Karen Ishizuka talking:
George Takei and others have called it internment, because that’s the common phrase. But I think, you know, when I was asked to curate the show, Asian—that we ended up calling “America’s Concentration Camps,” you know, I had 19 advisers, including Roger Daniels, the historian, who was probably one of the first major historians to write about the camps, as well as Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, who was the lead researcher on the Commission for the Relocation and Internment of Civilians for the government. And all of those 19 advisers advised us to not continue to use euphemisms that have been used throughout the history of the United States to mitigate, basically, what had happened during World War II to Japanese Americans.
people say that 120,000 people were interned, but the internment refers to a parallel but different set of incarceration under the international laws, so only so-called enemy aliens, including Germans, Italians and Japanese, were so-called interned in internment camps. And that was about 7,000 or 8,000. In the meantime, there was a Commission on War Relocation Authority, set up 10 camps that they euphemistically called relocation centers, but that are now called concentration camps, because FDR himself first called them concentration camps. So, it’s not that the Japanese-American community started that phrase; it was—really came from the government itself. So, we were advised, and we continue to not use euphemisms such as “internment” for “incarceration,” “relocation center” for “concentration camp.”
Richard Reeves talk:
That could happen again to Muslims, to border crossers, and I wanted to do my bit to try to make that not happen. But I do think a few incidents—the Supreme Court never ruled that the laws the White House and the military used to incarcerate these people—that’s still on the books. As Justice Jackson, Robert Jackson, said, it’s a loaded gun on the Constitution, so that I had—I’m amazed at how few people, once you get east of the Sierras and the Cascades, really know or believe this happened.
No one was questioning the military had the right to do this at the time. It was all internal dialogue between the Justice Department, the War Department and the president. And then there was—there was great speaking of words. There were great disputes, internal, on—until they came up with a statement that avoided using the words that partly drove the incarceration. That is, race and greed. Japanese Americans or Japanese are never mentioned in Executive Order 9066 which Roosevelt signed, partly under the tutelage of Roger Baldwin of the American Civil Liberties Union, who was saying—these were the people you would think would rise up.
But Baldwin was a great friend and supporter of Roosevelt, and he forbade his people to talk about race in this sentence. The order doesn’t say race, but it was only the Japanese Americans who were rounded up. And they—but they were never used, the real words.
this is a very little-known chapter of American history. because it’s also a continuum, beginning with the treatment of the Tories, or the Indians, before that, after the Revolution, and “Irish need not apply” and anti-Semitism. And the other has always been discriminated against, if they came as we needed the labor. They built the country. But the—and then they were discriminated against, because they weren’t us, until they were us. And now they are us. As to what happened, there were—they established a war zone along the Pacific Coast, claiming—there was great fear, proclaiming that the Japanese, imperial Japanese, could invade the West Coast. Actually, Roosevelt and his people knew they didn’t have the capacity to do that, but he wanted that issue off the boards, and also so that—they were first rounded up and kept usually at racetracks. Santa Anita had 18,000 Japanese Americans held in there, as did other racetracks, livestock fairgrounds. That’s where they put them for four or five months, while they built, from prisoner of war camp plans, the relocation centers or the camps in 10 different places around the country.
that’s why, you know, sort of the difference between incarceration and internment comes up, because Santa Fe was an internment camp, and there were—my grandfather was interned in Santa Fe before he was released and sent to Arkansas to join the rest of my family. But I think that’s where it gets difficult to accurately talk about the era, because of the continued use—and I noticed that you, you know, used the term “internment.” And I have to also make a correction, that, you know, I know that George Takei was one of the few who’s been—you know, stood up to Donald Trump and asked him to really stand up for his words, but, you know, I am not sure whether he uses the term “internment” or “incarceration.” But he was part of the Japanese American National Museum board when I did the “America’s Concentration Camps” and was really one who stood up for our right to tell the story, our history, the way it was experienced.
even when I was doing the exhibit and I called the Justice Department, even they did not have a complete list of so-called internment camps. I think everything happened so fast, and so one hand didn’t know what the other was doing. So the Justice Department was, from my understanding, in charge of the internment and of the so-called enemy aliens. So, you know, as I mentioned, both Japanese Americans as well as Italians and Germans were—
The military handled the camps. Many people in the Justice Department were against the roundup, as it were, but their voices were stilled. Some people quit over it. But Roosevelt wanted it, and he got it. I would begin by saying that 75 percent of the net worth of the Japanese community, in California, at least, disappeared. On December 8th of 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor, Japanese-American bank accounts were frozen, so that they couldn’t pay mortgages. They couldn’t pay insurance. And then the attorney general of California, Earl Warren, and his department ruled that their property was abandoned property, and either sold or distributed it to their Caucasian neighbors. It was—it was an outrage.
there was an attempt for reparations way back, right after the war, in the ’50s, if I remember correctly. But they were also asked at that time to produce receipts of what was lost, etc. So, it was a big fight, and it came from the community itself. And it was something that even Japanese Americans—my parents, for example—did not want to talk about. It was a shameful—and, you know, in terms of blaming the victim, they really felt that, you know, let bygones be bygones. And Japanese Americans, as well And we needed to bring out the truth and ask our parents to really talk about what had been covered up.
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Karen Ishizuka
third-generation American of Japanese descent who was part of the Asian American movement in Los Angeles. She was the curator of the nationwide exhibit called “America’s Concentration Camps: Remembering the Japanese-American Experience.” Her latest book is titled Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties. She is also the author of Lost and Found: Reclaiming the Japanese American Incarceration.
Richard Reeves
author of several books, most recently, Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese-American Internment in World War II. He is the senior lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.
— source democracynow.org