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BY: Tom, what are your current thoughts about the use of the term "concentration camp"?

TI: When I first started the project, I think I was of the opinion that it was probably not a good term, and a lot of it had to do with that use of term with the Nazi concentration camps. I felt that it would be hard to talk to people with that term, and that was twenty-five years ago when I first started. Over time, it gets to what I saw as my role as a historian, and to try to be as clear and accurate as possible. And as I looked at it more and more, what that term meant, and how, if we start using words or avoiding words because of political reasons or others, then it actually increases this layer of confusion. And it just felt that that's what these camps were. That we rounded up people because of who they were. Not for what they did, because Japanese Americans weren't guilty of anything, it was because they were of Japanese ancestry. And two-thirds of them were U.S. citizens, and it wasn't even that, it was just like there was no reason other than their ethnicity. And that, under armed guards, they couldn't leave, so that, to me, very much fit the definition of concentration camps. So I've come to feel very comfortable using that term, and explaining it in terms of when I'm in an educational context, or in public, to differentiate it from the camps that were in Europe. But yet, as I do this, I also talk about there were similarities. I mean, on the exact dates that they were rounding up people in groups of about eight hundred to a thousand in Germany, they were on the same exact day doing this in the United States in places like Santa Monica, Tacoma, and very similar in terms of people taking only what they could carry under armed guard, boarding buses or trains, not really sure where they're going or how long, and there are similarities there. I talk about... and I get this from ADL and the Holocaust Center, the "pyramid of hate," it doesn't go from nothing to genocide, because all these steps, and with that, the Japanese American incarceration is part of that "pyramid of hate" in terms of getting there.

BY: I have no reservations personally about using the term, but it does seem to provoke some people, and I don't want it to take away from the story, to have people stop and do their intellectual exercise about it. I don't know if you found it most successful to use the term but with some kind of qualifying statement about, "No, they weren't death camps, but..."

TI: I do that, and I also talk about how it's problematic to call them "internment camps," because then it gets confused with the Enemy Alien Act, and that was a legal process that you can go through. And yeah, they abused it by not having really good hearings and things like that, but it gets to the point -- and I talk about the history -- the point for me is what the government did was, one, in this body of people, they suspected in that body there were some people that might be dangerous. And they knew that the vast majority of them were not dangerous. Knowing that, they put that whole body into camps. And that... and so if there's a process to really find people that they really think are dangerous, and to have some hearings or due process to figure that out, I'm not opposed to that. It's this idea that because this body, they're saying they can't tell for racial reasons or whatever, and to put all these innocent people through that process in terms of being removed and incarcerated, that's the wrongdoing. And so "internment" is problematic, because if done appropriately and reasonably and done well, that is a process to try to figure things out.

BY: But to the vast, I would argue, to the vast majority of Americans, a, it doesn't even have a meaning, "internment," okay, what is that? And that's where language becomes so important. And you especially have to be, I think, mindful of governments and these kind of euphemisms, "Camp Harmony," for instance. Small question, Tom, so why, today, do I still see 110,000 a bunch of places and 120,000 a bunch of places?

TI: Because that number, it's different for different parts of the process. So in terms of the removal from the West Coast, it's actually 110,000. But when you look at how many people were incarcerated, so these are, there were births in the camp, there were transfers from the Department of Justice camps. So in terms of how many were incarcerated in the camps, it's 120,000. And if you want to talk about including all of the Department of Justice and military camps with the WRA camps, then it's 126,000. So it's within that context of how you do it. And I get it's confusing, but when I talk about it, so I say, "110,000 were removed from their homes into the WRA camps." But when I say how many people were affected by the incarceration, it's 120,000. And then if I include the DOJ camps, it's 126,000.

BY: Oh, okay. And by the way, no Japanese Americans were ever convicted of espionage during World War II. Is that correct?

TI: Well, there's this interesting case that a scholar mentioned to me. There were two Japanese American women who were convicted of aiding prisoners of war, but they were German POWs in, I think, Colorado or some state. And so those are the only two known that I know of.

BY: Huh. Helping German POWs.

TI: Yeah. I guess there was a romantic kind of encounter or something and they ended up helping these two.

BY: That's a fascinating story.

TI: Yeah, I think Eric Muller, scholar, wrote a book or something about that, or an article, so he let me know. So it's not true to say that no Japanese American was ever convicted during that era, but it wasn't to help Japanese, it was German POWs.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2020 Densho. All Rights Reserved.