To tell an honest story, a writer must use honest words. As you read this book, I hope you will keep that fact in mind. I certainly have as I have written it.
I mention this for several reasons. For one thing, many of the words that have been used for years to talk about the history described in this book are words that were designed to be deliberately dishonest. When the US government announced that tens of thousands of Japanese Americans were to be forcibly removed from their homes, military and political leaders called this an “evacuation.” They called the fairgrounds and racetracks where Japanese Americans were first confined behind barbed wire “assembly centers.” They called the process of rounding them up and incarcerating them “internment.” They called the permanent camps to which Japanese Americans were later moved and where they were held against their will “relocation centers.” All of these words were chosen to make what was happening to Japanese Americans sound more acceptable to the American public.
I want to call particular attention to that last term. These camps were not “relocation centers.” They were concentration camps. They were created to concentrate Japanese Americans, based entirely on their race, behind barbed wire in order to separate them from other Americans. So I sometimes refer to the camps with this term.
At the same time, it’s important to underscore that in using the term “concentration camps” I do not mean to compare these American camps to the horrific death camps and slave-labor camps created by the Nazis in Germany and Poland during World War II. Those Nazi camps—places like Dachau and Auschwitz-Birkenau—represent an evil that is beyond all imagining.
Another part of using language honestly means recognizing when it is racist. In reading this book, you will occasionally encounter the word “Jap.” It is a racist term, widely used by millions of Americans during the period of history this book discusses. It was used to hurt and demean both Japanese citizens and Japanese Americans, just as the N-word has been used to hurt and demean African Americans and other Black people. It has no place in our society, a society created on the idea, and the fact, that all people are created equal. It appears in this book only for the purpose of showing honestly how deeply rooted racism against Japanese Americans was during this time in history.