Talk:Japanese internment

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Deleted the false statement "Would be internees were ordered to sell or give away all that they owned within a short period of time."

Internees were not ordered to "sell or give away" anything. They were ordered to bring specific personal effects with them to the reception centers, and were instructed not to bring anything they could not personally carry. Internees were free to store their household goods however they saw fit during the terms of their internment. The United States Government would provide storage for said goods.

Removed the word "forcible".

Internees were not forced into the internment camps. Instead, they were ordered out of the exclusion areas. If they had family or friends outside the exclusion areas they were free to stay with them, or to simply move outside the exclusion areas. The internment camps provided housing for those internees who had no other place to go. Over 35000 internees left the camps during 1943 and 1944 as they found places to resettle.

Snoyes "forcible" is correct. If you have no choice you are forced to do something)

They did have a choice. They could relocate themselves anywhere outside of the exclusion zone. Paraphrased the orders were like this: "You will leave california. If you have no place to go, we will provide camps".

If you don't have family outside the exclusion zone then you didn't have a choice in the matter. With that said, I don't think the word "forcible" is needed given the third paragraph which states the major affects on the internees. --mav 22:52 Feb 19, 2003 (UTC)

Debate over the means of "force" aside, forced relocation is not the same as forced internment.

Please sign your comments - it is standard wikipedia practice. --snoyes 23:07 Feb 19, 2003 (UTC)

Sorry for the knee-jerk reaction. (Its hard to keep your cool in these times - having recently heard one of the Bush lackeys say that these internments were justified). However, if what mav says is correct then the article should be adjusted to say that these internments were forcible if one did not have a family outside the exclusion zone. I am not knowledgeable enough on the situation and will hence not make this change - somebody should though. --snoyes 23:06 Feb 19, 2003 (UTC)

There was not a requirement that you have family outside the exclusion zone to avoid internment. What was required was that you leave the exclusion zone. For those who had no other place to go, the internment camp was the only option.

Older versions of this article began "Japanese internment was the forcible relocation of Japanese-Americans during World War II." In that version, it was clear that they were forced to relocate, but it didn't claim they were forced to relocate to the camps. Repeating what I said earlier, forced relocation is not the same as forced internment.

Regarding "Bush lackeys say that these internments were justified", I don't see how that relates. It isn't the place of wikipedia to determine whether they were justified or not. Instead, we should factually state what happened, why it happened, who it happened to, and so forth. --Anon

Hm. I tend to agree that my original wording is probably better. The current wording only focuses on the confinement aspect. I'll fix this hopefully soon unless somebody beats me to it. --mav

Removed the bit about "Japanese-Canadian"

I don't debate that evacuation of Japanese from certain Canadian zones took place. But I feel that someone should research these actions and write about them in a separate section regarding Japanese in Canada. Every paragraph of the current article is specific to the USA (executive order, presidential statements, WRA, etc.). Making a passing reference to Canadians in the first sentence can give the mistaken impression that all the paragraphs that follow somehow apply.

This article should be balanced by another on the Japanese internment of Western civilians. Conditions in the Japanese-run camps for Americans and other Westerners were much worse than in the American-run camps. Were the numbers smaller, though? (I could use some help researching this.) --Uncle Ed 15:03 Feb 24, 2003 (UTC)

Captured: The Japanese Internment of American Civilians in the Philippines, 1941-1945 [1]
Thousands of American, British, Dutch, Belgian, and other civilians of Allied nations living in China awoke to find their nations were at war with Japan. Continents away from their home countries, they were cut off, isolated, and faced an uncertain future. As the rigors of life under the occupation increased, they were eventually herded into internment camps, euphemistically called Civilian Assembly Centres by the Japanese. There they experienced near starvation rations. [2]
The Japanese ignored the Geneva Convention which barred women and young children being treated as slaves. According to the Geneva Convention, women and children were to be given enough food, medical attention, and proper hygiene. [3]

It would also be interesting to contrast the American treatment of foreign civilians (especially Japanese) with the Japanese treatment of civilians in China before WWII (see the Rape of Nanking) and Korean civilians during WWII (see comfort women).

I'm not saying either the US or Japan is "better" than the other, based on number of civilians murdered, raped, enslaved, or interned. Just that when we look with outrage upon one episode, like Japanese internment in the US, we ought not to neglect other similar episodes. We might then conclude that "none is righteous, all have fallen short" (Romans 3:9-10) --Uncle Ed 15:51 Feb 24, 2003 (UTC)

So what? Remeber the article needs to put facts not whether it is rightous or not. If we start justifing, we need put mention about atomic bombs to Rape of Nangking, or how jews are greedy to Auschwitz article. There is no debate about whether we should put POV or not. -- Taku 16:40 Feb 24, 2003 (UTC)

Which is true:

"all Japanese and Americans of Japanese ancestry were removed from Western coastal regions to guarded camps in the interior."; or
those who couldn't find relatives outside those regions were removed; or,
those who remained past the deadline (for whatever reason) were removed?

What I'm asking is whether there was any choice in the matter for the Japanese, or whether they were ALL rounded up, arrested and then imprisoned for the duration of the war. If any were ever allowed to leave the camps during the war and (a) return to Japan or (b) live FREELY anywhere in America, then that is news to me!! --Uncle Ed 15:59 Feb 24, 2003 (UTC)

The article is still in pretty bad shape, and far from NPOV. It is hard to read this article, as it stands, and understand the political climate that led to the relocation, the justification behind the relocation, or how the relocation was perceived by the public. This article leaves the impression that the relocation was a "bad thing".

I'll take a shot at answering Ed's questions. Keep in mind that this was the 1940's, and that official army policy may have been interpreted and applied differently in various locales. Basically, if you were Japanese and living in an exclusion area, you were given a very short deadline to make yourself scarce. Ask yourself what you would do today if you were given 10 days to move out of the state where you live now. If you are lucky, you would have friends or family to take you in somewhere else. If you are lucky, you might have enough cash on hand that you could just hop in the car, drive to another state, and try to settle down all over again.

But what if you don't know anyone who can take you in? What if you aren't rich enough to just go start over somewhere else? What would you do then? In 1943, if you were Japanese, what you did was present yourself to a collection center and you were transported to a relocation center. If you ignored the orders, didn't relocate yourself, and didn't go to a collection center, then you would have been arrested like any other lawbreaker. So, was there a choice for Japanese-Americans? Yes. Was it a realistic choice for all who it applied to? Sadly, no.

Once you were in a relocation camp, were you stuck there for the entire war? No. If you could find work and housing outside the camp you would be allowed to leave. As I mentioned above, over 35,000 Japanese-Americans left the relocation camps during 1943 and 1944. The article (as it stands) doesn't really distinguish between the relocation camps, the isolation camps, and the internment camps. There were important distinctions between these three, and between the treatment of the prisoners therein.--Anon

Then add that information then - this article was created from general material left over from me writing the Manzanar article after I visited the camp. And relocation was a "bad thing" - the US Congress has admitted this and reparations have been paid (which are two facts that also need to be in the article). So it is a bizarre statement to say that is was anything but a "bad thing". Books have been written on this subject and this article is still a stub because it still lacks some of the basics. The amount of time you have put into writing the above could have been spent fixing this article. --mav 18:39 Feb 24, 2003 (UTC)

Maveric149, I wish you (and other wikipedians) would be more careful. I suspect that you tried to attribute the Tom Clark statement to "his book" because you -assumed- that had to be where it was from, or it seemed to make grammatically sense. Although you meant well, you ended up making a factually incorrect statement. It is hard enough to try to correct the mistakes people write on purpose, we should all try to stop inserting mistakes on accident.

As it stand, I'm uncomfortable with this quotation, but I won't remove it at this time. The only places I can find this quotation on the internet only include the text we have here, so it is possible we are taking this out of context. Without knowing what the previous sentence is, or knowing what comes after the elipsis, we don't know exactly what Mr. Clark was saying. My local library does have a copy, but it isn't due back until the middle of May.

Saying it was a "bad thing" simply isn't NPOV, and no matter what a modern congress today has declared, nor who they have made reparations to, makes it so. As you know, the best thing to do is simply to present all the relevant facts and let the readers come to their own conclusions. But if you go in with the assumption that it was a "bad thing" it is hard to maintain your neutrality.

Look at it from the point of view of being a young man in 1943. Which of these would you rather have apply to you:

You are a 28 year old Japanese-American, living in San Francisco. You are single, but have a steady girlfriend. You have been struggling to keep the restaurant you opened successful, but are doing well enough that you purchased a house (and a mortgage) last year. Suddenly, you receive orders from the army. You are to be relocated to Idaho where you will be housed and fed at Uncle Sam's expense. On short notice, you kiss your girlfriend goodbye, sell your house and business at panic prices, and spend the next 3 years in a relocation camp. Three years later, you return to San Francisco, bankrupt but intent to start all over.

-or-

You are a 28 year old Irish-American, living in San Francisco. You are single, but have a steady girlfriend. You have been struggling to keep the restaurant you opened successful, but are doing well enough that you purchased a house (and a mortgage) last year. Suddenly, you receive orders from the army. You are to be relocated to England where you will be housed and fed at Uncle Sam's expense. On short notice, you kiss your girlfriend goodbye, sell your house and business at panic prices, and spend the next year in training. Six months later you die in a German forest.

I'm not saying that this should be an apology piece that tries to justify the relocation, but I'm saying that things were different in wartime 1940's america, and if we just look at it through our 2005 glasses, things look different. Back then, with young men being drafted to die, with workers being ordered what industry to labor in, it didn't seem so bad (to those on the outside) to be Japanese. But today we are starting to learn (again) how things are different in "wartime" - look at how much "internees" and "foreign combatant" have been in the news lately.

Why am I writing all this here instead of in the article? Because the article is a NPOV disaster as it stands, and the only way to salvage it is to rewrite it from the ground up. Doing that, and doing it in an encylopedic manner, will take a lot more work than making comments in talk. Personally, I don't see what happened as a "bad thing" or a "good thing", instead it was simply a "thing". Since you have already expressed that you feel it was a "bad thing", I hope you will resist making future edits without carefully examining your neutrality. --Anon

Gesh. And I'm one of the people being accused of being too pro-American and for trying to soften Anti-Americanism propaganda? Well if I am being accused of that by people with Anti-American POV and am being accused of the opposite by you, then I must be doing something right. Your statement does smack of relativism and I resent your statement that this article isn't salvageable. I will continue to edit this article and work toward improving it. I know we are talking about an order of magnitude of difference here, but would you also consider the holocaust to be just a thing or a "bad thing?" Should we also try to be relativistic with the Nazi viewpoint on this? They were just exterminating vermin BTW. NPOV doesn't extend back in time and it doesn't extend to fringe viewpoints - it is only concerned about non-fringe controversies in the present. It is a very widely held belief that Japanese internment is a black spot in American history -- there is little controversy over that. The current situation with the detainees will probably be similarly viewed by history - but since this is a current phenomenon NPOV directly applies. But NPOV is concerned with the here and now - but that doesn't mean we shouldn't add a section titled ==Motivations for the Internment==. That's information but it shouldn't be the guiding POV of the article. What people currently feel sets the parameters of NPOV. NPOV doesn't extend back in time. --mav

I don't see this at all as being about "pro-american" vs "anti-american", I see it as simply presenting the relavent facts in as neutral a manner as possible. With regards to the holocaust, yes, I feel that the editorial policy should be to present it as a "thing", leaning neither towards interpreting it as a "good thing" or as a "bad thing". I would say the same about the Trail of Tears, the Bataan Death March, the September 11 terrorist attack, or the My Lai massacre. The issue of internment shouldn't be as hard to summarize as the holocaust, because we aren't dealing with a major dispute over the facts (such as did the holocaust happen or not) but merely with the interpretation and presentation of the facts.

I also don't see where you get the principal that NPOV is only associated with current events. I don't see that in NPOV, and Can history be truly NPOV? suggest that we can at least make an attempt.

I suspect that you might agree with what I write next. I believe that, if an article were to be written as NPOV as possible, there would be no reason to rewrite it even if public opinion on an issue shifted radically. --Anon

Key word: relevant. NPOV does not mean that we give equal time to fringe POV or even previously widely-held POV - even if those views are properly attributed and written objectively. In an encyclopedia article we must make sure we summarize events in a way that are most relevant to current readers. This process requires us to select some data and to not select other data. So an article on the Holocaust should concentrate on the treatments to and impacts on victims and the larger socio-political-economic consequences. Very little space should be given in the presentation of the Nazi justification - no matter how objectively it is written, adding too much of that would unbalance the article by giving a fringe POV too much time. That is what I meant. The main purpose of NPOV is to make it possible for reasonable people with very different POVs to work on the same article. The type of timelessly NPOV article you write about is not possible BTW since prevailing viewpoints will dictate differing levels of detail allowable for different viewpoints. If ultra-conservatives take over the world then the "justification" section of an article on the Holocaust would increase in size. What is "neutral" is a moving target that evolves over time. You should read some of the stuff in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica that passed for neutral at the time. --mav

"NPOV does not mean that we give equal time to fringe POV or even previously widely-held POV" --- We don't need to give "equal time" to the fringe POV, because we shouldn't give time to the commonly-held POV to begin with. From NPOV "The prevailing Wikipedia understanding is that the neutral point of view is not a point of view at all; according to our understanding, when one writes neutrally, one is very careful not to state (or imply or insinuate or carefully but subtly massage the reader into believing) that any particular view at all is correct.".

My emphasis and meaning was on the selection of what to write - I thought I made that clear. That means we choose which POV to present. Of course we present it in an objective manor and attribute POV to their adherents. --mav

"You should read some of the stuff in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica that passed for neutral at the time." --- Are you presuming that the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica attempted to be neutral? Did the authors ever state that was one of their objectives?

Not specifically, but I do know that EB 1911 was the best reference of its day. But maybe standards of neutrality didn't really exist back then. A better example would be an encyclopedia made within the Soviet Union (the name escapes me for the moment) that is widely regarded as factually correct and was written with standards of neutrality in mind. But it, of course, tended to cover subjects and aspects of subjects that were of interest to communists. If the Ferengi wrote an encyclopedia their emphasis would be on economics and the acquisition of wealth. If the Klingons had an encyclopedia then I would expect it to concentrate on warfare. But our audience, admittedly, is far more diverse - all English speakers (with an emphasis on native speakers). I just noticed the "racial motivation" statement in the article - that was from the Park Service and should have been attributed. At the very least some mention should be made that German-Americans were not excluded from the Eastern part of the United States even though we caught a groups of Nazi saboteurs on the East Coast. Given these facts the reader could decide for themselves. --mav

If we are proposing a piece on Japanese-Canadian internment, this article should be at Japanese-American internment. The United States are not the default semantic setting. - Montréalais

I would lean more towards Japanese Relocation or Japanese-American Relocation or Japanese Relocation in America or such. "Relocation" is more inclusive as it covers the experience of those who moved themselves, those who were interned briefly, and those who were interned for the course of the war. "Internment" focuses more on the camp experience, at the expense of the entire phenomenon.

I am suspecting they are all American? I mean I am sure there were some Japanese residenting in the United States like for study. So, the article about internment in Canada probably should be renamed to Japanese internment in Canada? Anyone knows about it? -- Taku 20:56 Feb 24, 2003 (UTC)

Maveric, please try to understand where Anon and I are each (separately) coming from. Sometimes contributors (like Anon) feel daunted by the prospect of correcting what they see as a biased article, and thus prefer to make comments in Talk instead. In my case, I also feel daunted, but I often comment and then, if no one objects, just go ahead and make changes; my feelings aren't hurt (well, not MUCH ;-) if someone objects afterwards.

I think a separate article is needed on internment by the Japanese of civilians such as Americans, Canadians, etc. rather than adding to the article a section comparing and contrasting how Japanese civilians were treated in America and Canada during WW2 with how Japanese treated foreign civilians. I was thinking more in terms of a Japanese war crimes article, since IMHO the relocation is inconvenient while starvation and rape are criminal.

Again, don't get me wrong. I do not condemn Japan as a whole, nor do I harbor resentment toward contemporary Japaneses individuals for what happened 60 or 70 years ago. I just want to put everything into perspective. Let each reader draw their own moral conclusions.

I address you most of all, Maveric, because you know more about the subject than I do. Also, you are keenly aware of the problem a writer who holds a strong POV has, when intending to write a neutral article. I am hoping we can all help each other on this subject, both to improve our writing ability and as an example to others. --Uncle Ed 14:25 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

I agree that the horrible (there is no better way to describe it) way Allied prisoners of war and civilian prisoners were treated by the Japanese is a separate subject that needs a separate article. I have no problem with that. But Anon should note that it isn't my fault that such an article doesn't yet exist in Wikipedia and that this article is a separate subject. My POV on this is that what the United States did was bad and unfair but what the Japanese did was inhumane, criminal and bizarre. Their bioweapons testing facility in Manchuria was horrifying: They would test the effects of things like anthrax and bubonic plague on American POWs and Chinese (all the while comparing and contrasting the effects that different delivery methods had). And the practice of beheading POWs with samari swords for the smallest of offensives... Then there was the Rape of Nanking and the genocide of the Coolies... Well I could go on but it making me sick to my stomach. I also do not condemn modern-day Japan, or even modern-day America for the sins they committed during WWII. But if we forget or whitewash history we are destined to repeat it. Some people already charge the US for forgetting Japanese internment (thinking of the detainees in Cuba - which I have mixed feelings about). --mav

There seems to be a consensus, then. Well spoken Mav. And Ed. BTW, my move of the entry was essentially motivated by laziness. It would have taken me many hours to remove the POV from the entry "Japanese internment" by writing new material, 2 minutes to remove the POV by moving it to "Japanese internment in the United States", leaving the problem of internment in Canada, Australia (yes it was in Oz too) and whichever other places it applies to for another day. If anyone wants to take on the huge task of writing about all the different internments in one place, then I have no particular objection, but I am inclined to think that seperate entries is best. Tannin 23:15 Feb 26, 2003 (UTC)

It's difficult to judge people of the past by our knowlege and perspective of today. The Californians were justifiably fearful that Japan would invade them (I remember a wartime Hollywood movie depicting such an invasion). After Pearl Harbor emotions were extremely directed at the Japanese. Additionally, many of us still had notions from the 1800's that racial differences affected comprehension and other mental abilities. Absurd but so true was the idea held by many that the Oriental eye, being shaped differently from the Occidental, could not make out shapes well at distance, and this would limit their ability as airplane pilots.69.223.55.57 05:05, 22 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]