being mentioned in the main article, however it should be moved down to the bottom.Dezertfx21 06:05, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Commment on EXTERNAL LINKS and SEE ALSO section 

message: The second-to-last sentence of the lead section begins:
:The official apology said that government actions were based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership"
I can't find a reference to the actual text of the bill or the apology.  Most references attribute this language to the CWRIC report (Personal Justice Denied).  Can anyone provide a reference to the act or apology? --ishu 02:41, 12 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I found a reference to the Senate bill S.1009.  I have changed the reference in the article and added the appropriate link.  --ishu 04:28, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Apology quote in lead section

message: I removed the following statement because the link does not point to an acutal page or document:
:James C. Naughton, Command Historian of the US Army, had this to say, "The hints contained in MAGIC, if decisionmakers paid them any heed at all, were not by themselves sufficient to justify the mass evacuation and incarceration of over 100,000 civilians..."U.S. Army Center of Military History
We can move it back if the editor will supply a better citation.  --ishu 03:31, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Naughton on MAGIC

message: I know that it is not looked fondly upon to introduce new sources for citations, but I have a source for the first paragraph under 3:3 'Conditions of Camps.' The docu-drama Unfinished Business: The Japanese-American Internment Cases.  BUT I do not feel that I have the status to be making this addition my self, let alone do I have the knowledge of how to make the change anyways.LEKS 16:43, 18 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: On 3:3 Conditions of Camps

message: I reverted some edits to the article--especially because they appeared in the lead section.  
There is a consensus among recent editors on this article regarding new copy.   
*Any new copy in this article should be subject to strict citation requirements.  The citation of the existing copy is woeful, and needs to be upgraded, but new copy should be held to higher standards so that we don't have to go back and re verify the new stuff.    
*This consensus is an offshoot of a protracted edit war that occurred in June and July of 2006.  
*In order to understand what occurred and why the strict standards, (please) browse through this talk page, including some of the recent archives. (Due to the high "noise" content in archive 5, a digest of that archive has been created.)  
A review of the edit history of this article will show that I have been adding citations and requesting citations as busily as I can.  Without intending to sound dictatorial, I think this should be the main focus of editing for the short term.  
I'd appreciate concurrences from some of the other editors.  Thanks for your understanding and cooperation.  --ishu 23:10, 17 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Citations for new copy 

message: I've made a lot of edits this month, and basically, nobody else has been editing this article.  I'm not complaining--I am not trying to be the Little Red Hen.  However, I would like to do a pulse-check of anybody out there to record a consensus for the article as it stands.  Just to be clear, there's lots to be done, and the current structure might be improved upon.  However, i feel the article is vulnerable to rewrite (as it has been in the past).  If we can demonstrate some moderate consensus on the current revision, it might help to guide any future discussion.  
I'm talking to all you page-watchers out there!
So, our straw poll question is:  "Do you think the article is going in the right direction, or do you think it's on the wrong track?"  By "right direction," I mean several things:
*Is the current structure adequate for the content in the article now, while also leaving room for additional sections in the near future?
*Do you agree with the short-term philosophy restricting new material to high standards of verifiability until the existing copy is fully verified?  I deem this standard necessary in response to the June/July 2006 edit war.  
--ishu 20:37, 20 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for all your work. I haven't reviewed the article in a while (or for that matter, worked on it ever...), but will do so shortly. But in the meantime, I strongly concur with your second point - no matter what article, information should always adhere to strict verifiability and high standards. Thanks! Flcelloguy (A note?) 20:48, 20 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for your comment.  I think I should clarify what I mean by restricting new material to high standards of verifiability. I have stated elsewhere on this page my intention to revert any edit that is not verified.  I would like to establish a consensus for this guideline.  I think you will agree that this is a stringent standard that is not often used on WP.  If you are somewhat familiar with the edit history on the page, I hope you will agree that it is a desirable guideline.  --ishu 22:01, 20 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not too familiar with the history of the page, but I don't think we need to say that any edit without citation should be reverted - for instance, a spelling error would be an edit without citation. What we do need to say is that we need to aggressively remove any statements that are either dubious or not cited properly. Thanks! Flcelloguy (A note?) 00:35, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

text: As I noted below, the citations need lots of work.  But can you comment on the structure of the article?  Are the current topics reasonable?  Does the structure allow for the logical addition of new topics?  --ishu 06:02, 24 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Survey:  Is there consensus for current structure and philosophy? (ATTENTION page watchers!) 

message: *Some 120,000 U.S. residents of German and Italian descent across the country were also arrested and interned as security risks, but no compensation was ever paid to them.Nigel Wrench (2004, April 7), "The lost voices of Crystal City," BBC Radio (republished at news.bbc.co.uk, accessed 18 Sept. 2006Emily Brosveen, World War II Internment Camps in Handbook of Texas Onlinepublished at www.tsha.utexas.edu by The General Libraries at the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas State Historical Association.  Accessed 18 Sept. 2006.
Wehere do we get the figure of 120,000? It isn't in the cited references. Here's a better reference, but it mentions much smaller numbers, "WWII Violations of German American Civil Liberties by the US Government". A U.S. Senator sponsored a bill to study the issue and he said in a speech:
*Approximately 11,000 ethnic Germans, 3,200 ethnic Italians, and scores of Bulgarians, Hungarians, Romanians or other European Americans living in America were taken from their homes and placed in internment camps 
It appears that we are off by an order of magnititude. -Will Beback 19:42, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  120,000