Robert Tadashi Ikeda collection of school materials

Language for the description of these materials is informed by the Japanese American Citizens League Power of Words handbook (https://jacl.org/power-of-words) and Densho's Terminology Guidelines (https://densho.org/terminology/). These resources highlight the need to avoid euphemistic language when describing the Japanese American experience during World War II because it masks the extent to which the actions of the government impacted and harmed Japanese communities. For these reasons, we use the terms Japanese American instead of Japanese; forced removal instead of evacuation; incarceration instead of internment and concentration camp instead of relocation center.

Acknowledgement of Harmful Content
The Seattle Public Library Special Collections Department is committed to creating an inclusive archive that documents the history of our diverse communities in a respectful manner. Our collections include historic materials that may contain images and outdated language which can be harmful due to issues such as racism, colonialism, sexism and homophobia. This content can provide important insight into the creator and context of the historic materials but can also reveal hurtful biases and prejudices.

We may decide to use or retain harmful language in our description when the terms have been used by the creator(s) of the materials to describe themselves or their community; when we have reused description created by the donor; when we have transcribed information directly from the materials; and when using national standards such as Library of Congress Subject Headings, which allow for standardized searching and retrieval of records. When including language from the original material in our finding aids or descriptions, we will indicate that this material comes directly from the original item by putting the language in quotes or prefacing it with a note that says the description is transcribed from the item or provided by the creator.

We will continually review our finding aids to identify harmful language and encourage you to contact us at specialcollections@spl.org if you find language that causes concern.