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Q: I want to talk about, I want you to talk about the term "concentration camps."' Were they concentration camps and what kind of psychological effect did it have on the internees, you know, desperate acts, suicides?

RD: Well, the camps to which Japanese Americans were sent fall into three different categories. There were first of all, the real internment camps, which were for enemy aliens, these were for males only, they were conducted under the rules of the Geneva Convention. They were run by the, not by the army, but by the Department of Justice or the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which is part of the Department of Justice. Secondly, there were the assembly centers which were the temporary places to which Japanese Americans were sent, Santa Anita, Tanforan, etcetera. Then there were the ten relocation centers: Manzanar, Tule Lake, Minidoka, Heart Mountain, Granada, the three in Arizona, the two in Arkansas, the others being in California, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado and of course, Topaz in Utah, which I forgot. These were places in desolate locations surrounded by barbed wire, guarded by gun towers and troops armed, who on occasion did shoot and kill people who were allegedly trying to get near the fence, not very many. To which persons were sent, not because of trial, not because of a trial or imprisonment, not because of an accusation of an individual act, not because of the status being enemy aliens, but they were sent because of their ancestry, because of their ethnicity, they were incarcerated and I think that is very much a concentration camp. If, however, you want "concentration camp" to only be used for places of extermination, like Buchenwald or Auschwitz or the Soviet labor camps of the Gulag Archipelago, then these were not concentration camps. More persons were born in them than died in them, but they were terrible places. And by the normal definition of a concentration camp, they were, they certainly weren't prisons because there was no trial. They certainly weren't internment camps because you cannot intern a citizen. Internment is a legal process for an enemy alien, and two-thirds of the persons placed in relocation centers were native born American citizens. In addition, internment has traditionally been applied only to adult males and men, women and children were placed in these camps. So I think that "concentration camp" is the appropriate term. Franklin Roosevelt is willing, on three different public occasions, or semi-public occasions, in his press conferences to call them concentration camps. They're good enough for Franklin Roosevelt, it ought to be good enough for Americans. 'Course, people like John J, McCloy and others tried at the time and have insisted that they not be called concentration camps. One government bureaucrat even suggested that the whole program should be called a "residence control program." But this Orwellian phrase was even a little bit too much. Dillon Myer, head of the WRA, a bureaucrat who tried to do a decent job and I guess is more of a quote, unquote "good guy" than a bad guy. Dillon Myer very much resented the term "concentration camps." But we must say of Mr. Myer that after he got through running the Japanese American camps and knew nothing about Japanese Americans when he took over, they figured that since he'd run those camps, he would good at running other camps, so his next major job was as Commissioner of Indian Affairs, to be in charge of all the Indian reservations. And maybe the previous American institution that are most like the camps were Indian reservations. Now, Indian reservations were too big to be surrounded by barbed wire, but you know if Indians went off the reservations in the old days, the cavalry would hunt them down. We'd seen John Wayne. Same thing was true here.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 1983, 2010 Densho and Steven Okazaki. All Rights Reserved.