LOS ANGELES — 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.
In the aftermath of Japan's 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, they were imprisoned in an incarceration camp — not an internment camp.
Internment. Incarceration. Not many people make a distinction between the two terms or understand why it's so important to do so. 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.
