No, my Japanese American parents were not ‘interned’ during WWII. They were incarcerated

My parents, Shigeo and Joanne Watanabe, were U.S. citizens born and raised in Seattle — she a student at Seattle University who loved parties and red painted fingernails, he an aspiring accountant with a golden glove and killer smile. But in a historic decision aimed at accuracy and reconciliation, the Los Angeles Times announced Thursday that it would drop the use of “internment” in most cases to describe the mass incarceration of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II. We hope this will help bring closure to the families of those unjustly incarcerated and deepen our society’s understanding of that period.” Some Times journalists have long pressed for change in how to describe what has been commonly called internment — with the late Henry Fuhrmann, our former assistant managing editor and self-described word nerd, taking the lead. “Officials employed such benign-sounding language to obscure that the U.S. was incarcerating Americans whose only ‘crime’ was that they looked like the enemy.” My family experienced the distinct difference between those two terms. Three months later, in July 1942, the U.S. attorney general issued an official internment order for Jichan, calling him “potentially dangerous to the public peace and safety of the United States.” He was transferred from an Immigration and Naturalization Service facility in Montana to the center for enemy alien internees in Louisiana.