<Begin Segment 26>

AI: We're -- I'm going to fast-forward us in time here and come up to the time of the late 1960s and early 1970s, where there began to be some initial calls for some redress for the Japanese Americans...

BH: Yeah.

AI: ...who were incarcerated during World War II.

BH: Uh-huh. Yeah.

AI: And my understanding is that there were a great number of Japanese Americans who were quite uncomfortable with the idea of asking the government for any sort of reparations or redress.

BH: Yes. Yes.

AI: Can you talk a little bit about that...

BH: Yes.

AI: ...and what that negative reaction was about?

BH: Yeah. I was among those who opposed the redress movement, and I felt that it cheapened our sacrifice, to put out our hands and say, "Give us some money for what we went through." Cheapened the sacrifice, cheapened the, the ordeal that we went through. We wanted pay for what, in effect, we did to save the nation in the war. I changed my mind when they came up with the idea of the Congressional Commission, the relo-, what did they call that?

AI: The Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of...

BH: Yeah.

AI: ...Civilians?

BH: Yeah. That would have the advantage of making a very intensive fact-finding, fact-found report to Congress, which would prove that a terrible wrong was done to us. And it, when we could come up with that kind of back, backing, it was far different from people who had suffered saying, "Give us some money for what we went through." And when that commission was approved and Dan Inouye and others got that bill through Congress, then I thought, "Yeah, this is, this is, this changes the picture altogether. Now, the main emphasis at the beginning was money. "Give us money." The original idea that Clifford Uyeda proposed at the JACL convention in Salt Lake City was $25 dollars, $25,000 dollars and it was called "reparations," which has an altogether different connotation from redress. And I was very uneasy with the approach that we were taking, but I changed my mind when it was made into a redress effort and included an apology from the, from Congress and the American people.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2001 Densho. All Rights Reserved.