Densho Digital Repository - Roger Daniels Interview IV (Densho ID: ddr-densho-418-6)

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TI: And not only in textbooks, but going back, it happened in your writings, too. You mentioned you have written about the incarceration in a substantive way four times. Starting with Concentration Camps USA, and then the one in the '80s, would that be Asian America?

RD: Oh, yes, there's a long chapter. The subtitle of that book is Chinese and Japanese...

TI: ...in the United States since 1850.

RD: Yes, since 1850.

TI: So you have Asian America, and then would the one in the '90s be Prisoners Without Trial?

RD: Yes.

TI: And then the fourth one is the one that will be published this November.

RD: That's right.

TI: And it's about the Supreme Court cases.

RD: It's called The Japanese American Cases. And then there are smaller versions. And then I wrote... it was almost an accident, a long essay called Words Do Matter, which talks about the different ways in which historians, Japanese Americans, and all kinds of other people have discussed the concentration camps, and which words they have used. And for a long time, and still today, the phrase "American concentration camp" is not something that all historians are willing to write down and put in one place. And a long list of terms: "exclusion," "relocation," not "exile," "ethnic cleansing," which are more appropriate terms. So the language changes, and there are language wars over that. Language is very crucial. If you can control the language used to describe an event, you shape the public parameters of that event. And that's why this whole debate within the Japanese American community, the so-called "power of words," is very important. And, again, that's another thing that has changed very much, and that is the community's consciousness of what it was up to and what happened to it. I wish I had a dollar for every Japanese American who said to me at one time or another, and in one way or another that, "It never occurred to me that I was in a concentration camp. I thought that would happen to other people." So that self-realization was very important. If you control the language of an event, about an event, you shape the way people see that event and these gentler terms are very important. "Segregation" and "apartheid" are two very different terms describing the same kind of process. One is much stronger, much harsher, than the other, and certainly South African segregation, which is apartheid, was harsher than American segregation. But it wasn't that different.