A Note on Terminology

Throughout Seeing Memory, we use terms like “forced removal,” “temporary detention centers,” “incarceration,” and “prison camps” to describe wartime Japanese American confinement. Although terms like “assembly centers” and “internment” are often used to describe this history, they are euphemisms, meant to lessen the racism and xenophobia at the root of how Japanese Americans were treated. 

While we use the term “incarceration camp” or “concentration camp” to describe the ten War Relocation Authority camps that imprisoned the majority of the Japanese American community removed from the West Coast, we do use the term “internment camp” to describe three of our sites: Kooskia, Fort Missoula, and Fort Richardson. These there camps, run by Immigration & Naturalization Services (INS) and the U.S. Army, were internment camps by definition—prisons for the detention of so-called “enemy aliens” in a time of war. With very few exceptions, Kooskia, Fort Missoula, and Fort Richardson imprisoned Japanese immigrant men, referred to as Issei, who were “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” 

For more, see JACL’s “Power of Words” Handbook (PDF here - below the YT video) and Densho’s page on terminology.