Then They Came for Me: Incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII<\/a> (through May 6), a comprehensive portrayal of this reprehensible period in American history.\u00a0 It includes works from prominent photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams, letters and other personal mementos, and moving video testimonials from those who were incarcerated or have family members who had been.<\/p>\nFrom 1942-1946, thousands of Japanese Americans were forcibly relocated to incarceration camps in desert and swamp areas of the Western U.S.\u00a0 The original term for this had been “internment,” but I learned from the exhibition that Japanese American organizations and scholars have developed new terminology in an effort to more accurately reflect the wrongness of what took place.<\/p>\n
For example, what was initially referred to as \u201crelocation centers\u201d are now called \u201cillegal detention centers,\u201d and those who were detained are known as \u201cinmates\u201d or \u201cprisoners\u201d as opposed to the original \u201cevacuees\u201d or \u201cinternees.\u201d\u00a0 At the time \u201cconcentration camp\u201d was used even by government officials, but due to confusion with Nazi death camps the term “incarceration camp” came to be favored (other acceptable terms include “American concentration camp,” “detention center” and “prison camp”).<\/p>\n
Monday marks the 76th anniversary of FDR’s issuing of Executive Order 9066, which led to the forced removal of Japanese American citizens and legal Japanese residents from their homes by stating that “any and all persons could be removed from any area designated as a military zone.”\u00a0 We see echoes of this discriminatory decree in current edicts against Muslims and other minorities, and fervently hope that a renewed awareness of past injustice can help prevent history from repeating itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Written by freelance Writer\/Interpreter\/Translator\u00a0Stacy Smith\u00a0(Kumamoto-ken\u00a0CIR, 2000-03),\u00a0WIT Life\u00a0is a periodic series about aspects of Japanese culture such as language, film, business, food and politics. Stacy starts her day by watching\u00a0Fujisankei\u2019s newscast in Japanese, and here she shares some interesting tidbits and trends along with her\u00a0own observations. After interpreting in Manhattan Criminal Court earlier this week, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[76,18,36,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photography","category-translatinginterpreting","category-wit-life","category-writers"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pkZ7m-b40","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42532"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42532\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42691,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42532\/revisions\/42691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jetwit.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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