Why we use the term "incarceration" instead of "internment."
It is important to understand that the word "internment" has a specific legal definition that does not fit the situation of Japanese Americans during WWII, and that this misusage of the word "internment" was a purposeful move on the part of the US government. The term "internment" legally refers to the confinement of noncitizens who have been proven to have material malicious intent against the country they are in during times of war. This definition clearly does not fit the situation of Japanese Americans during WWII. First of all, a large portion of those taken were citizens, secondly, the US government incarcerated everyone regardless of whether or not they were proven to want to take down the US. It is also clear in this definition of "internment," that the US government wanted the American public to believe that every person of Japanese heritage in the US was fighting against the US so that they could justify the mass incarceration.
Source: Lachman, 2017 Huffington Post
If you are interested in learning more about the complex history of Japanese incarceration in Tacoma, as well as its current implications, here are some things to look into.
Tacoma Community History Project
https://blogs.uw.edu/tchp/category/japanese-internment/
Collins library information
https://library.pugetsound.edu/c.php?g=304567&p=3322836
"Remembering the Day Tacoma's Japantown Disappeared."
https://www.knkx.org/news/2017-05-17/remembering-the-day-tacomas-japantown-disappeared
Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan, the already existing anti-Japanese sentiments made it easy for President Roosevelt to sign Executive Order 9066 instantly authorizing the rounding up of Japanese Americans living in the western states, forcibly removing them from their homes and communities to lock them up in make-shift, barbed-wire incarceration campus farther inland. Most lost their homes, businesses, pets, and almost everything they owned. For the duration of the war, children grew up in these desolate, dirty, and isolated camps.
At Puget Sound, there were 36 Japanese American students attending at the time of the Executive Order, some just a semester and a half away from graduating. None were able to return to Puget Sound to finish their degrees after the war. It wasn’t until 2009 that Puget Sound awarded these students with honorary degrees, but by this time only 6 of the students were able to return to receive them. Before the students were forcibly removed from the Puget Sound campus, they gave the university cherry trees that bloom each March. The original cherry trees were gifted to the University by the Japanese Club in 1940 by the Japanese American students who were attending Puget Sound at that time. They were given to the school as a “symbol of friendship.” Tragically, two years later the students were taken from campus and incarcerated due to the executive order.
The trees you see today are not the original cherry trees given to the school by the Japanese Club. Cherry trees’ lifespan is roughly 15-20 years. Thus periodically the campus gathers together to recognize the history behind these trees, to read the names of the 36 students who offered them to us in a spirit of friendship, and to draw connections between the injustice of mass incarcerating thousands of people, families with children, out of fear, and similar injustices happening in our world today. The most recent of these moments was in 2017 when the cherry trees needed to be planted anew, “the wood cores of their predecessors...buried at their roots—a symbol of the passing of life from generation to generation.” In her 2017 address at the dedication ceremony for the new trees, Brittney Imada (‘18), offered the call she found in the presence of the cherry trees, “Just as these stories are often all too forgotten, the experiences of Asians/Asian-Americans and other minorities on this campus are often overlooked. For me, these cherry trees serve as a tangible reminder of the injustices and battles that those before us have faced and those that students today still continue to face. As we walk past these trees every day on the way to class or work, let them be a reminder of our responsibility as members of this campus, this community, to recognize the experiences of others who are different from us, and our responsibility to look out for each other in the face of injustice.”
