American Propaganda
'Instructions to All Persons of Japanese Ancestry', 1942 US document: Posted beside an air-raid shelter notice, a U.S. Army

'Instructions to All Persons of Japanese Ancestry' (exclusion order posted in San Francisco)

The posted order to persons of Japanese ancestry

April 1942 Western Defense Command instructions posted in San Francisco. NARA 536018. The sheet names Japanese ancestry; Executive Order 9066 did not.

Techniques named on the archive record

Euphemism / doublespeak
Date
April 11, 1942
Made by
U.S. Army Western Defense Command and Wartime Civil Control Administration
Medium
Document
Country
United States
Regime
Roosevelt Administration
NARA
NARA 536018
Source
Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
Source
Wikimedia Commons , retrieved September 27, 2026
Source
Public domain (U.S. government work) Dorothea Lange, War Relocation Authority (NARA 536018).

Object, image, and catalog record from the FRAME archive. Text on this page is CC BY 4.0. Image rights are as the archive records.

Full record at propagandaarchive.org

Instructions to All Persons of Japanese Ancestry is an April 1942 exclusion order of the Western Defense Command and Fourth Army Wartime Civil Control Administration, posted in San Francisco. The sheet, dated April 1, 1942, orders "all Japanese persons, both alien and non-alien," out of a mapped part of the city by noon on April 7, 1942 (NARA 536018).

What the posted sheet said

The FRAME record dates the photograph April 11, 1942. The instructions printed on the paper are dated earlier. They name the people, the streets, and the hour.

WESTERN DEFENSE COMMAND AND FOURTH ARMY

WARTIME CIVIL CONTROL ADMINISTRATION

Presidio of San Francisco, California

April 1, 1942

INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL PERSONS OF JAPANESE ANCESTRY

All Japanese persons, both alien and non-alien, will be evacuated from the above designated area by 12:00 o'clock noon Tuesday, April 7, 1942.

Opening of the transcription in the FRAME record. The area described there is the portion of San Francisco generally west of Junipero Serra Boulevard, Worchester Avenue, and Nineteenth Avenue, and generally north of California Street to Market Street and the bay. Full record at propagandaarchive.org. NARA 536018. Photograph by Dorothea Lange.

The order behind the poster

Executive Order 9066 let a military commander exclude "any or all persons" from designated areas. The order does not name Japanese Americans. The exclusion that followed did. The posted instructions say "Japanese ancestry," and they say "both alien and non-alien," which is a way of covering citizens without using the word citizen. That is the record, and the exclusion was wrong.

The archive tags the sheet's technique as euphemism. "Evacuated" is the sheet's verb for forced removal. This page does not retell the camps, the assembly centers, or the later cases. Those are a larger history. The propaganda artifact is the wording on the wall. The bridge page is Japanese internment propaganda.

Not a caricature, and still a wrong

Unlike Tokio Kid, this sheet does not joke. It instructs. The constitutional injury is sharper because of that. A plant cartoon shames a workforce. This paper tells a class of people, including citizens, to leave their homes by a noon the Army picked. Due process is the thing the noon replaces. Lange's photograph for the War Relocation Authority is evidence of the posting. It is not a defense of the posting.

Sources

  • FRAME object record, Instructions to All Persons of Japanese Ancestry, photograph dated April 11, 1942. Western Defense Command and Wartime Civil Control Administration. NARA 536018. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work), Dorothea Lange, War Relocation Authority.
  • The quotation "any or all persons" is the operative language of Executive Order 9066. The order does not name Japanese Americans. The posted instructions do.