No, my Japanese American parents were not 'interned' during WWII. They were incarcerated

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

My parents, Shigeo and Joanne Watanabe, were U.S. citizens born and raised in Seattle — she a student at Seattle University who loved parties and red painted fingernails, he an aspiring accountant with a golden glove and killer smile.

In the aftermath of Japan's 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, they were imprisoned in an incarceration camp — not an internment camp.

Internment. Incarceration. Not many people make a distinction between the two terms or understand why it’s so important to do so. But in a historic decision aimed at accuracy and reconciliation, the Los Angeles Times announced Thursday that it would drop the use of “internment” in most cases to describe the mass incarceration of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II.

Instead, The Times will generally use “incarceration,” “imprisonment,” “detention” or their derivatives to describe this government action that shattered so many innocent lives.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/no-my-japanese-american-parents-were-not-interned-during-wwii-they-were-incarcerated/ar-AA18HOa5

[cbabe]

1. Good. Now use 'juvenile detention' instead of Indian boarding school.

[TheRealNorth]

2. But if you say, "incarcerated", doesn't that suggest they were charged with a crime?

[Haggis 4 Breakfast]

5. They were charged with a crime.

They were charged with having almond shaped eyes and a different skin tone and therefore, they were a threat to the state. And when you're deemed a threat, you can be locked up for no other reason.

Ask the thousands of Black men and women.

Ask Muslim men and women.

Ask the immigrant children that were herded into over-crowded "custody" camps, forced to sleep on bare concrete floors in cages by the Federal government, many of them sexually abused, after being ripped out of their mothers' arms - some as young as six months old and still being breast-fed - at the border during trump's Stalinist reign.

One of my friends parents were first generation Japanese (Issei), living in CA, owning a prosperous business, when they were wrongfully removed to one of these places. When they were finally released, they returned to CA to find that EVERYTHING had been taken from them. They never got any of it back and never got an apology. What was their crime ?

[Baitball Blogger]

3. Well, that's one history lesson that won't make it into Florida schools.

[Igel]

4. It may. Probably would.

Current/new standards for regulars US History:

SS.912.A.6.4 Examine efforts to expand or contract rights for various populations during World War II.

Separately:

Remarks
Examples may include, but are not limited to, women, African Americans, German Americans, Japanese Americans and their internment, Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, Italian Americans.

This benchmark is annually evaluated on the United States History End-of-Course Assessment. For more information on how this benchmark is evaluated view the United States History End-of-Course Assessment Test Item Specifications pages 40-42.

If it's EOC-evaluated, it'll be touched upon. Don't know if Florida has a "60-30 rule" (or whatever the number is in Texas), where 60% of the test is based on 30% of the standards. (In fact, don't know if that kind of rule's going to continue with the new and revised EOC tests being rolled out this spring).

California's:

Discuss the constitutional issues and impact of events on the U.S. home front, including the internment of Japanese Americans (e.g., Fred Korematsu v. United States of America) and the restrictions on German and Italian resident aliens; the response of the administration to Hitler’s atrocities against Jews and other groups; the roles of women in military production; and the roles and growing political demands of African Americans.

Florida's are "next gen," California's are "Common Core." I find "next gen" standards are vague and unfinished. They avoid laundry lists and things like "talk about" and focus on cross-cutting relationships instead of disparate events. So "internment" and "restrictions" was "contracting" rights.

When helping to rewrite some of Texas' science standards the TEA folk kept pushing us to be more like Florida's "next gen"; my working group gave the next gen business lip service and always included a laundry list, mandatory is "including ..." and optional was "such as ...".

[MichMan]

6. History books need to hold FDR accountable

[Bucky]

8. Generally they do

Although the term of art here is still internment (replacing it with the word incarceration is still a very new development), the treatment of a Japanese-Americans along the west coast is an absolute requirement in US history courses here in Texas.

And I don't think it's because FDR was a Democrat 😆

In fact come back when I was teaching US history it was part of a unit that included the origin of concentration camps, which were used against the Boers in South Africa and the general population in Cuba prior to the Spanish-American War. I seem to recall some primary sources from the US in WWII referring to the Nissei camps as concentration camps as well.

Given the stated intentions of the West Coast officials, I would argue that "concentration" camp is actually a more accurate term than incarceration. Of course to a lot of California property owners, it was primarily a land grab.

Here's an interesting side bit about the Japanese American internments. It didn't happen in Hawaii, which had a much larger nissei population and which was absolutely more vulnerable to pro Japanese sabotage, had there been any. There was not a single incident of it in the entire war, BTW.

The governor of Hawaii did briefly lock up a few Japanese American community leaders, but explicitly stated it would be too destructive to the state's economy to try and lock up every Japanese-American.

[betsuni]

7. K&R