Japanese
By William Wetherall
30 December 2025
I've been engaged in studies of minorities in America and Japan for over half a century. In both countries, social histories of minorities have changed. For history is not about the past, but how people presently living choose to consume, digest, and assimilate whatever vision of the past best suits current ideological fashions.
During the Pacific War (1941-1945), "all persons of Japanese ancestry" residing in military zones along the west coast of the United States, which the U.S. Army declared off-limits to "Japanese", were evacuated from their homes to temporary "assembly centers". Evacuees were soon moved to "relocation centers", which many were allowed to leave in order to work or resettle in localities east of the exclusion zones, while a few were recruited for military service.
Practically all of the terminology used by the U.S. government agencies that oversaw the mass removals of "all persons of Japanese ancestry" from their west coast homes are today considered "euphemisms" by scholars and others who write about the removals. Most organizations that memorialize the removal experiences of over 110,000 (or 120,000 or 125,000) persons of Japanese ancestry -- as examples of past injustices that should never be repeated -- offer alternative terms they claim are more "truthful" through the eyes of "critical" history.
I regarded the earliest adoptions of the critical alternatives as gestures of political correctness. Today, though, their "correctness" is so taken for granted that few writers bother to wonder whether in hindsight the "euphemisms" might not be more truthful.
"Japanese" or "Americans"
For example -- "all persons of Japanese ancestry" included both "Japanese" -- legally defined at the time as "enemy Aliens" -- and "U.S. citzens" who happened to be descendants of Japanese immigrants. Then (as still today), "Japanese" was widely used in English as a label for anyone regarded as being "racially" or "ethnically" Japanese by "blood".
There is no such racial beast in Japanese law. In Japanese law, a "Japanese" -- or "subject" (historically) or "national" (historically and today) of Japan -- is someone who possesses the purely civil, raceless, non-ethnic nationality of Japan. This is also the essential sense of "Japanese" in U.S. laws that differentiate between "aliens" and U.S. citizens or nationals.
Likewise, a citizen or national of the United States is legally anyone who possesses the nationality of the United States -- regardless of the person's racioethnic status in America's "race box" culture. Note that U.S. passports declare that the bearer possesses the "nationality" of the United States of America. Whether the bearer is a citizen or national of the United States is a matter of U.S. domestic law, not international law.
Keep in mind here that in conventional Americanese -- the language of the street, novels and movies, and even some journalism and scholarship -- "What is your nationality?" generally alludes to a person's putative biological "race" or "ethnicity" or "heritage" or "culture" or "peoplehood" -- rather than to the person's passport status.
Also in conventional Americanese, "persons of Japanese ancestry" was then (and is still) typically reduced to "Japanese" -- a highly racialzed term that alludes to anyone with putatively "Japanese blood". The term has nothing to do with civil nationality, and everything to do with race.
The same confusion between legal status and social perceptions of "race" and "ethnicity" is every bit as prevalent in Japan. Just as in Americanese "Japanese" is almost always racialized, "Nihonjin" (日本人) in vernacular Japanese is typically racialized. So it comes as no surprise that immigrants to the United States from Japan have usually racialized themselves as much as they have been racialized by others.
Japan, however, didn't (and still doesn't) have race boxes. Japan's civil laws did not prohibit interracial marriages. Japan's Nationality Law did not prohibit naturalization on account of "race" (jinshu 人種) or "racioethnic nation" (minzoku 民族). In fact, equivalents of such words are absent from Japan's laws, though its 1947 Constitution prohibits discrimination on account of race, or other personal attributes tantamount to descent or ancestry.
Densho on "Japanese American vs. Japanese"
Densho -- an organization that advocates "Preserving stories of the past for the generations of tomorrow" -- adopts the following stance on terminology (viewed 30 December 2025).
In the 1940s, government officials and military leaders used euphemisms to describe their punitive and unjust actions against people of Japanese ancestry in the United States. The deceptiveness of that language can now be judged according to evidence from many sources, most notably the government's own congressionally-ordered investigation, documented in Personal Justice Denied (1982-83), the report of the U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC).
Today, these decades-old euphemisms persist in textbooks, news sources, and other platforms -- meaning that most Americans learn about this history through a distorted lens that diminishes the harsh realities of Japanese American WWII incarceration.
Densho makes the following argument for replacing "Japanese" by "Japanese Americans".
Media outlets and other sources often refer to the more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent imprisoned by the U.S. government during WWII as simply "Japanese" -- but this both erases their American identity and conflates Japanese Americans with Japanese citizens in Japan. The wartime government employed this strategy itself, inventing the orwellian term "non-alien" to describe Japanese American citizens in public documents.
The Nisei ("second generation") were U.S. citizens born to Japanese immigrant parents in the United States. Many had never set foot in Japan. Their Issei parents were forbidden by discriminatory law from becoming naturalized American citizens, but by the 1940s most had lived in the United States for decades and raised their families here. Most had no plans of returning to Japan, and would have become naturalized citizens if allowed. By birth or by choice, Japanese Americans were just that -- American.
The cold reality of America's unjust treatment of "all persons of Japanese ancestry" during the Pacific War is precisely that it racialized as "Japanese" both aliens and Americans perceived as having "Japanese blood". That America's naturalization laws viewed aliens of Oriental "national origin" as racially ineligible is important. That immigrants from from Japan therefore couldn't become Americans is important. How many might have naturalized had they been allowed to is irrelevant to a truthful history of the period. All that matters is that they were legally race-boxed as a caste of aliens ineligible for citizenship.
Not about "Americans" by any definition
The use of "non-alien" in the context in which it was introduced is legally precise and not at all deceptive. That American citizens of Japanese ancestry were regarded as "non-aliens" who thus had rights and duties different from those of "aliens" in general and "enemy aliens" in particular is of utmost importance.
The day after Japan's attack on the United States at Pearl Harbor, subjects and nationals (not "citizens") of Japan were declared enemy aliens. The phrase "all persons of Japanese ancestry" conflates Japanese enemy aliens with their U.S. born descendants, who were American citizens. The phrase also includes persons, of neither Japanese nor U.S. nationality, who were regarded as being of "Japanese blood".
The phrasing is intended to be racialist -- because the removal of people of "Japanese ancestry" was predicated on race, not nationality. Their civil status, as aliens or citizens, didn't matter to exclusionists. Whether out of hatred or fear, exclusion was not about being "Japanese American" by any definition of the term -- but only about being "Japanese" as a matter of putative race.
The use of "Japanese" as a racialist reference to anyone perceived as being of "Japanese blood" is as prevalent today as it was then. Little has changed in that regard. Race boxes are alive and well in the United States today. Eavesdrop on a conversation between self-styled "Japanese Americans", talking about their "identity", and witness how quickly "Japanese American" is reduced to just "Japanese" as a biological imperative of Japanese American identity. It was then, and is still, all about pride in biological ancestry.
Euphemisms
As for "euphemisms" -- "evacuated" and "relocated" may smack of banal bureaucratese. But historically, they are far more truthful than "imprisoned". The "relocation centers" were not prisons. The removals of "all persons of Japanese ancestry" from their homes were horribly unjust, but they were not punitive. They were, in fact, for the purposes of evacuation and relocation -- more about which in future posts.
Last revised 30 December 2025