Japanese American Internment/Incarceration/Concentration Camps--which one is it?

Yesterday I went to a talk given by a visiting scholar, lets call him Professor "X," on a portion of his latest research about the Japanese American internment. There were about a dozen people who gathered for his talk, including one I'll call Older American Historian (OAH), who declared at the onset of the talk that he would probably disagree with Professor X since OAH was writing an essay called "The Myth of Japanese American Concentration Camps."

You see, Professor X had dared to include the phrase "Japanese American Concentration Camp" without the scare quotes around the term concentration camp.

Let me pause here by saying that there is an on-going and long-standing debate about whether to refer to the period of WWII in which Japanese and Japanese Americans were racially targeted, detained, relocated, and held in camps throughout the Western and Southern portions of the U.S. as either Japanese American Internment, Japanese American Incarceration, or Japanese American Concentration. Usually this gets even thornier when talking about the actual locations--as in, were these internment camps, detainment centers, relocation centers, incarceration camps, or concentration camps?

Most scholars throw out detainment and relocation. It doesn't get to the magnitude of this mass removal and racialized dimension of what happened. Internment has become the default term, it seems, although many, particularly those who experienced this period, believe this term is too neutral and too inaccurate to describe the inherent racism of this period and the devastating legacy of this period. Incarceration gives more of a feel to the ways in which Japanese American citizens were imprisoned against their will, although I have read some scholarship that believes that incarceration is inaccurate, as well, since Japanese Americans were not truly prisoners, although Densho: The Japanese American legacy project, prefers this term. That leaves us with concentration camps, which is actually the language used by FDR and the other architects of Executive Order 9066 to describe the ten different centers used to house Japanese Americans during WWII.

So here's the thing: when you hear the word "concentration camp" what immediately comes to mind? The Holocaust? Nazi genocide of Jewish people in Europe? You bet. It's the reason I've usually avoided the term in my own writing on the Japanese American internment.

But I have to say, after the exchange between OAH and Professor X, I'm ready to jump on board the Japanese American Concentration Camp bandwagon, because Professor X made a very intelligent, reasoned, and astute argument for why we should understand the camps as concentration camps and why we should use accurate terms to describe particular historic situations. And OAH came across as a cranky, slightly crazy, and most of all incredibly PRIVILEGED white male academic. And those guys drive me NUTS.

You see, right after Professor X finished his talk, OAH immediately launched into a series of questions (because, as he declared to everyone, HE had to leave EARLY). The first one was asking Professor X to compare Japanese American concentration camps to German concentration camps. You know, the ones used to exterminate over 6 million people of Jewish descent.

AGHHHHH!!!! I HATE this question. It's one that appeared in the early stages of Japanese American internment scholarship. Particularly among people who wanted to discredit the legitimate claims of redress and reparations of Japanese American survivors of internment/incarceration. Professor X was very deft at handling OAH's question--he began by saying that it was futile to compare the two, because German concentration camps were actually death camps, and even the ones that were "labor" camps were designed with the Final Solution in mind (ie: Jewish Holocaust/genocide). And then Professor X went through the history of the phrase concentration camp--a phrase that predates WWII by about 50 years (first usage was in the late 19th C. with respect to South Africa and Cuba). Concentration camps, in Professor X's belief, are accurate because they were designed with the purpose of involuntarily concentrating the majority of an ethnic group into one location--for detainment of an indeterminate length. And that's what the U.S. government did to 120,000 Japanese American people--they were targeted, relocated (twice), and detained in camps solely based on their ethnic identity--their visible ethnic and racial difference from white America. No charges of espionage were every discovered among Japanese or Japanese Americans. And as Ex Parte Endo proves, the Japanese American interment was an unconstitutional act that the U.S. government had no business in perpetuating.

But perhaps my desire to jump on the concentration camp terminology bandwagon has as much to do with my antipathy towards OAH as it does with my admiration of Professor X's scholarship. Because the kind of strange refutations that OAH kept making--focusing on the fact that mass numbers of Japanese Americans didn't DIE as a result of being in these camps and that the quality of life for Japanese Americans in the U.S. was demonstrably better than their German/Jewish counterparts. Well... DUH! The U.S. did many dishonorable things to people of Japanese ancestry--but they did not implement a system of genocide against them. The only reason to bring up this false comparison is to discredit the very legitimate hardships faced by Japanese Americans and to discredit the very real racism used by the U.S. government to disenfranchise an entire group of people based on nothing more than irrational and unsupported ethnic bias.

Older white male academic privilege...it leaves a rather bad taste in one's mouth.

[Addition--July 17, 2008: If you found your way here because you are looking for more information about this period in history and/or connections with current abuses of civil rights, click here for my July 17, 2008 post]