Relocation or Internment?
I was more than mildly disappointed in the shallowness of your research in “The Stolen Years” series. The “litmus test” for writing on this subject is whether the author knows the difference between internment camps and relocation camps and there is a world of difference between them. Apparently you don’t pass.

The principle of “internment” is a centuries-old doctrine going back, at least, to the Revolutionary War and probably earlier. The people who were sent to internment camps had to meet two criteria: be an alien (non-citizen) and be considered subversive. The usual practice was to “intern” them until the end of hostilities and then deport them. In the case of World War II, there were only four internment camps (Missoula, Mont.; Bismarck, N.D.; Santa Fé, N.M.; and Crystal City, Texas). German, Italian and Japanese “internees” were, indeed, “incarcerated” in those camps. Crystal City was the only camp that housed whole, alien families.

The relocation-camp concept did originate with the DeWitt Proclamation and, as Carl Kostol pointed out [“Letters,” March 2006], only applied to Japanese residents west of Highway 97 (in Washington and Oregon). The “restricted zone” also included the whole state of California and the southern portion of Arizona. If the residents (both non-subversive Issei aliens and Nisei citizens) in the restricted zone chose not to relocate voluntarily, they were forced to move to relocation camps (10 total). The biggest difference from the internment camps was they could leave the camp anytime they wanted as long as they had a sponsor (family member or friend) who would confirm that they were not relocating back inside the restricted zone. Read Monica Itoi Sone’s Nisei Daughter for an account of a Seattle Nisei girl who did exactly that, leaving the Minidoka Relocation Camp to go back to the Midwest and finish up her schooling.

Burt Pierard,’68
Richland

Editor’s Note: As noted in “Prelude” in the Dec. 2005 Columns, the use of the terms “internment” and “imprisonment” to describe the treatment of Japanese Americans follows mainstream historical scholarship. The “relocation camps” were surrounded by barbed wire and had guards in watchtowers with rifles. Japanese Americans could not leave without a pass, and if they wanted to move permanently out of the camps, they had to find a sponsor on the outside and pass a security screening that could take months to complete.

Learning About the Internment
I have just finished reading Part Two of “The Stolen Years,” and want to tell you how much I appreciated these articles. I started at the UW in the fall of 1950. I had Professor Gordon Hirabayashi for Sociology 101, and it was then that I learned of the wartime evacuation/relocation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. (I had been a child in New York state at the time.) I had a Japanese American friend in high school in Seattle in the late ’40s whose family was living on Beacon Hill, yet I had never heard a word from any of them about what had happened to them during the war years.

I had Professor Frank Miyamoto for classes, and then worked for him as a reader (grading exams) and research assistant when I was a graduate student. He is a man of such dignity and integrity! I adored him. I didn't know he had been teaching at the UW at the time of the internment.

I was active in the student YM-YWCA in the early ’50s and also developed Quaker connections about that time. If the UW gave me my formal education, it was at the student Y that I developed my spiritual, social, political and international awareness. It is not surprising that Gordon Hirabayashi was active at the Y, or that staff and students there, along with Quakers and other socially concerned members of the community, supported him in his standing for, and suffering from, his principles.

It is easy to look back and say how awful something was. It is harder to see it at the time and to try to do something about it. In any case, thank you for bringing to the present those people and activities that were such a part of my formative years.

Elizabeth Jallie Bagshaw, ’53, ’76
Seattle

Bad, One-Sided Journalism
Your articles on the wartime internment of some Japanese are bad, one-sided journalism by people who obviously weren’t there and have no idea what the situation really was. Please read more of the whole story. See my article “Wartime Internment”.

Robert E. Hannay, ’47
Phoenix

A Special Place in Our Hearts
Thank you for your great article on Gordon Hirabayashi. Frank Walters was my grandfather; unfortunately he passed away in the mid-1970s and did not see the result of his work on this case. [Walters was a local Seattle attorney who argued for Hirabayashi’s civil rights all the way to the Supreme Court.]

My grandmother, Ruth Walters, lived into her late 90s and was delighted with the news of Gordon’s eventual court victories. [In 1987, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the government had withheld information from the courts in Hirabayashi’s original legal challenge during the war.] She said Gordon always had a special place in her heart for what he went through in all of this.

Mike Wilson,’76
Yakima