# Japanese internment propaganda in three US artifacts

Japanese internment propaganda, on this page, means the US government's own wording on the exclusion: Executive Order 9066, the posted instructions to persons of Japanese ancestry, a War Relocation Authority photograph, and an Office of War Information film card. It is not a history of the camps.

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  Japanese internment propaganda in three US artifacts
  Japanese internment propaganda, on this page, means the US government's own wording on the exclusion: Executive Order 9066, the posted instructions to persons of Japanese ancestry, a War Relocation Authority photograph, and an Office of War Information film card. It is not a history of the camps.

The propaganda is the language that made a forced move sound like a transfer. This page keeps three artifacts and the order that authorized the machine behind them. It does not list camps, populations, or court dockets beyond what those artifacts say.

## The order that does not name them

Executive Order 9066 authorized a military commander to exclude "any or all persons" from military areas. It does not say Japanese Americans. The paper that did say it is the Instructions to All Persons of Japanese Ancestry, Western Defense Command and Fourth Army, Wartime Civil Control Administration, Presidio of San Francisco, dated April 1, 1942 on the sheet. Dorothea Lange's photograph in the record is dated April 11, 1942 (NARA 536018). The instructions order "all Japanese persons, both alien and non-alien," out of a described part of San Francisco by noon on April 7, 1942. "Non-alien" is the sheet's way of reaching citizens. The exclusion was wrong.

## The window

"I am an American" is not a government slogan pasted over a race. It is a sign in the Wanto Co. grocery window in Oakland, photographed by Lange for the War Relocation Authority in March 1942 (Library of Congress LC-USZ62-23602). The FRAME record states that the owner put it up on December 8, 1941. The government's role on this object is the camera, not the lettering. A loyalty claim in a shop window is speech. An exclusion order is the opposite of speech. They belong on one page only because the second answered the first by removing the speaker.

## The film card

In 1943 the Office of War Information, Bureau of Motion Pictures, opened Japanese Relocation by saying it had become "necessary to transfer several thousand Japanese residents" inland. "Transfer" and "residents" are the euphemisms. The card does not mention a hearing. The Internet Archive item is Japanese1943. That is as far as this page goes into the movie.

## Not the plant posters

Tokio Kid and the poster gallery insult an enemy race to speed a factory. These three artifacts do something else: two of them are the state's voice about people of Japanese ancestry inside the United States, and one is a citizen's answer in a window. Mixing them into a single joke about "enemy posters" repeats the category error the exclusion relied on.

  United StatesExclusion instructions, 1942April 11, 1942 · Euphemism / doublespeakUnited StatesI am an American, OaklandMarch 1942 · TransferUnited StatesJapanese Relocation, title card1943 · Euphemism / doublespeak

Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/topics/anti-japanese-wwii/internment-propaganda/