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9 I WORDS DO MATTER A Note on Inappropriate Terminology and the Incarceration of the Japanese Americans ROGER DANIELS On or about August 2, 1979, I received a telephone call from Senator Daniel K. Inouye's Washington office.' One of his administrative assistants read me a draft of what became Senate Bill 1647 callingfor the establishmentofa "Commission on Wartime Relocation and .InternmentofCivilians (CWRIC)." The callcame because I had been advising the staffofthe 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.Z She asked what the difference was, and I explained that "internment" was an ordinaryaspect ofdeclared 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 earlyas 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 semblanceofdue process.> What happened to most ofthe 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 onlyin the literature but bymany Japanese Americans. After some discussion she said that the difference was dear to her and that the bill's text would be changed. In a second phone call, the next day, she told me that, unfortunately, thesenator had not waited for my vetting and had secured the agreement of a number ofother senators to co-sponsor the bill and that he would not countenance any changes. Thus, not for the first time, inappropriate, euphemistic language was WORDS DO MATTER 191 employed, officially, to describe what happened to West Coast Japanese Americans in the aftermath ofPearl Harbor. Although, over time, the consciousness ofJapanese and other Americans has been raised, most notably bythe successful redress movement which resulted in the passageofthe Civil LibertiesAct of1988,which eventuallyproduced bothan apologyand 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 declaredwar, and no internment occurred.4 The first actual internment by the United States government occurred during the warof1812when someresident British, mostly merchants, were ordered to remove themselves fifty miles inland. British merchants in NewYorkCity, 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 enemyaliens-the vast majorityofthem Germans and almost all the rest subjects of Austria-Hungary-were arrested under presidential warrants , but nearly three-quarters ofthem 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 ofthem male.~ During World War II, internment ofGermans and Italians began more than two years before the United States formally entered thewar in December 1941. A few seamen from German vessels stranded in U.S. ports were interned shortly after the outbreak ofwar in September 1939, as were, after June 1940, perhaps a thousand Italians, seamen and a group offood work...

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