“At what point are we, as Americans of Japanese ancestry, going to resist having our history written for us by others?” asked Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, a Nisei survivor of the World War II incarceration. Herzig-Yoshinaga is revered as the researcher who found the document that proved the government’s claim of “military necessity” as the reason for the forced wartime removal and incarceration was a lie.
“Is our empowerment so weak that we must capitulate and surrender our right to state our own history in our own words?”
Herzig-Yoshinaga’s frustration came from the exhibit on the wartime incarceration of persons of Japanese ancestry, “America’s Concentration Camps,” held in 1998 at the National Park Service’s Ellis Island Immigration Museum. There, critics forced the Japanese American National Museum to defend its reasoning and right to use the term “concentration camps.”
Her in-depth research into the incarceration’s documents and language led Herzig-Yoshinaga to begin a list of “words that lie” — words the government used to cover up and minimize the unjust wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans. This list, gathered over several decades, developed into her 2010 paper, “Words Can Lie or Clarify,” a personal biography and discussion of terminology, found at: www.nps.gov/tule/forteachers/suggestedreading.htm.
Herzig-Yoshinaga’s views on terminology parallel those of the Japanese American activists in the 1970s, who recognized and spoke out about the wartime incarceration as a shocking violation of the civil and human rights of an unpopular racial minority. Their views remain, cast in bronze on California State Historic Landmark plaques that describe Manzanar and Tule Lake as “concentration camps.” Yet, in the new millennium, the National Park Service, the federal agency tasked with preserving the Japanese American incarceration story, remains hesitant to call the War Relocation Authority sites “concentration camps,” citing the need for greater public consensus.
Working toward such consensus, delegates to the 2010 National JACL convention passed overwhelmingly (80 votes for, two against) a resolution that urged accurate and non-euphemistic terminology when describing the Japanese American wartime experience. After this victory, however, the JACL wrote an implementation guide that advised using the euphemisms — in quotation marks. Grassroots members and delegates protested the distortion of the original resolution which discouraged the use of euphemisms. The response of the JACL leadership was to invite Jewish organizational lobbyists to pressure convention delegates over the term “concentration camps.”
It was a tactic that was not persuasive. In the final vote, the majority of delegates voted (55 for, 17 against and three split) to block adoption of the flawed implementation guide. A revised guide will be prepared for review and approval at the JACL National convention in Seattle in 2012. At that time, JACL’s leaders will then choose whether to align with its grassroots members who overwhelmingly supported the resolution to use accurate and non-euphemistic terminology, or with those aligned with other organizational interests.
Lamentably, after decades of community advocacy over what to call the places where 120,000 persons of Japanese descent — most of whom were American citizens — were stripped of their rights and their freedom, this issue of self-definition remains unsettled.
Some survivors say that terms such as “prisoner” or “concentration camp” seem uncomfortably harsh, raising images of pain and victimization. Yet, what good would come of minimizing the public’s understanding of the traumatic violation of rights and human dignity suffered by persons of Japanese descent during World War II?
If the goal is to ensure, “Never again!” — the truth is the best place to start.
[Editor’s Note]
Barbara Takei, a writer and researcher based in Sacramento, Calif., is a board member of the Tule Lake Committee and an organizer of the October 22 symposium in San Francisco’s Japantown, “Cast in Bronze: Terminology and Memory of the Japanese American WWII Incarceration Experience.”