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A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY T HE JAPANESE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE during World War II had a wide range of constitutional and legal repercussions, in part because the treatment of Japanese Americans was shrouded in euphemism. The words used to describe federal policies minimized the real impact these policies had on people and created lasting complications for those who tried to discuss the unconstitutionality of “evacuation” and “relocation.” Scholars still grapple with the most appropriate terminology for these policies. For this study, therefore, I use a wide range of terminology, depending on the specific topic at hand, selecting those terms that best fit my interpretation of events. Because the terms used in this study are diverse, some of the choices I have made warrant specific explanation. First are the commonly accepted terms used to describe generations of Japanese Americans and ways of identifying the entire group regardless of generation or citizenship. “Nisei” is a Japanese term that describes the second generation, or specifically the American-born children of Japanese immigrants. The first generation is called “Issei,” the third generation “Sansei,” and the fourth generation “Yonsei.” “Nikkei” is a Japanese word for all Japanese Americans and does not differentiate between Japanese-born and U.S.-born persons of Japanese ancestry. “Kibei” refers to U.S.-born Japanese Americans whose parents sent them to Japan for their education. Finally, when referring to the entire group, I have left “Japanese American” unhyphenated to emphasize that ethnic Americans are not partial Americans. Scholars argue that hyphenating such terms as “Japanese-American” implies that the individual is half of each nationality and wholly nothing. Leaving out the hyphen promotes the idea that ethnic Americans choose for themselves elements of more than one culture to create their own unique identities.1 Even though popular usage continues to refer to the ten War Relocation Authority (WRA) centers as “internment camps” and the wartime treatment of Japanese Americans as “internment,” the term is appropriate for only a very specific legal category of confinement. When taking into custody enemy aliens or individuals suspected of specific and documented threats, the Department of Justice interned those individuals in federally regulated facilities. Some Japanese Americans, as well as German and Italian nationals, were legally interned in Department of Justice centers during the war. These individuals were interned because they were on a list of individuals identified as maintaining connections with enemy nations that would likely create a conflict of interest during wartime. The number of Japanese Americans “interned” was small compared with the total number of individuals forced into federal custody during the war. The federal government never used the term “internment” to describe the confinement of the majority of Japanese Americans. A government propaganda newsreel that explained the “relocation” of Japanese Americans said, “They are not prisoners; they are not internees. They are merely dislocated people, the unwounded casualties of war.”2 The War Relocation Authority called its camps “relocation centers” to make it appear that the population had merely been moved from one place to another. This terminology is problematic because it is passive and extremely benign. It does not indicate the financial cost, the heart-wrenching personal losses, or the involuntary nature of the program. According to WRA terminology, individuals were evacuated from a military zone for their own safety and relocated to centers while they awaited a more permanent form of resettlement outside the temporary camps. This terminology denied all culpability and cloaked the involuntary nature of the program in euphemisms that did not accurately describe the legal condition of the “evacuees.” Instead, scholars now prefer such terms as “forced removal,” “exclusion,” “confinement,” “incarceration,” and “detention” rather than “evacuation” and “relocation.”3 Even during the war, people outside the WRA used alternative language to describe the treatment of Japanese Americans. President Franklin Roosevelt called the WRA centers “concentration camps.” This term is not generally used today because of its close association with the death camps of Nazi Germany . “Internment” became the most popularly used term, but it is used in this study only when conveying the words of others and is enclosed in quotation marks to make it clear that this legal form of confinement should not be confused with the unconstitutional manner in which most Japanese Americans were held. In recent years, scholars have experimented with words that emphasize the involuntary nature of Japanese American exclusion and confinement. These terms sometimes blur the lines between formal prisons and the civilian “relocation” centers. The terms “detained” and “detainee” are useful...

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