Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Phil Shigekuni Interview
Narrator: Phil Shigekuni
Interviewer: Sharon Yamato
Location: Northridge, California
Date: August 29, 2011
Densho ID: denshovh-sphil-01-0017

<Begin Segment 17>

SY: And what was your position?

PS: To go for the commission.

SY: And why?

PS: Well, I said that number one, the issue had not been aired publicly and I think coming from someone who had been in education for many years, education is crucial to these kinds of things. You just can't lay something out to people and expect them to buy it the first thing out without educating people. And the second thing is we needed to get people to tell their stories. And boy, it just was the main decider, and when the community was able to come to grips with it by hearing stories from their own people, it was very telling.

SY: And what kind of opposition did this have, the commission hearings?

PS: The Seattle people said, "No, no, it's a waste of time. These people are dying off, let's get this thing on the road, just submit an appropriations bill to Congress and get a yes or no vote." But then Inouye knew that there was no way that it was going to fly. It was tough enough to get the commission thing going.

SY: And by this time had EO9066 sort of dissolved?

PS: We dissolved after JACL came up with their position back in '78 at their national convention. Then we figured, oh, this is great we'll let it go at that.

SY: So you were finally in agreement with what the JACL decided?

PS: Yeah, unfortunately Paul for whatever reason was not very active after EO9066. He got a lot of flack.

SY: Flack for what?

PS: One of the things is that we were pushing Edison Uno through this and having the community fund rather than individual payments. But that was not an issue because of the commission hearings. That overruled everything as long as we decided to go with the commission hearings. And Bill Hohri with his other group --

SY: NCJAR.

PS: What was it called?

SY: National, it was NCJAR.

PS: NCJAR, Japanese American Redress. Of course, he was completely opposed to the hearings because he felt that it had to go through the courts. But interestingly enough he pursued it and I give him so much credit because he put a lot of time. I mean, he was going to his regular job, coming home and staying up to all hours of the night working on the thing. I mean geez... but anyways, but he brought it up and it looked as though it might be heard by the Supreme Court at about the same time as redress hearings were coming on so that kind of... my impression was -- and I heard that it created some leverage for us to get the bill through Congress. Because Congress didn't want to deal with -- they were willing to deal with billion or a billion point five or whatever it was but they weren't willing to -- Hohri was talking about thousands of dollars per evacuee and that was -- so that was one reason the vote went in our favor.

SY: I'm wondering if you got a sense of the time of this terrific divisiveness with all of these different organizations, did you get a sense of that were you feeling that it was a very hot issue that was provoking a lot of dissention among different organizations?

PS: No, I don't see it, it was just certain amount of apathy. I think it was more apathy more than dissention. I think typically Japanese are consensus people. They like to see which way the wind's blowing and go in that direction. So when it came time to go to camp, everybody says we got to go, so you get one guy, Korematsu, who is out there having plastic surgery and changing his name and doing all of that. They finally catch up with him, he's not going to be hailed as a hero. They said, "Hey, you think you're better than us?" So I think --

SY: That was the goal then in terms of all these different organizations because you did have JACL and you had NCRR and the other and then you had the Seattle group.

PS: The Seattle group eventually came on board I think. There were hearings in Seattle, so reluctantly they came on board. I remember we had this big redress meeting in UCLA.

SY: This was way after?

PS: Oh, yeah, this was in the '90s, early '90s as I recall. And this main guy, I can't think of his name, I can picture the guy, but he got into it with Norm Mineta about this guy was saying Norm Mineta was not supporting him when he came here after the war, and boy, Mineta really unloaded on him. I was really surprised and then at that meeting I remember I saw Bill Hohri and Hohri admitted, he says, "After those hearings I became a believer." So that was good to see he was big enough to admit that we did the right thing and it turned out well.

SY: It must feel good to sort of be a part of that decision to go forward with that because it really did change the course of the redress movement in a lot of ways, the commission hearings.

PS: It would have been dead without it and also when Tom Doi, who is, got to be eighty-eight, eighty-nine now was our chapter president. He had Grant Ujifusa who was the chief lobbyist for the bill, he came out and he told us some interesting stories about how made it through how we had all of this support from different groups, we had support from the gay groups, we had support, fascinating stories. You know it was good too is that he was a Republican, so he was able to get support from the Republican side because it took everybody on board to get something to Congress.

SY: Yeah, absolutely.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.