Citizen 13660

During the beginning of Japanese American internment, Okubo notes that the process of registering Japanese Americans was referred to as “evacuation.” Okubo first mentions this term when the US declared war on Germany and Italy after having declared war on Japan just days before. The US began to require all noncitizens, particularly those with affiliations to the enemy countries, to carry identification documents with them. When “possible reports of evacuation” (10) began to circulate, it did not occur immediately to Okubo that she would be impacted. At the same time, anti-Japanese sentiment was on the rise, a circumstance that Okubo made clear through the drawing of commonly heard phrases at the time, such as “stab in the back” and “sorry no japs” (10) in the accompanying illustration. She did not know the severity of this alarm until evacuation became mandatory.

As a political term, evacuation refers to the removal of people from their immediate area in the case of emergency, such as a natural disaster. The use of evacuation to refer to Japanese American internment was ironic as it created a false sense of danger concerning an ethnic minority population. Furthermore, it positioned Japanese Americans as being dangers to themselves and therefore in need of containment from the emergency they posed. By referring to internment as evacuation, the US government was able to relay the urgency of wartime policy, convincing Japanese Americans to submit themselves to a process that was essentially incarceration.