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Good job everyone!

It looks like after a lot of debate, and some contentious editors who would test anyone's patience, you all have ended up with a pretty good article. Good job everyone! Lipsticked Pig (talk) 00:52, 20 February 2010 (UTC)

Not really. A lot of POV still in this article and it's light on evidence of fifth column activity. Better than it was a few years ago but still biased. Why not add some information on the Japanse Civilian Spy Service?

The "Civilian Spy Service" was a paramilitary espionage organization which co-ordinated and supplemented the work of the Army and Navy Intelligence departments of the Tokyo General Staffs. Its directorate, which worked out of the Imperial Palace through the fronts of charitable and cultural organizations, was mostly staffed by retired military intelligence officers. Its agents worked in the diplomatic corps of the Foreign Ministry and the marketing staffs of cartels engaged in foreign trade. Its network blanketed Asia and extended into all major cities of the West. Founded by Emperor Meiji's Imerial Household Minister Count Tanaka Mitsuaki, the spy service was directed throughout most of Hirohito's reign by retired Lieutenant General Banzai Rihachiro."

-Bergamini, p. 1086

"In the two decades since the Meiji era, "Spider" Tanaka had watched the spy service grow until by 1931 it had cast its net over all Asia as far south as Australia, as far west as Iran. By 1941 it would be world-wide, with operatives in every major city of North and South America as well as Europe. When war with the West broke out, President Roosevelt would appraise its fifth-column so highly that he would allow the forcible relocation of of all Americans of Japanese parentage on the West Coast to detention camps inland. In the Philippines when the Japanese army arrived in 1941, U.S. colonials would be surprised to find that Filipino carpenters and masons of Japanese birth stepped immediately into high positions of authority in the Japanese occupation governments. In Baguio (where the author and his family were captured), a chain of command within the Japanese community would spring into being or be activated even before the arrival of the first Japanese occupation forces."

-Bergamini, p.433 --History Student (talk) 18:18, 26 February 2010 (UTC)

It's "light on evidence of fifth column activity" because the evidence doesn't exist. 75.76.213.106 (talk) 05:30, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

MAGIC/Lowman debunkers

Much reading needs to be done prior to accept the debunking of Lowman on the word references that may be no more credible than Lowman. This is not good academic rigor. More of what Mr. Lowman said may be found by reading the official transcript (and documents it references) of Mr. Lowman's testimony before congress RE: S. HRG. 98-1304, found at: http://home.comcast.net/~eo9066/1984/IA182.html —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.177.204.109 (talk) 23:12, 14 June 2010 (UTC) I attempted to add only the link to Lowman's testimony, but it was twice removed. UtahRaptor (or any helpful editor), there was no opinion nor personal statement in the last two attempted posts of a simple link to Lowman's testimony. Please explain the reason for removal. Anybody? 70.177.204.109 (talk) 23:55, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

I removed it because it was a personal statement which suggests your preferred view (you are clearly admonishing the reader, whom you call "you", to find the truth in your preferred text), and because it is cited to a personal website. There is nothing encyclopedic in the contribution, only personal statement and self-published material. If you have a book citation stating that Lowman's views deserve reconsideration or are unfairly attacked, you should incorporate that, with proper citation to material you aren't self-publishing . It may seem like I'm just throwing up obstacles, if you're new to Wikipedia, but that's really how it works. Cheers, DBaba (talk) 00:17, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

"Comparisons" section

That's a rather interesting essay, but slanted. Not sure it's even topical Tedickey (talk) 00:47, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

I think it's a violation of WP:SYNTHESIS. It also seems superfluous, and may serve to relativize or trivialize the events. If there are sources making such a comparison, they seem not to be included among the various citations... I'm going to blank this, and see what everyone else has to say. Cheers, DBaba (talk) 16:16, 25 July 2010 (UTC)

The Volga Germans were obviously singled out as a potential "fifth column" and their deportation had a preventive character. It took place in 1941, before the German advance to Stalingrad, and so can be attributed to war hysteria of the moment. In the United States similar measures were taken against Japanese-Americans.[1]

The Soviet textbooks said nothing about the mass deportation, whose American parallel was the internment of the Japanese Americans during World War II.[2]

Ethnic minority harassment during World War II occurred both in the United States and the Soviet Union practically simultaneously. A comparison of the two historical situations, as they are depicted in literature, may be conductive to a better understanding of the character of the respective political regimes.[3]

In 1937-8, 180,000 Koreans around Vladivostok were deported into Central Asia in fear of a war with Japan. But during World War II eight entire Soviet nationalities were identified by the regime as potential German collaborators. Over 80 percent of the 1.5 million ethnic German Soviet citizens were forcibly deported eastward during 1941 and 1942. They were to live in varying but often dreadful conditions for about 14 years, a far more callous version of US relocation camps for Japanese Americans.[4]

In the case of the Volga Germans, to whose territory Hitler's armies never penetrated, the justification was that there was a danger that they might collaborate. There is perhaps a similarity between this case and the Japanese-Americans, though the latter were treated more humanely.[5]

Tobby72 (talk) 20:08, 25 July 2010 (UTC)
Very compelling. I still don't like the heading, "Comparison". I think it would more properly be headed "Other deportations of ethnic minorities during WWII", or something to that effect. Although these sources are excellent for the material you want to include (and which I now want to include, with you), I still see the text as it stood as constituting synthesis, as per Wiki policy. The original citations ought to demonstrate comparison with Japanese internment, which they all seem not to do. This means the text of the paragraph itself is based on synthesis rather than the reliable sources supporting the gist of your point here on the talk page.
Since I'm being a pain, maybe I can help you rework the para with the sources you've furnished here. I hope I'm clearly articulating my point here: that the citations must note comparisons to Japanese internment, and the paragraph must be built off citations making these comparisons. Even if the Volga Germans were penned into a camp called Manzanar, we can't make the obvious connection until someone else does, and we cite them doing so. It's also a lot of text and citation so I hope I'm not overlooking anything. Thanks Tobby72 for your excellent response. Cheers, DBaba (talk) 22:14, 25 July 2010 (UTC)
Maybe this material would be better at Internment?   Will Beback  talk  22:30, 25 July 2010 (UTC)
It's certainly a problematic section as it stands. Stating that Japanese-American internment has been compared with these other actions, and dumping a load of cites to answer the question "by whom?", is pointless if there is no discussion of what the cited sources think was comparable about the situations. All we have now is "Lots of folks think the Japanese-American internment was similar to these other events. These other events were awful." That might even be a very subtle WP:POV violation, if it encourages readers make the additional leap in logic "A is like B. B was awful. Therefore A was awful." I'm not saying the internment wasn't awful, but there's a lot of daylight between American internment awful and Soviet deportation awful. --Yaush (talk) 15:53, 17 October 2011 (UTC)
I also see it as suggestive of POV, but I drew a different inference: that the section suggests that the USA is kinder and gentler than the USSR, and therefore the event wasn't so terrible after all because look what happened to the Ingushes. I'm not sure what more to do to answer your question, 'by whom'. The links to the actual Google Books pages are embedded in the citations, if you're interested. Faced with these, I don't really have an answer for the editor who initially added this: it seems to jibe with the texts. By all means, have at it, if you think it is vague and leading, as it is. DBaba (talk) 00:41, 18 October 2011 (UTC)
I suppose that if one group is complaining that we're anti-American because we note (correctly) that the comparison is being made, and another group is complaining that we're pro-American because we note (correctly) that some of those making the comparison find that the actions of other nations were much worse, then we've struck some kind of POV balance. My complaint really is that the section, as currently worded, simply recounts the events in other nations without saying why the sources find them similar/dissimilar to the Japanese-American internment. In other words, when we bring in material on events other than the Japanese-American internment itself, we owe it to the reader to show how the historians connect the dots. --Yaush (talk) 14:04, 18 October 2011 (UTC)
I see what you're saying. I'll take a crack at it at some point in time. I still find that I have other troubles with the page's organization that I hope to tackle as well. DBaba (talk) 01:48, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

"Concentration camp" wording in lead section

I reverted this edit to the lead section, which added the words "concentration camps" and an internal link to Franklin D. Roosevelt. I notice that the use or non-use of "concentration camps" has been discussed several times in the talk archives. I have no particular recommendation on this issue, but think the wording should be discussed before making changes, as it is likely to be controversial. Cnilep (talk) 18:44, 1 August 2010 (UTC)

I agree it is controversial and ought to be discussed, and when it is decided to add it, that it should be in the context of acknowleging the controversy surrounding the term. These were not Nazi death camps. They were concentration camps, in the strict definition of the term. 74.83.14.59 (talk) 19:51, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

Land-grab motivation

A gardener who is the son of a couple who met at one of the Arizona internment camps, says that part of the motivation for internment was to acquire rich farmland that was owned by Japanese families. Currently the article lacks any reference to this land-grab motivation.

Does anyone have a reference to the land-grab motivation? A reference is needed to add this significant information.

In case it's relevant, he says that two Japanese families in north San Diego county, with financial help from their relatives in Japan, were able to buy back farmlands. These families may be the ones who can attest to the land grab (whether intentional or not).

The gardener also said that many Japanese who were interned do not want to talk to outsiders about internment because they regard their lack of complaining as proof of their patriotism (allegiance to the United States) and their U.S. citizenship. With many of them dying out, this may be the time to ask for information, such as the unmentioned land-grab motivation.

I'm not knowledgeable about this subject, yet I recognize that it parallels a key motivation of the Nazis to put Jews in concentration camps, namely to take/acquire/steal real estate, jewelry, and other valuable property from Jews. VoteFair (talk) 17:34, 8 August 2010 (UTC)

Alien and Sedition acts? Come on!

The article as it is has the following

To this day, some believe that the legality of the internment has been firmly established as exactly the type of scenario spelled out in the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.[citation needed] Among other things, the Alien Enemies Act (which was one of four laws included in the Alien and Sedition Acts) allowed for the United States government, during time of war, to apprehend and detain indefinitely foreign nationals, first-generation citizens, or any others deemed a threat by the government. As no expiration date was set, and the law has never been overruled, it was still in effect during World War II, and still is to this day.[citation needed] Therefore, some continue to claim that the civil rights violations were, in fact, not violations at all, having been deemed acceptable as a national security measure during time of war by Congress, signed into law by President John Adams, and upheld by the Supreme Court. However, the majority of the detainees were American-born, thus exempt under law from the Alien and Sedition Acts except if found to directly be a threat due to their actions or associations. This exemption was the basis for drafting Nisei to fight in Europe,[citation needed] as the Laws of Land Warfare prohibit signatory nations (including the United States) from compelling persons to act against their homelands or the allies of their homelands in time of war.

Whoever wrote this has truly taken the sapiens out of homo sapiens. The Alien Enemies Act has never been formally tested in court since the expiration of the Alien and Sedition Acts- for the simple reason that any court today would find it unconstitutional in a heartbeat (and many justices have made statements to that effect.) Sure, it has not been formally repealed. But neither have any number of other absurd laws (like, for example, a certain Baltimore law which makes it illegal to throw bales of hay from a second-story window within the city limits) which no one has felt like repealing for the simple reason that no one has ever felt like enforcing them. It is an embarrassment to Wikipedia that an article as important as this has continued to contain text as insane as this for well over a year. And it is an embarrassment to me to be a member of the same species (let alone the same online community) as whoever wrote it. Unless someone can source this, it's gone. Szfski (talk) 19:31, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

Szfski, your comments are out of line. The Alien Enemies Act is still good law until declared otherwise by an appellate court and was alleged as the basis for the internment. Further, I suggest you tone down the rhetoric. Remember Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia of facts, not a political advocacy forum. We all understand your stance regarding the internment so let's try to explain what happened, not what you think should have happened, ok? 99.117.61.154 (talk) 01:49, 31 August 2011 (UTC)

Solicitor General's Mistakes in Handling the Internment

From the US Department of Justice:

http://blogs.usdoj.gov/blog/archives/1346

"Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States uprooted more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent, most of them American citizens, and confined them in internment camps. The Solicitor General was largely responsible for the defense of those policies.

By the time the cases of Gordon Hirabayashi and Fred Korematsu reached the Supreme Court, the Solicitor General had learned of a key intelligence report that undermined the rationale behind the internment. The Ringle Report, from the Office of Naval Intelligence, found that only a small percentage of Japanese Americans posed a potential security threat, and that the most dangerous were already known or in custody. But the Solicitor General did not inform the Court of the report, despite warnings from Department of Justice attorneys that failing to alert the Court “might approximate the suppression of evidence.” Instead, he argued that it was impossible to segregate loyal Japanese Americans from disloyal ones. Nor did he inform the Court that a key set of allegations used to justify the internment, that Japanese Americans were using radio transmitters to communicate with enemy submarines off the West Coast, had been discredited by the FBI and FCC. And to make matters worse, he relied on gross generalizations about Japanese Americans, such as that they were disloyal and motivated by “racial solidarity.”

The Supreme Court upheld Hirabayashi’s and Korematsu’s convictions. And it took nearly a half century for courts to overturn these decisions. One court decision in the 1980s that did so highlighted the role played by the Solicitor General, emphasizing that the Supreme Court gave “special credence” to the Solicitor General’s representations. The court thought it unlikely that the Supreme Court would have ruled the same way had the Solicitor General exhibited complete candor. Yet those decisions still stand today as a reminder of the mistakes of that era."

This information ought to be incorporated into the article. -Gar2chan (talk) 14:56, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

The blog is interesting reading, but probably not WP:RS TEDickey (talk) 15:09, 21 May 2011 (UTC)
I think it might be used, with caution. It has likely undergone some internal peer review before being published at the official DoJ site, though not to the level of a scholarly article. Naturally I would prefer such a published source. But the mere fact a DoJ attorney is talking about it in a U.S. government-sponsored forum makes it notable. --Yaush (talk) 16:57, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

Anica Meller source

There's a problem with the given source: the only reference google finds is a webpage which appears to be an undergraduate's paper, not a published article as implied by the "South Bend Press". Additionally, the source refers to an actual published book or article which is preferable, should someone take the trouble to verify that the cite is factual TEDickey (talk) 23:52, 12 September 2011 (UTC)

This message is to inform editors interested in the topic of this article that there are new documents from the US National Archives related to the topic now available on Commons. The Commons category "Central Photographic File of the War Relocation Authority, compiled 1942 - 1945" currently contains 3953 files. Please browse the category for images which could be used in this or related articles. These files represent the best quality images of the documents that have been made, and if they duplicate any images already being used, please update the article with the higher-resolution images from the National Archives.

These were uploaded as a result of a cooperation between the National Archives and Wikimedia. Please visit our project page at WP:NARA to learn how help with our collaboration with the National Archives. In addition, any textual documents in the series may be transcribed on Wikisource; please see WS:NARA to get involved in transcribing documents. Dominic·t 18:56, 3 October 2011 (UTC)

I categorized a bunch of the photos that were taken in San Leandro, California and Hayward, California as related to the internment, so are searchable at WC now, under those cities and under this articles category. This article already has a lot of images, dont know if it needs more, but some are really good.76.234.122.2 (talk) 02:24, 14 October 2011 (UTC)
These photos are amazing. I wish I could accommodate all this wonderful material in the article. Since I can't, here are some gems I'd just like to highlight for whoever is interested. DBaba (talk) 21:48, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

Opposition to the internment of American citizens of Japanese descent

I’m wondering if there is information/evidence available to support the addition of a section/sub-section on any political/social justice movement which arose in opposition to the expropriation of private property owned by and the internment of American citizens of Japanese descent during this period? MelioraCogito (talk) 21:57, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

Canadian internment?

Many editors forget that Canada is also a part of "North America" and that they also interned people of Japanese descent. There's a photo of one of the camps if you check out the article: Internment! Shouldn't Canadian internment belong in this article as well, or did I miss something as I surfed through? --Leahtwosaints (talk) 12:26, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

It is mentioned in the section Japanese_American_internment#Other_detention_camps, and a link is provided to the main article Japanese Canadian internment — Myasuda (talk) 13:23, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

"Minorly" is not a word. Not sure what was intended. Unclemikejb (talk) 16:23, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Ancestry

1/16th ancestry is pretty vicious (sorry for the pov). There would have been no Japanese who traveled before 1860, essentially. So this would have included (unlike Germans with more history in the US) everyone with Japanese ancestry. No one would have had the required 1/15 or less to be excluded. Need a WP:RS that says that though. Student7 (talk) 20:33, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

Hyphen or not?

There was an inconsistent use of 'Japanese-American" and "Japanese American" in the article, sometimes in the same paragraph or even sentence. Not sure which was correct, I changed as many 'Japanese-American' to "Japanese American" as I could find as I decided the latter was better. Thomas R. Fasulo (talk) 05:43, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

I changed a few the other way. Leaving most alone since it appears it was done deliberately. There is an article on hyphenation (agreeing with no hyphenation, but can't seem to find it in any Wikipedia MOS. It makes more sense to me to have it hyphenated. Student7 (talk) 21:35, 8 October 2013 (UTC)
Hyphenation implies a division, that people are ____ AND American when they are not separate at all, so yes, the hyphen does not belong. This was adopted decades ago in scholarly work in Ethnic Studies.-- Gmatsuda (talk) 22:18, 8 October 2013 (UTC)
It might be nice to place this in a WP:MOS style policy someplace. Thanks. Student7 (talk) 19:09, 12 October 2013 (UTC)
Yes, it would be nice, but there has been debate about this before at WP:MOS without matters moving beyond the discussion stage. See, for example, [6]. — Myasuda (talk) 20:27, 12 October 2013 (UTC)
Well. I guess I can rationalize that people are Japanese Americans, no hyphen. Both Japanese and American. No difference. If it were say Euro-American football, I would expect football that is neither European nor American, exactly, but some combination of both. That is, there would be a difference. How's that? Student7 (talk) 22:28, 16 October 2013 (UTC)
I THINK you've got the point...that there should be no distinction, hence, no hyphen, which implies a division, or distinction, however one might want to put it. -- Gmatsuda (talk) 02:33, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

How many died in the camps?

Considering how the IC's were compared to the German Concentration camps where millions were killed, the death toll would be appreciated.Ericl (talk) 16:38, 2 November 2013 (UTC) }}

Drop of blood

Wikipedia is not WikiNews, nor television nor a journal. See WP:INDISCRIMINATE. Bendetsen was an appointee, not really a "political" appointee but a military one. While there may be nothing wrong with putting his comment in a "quote" in a citation, inserting it as though it were important in itself, is not useful. The genealogy of Japanese immigration would legally place every Japanese-American in interment (up to 1/16 Japanese). The "one drop of blood" is hyperbole. It might be appropriate if some ranking member of Congress had said it, or some political appointee, but Bendetsen was neither. The phrase meant nothing logically. It would have meant more if the Governor of California had said it, revealing what a most people thought at the time, BTW, though later denying it, of course.
Note that Earl_Warren#Japanese-American_internment did not try to lie about his complicity. Warren's comments would be more appropriate IMO. He was an elected official who (note) actually claimed to be the moving force behind actual interment. Note that the Hawaiian internment didn't last long for 98% of internees. Student7 (talk) 22:06, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

Bendetsen was in charge of the internment program. Claiming that his words "meant nothing logically" is ridiculous on its face. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 22:26, 18 February 2014 (UTC)
From Bendetsen's 1942 military record: "I conceived the method, formulated the detailed plans for, and directed the evacuation of 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry from military areas of the West Coast." (Klancy Clark de Nevers, The Colonel and the Pacifist: Karl Bendetsen, Perry Saito and the Incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, 313-315.) MartinaDee (talk) 23:43, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
The reason given for the incarceration was "military necessity." Executive Order 9066 gave the military the authority to designate military zones from which they could exclude anyone deemed a threat to military security. Bendetsen was in charge of the WCCA, the branch of the War Department that carried out the West Coast evacuation. Yes, Warren and other political leaders were a significant driving force behind EO 9066, but the incarceration was ultimately a military endeavor. MartinaDee (talk) 23:43, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

Eleanor picture

Now I'm having trouble (can't see) "File:Eleanor Roosevelt at Gila River, Arizona at Japanese, American Internment Center - NARA - 197094.jpg". I've used windows-F5 and ctrl-F5. Neither works. Okay with everybody else?

Can see this just fine: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eleanor_Roosevelt_at_Gila_River,_Arizona_at_Japanese,American_Internment_Center_-_NARA_-_197094.jpg Student7 (talk) 22:49, 27 March 2014 (UTC)

Article totally biased

I don't have the time to get into an edit war with whoever is lording over this article but let me weigh in on any discussion. This article is totally biased. Like some activist wrote it.

For instance, a lot of the "nissei" were kids under 18. The article neglects to mention that key point.

Also, he article bends over backwards to explain the motivations of people renouncing their citizenship, explaining away people that won't foreswear allegiance to an enemy emperor, downplaying the REAL concerns of Americans. Yes some historians might say *now* that there was no real risk of invasion but war is chaos, information is imperfect, and things change. I'm sure the Japanese thought there was no real risk of two nuclear bombs being dropped on their heads.

The quotes are primary sources, and are disallowed by wikipedia because of the ease of which they can be cherry picked.

There are mispresentations, e.g. the cited work quotes the source as "impossible to establish the identity of the loyal and the disloyal with any degree of safety", but the article says "because of their race, it was impossible to determine the loyalty of Japanese Americans". Bad stuff guys, bad stuff.

There are also unsurprisingly, very few citations in the biased stuff. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Richmondian (talk • contribs) 05:16, 21 February 2015 (UTC)

Richmodian, you are the one who is POV-pushing here. I have twice reverted your deletion of properly sourced material germane to the article. You are deleting them under the pretext that they are primary sources and therefore disallowed; it seems clear you are, in fact, deleting them because you don't like the picture they paint. Neither do I, but it's the picture historians of this period have generally painted.
And I am not some kind of anti-American activist. Quite the contrary. But I know neutrality when I see it, and when I don't. --Yaush (talk) 00:28, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

All of the categories were removed from this article

I noticed that this article belongs to no categories at all, unlike one of its previous revisions, which belonged to several categories. Why were all the categories removed from this article? Jarble (talk) 01:32, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing that out. I've restored the categories, which were removed without explanation by User:TehSharp about a week ago.—Myasuda (talk) 02:17, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

The term "Japanese American"

Since they were ineligible for citizenship, the first generation, issei, were "Japanese," and could well be considered "enemy aliens." They were not "Japanese Americans." Granted that citizenship "should have" been granted, but it wasn't. In most cases, second generation+, unarguably real Japanese Americans, were also involved for most purposes in this article. But imprisoning or restricting the movements of actual "enemy aliens" was not (and is not) illegal. Student7 (talk) 19:13, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

Without identifying your sources, it is unclear whether this is based on something you have researched or is your own personal commentary. VQuakr (talk) 20:35, 21 March 2015 (UTC)
I'd call it common knowledge. However ... what's Student7's point? Are you proposing a change to the article? --Yaush (talk) 21:08, 23 March 2015 (UTC)
I would disagree that "non-citizen equals non-American" is common knowledge. That is, however, my personal preference for a cultural rather than legal reading of the definition (so not any more justification for word choice than anyone else's opinion). But that said, the pages on Americans and the word "American" include longtime residents who claim an American identity without holding U.S. citizenship, and this page (and the research it cites) defines the WWII incarceration as the detention of the Issei and the Nisei. MartinaDee (talk) 23:01, 23 March 2015 (UTC)
Detaining Nisei was probably illegal, even from a 1941 perspective. Detaining Issei was technically legal, even now, though of somewhat immoral basis for failing to allow citizenship application. I think this point should probably be made somewhere. Just as the article concedes that most Japanese (in both categories) were mostly released or never detained in Hawaii since the islands couldn't run without them. Student7 (talk) 01:29, 28 March 2015 (UTC)
What sources do you propose using? VQuakr (talk) 17:43, 29 March 2015 (UTC)
Good question! I was hoping for help from enemy alien but I just made changes to that article which doesn't have cites/links in proper places. No help there. That article tries to distinguish between "permanent resident alien" and "transitory (enemy) alien." If they can clarify that and it withstands scrutiny, my argument collapses. Student7 (talk) 20:47, 29 March 2015 (UTC)
It turns out that Alien_and_Sedition_Acts is still in effect. Possible citations from there. Student7 (talk) 21:11, 29 March 2015 (UTC)
Is that "concession" really necessary, though? I agree the article could use a better analysis of the enemy alien/non-alien classifications and how they were used to justify the internment. But if you concede that interning the Issei was legally permissible because they were enemy aliens, you also have to concede that they were prohibited from becoming citizens by government practice now recognized as legally impermissible. Essentially what you would be conceding is that their internment was legal based on illegal naturalization restrictions. Lots of illegal practices were legal "at the time." Redlining, alien land laws, poll taxes, etc. were never legally defensible, even if previous versions of our laws claimed otherwise. I don't mean to imply that this article can't or shouldn't make this concession, but it would be irresponsible and one-sided to explain how this one aspect of the internment was justified without honestly explaining why that justification is so problematic. MartinaDee (talk) 22:26, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
I hope what is inserted is something short, like one or two sentences, maybe. The internment of enemy aliens was legal, the Nissei illegal. Stopping resident aliens from applying for citizenship is not illegal,as far as I know. Today (for example), Switzerland does this as a matter of common policy (for everybody). A nation can make any conditions it chooses for citizenship. No non-Swiss can apply for citizenship.
What do you mean when you say that the internment of the Nissei was illegal? SCOTUS ruled that the exclusion order was legal, while the internment itself was never ruled on either way. We need sound secondary sources addressing the constitutional issues involved, not a couple of sentences of speculations or synthesis by editors. --Yaush (talk) 15:59, 3 April 2015 (UTC)
Was it "nice," or (by American standards, "moral?" Maybe not. But that is rather a matter of opinion which (you and I) agree on today. But the American people didn't then. All the article should contain is the facts. Right now it seems skewed towards branding all internment as "illegal." I don't think this is supported by the facts. Student7 (talk) 14:24, 3 April 2015 (UTC)
It's not illegal to restrict naturalization based on skilled vs. unskilled labor, or any other equally-applied policy. It is illegal to deny citizenship based solely on race, as was the case for the Issei. The legality of the Japanese enemy alien internment is not as clear cut as with the German/Italian internment because of that race-based restriction.
The SCOTUS ruling you're referencing was based on false and withheld information, which is why the conviction that resulted from that case was later overturned. And then there's the ex parte Endo ruling that it was illegal to detain loyal citizens without charge. There's a lot of grey area that those cases did not (choose to) cover, but the majority of the secondary sources addressing the constitutional issues involved here have drawn the conclusion that the internment, of the Nisei if not the Issei, was illegal. The government's own report on the internment calls it a "violation of our own laws and principles" (p460). The Civil Liberties Act acknowledged the "fundamental injustice" of interning both the Nisei and the non-citizen Issei. If the article seems "skewed" towards calling the internment illegal, that's because it's reflecting the pretty solid consensus among existing secondary sources, which is supported by the fact that the government had to pay reparations for what happened. MartinaDee (talk) 19:00, 3 April 2015 (UTC)
Also, the article doesn't currently claim that the internment, of the Nisei or the Issei, was illegal. It mentions how internee protesters argued it violated their rights, but most of the focus is on either describing the process of removal and conditions/events in camp, or explaining how it was justified by the Justice Department and the military. I can't seem to find an example where the article itself questions those justifications or presents "illegality" as a given fact, so what exactly are the changes you're proposing? MartinaDee (talk) 19:20, 3 April 2015 (UTC)
The Ex parte Endo was new to me. And is not terrifically clear, but does say the government shouldn't continue to intern (Nissei) without good cause. I now don't see that Wikipedia can say it was (retroactively) illegal, as well, which I was hoping to say. So we have some benchmarks for legality and illegality, which if they aren't mentioned somewhere, should be, since we talk all around the issue, using "non-military" opinions both ways, among others, then the "loyalty test" of the recruiters in another section.
I'm sure the current structure of the article was adequate at one time. It seems to me to need some sort of restructuring now. I do not have any specific recommendations as yet. Student7 (talk) 15:14, 4 April 2015 (UTC)
Just for clarification: the Endo ruling said the government couldn't continue to intern Mitsuye Endo because it couldn't legally detain loyal citizens without charge. So... yes, illegal (at least for "loyal" Nisei).
I think we agree on the purpose of this article within the scope of Wikipedia, albeit clearly not on the issue itself. A more substantial discussion of the grey area surrounding the legality/illegality is needed; I just want to be sure all the facts are given so the article doesn't turn into a series of surface-level assumptions. That said, have at it. MartinaDee (talk) 19:53, 6 April 2015 (UTC)

Medical care. Smallpox vs typhoid

I agree that something was wrong (overcrowding and sanitation facilities) when the authorities felt forced to inoculate the population against typhoid.

The smallpox entry is more nuanced or peculiar. Entering schoolchildren were forced to demonstrate that they had a smallpox inoculation in the 1930s. Immigrants were checked for smallpox inoculation before admitting them. So why didn't the Japanese already have a smallpox inoculation? It wasn't so much the danger of an incipient smallpox epidemic but rather the fact that the authorities had discovered that an entire group had fallen into a "failure to inoculate" hole. That is peculiar. At the time, the inoculation left a distinguishing "circle" on a person's arm, so there were no chance they were being "double inoculated" unless, of course, they simply didn't have written "proof", left behind with other belongings. Still, this was an 'important paper" back then, kept with visas, passports, drivers license, etc. It is something they would have brought with them to the camp. Odd IMO.

As to the "40,000" which may sound impressive to somebody: at one shot per minute, not an unachievable rate, even then, it would take 17 weeks for ONE person to administer 40,000 shots, working a normal 40 hour week. (but more likely done by a number of people working at once). The patients are people standing in line, not waiting in a doctors office! I think it is a bit WP:UNDUE and overdone. Sounds good on paper but fails under analysis to demonstrate an imperiled medical system.

I agree the typhoid was serious stuff and deserves mention. Student7 (talk) 21:35, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

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Merge discussion in re Presidential Proclamations 2525, 2526, and 2527

Editor User:Compassionate727 put tag to discuss merging the Presidential Proclamations 2525, 2526, and 2527 article with this article.

  • Oppose the merge - I am against merging for the following reasons.
  • 1 - The first reason is that two of the proclamations apply only to Germans and Italians. The proclamations had effects on Germans and Italians that is very different from their effect of leading to internment of Japanese.
  • 2 - The second reason is that on 12-8-2015, Donald Trump cited these proclamations as good precedents in relation to his proposal to temporarily disallow all Muslims from entering the US. At the same time as citing these proclamations, Mr. Trump specifically stated his opposition to internment of Muslims. The article on the proclamations should mention Mr. Trump, since the proclamations are the only precedent cited by Mr. Trump for his proposal, and the proposal is receiving significant media coverage. Many people will be coming to Wikipedia to get information on the proclamations. This article on internment of Japanese should not have any mention of Mr. Trump, since it violates NPOV to link his proposal to any internment, which he claims to be against. Having information on the proclamations be in an article on internment is not NPOV as to Mr. Trump. MBUSHIstory (talk) 15:50, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Oppose the merge. This is not just Japanese, it also blocked people of other races from air travel, ownership of invisible ink documents, etc, as per 1 above. -- Callinus (talk) 21:04, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

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"Determined" versus "claimed" to result primarily from racism

When Japanese Americans were asked to confirm whether they were loyal to the Emperor of Japan or the US, "17 percent of the total respondents, 20 percent of the Nisei — gave negative or qualified replies". The reason was not "out of confusion, fear or anger at the wording and implications of the questionnaire". It is quite possible that 17-20% were loyal to the Emperor. Why assume that none were, and that all negative answers were a mistake. That is totally illogical and unsubstantiated.Royalcourtier (talk) 08:23, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

That sounds like your personal analysis of a primary source. That's not really a policy-based reasoning for this edit. VQuakr (talk) 08:28, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

While there's no serious doubt racism was a major factor, the article itself gives considerable evidence that war panic was a major factor as well. "Determined" is a bit strong to base on a single source, especially one as dubious as a blue-ribbon commission, unless there is language in there naming the commission as the source of the determination.

I suggest changing the sentence to read: "The Commission on Wartime Relocation of Civilians determined that internment resulted more from racism in the West Coast rather than any military danger posed by Japanese Americans.[7][8]"

I prefer the active voice anyway. Yaush (talk) 19:17, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

To what "single source" are you referring? Two are in the lede, which summarizes the more extensive discussion in the body starting with the "Reparations and redress" section. Characterizing the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians as a "dubious" source is silly; it is an authoritative source and one that reflects the broader consensus assessment of the motivation for the internment. There might be room for improvement in the sentence, but implying that the Commission is isolated in this viewpoint would mislead the reader. VQuakr (talk) 02:56, 15 April 2016 (UTC)
Do you object to my proposed wording? --Yaush (talk) 22:43, 15 April 2016 (UTC)
Yes, I object to the proposed wording because it ascribes a widely held characterization to a single entity. VQuakr (talk) 04:33, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

No discussion of worldwide context

Internment of enemy nationals was a common practice in WWII. The internment of Japanese-American citizens happened in that context. What is distinctive here is that many of the Japanese-Americans were citizens. The internment is not unique; their citizenship was. (U.S. citizenship law is of course much different from the citizenship laws of other countries.) --Iloilo Wanderer (talk) 12:20, 20 May 2016 (UTC)

The Los Banos Internment Camp and Santo Tomas Internment Camp articles are too remote from this article to justify links in the "See also" section. Why not link to the Buchenwald or Dachau articles? They're actually much more related to the Japanese American internment in that the Germans incarcerated many of their own citizens at those camps simply due to ethnicity. Your examples don't show the Japanese incarcerating their own citizens based on ethnicity, so I don't think there's a good rationale for their presence in this article. — Myasuda (talk) 13:53, 20 May 2016 (UTC)

Endo decision in lead

I reverted a vague reference to this added to the already overly long lead. If added back (and my preference would be not to), it should probably mention the actual decision and not include a footnote to another wikipedia article. Tom (North Shoreman) (talk) 00:24, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

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Capitalization of titles, etc.

@Gmatsuda: our style (MOS:JOBTITLES) is generally that job titles following a name should be in lowercase. Therefore, Dr. James Hirabayashi, Professor Emeritus and former Dean of Ethnic Studies... should be lowercase: Dr. James Hirabayashi, professor emeritus and former dean of ethnic studies..."

This lowercase style is very widespread: not only is it used in our own Manual of Style, but the Chicago Manual and the AP have the same rule, and probably other style guides as well.

As for the "unsigned editorial" vs. "editorial" - if you want "unsigned" in there, I'm OK with it, although as I noted in my prior edit summary, almost all NYT editorials are unsigned in any case.

I would ask that you not mark reverts as minor (they are not, typically). --Neutralitytalk 16:15, 11 December 2015 (UTC)

I removed "unsigned," since that is normal practice for newspaper editorials. Sincerely, BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 21:27, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

Evaluation of this article

Questions: 1. Is each fact referenced with an appropriate, reliable reference? 2. Is everything in the article relevant to the article topic? Is there anything that distracted you?

Responses: 1. Each and every fact is referenced with an appropriate and a reliable reference. This article uses superscripts in blue font that if clicked links you to a whole list of sources used on the bottom of the article. 2. Everything in the article is relevant to the article topic. Not only that it's related text, but also pictures and photos that depict the things and locations that are related to Japanese Internment Camps in the US.Dovosh2 (talk) 17:32, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

I would have to say that many of the references are not neutral, and some are WP:Original research. This WP article is not the final word on this topic, so one should not edit as if it were. Thanks. BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 21:30, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

Ordered or Allowed?

What sources are there if any that say president Roosevelt ordered the internment? Executive Order 9066 signed by him allowed it but he did not order it. -- Dvorak4159 (talk) 00:45, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Let's not get caught up in semantics here. The military knew what they wanted to do. EO9066 may not have explicitly ordered it, but it was a carefully crafted plan. Also, to place that much emphasis on DeWitt is almost totally misleading when FDR was ultimately responsible. -- Gmatsuda (talk) 09:53, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

But its not a matter of responsibility, it's who ordered it and Dewitt Signed/wrote Civilian exclusion order No. 34 as per https://www.nps.gov/nr/twhp/wwwlps/lessons/89manzanar/89facts2a.htm is that not a reliable enough source? yes, FDR did allow the order but he didn't author it. Also, in what document/speech does it say they ordered the internment as the NPS did not specifically mention that? Dvorak4159 (talk) 13:53, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

The bottom line is the FDR is ultimately responsible. DeWitt implemented a previously designed plan. This is all documented in several sources. You might want to do more extensive research. -- Gmatsuda (talk) 01:33, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

Densho Encyclopedia

A couple of citations to Densho Encyclopedia are tagged as "Better source needed". Densho is an archive specializing in the internment of Japanese Americans, so I'm not sure what sources would be considered better. I'll remove the tags, but if anyone thinks they should stay then please undo my edit. Mcampany (talk) 05:57, 31 January 2018 (UTC)Mcampany

Imperial Japan

There was a sentence in the article that used the phrase "Imperial Japan." True enough that Japan thought itself to be an empire, but for most of the world it was just plain old "Japan," and that's the way Wikipedia should have it, because we rely on English-language sources for usage. Check just about any source, and you will find that it was "Japan," with no modifier. I don't mind linking to "Empire of Japan"; that is entirely appropriate. Thanks! BeenAroundAWhile (talk) 02:54, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

The Empire of Japan (1868-1947) did not only control the traditional Japanese islands. It annexed the Korean Peninsula, areas of China, and during World War II it was occupying large areas of both East Asia and Southeast Asia.

The article specifies that the internment orders were not only covering those of Japanese ancestry, but populations which were subjects to the Empire: "Korean-Americans and Taiwanese, classified as ethnically Japanese because both Korea and Taiwan were Japanese colonies at the time, were also included." Dimadick (talk) 10:19, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

In addition to Dimadick's above post, plenty of sources say "Imperial Japan", including:
https://dp.la/exhibitions/exhibits/show/japanese-internment
https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2012-featured-story-archive/japanese-americans-WWII-intel.html
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/i-cant-believe-im-responding-to-another-pro-japanese_us_588ffab7e4b080b3dad6faf3
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Japanese_American_internment
http://hekint.org/2017/11/13/japanese-american-internment-camps-world-war-two/
As well as others: https://www.google.com/search?q=Internment+of+Japanese+Americans+imperial+japan&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS755US755&oq=Internment+of+Japanese+Americans+imperial+japan&aqs=chrome..69i57.60j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Simply saying "Japan" would be grossly and intentionally misleading, confusing modern "Japan" with the "Empire of Japan". We could easily say the "Imperial Japanese Navy". Vivexdino (talk) 01:26, 15 February 2018 (UTC)

Photo in Education Section

The photo in the section on education in the camps is partially captioned, "Flag of allegiance pledge." This makes no sense and is simply grammatically incorrect. It should be rewritten to read something like, "Pledge of allegiance to the flag," or simply, "Pledge of allegience." 2600:1700:4070:6240:714E:AA6B:73BC:7817 (talk) 00:33, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

Major Problem with "DOJ Internment Camps" Section

The section relating to the Department of Justice internment camps is written as if it were an editorial. Although it attempts objectivity, the section comes off as conveying a point of view. The problems start with the third paragraph and continue until the end. Lines like "your opinion of the facts", "one must wonder" and "This leaves one to guess", along with questions posed to the reader, need to be removed, and the entire section should probably be rewritten. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.84.107.194 (talk) 04:32, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

I agree; that section is dreadful. Be bold. --Yaush (talk) 15:13, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
 Done. Still leaves one wondering about WP:SYNTH of material there. Student7 (talk) 17:19, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Separate section for Japanese Latin Americans?

This section doesn't really discuss the actual DOJ facilities, which also held German and Italian Americans and about 5,500 Issei and Kibei, but focuses almost exclusively on the deportation and confinement of Japanese from Latin America. I propose moving most of the current text to a new section called "Japanese Latin Americans," probably after the sections on Hawaii in "Exclusion, removal and detention," and reworking the "DOJ Internment Camps" section. Do these changes seem appropriate to others? MartinaDee (talk) 01:21, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

Sounds like a reasonable proposal. However, if there's not enough material left over to justify a separate "DOJ Internment Camps" section, then perhaps you could simply retitle the existing section. — Myasuda (talk) 00:16, 1 March 2014 (UTC)
 Done with 2 edits I feel I should mention here: One, I'm adding a brief reference to Japanese Latin Americans and German/Italian Americans in the article overview. (If it's discussed in the body of the article, it should be mentioned in the intro.) And two, I've removed the bit about deportees "not being traded against their will" because (a) it's misleading, as this is not entirely true, and (b) the previous editor's only citation to back this claim was a video made by the INS during the war, arguably propaganda but at the very least a biased source. MartinaDee (talk) 23:00, 5 March 2014 (UTC)


```` — Preceding unsigned comment added by Starhistory22 (talk • contribs) 20:58, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

There is not a single credible military thinker or historian who ever believed Japan was either capable of or interested in invading so much as the Hawaiian Islands, much less the West Coast mainland. The Japanese military couldn't even hold onto a couple barely-inhabited Aleutian rocks - you think they could,have dropped anchor in San Francisco Bay? Sorry, but that's just a lame attempt to retroactively justify oppression. Your "imminent danger" never existed.
And no, Pearl Harbor proves nothing. A hit-and-run surprise raid by carrier-based aircraft is a far, far cry from landing amphibious troops, seizing a beachhead and logistically supplying those troops over thousands of miles of ocean. The IJN practically ran out of destroyers just trying to keep Guadalcanal supported and reinforced, much less Honolulu, never mind the US mainland.
More to the point, the Constitution does not permit the president to arrest and indefinitely imprison US citizens without charge or trial for any reason - much less hysteria driven by false stereotypes and gross racism.
Congratulations, "families were kept together" behind barbed wire and under machine gun towers, with all of their land and property seized and dispossessed. What a great tribute to American ideals. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 21:51, 7 February 2014 (UTC)
The Niihau Incident is the only case of a local Japanese American population taking action against the U.S. during an attack by the Japanese Navy, and while it could use some expansion, it does have its own section in this article. How Japanese communities in other parts of Asia and the Pacific acted is irrelevant. The Japanese spy ring you are referring to centered around a Japanese naval officer (Tachibana Itaru) who was posing as a language student. There were a few Issei but no Nisei or citizens implicated in the case. What Roosevelt knew is what he had been told by the Office of Naval Intelligence, the FBI and presidential investigators: that there was "no evidence which would indicate that there is danger of widespread anti-American activities among" Japanese American communities. (See the Munson Report)
I'm glad you are inflamed that "babies were interned," but there is nothing wrong with language that accurately describes a historical fact. There are plenty of sources documenting that infants went into camp with their parents, were born in camp, and were taken from orphanages and non-Japanese foster families and put into camp. As for "what Imperial Japan did with Allied civilians," that has no place in a discussion of U.S. actions against U.S. residents and citizens. MartinaDee (talk) 00:40, 26 February 2014 (UTC)
The article should be unbiased, if it isn't now. Quite rightly, the West Coast feared an invasion by the Japanese. The "third strike" of Pearl did not occur because the leader of the strike force realized that he didn't know where the American carriers were. Only their absence, prevented their destruction, the total destruction of Pearl as a base, followed by a planned invasion of Hawaii.
While there were no plans (as we now know) to actually invade the West Coast, it seemed like a real threat to most inhabitants. A fifth column was not only possible, it was likely among some of the first generation that inhabited the area. How effective it would have been is unknown as they were all interred. While everyone wrings their hands now, no one wrung their hands then. There was a general feeling of "Well, thank God for little favors!"
As far as "constitutionally" goes, Lincoln suspended habeus corpus during the Civil War. The Supreme Court chose to overlook that. Courts have done that sort of thing during times of crises. Also, the government ordered plants to produce war goods instead of what they were producing. Not exactly democracy, but, again, tolerated by nearly everyone. Along with rationing goods. Where is "rationing" given to the federal government in the Constitution?
Interment itself was hardly barbarous, except for the blatant loss of freedom. Obviously everyone lost their job. Most of them never got them back. People lost businesses which they never got back.
Note that the Hawaiian interment was mostly reversed for the simple reason that the territory couldn't run without them! Student7 (talk) 22:39, 11 February 2014 (UTC)
The West Coast did not "rightly" fear an invasion. There was absolutely no military possibility that the Japanese could have invaded the West Coast.
No Japanese invasion of Hawaii is plausible. They had neither the amphibious ships nor sufficient land troops (remember, most of the Japanese Army was in Manchuria), and did not have the logistical capacity to supply and support such a large force at that distance. There's a good layman's explanation of that fact here, and if you need further references... well, basically any and every book studying World War II in the Pacific will explain it for you.
Your claim that a "fifth column was not only possible, it was likely" has been dismissed by a wide range of reputable historians as nothing but wartime hysteria. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 03:08, 12 February 2014 (UTC)
The "one drop of blood" is mere hyperbole and doesn't belong here.
The reason for the 1/16th (if true) could be traced to racism. This would be anyone who had a great-great-great grandparent who was Japanese could be interred. This was overkill since nearly everyone in the country with Japanese ancestry had at least one grandparent (or more) who was Japanese. Never mind triple-greats. Unlike the Nazis who were "really serious" about being Jewish, the Americans never bothered to track down people who were descended from Japanese but had "American" last names and didn't especially look Asian. At the time, they had no real way of tracing them. There was no "national registry." Student7 (talk) 22:58, 11 February 2014 (UTC)
Your claim that the "one drop of blood" statement is "mere hyperbole" is interesting. Unfortunately, it is not supported by a reference. The statement was made and it speaks for itself. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 03:06, 12 February 2014 (UTC)
The statement comes from a 1942 letter sent from Karl Bendetsen to the director of the Maryknoll Home for Japanese Children, regarding the removal of orphans of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast. It should perhaps be moved to the section that mentions the Manzanar Children's Village, or noted that it is in reference specifically to orphans and not the general JA population, but it is a well-documented quote from the man who was in charge of the incarceration. Not exactly irrelevant. MartinaDee (talk) 23:43, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
Gonna quibble slightly, for the record. Yes, there are credible historians who believe the Japanese contemplated invading Hawaii. However, the Japanese recognized that the operation would be extremely difficult; the Japanese military had other priorities before the battle of Midway; and the Japanese to abandon any thought of a Hawaiian invasion after they lost carrier supremacy. This is a quibble. The main point, that there was no credible threat of a West Coast invasion, is sound, notwithstanding the ravings of a few Japanese ultranationalist politicians about annexing Washington and Oregon and the Panama Canal. --Yaush (talk) 15:19, 12 February 2014 (UTC)
Even if the USN had been defeated at Midway, the Japanese didn't have sufficient amphibious lift or logistical support. There were the equivalent of 3-4 US divisions on Oahu by midsummer 1942, meaning that Japan would need a 5-division force to even consider a landing. They physically couldn't have landed that many troops at once, without stripping every other war theatre. It would have meant abandoning the Solomons, for one. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 16:33, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

Being Japanese ethnically made them enemies hmm. You know the funny thing is we cry out that these wars were fought for freedom meanwhile we talk about how it was ok to Jail 3rd or 4th gen American citizens because their ancestors came from a country that was at war with them 50 years or so later. We also Denied many Jews from landing here even though they were fleeing the Nazis. We also talk about the holocaust and how every sane human is shocked at how even children and babies could be massacred just because they were Jewish and yet ignore the Chinese massacres committed by the Japanese for "Security" and how American forces nuked children, and babies and pregnant women and mutated human beings. But you know we are the good guys. Also your point about how Japan treated it's foreign populations? IRRELEVANT American citizens whose ancestors left a nation a few generations ago are not responsible, if the nation from which your ancestor lies where to persecute conservatives, would we suddenly say ok well that means we have legitimacy to now persecute you. How , unless we went to war where-ever your ancestors are from and than say well we are afraid and our security requires your internment. I bet we would here some protests from you than. If you support the internment of people even third or fourth generation Americans simply for ancestor than you should have no problem having your territory taken away and your freedom taken away and being treated by everyone for the next 20 or so years as an enemy or subhuman as many Japanese-Americans felt. The reason it seems PC to you is simply because just like the holocaust, 95% of scholars are going to recognize it for what it is. An injustice. The rise of some pseudo-neo-conservative movement only does damage to itself. Many times things are labeled liberal or leftist bias on Wikipedia, when really it is for the most part supported by CONSERVATIVE or REPUBLICAN tradition scholars as having offended American rights. Ridiculous. It is actually right wing or conservative values that support American rights from a government encroaching on them or the constitution. Ridiculous. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.69.176.102 (talk) 04:01, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

Answering the above, of course the Administration at the time was extremely left wing liberal, hardly conservatives. And liberal Attorney General Earl Warren ratified the internment. Conservatives had been ousted at the onset of the Great Depression and had almost no influence on much of anything until 1946, the next election after the war. It is a fact that incarcerating the Japanese was a highly popular outside of Hawaii, where they were too integral to the population to lose them. So ironically, the largest concentration of Japanese-Americans in the US, was essentially ignored.
The Jews wandering from Nazi Germany were turned away because no country wanted or needed more people during the Great Depression. Just add (or cause more) depression. There is no group that wouldn't have been turned away at the time. This is just basic history.
It is history that influences the future, not the future that tries to spin the past to "make them" wrong! We learn that 2+2 = 4 in the first grade, then the square root of tan theta in high school. We don't then say, "we shoulda known/been taught the square root of tan theta in the first grade"!
To answer the potential for a West Coast attack, it wasn't what we knew, it was what we thought we didn't know, exaggerated by the surprise attack on Pearl, which resulted in a lot of frightened decision makers. Yes, we know now, that there was no way they were going to invade Hawaii then. But we didn't know it at the time. I heard, but cannot find on the web, that Admiral Ernest King had thought that an attack on the West Coast was imminent. If true, people in "high places" were afraid as well. In short, it was pretty much what we saw immediately after 9/11 and the Kennedy assassination, except we didn't have the communications and extensive intelligence systems then that were developed by 1963 and 2001. So the decisions took longer then. Student7 (talk) 21:06, 4 November 2014 (UTC)
I'm not sure how useful it is to frame this as a liberals vs. conservatives issue, but it is worth noting that Roosevelt appointed two conservative leaders (Henry Stimson and Frank Knox) to head the War Department and the Navy, very high-level positions and where much of the push for incarceration originated — and then you have to take into consideration the actions of conservative politicians on the state level. But yes, Roosevelt's very liberal administration (and the general public) went along with it, so it comes out about even on both sides. Let's move on.
As for Student's claim that by analyzing history we are trying to "spin the past," the evidence speaks for itself. It's been well-documented that the FBI and Naval/Military Intelligence debunked claims of Japanese American sabotage. The ONI and FBI had been conducting surveillance on Japanese Hawaiians and mainlanders for about a decade before Pearl Harbor and had concluded that the risk of a fifth column was virtually nonexistent. High-level military, political and intelligence officials argued against mass incarceration, both on national security and constitutional grounds. Yes, your average citizen was very concerned about an invasion of the West Coast, but most policymakers were not because, unlike the public, they had access to more accurate information. Student is right: history does influence the future, which is why you also have to look at the even earlier history of anti-Japanese prejudice and "Yellow Peril" agitation that formed the social/political context that influenced what happened during WWII. What Roosevelt and his advisers knew in 1942 was that it was not necessary, or legal, to put Japanese Americans in camp, and what we know now is that they chose to do it anyway. Pointing to definitive proof of this today is not the same thing as "making them" wrong. MartinaDee (talk) 20:31, 5 November 2014 (UTC)


The total glossing over of the Niihau Incident in order to push a racist agenda is indicative of how hopelessly slanted Wikipedia is. I'm terribly disappointed. Not a word about Japanese American citizens trying to murder Hawaiian Americans in acts of war as traitors acting for the Japanese Emperor. Fuck Wikipedia. CitizenDaveS (talk) 08:20, 1 April 2018 (UTC)

Roberts Report

Based on information in Conn, et al, Guarding the United States and its Outposts, pp. 120-123, which I have cited, I've added information on the influence of the Roberts Commission report to this article, and to the articles on that report, the Western Defense Command, and Gen. John L. DeWitt. Information on the report's accusations of Japanese espionage was previously absent from these articles. RobDuch (talk) 01:44, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

This is not quite accurate. The Roberts Commission report vaguely accused Japanese consular agents and "others" of espionage, but made no mention of Japanese Americans. I've just added some additional information to your edit to make this clear. MartinaDee (talk) 00:45, 15 August 2018 (UTC)

Japanese Americans in the Eastern U.S.?

although the population of Japanese Americans in the eastern areas of the country was and is lower and there were no camps east of the Mississippi shouldnt they at least be mentioned in the context of world war 2? as far as I know no other article on Wikipedia says anything about Japanese Americans in the east during the war. Razorhawk4595 (talk) 20:08, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

Which territorial governor?

I think there is a statement in this article that's too ambiguous and in need of some clarification. Namely, this one:

Despite the incident, the Territorial Governor of Hawaii rejected calls for the mass internment of the Japanese Americans living there.

This doesn't clarify which territorial governor it was who was against the mass internment of Japanese Americans. There were two during the Presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt: Joseph Poindexter and Ingram Stainback. So which of them is this sentence referring to? I honestly don't know, otherwise I would have clarified this myself. Maximajorian Viridio (talk) 16:35, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

I clarified the statement, it was Joseph Poindexter Razorhawk4595 (talk) 20:38, 14 February 2019 (UTC)

Terminology debate

Moved from User talk:Reywas92, @Gmatsuda::

Thanks for your thoughtful edits to the Tule Lake, Manzanar and probably other camp articles. Please note what you're trying to do—move that to the main article—has been tried several times before, only to have it watered down rather badly each time. I've found the duplication easier, even though duplication, on its face, makes little sense. -- Gmatsuda (talk) 06:32, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

It should be at the obvious central location. The general information should not be on the specific site articles it is not directly connected to, and content should not be duplicated in general. If being watered down at Internment of Japanese Americans#Terminology debate has been a problem in the past, it should be discussed at the talk page there, not moved to the site articles as an out. I could not find any discussion on the Terminology Debate section there, but I would support its presence there. These are relatively WP:LONGQUOTEs that are already fairly extensive for the overview article; it is far too long and detailed to include on the site articles. Reywas92Talk 06:50, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
The terminology used is directly related to the individual camp/facility articles. After all, if you don't understand the terminology used, you won't understand much of the article contents. I agree that the terminology section should only be in the main article IF it hadn't been subjected to repeated revisions that watered it down (mostly by those opposing the use of "concentration camp" for anything other than the Nazi death camps. These people comtinue to wreak havoc on the camp/facility articles, removing "concentration camp" and often times, any content that supports its use. After a long, drawn out "battle" over terminology in the Manzanar article, that section was added, yet they continue to remove "concentration camp" and replace it with "internment camp," which is inaccurate for the ten WRA camps. This is why I think the terminology section should remain in each article. Again, not everyone will bother to read the main article and as I've stated here, it's been continual problem. -- Gmatsuda (talk) 14:23, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
Okay, now I see why it may have been watered down before. Nearly half of [7] was copied into the first two quotations at Manzanar#Terminology: rather than being a selective quoting of the main points, this is a copyright violation (WP:COPYQUOTE). The fourth blockquote from Power of Words is not even a quotation at all! This is a paraphrase of the article falsely formatted as a quotation. These are excessively long and it is inappropriate to have such long quotes in the site articles, much less duplicated across articles. Reywas92Talk 19:43, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

I fully support content on the use of the euphemism and RS discussion on more accuate terminology. I do not endorse having excessively long quotations, including copying from half of an article, or a long paraphrase masquerading as a quotation. This section needs to be rewritten to take the main arguments from the sources more concisely. Most of all, sections should not be copied and pasted across articles in general, especially not as a long overview that does not relate specifically to that camp. Reywas92Talk 20:05, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

As for the copyright violation, that quote was taken from the draft version of the Power of Words handbook, which has since been revised and it no longer contains that quote, so please take you "making up quotes" accusation and shove it. Normally, I don't resort to such language here, but your assumption and accusation of wrongdoing was unwarranted and rather serious.
As for the Hirabayashi quotes, the Fair Use clause allows such use of an excerpt, even a fairly long one, in another work, if it is properly cited and relevant to the work in question. Dr. Hirabayashi's writings on this subject was more than highly relevant and are from someone who was incarcerated in one of the camps. As such, his comments are both scholarly and from personal knowledge, making removal of his quotes a serious error in judgement,
I've added a different quote from the final Power of Words handbook on the subject. It's a bit long, but necessary, given the campaign to reserve "concentration camp" solely for the Nazi camps. I'll add/revise all of this on the Manzanar article only. I'm guessing that you'll still object vigorously, but please take a look, anyway. -- Gmatsuda (talk) 12:19, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
Well you failed to notice that when you replaced the draft reference with the final version! To the Hirabashi, WP:COPYQUOTE says "The copied material should not comprise a substantial portion of the work being quoted, and a longer quotation should not be used where a shorter quotation would express the same information." This copies 33% of the original article, which I would guess is a substantial portion. I don't think every sentence is necessary to convey this position.
However having four huge blockquotes remains WP:UNDUE weight to that article when these quotes and references do not refer to Manzanar specifically! Why would you add it on Manzanar only anyway when it applies to all of them generally? Is this main article not a good place to have the most information? The full version, with excessive quoting minimized, should be in the main article, with the camp articles summarizing it. An older version covers it quite well without the long quotes. Reywas92Talk 17:40, 19 March 2019 (UTC)
I was thinking that we could refer to Hirabayashi's article instead. The problem has been a rather zealous effort by those who insist on referring to these canps as "internment camps," even though that is factually inaccurate. They continually go into these articles and make such changes. This is part of the thinking. BTW: I am aware of Wikipedia guidelines. That said, there are exceptions. -- Gmatsuda (talk) 22:16, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

Emperor Worship (or Lack of) in the US Prior to WW2?

Is there any evidence of Japanese-Americans showing emporer worship through ceremonies at their temples on the auspicious days in the decades prior to World War 2? If you look at even modern Thai society and Thai-Americans in relation to their worship and fanatacism relating to its royals family, you might find it shows some connections to the way Japanese would have acted in that past period. Thai-Americans fit in well into America society but you will find that few are willing to publicly speak out agains the Thai royal family or Thai regime in power due to the fear of loss of access to Thailand and possible reprisals against their families. With the Thai royals allowing their most devoted supporters to commit human rights abuses in their name, there is little condemnation from the US Thai community which has around 400,00 members. Thais pay tribute to the abusive Thai royals at temples and Thai businesses in the US. They even have a monument to King Bhumiphol in Cambridge Massachusetts. I would find it very surprising that Japanese Americans in the 1930s and 40s would show condemnation of the Japanese emporer at that time. In fact, most probably went along with their community leaders and and temples and worshiped him and the royal institution. This is an area that should be investigated. My experience is with the Thai-American community so that's why I made the connection here. How did Japanese Americans hold the emporer at that time? A lack of evidence of condemnation from Japanese Americans is not apathy or disinterest by the way. It may well mean fear on their part or approval. 203.131.210.82 (talk) 05:33, 1 April 2019 (UTC)203.131.210.82 (talk) 05:35, 1 April 2019 (UTC)

General DeWitt and Order 9066

Some versions of this article claim that Roosevelt personally ordered all of these actions, when in reality his orders were very limited in nature and it was General DeWitt who planned and carried out the mass interments while abusing order 9066. DeWitt's actions should not be excluded from the summary, as it was his plan and he was in charge of carrying it out.

Blaming FDR for DeWitt's personal plans and actions is not accurate and honest because there is no evidence to show that FDR knew what DeWitt had in plan. The only evidence that FDR was involved are assumptions that DeWitt was honest with him when he showed FDR a presentation. There is no evidence to suggest FDR knew of DeWitts personal plans and his intent to abuse order 9066.

Nothing FDR ever ordered was even remotely similar to what DeWitt did, and DeWitt was solely responsible for abusing the authority granted to him in order 9066. -- — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:100a:b016:5bc7:9517:a1a:2383:76e3 (talk • contribs)

* If you have verifiable evidence of this, please re-post and cite your source. Otherwise, please refrain from adding this dubious claim. -- Gmatsuda (talk) 12:13, 5 May 2019 (UTC)
The claim that DeWitt was "solely" responsible for the internment is a WP:REDFLAG claim not supported by any of the sources. VQuakr (talk) 06:09, 6 May 2019 (UTC)
Im going to disagree as well. This is your personal opinion not supported by facts. DeWitt planned and lead the internment and his name should absolutely be in the summary.
DeWitt both planned and carried it out. The article clearly states that Roosevelt disagreed with internment and was under massive political pressure to agree. DeWitt not only planned and lead the internment, he went on record with a huge amount of racist statements and also withheld reports on his behavior from the courts. DeWitt is absolutely the primary person responsible as he was the main leader and main proponent pushing for the internment. This is not in dispute and the cited evidence agrees.
Editors trying to blame Roosevelt for the actions of DeWitt is highly misleading, as Roosevelt likely did not know the extent of his plans or actions. The reports on DeWitt were destroyed and rewritten to be less offensive.
What Roosevelt ordered was not even remotely similar to what DeWitt carried out, and Roosevelt ordered him to stop once the report on his behavior came out.
To put blame on Roosevelt in the summary is extremely inaccurate and not supported at all by the evidence. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:100a:b016:5bc7:31d8:ffcb:7b75:b67b (talk • contribs)
We cite multiple letters by Roosevelt, referencing the internment camps, in the article. You suggestion that no one except DeWitt knew about the internment is simply implausible. But more importantly to our role as editors, you have not produced a single source supporting the point of view you are proposing adding. The burden is on you to provide sourcing, and as noted above it would need to be strong sourcing indeed. Once you have satisfied that burden, you can attempt to achieve consensus for how to update the article. Since the lead section summarizes the body, it probably wouldn't be just a change to the lead. VQuakr (talk) 05:02, 7 May 2019 (UTC)
Who is "we"? Its only you having this issue. And that is not what he said at all. You are intentionally taking other members out of context. He said DeWitt was responsible for planning and carrying it out, which is absolutely true. He said Roosevelt was not aware of the SCALE of the internment because that is not what he ordered. In fact, he ordered it stopped after seeing the report on it. You are also completely ignoring that FDR opposed it and only agreed under pressure, which has already been stated by others.
Trying to remove DeWitt and blame Roosevelt when DeWitt clearly planned and carried it out is highly dishonest. The plan literally has DeWitt's name on it.
I keep seeing DeWitt being removed from this article despite being the person who planned and carried out the internment.
Why would something that important keep being removed from an article? That makes no sense. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:100a:b016:5bc7:bc0e:5f5d:d533:7d8e (talk • contribs)
"We" is Wikipedia. As in "our article", since this is a collaborative environment. FYI your IP address is public so your ham-handed attempt at looking like more than one person isn't going to fool anyone. I've already linked our policies on reliable sourcing and consensus, so I'm not sure what more I can explain to you about how to interact and edit here. DeWitt is mentioned 19 times in the stable version of the article. VQuakr (talk) 15:57, 7 May 2019 (UTC)
Talk about destroying one's own credibility...sockpuppet-ing? Tells us all we need know about the author here. -- Gmatsuda (talk) 22:42, 7 May 2019 (UTC)
So your only evidence against DeWitt being listed in the Supreme Court case and two separate reports in 1943 and 1944 is to make false accusations? Do you have any actual arguments or are you just going to insult other users?
And the existing edits by all the other wikipedia editors agree. Thats the entire point but you arent reading what users are saying. DeWitt is already quoted in the article so removing him and saying its not cited is the entire issues here. You are arguing just for the sake of arguing. The 1943 report, 1944 report, and Supreme Court case all state DeWitt was in charge and planned it. They are already cited in the article.
And you think that is evidence that he should NOT be listed at the leader in the summary? That he is clearly cited as the leader? Thats why it should NOT be listed? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:100a:b016:5bc7:5571:4280:84c:f9c (talk • contribs)
No, your proposed edit makes the unsourced and red flag claim that Roosevelt was somehow unaware of the internment until late 1944 and the blame for the internment falls only on (or at least primarily on) DeWitt. That is inconsistent with the sources in the article and the historical record. To put it another way, what reliable secondary sources conclude that Roosevelt was an unwitting participant in the internment? VQuakr (talk) 23:03, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

Article is too big. It should be 1/4 to 1/2 the current size

Per WP:LENGTH, the article is too long and should be 1/4 to 1/2 the size. The guideline says "> 100 kB Almost certainly should be divided". Currently the article is at "221,018 bytes". I think that we should remove most of the quotations and other first party sorces and stick to WP:THIRDPARTYSOURCES especially when it comes to causes and justification. We can also shorten what is listed in the legacy and other sections. Remember Wikipedia is WP:NOTADIRECTORY. --Iloilo Wanderer (talk) 10:15, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

I have cut over 10% mostly by deleting the external links and further reading section and by creating List of Japanese-American internment camps article moving detail there. Some of the external links and further reading MIGHT be justified adding back in but some curating will need to be done. Remember "Wikipedia articles are not merely collections of: ... original historical documents, letters, laws, proclamations, and other source material that are useful only when presented with their original, unmodified wording....(and) Photographs or media files with no accompanying text." Per WP:NOTLINKFARM. And "Further reading section of an article contains a bulleted list of a Italic textreasonable number of works..." (emphasis added), from WP:Further reading.--Iloilo Wanderer (talk) 12:00, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
Absolutely correct, WP:LENGTH says for "> 100 kB Almost certainly should be divided". The readable prose is currently 95,000 characters with 14,756 words, which considering the scope of the topic is entirely justifiable. It is not over 100 kb, and is not near the size of the articles of: World War I, Special Counsel investigation (2017–2019), Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, Vietnam War, Cold War, Pacific War, Civil rights movement, United States, or History of the United States, all of which are indeed over 100 kB. It does NOT matter how many bytes are in an article, as many of the aforementioned are well over 400,000 bytes. That include markups, references, among other non-article content things, all of which are pretty irrelevant. Vivexdino (talk) 18:34, 22 March 2020 (UTC)

Lead needs to be significantly shorter

The lead introductory section is supposed to be concise summary of the article. MOS:LEAD says, "As a general rule of thumb, a lead section should contain no more than four well-composed paragraphs and be carefully sourced as appropriate." The current intro is 6 long wordy paragraphs. I do not have the time now but I will cut it down. Maybe to a single paragraph. Often will long articles the best is a short lead and then get straight to the article.--Iloilo Wanderer (talk) 10:08, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

Reduced the intro significantly. For most lengthy articles and ones with some controversy, a short intro usually works best, leaving discussion up to the main article. Some work still needs to be done to make sure that relevant information was not removed entirely. Relevant being the key work. The article is too long as is. --Iloilo Wanderer (talk) 11:51, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
And was reverted in accordance with the WP:BOLD, revert, discuss cycle. I agree, the lead needs work and we'll see what needs to done about it. But the lead is a summary of the entire article and provides a general overview of its contents as discussed at MOS:LEAD. But rule of thumb also means it "refers to a principle with broad application that is not intended to be strictly accurate or reliable for every situation" (e.g. Barack Obama, United States, History of the United States, Donald Trump, Civil rights movement, Cold War, Vietnam War, or World War I, etc.). MOS:LEAD also says "It should identify the topic, establish context, explain why the topic is notable, and summarize the most important points, including any prominent controversies." In this case, I can personally see a lot of things wrong with the lead, and can agree that it needs work. Vivexdino (talk) 18:34, 22 March 2020 (UTC)
So, User:Vivexdino present a proposal. I did. See here[8] but everything I did to the lead was reverted by User:Vivexdino and User:Myasuda without any counter-proposal. Where is your discussion? What did I do wrong? Why is EVERYTHING that I did not acceptable to you two? You need to discuss. Please be specific. What do you like? What do you not like? So far there has been bold, revert, but no discuss. --Iloilo Wanderer (talk) 11:59, 24 March 2020 (UTC)
Your premise is that the lede is too long and reducing its length was your only stated goal. I disagree, and have no major objections to the lede's size as it stands. Your rewrite, on the other hand, was awful. It summarized the internment itself to two brief sentences, leaving the bulk of the altered lede essentially devoted to an epilogue of legal matters and reparations. This is a completely disproprotionate weighting of the article content. If any changes are going to be made, it's better to be incremental and seek consensus first. — Myasuda (talk) 13:14, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

Property Dispossession Source

Journalist Gus Russo has several pages discussing the systematic private profiteering at the expense of Japanese Americans following the attack on Pearl Harbor in his book, Supermob: How Sidney Korshak and His Criminal Associates Became America's Hidden Power Brokers (Bloomsbury, 2007). The book was reviewed in SFGate by Trey Popp, who writes: "Russo's chapter on the shameless plundering of the assets of imprisoned Japanese Americans during World War II, presided over by a bevy of Korshak's associates, is particularly stirring." The book was also reviewed in the Chicago Tribune by Hillel Levin, who writes: "[Jacob Arvey's] clout with the Truman administration put a protege in charge of property seized from German companies and interned Japanese-Americans. Russo documents how these West Coast assets were sold for a fraction of their value to silent mob partners and the young lawyers, Arvey accomplices, who served as their frontmen." Russo also mentions how the reparations paid to Japanese Americans in the 1980s amounted to probably pennies on the dollar. It might be good to work some of this material into the article but I will also leave a similar suggestion on the talk pages of related articles. --Mox La Push (talk) 09:34, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

'Concentration camp' wording in lead section

Should the term 'concentration camp' really be used here? It has significant POV connotations. – Jadebenn (talk · contribs · subpages) 06:59, 6 September 2020 (UTC)

The use of the term 'concentration camp' in the context of the Japanese American internment / incarceration has been a matter of debate, both here and outside of wikipedia for some time. The usage of the term 'concentration camp' is not a recent one, though, actually being used by FDR in relation to Japanese Americans as early as 1936 as well as in various newspaper articles written during the lead up to the incarceration in 1942. In 1946, Harold L. Ickes (Secretary of the Interior) went so far as to write: We gave the fancy name of ‘relocation centers’ to these dust bowls, but they were concentration camps nonetheless. It is understood that following the Holocaust, the term 'concentration camp' often became conflated with death or extermination camps (which the Japanese American camps most certainly were not), but the term 'concentration camp' here is used in the (first) definition "a guarded compound for the mass detention without hearings or the imprisonment without trial of civilians, as refugees, members of ethnic minorities, political opponents, etc." [9]. And pertinently, contemporary usage of the term 'concentration camp' for the Japanese American camps has become arguably mainstream. As one prominent example, in 2018 Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts wrote (in his repudiation of Korematsu) "The forcible relocation of U.S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful and outside the scope of Presidential authority." — Myasuda (talk) 15:43, 6 September 2020 (UTC)
@Jadebenn: @Myasuda: - according to this source the US gov't called them "relocation camps" and the people who were sent there called them "concentration camps". See here. I don't think the lead should say "concentration camps". The Holocaust term is more about Extermination camps. I think the lead should say internment camps since that is what the linked article is called. --The Eloquent Peasant (talk) 16:52, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
The term "concentration camp" is standard terminology in media reports today, and we should follow convention in the lede. Also, read through the secton Terminology debate. It shows that behind the scenes, high ranking US government officials acknowledged that these were in fact concentration camps, described as "relocation camps" for largely euphemistic reasons.—Myasuda (talk) 17:28, 6 February 2021 (UTC)
In 2019, at the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington DC the exhibition about this subject matter used the term "concentration camp" and they had a disclaimer about the change in language. I don't know prompted the changes, but the term "relocation camp" is a false statement, since this wasn't merely to be relocated. Jooojay (talk) 15:07, 11 March 2021 (UTC)
I agree with using concentration camp in the lede and throughout the page. Likeanechointheforest (talk) 19:08, 29 April 2021 (UTC)
The term "concentration camp" is used less often than "internment camp" when referring to the United States' illegal, horrible, and wrong incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII. For example, news articles containing "Japanese" and "internment camp" in the year 2020 significantly outnumbered news articles containing "Japanese" and "concentration camp" 987 to 751. When you look at the usage of the terms "Japanese internment camp" and "Japanese concentration camp", usage of the terms is approximately the same until 1980, when "internment" begins to significantly outpace "concentration". The common name is clearly "internment camp", which is why the article is titled the way it is. I would support the use of the term "internment camp" for the sole reason of consistency with the title of the article and its common usage within the media.
That being said, I absolutely respect the viewpoint that says that "internment" is euphemistic and should be avoided to not diminish the nature of the U.S.'s human rights violation. This is an discussion that should be played out in the wider world, but not on Wikipedia, where our job is to reflect what most reliable sources say on the topic. My personal view is that "concentration camp", especially when referring to this era, is a term inextricably linked to the holocaust and the Nazi regime's murder of six million Jews. While I don't personally see either term as inherently incorrect for referring to what America did to its many citizens and residents of Japanese descent, I do think that it is important that we don't lay a false equivalency between America's heinous violation of human rights and Nazi Germany's far more atrocious genocide.  Mysterymanblue  22:02, 14 June 2021 (UTC)
Okay, but if internment isn't even a legally correct term, can Wikipedia be truly encyclopedic if it uses it? Source here: https://www.nps.gov/tule/learn/education/upload/rdaniels_euphemisms.pdf Likeanechointheforest (talk) 19:39, 17 June 2021 (UTC)
The author does make a compelling argument to discard "internment camp" in favor of some other term. While I would agree that the term "internment" should never have been used in the first place, for better or worse it is the term that we are stuck with now. Words are defined by their users, and our job at Wikipedia is to reflect what the consensus of reliable sources says, not to advance the viewpoints that we view as morally right. Most readers will not have any confusion when they read the term "internment" because it's the term associated with those actions at that time and that place. The technical imprecision between the historical meaning of the term, the meaning of the term under international law, and the meaning of the term in the context of "Japanese internment" may be irritating, but its widespread use makes it correct, and such ambiguities in language are relatively common in English.  Mysterymanblue  20:47, 17 June 2021 (UTC)
Well no, we certainly are not bound by NGrams, and are not "stuck" with anything. I don't consider ~30% more common to be such a significant enough difference to where that should drive any decision making about which term to use for the bulk of the article. MOS:EUPHEMISM suggests we should use the more accurate term. VQuakr (talk) 21:14, 17 June 2021 (UTC)
Agree ^. Likeanechointheforest (talk) 14:11, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
The news reports show a 30% difference; the ngram shows a 300% difference. Even then, the vast majority of the news reports containing "Japanese" and "concentration camp" are false positives, i.e. most happen to contain those two phrases and are not referring to the U.S.'s illegal imprisonment of Japanese americans during WWII. So the 30% figure is definitely an underestimate. You're right that we're not bound by any one metric, but we are bound by what reliable sources say, and I think these metrics do point pretty clearly to what they say.  Mysterymanblue  20:26, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
I was referring to sources. NGrams we just ignore. But that still isn't right; sources, particularly news sources, can be reasonably discounted in favor of academic sources that are specifically looking at the POV of the terminology. I don't think any sources have been presented that indicate that "internment" is superior? Meanwhile, MOS:EUPHEMISM is quite clear. VQuakr (talk) 21:07, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

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A major caveat

This article begins with the heading After Pearl Harbor - also spelled Harbour. Full understanding of the Japanese relocation must begin with material years BEFORE Pearl Harbor. It begins in the British and American embassies to Japan. The concerns of those ambassadors caused a chain of events political, military, legal, and geographic. The conferring heads of Canada and the USA triggered communication between their militaries, also between the FBI and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The signal event in BOTH countries was the obligatory issuance of IDENTITY CARDS to residents of Japanese origin or descent. Each nation had plans on the books for dealing with "their Japs" - including potential intern camp sites - perhaps 2 years before December 1941. Finding this material now is not easy.

Missing from history, IMO, is mention of a fraternal organization called Sons of the Golden West. It existed from San Diego to Vancouver, and appealed mostly to police officers. It felt one of its social obligations was to address the "Yellow Peril" of Asian immigrants, who began arriving by 1850. It seems no coincidence that there are some similarities to the KKK. --Ed Chilton

That is the Native Sons of the Golden West. They were not like the KKK, and changed their minds on this issue after the war. Dedicated several schools, with plaques proclaiming “ Justice, Liberty, and Tolerance” Some before-and-after quotes could improve the article. 2600:1010:B05A:B6E3:4528:E122:2230:895A (talk) 18:50, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

J. Edgar Hoover

He was supposed to have objected to this, and got in a fight with Earl Warren about it, before FDR told him to be quiet. I see nothing about it here. Could we have more info on this? 2600:1010:B05A:B6E3:4528:E122:2230:895A (talk) 18:53, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Introduction to Historical Studies

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Move to "Incarceration of Japanese Americans"

I'd like to rename this page "Incarceration of Japanese Americans." Given the ongoing debate on this talk page about whether to use the language of "concentration camps," (which I, as a Jew, do by the way believe is appropriate to describe Japanese incarceration) modify the language to "incarceration camps," which is still more accurate than the euphemistic "internment camps."

As per these essays, the term internment is a historical euphemism that is not a legally appropriate description of the forced relocation and incarceration of Japanese Americans:

https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2012/02/10/146691773/euphemisms-concentration-camps-and-the-japanese-internment https://www.nps.gov/tule/learn/education/upload/RDaniels_euphemisms.pdf https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2021/04/13/internment-or-incarceration-why-words-matter-describe-japanese-american-wartime-experience/ https://www.npr.org/2018/12/26/636107892/some-japanese-americans-wrongfully-imprisoned-during-wwii-oppose-census-question https://www.npr.org/2019/07/05/739051933/this-isnt-the-first-time-americans-have-debated-what-to-call-detention-centers

With the move to a new title, it should be noted that the term internment has been used euphemistically. Likeanechointheforest (talk) 19:05, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

While I respect the view that "internment" is euphemistic, I tend to believe that its usage to describe the illegal incarceration of Japanese Americans by the United States during WWII goes beyond the literal meaning of the word. For example, "concentration" is a similarly loaded term because its facial meaning is just that it brings a large number of people together. The word "concentration" does not literally entail all the human rights abuses that we associated with concentration camps, but its connotation in the context of a concentration camp is linked to those things because of the history of its usage. "Internment" is similar in how its literal meaning cannot possibly capture the dehumanizing incarceration of Japanese Americans, but its acquired connotation in referring to that makes it an accurate descriptor.
History may unmake "internment" in favor of some other term, but for now, it is clearly the most common phrase used to refer to what America did to Japanese Americans during WWII. See news results for "Japanese" and "internment" in 2020 and "Japanese" and "incarceration" in 2020, which shows an 8-1 preference for "internment". Google ngram results show a similar result. "Internment" is clearly the WP:COMMONNAME, and thus I oppose this move.  Mysterymanblue  22:28, 14 June 2021 (UTC)
As per essays cited above and in the article, the word "internment" is not only euphemistic, but legally incorrect, as internment is something that applies to enemy aliens, not citizens, and those who were legally interned were treated much better than the Japanese Americans forcibly incarcerated. I support this move. Likeanechointheforest (talk) 15:40, 15 June 2021 (UTC)
What the dictionary and/or legal meaning of "internment" is, though, is largely irrelevant. And not even only as far as WP guidelines goes, but also sociolinguistically: the word has acquired the almost-exclusive connotation of reference to the Japanese imprisonment during WWII, so whatever meaning the word might have had and whatever euphemistic purposes it might have been used for initially, history hath long forgotten. That being said, I am personally fine with calling them concentration camps rather than internment camps - and even with Wikipedia using "concentration camp" as the definition of internment camps in the lede, in Wikivoice; however, regarding article titles, the most common name for them is still "internment camps", wherefore the pages should not be moved unless and until something else replaces that as the dominant terminology. (I don't particularly care for "incarceration", either, because of its connotations with criminal prisoners - I would not want to use language that could cause readers to associate the imprisoned Japanese Americans with criminal status). Firejuggler86 (talk) 00:20, 16 June 2021 (UTC)
"Incarceration of Japanese Americans" fails as an alternate title per WP:NAMINGCRITERIA. It is imprecise, as it more accurately would apply to an article whose subject is crime rates among Japanese Americans; and it is not commonly recognizable because it is not a commonly used term for the forced mass detention of people in the US during WW2. VQuakr (talk) 21:25, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

From Wikipedia: 

           The Wikipedia article I have selected is about the internment of Japanese Americans, which was another racial attack to a minority group during the 20th century and mainly affected the West Coast, making it part of the history of California. The article is very well developed, as it is an extensive article with plenty of details and it is written very well. It breaks it down into sections and it includes details about who all was involved, when, where, and what happened after the internment of Japanese Americans. In addition, the article is written neutrally as it specifically provides facts, rather than the author’s opinion. Lastly, although the article is lengthy, the author provided over 130 references related to the information provided by in the article.

From your Ebook chapter: 

           The Ebook California : A History, chapter, “Discrimination and Accommodation,” page 187 makes emphasizes on the prosecution that minority groups were suffering and the attempts to stop it during the 20th century, which is now part of the history of the state of California. An example is the organization of Asiatic Exclusion League, a group against Asian minorities. This organization was responsible for discriminating Asian children, as they were not allowed in the same schools as Caucasians.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by FeedurBrain (talk • contribs) 22:47, 17 November 2021 (UTC)

Would you consider changing it to Japanese American concentration camps? or World War II Japanese American Incarceration? I'm trying to think of alternatives that would address the concerns of the Japanese American community--the Japanese American Citizens League, Densho, the Japanese American National Museum, as well as leading scholars in the field (like Roger Daniels) state that the term internment is historically inaccurate, while the term concentration camps was historically used by FDR and members of his administration, and the idea will be more recognizable to an American audience as many members of the media already call them Japanese American concentration camps.Hcmaruyama (talk) 18:37, 7 April 2022 (UTC)

I agree that changing the title from "internment" to "incarceration" is important. Honestly, since so many scholars (as well as the Japanese-American community at large) have come to the consensus that "internment" is both historically inaccurate and euphemistic, I was a little surprised that Wikipedia editors also haven't changed it yet. Could you have the page for "Interment of Japanese Americans" redirect to "Incarceration of Japanese Americans" [or equivalent title]? River 05:00, 18 October 2022 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by SELI-chan42 (talk • contribs)

I think calling them incarceration camps is more accurate than calling them concentration camps or internment camps. First of all, the definition of the term concentration camp is "a place which large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labour or mass executions". Japanese American camps easily stand out when compared to Nazi concentration camps, Ustaše-run concentration camps, or Italian concentration camps because nobody performed forced labour there or was systematically killed there. Also Unit 731 and Plantation complexes in the Southern United States meets the definition of concentration camps better than Japanese American camps. While I do agree that calling them "internment camps" is euphemistic, I think calling them "concentration camps" is dysphemistic. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.144.204.68 (talk) 21:48, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

Do you have any reliable sourcess that support this change? You've only cited your own opinion. Not to be pedantic, but our policies maintain that we follow how reliable sources address this issue, and not our own interpretations. There is an entire section in the article that refers to sources making a strong case for "concentration camps" vs. other terms. TarkusABtalk/contrib 19:07, 2 June 2023 (UTC)
Do you consider Xinjiang internment camps to be concentration camps. 95.144.204.68 (talk) 20:43, 7 June 2023 (UTC)
(1) It does not matter what I think. It matters what term sources use. (2) It is a totally different issue that does not dictate what happens here. And that terminology has been discussed extensively as well, if you read the talk page archives. TarkusABtalk/contrib 01:19, 8 June 2023 (UTC)
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