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TI: Earlier you talked about... we're at the point where the Commission has its findings, they publish Personal Justice Denied, and you mentioned earlier how, at this point, the recommendations were for an apology, redress payments of twenty thousand dollars.

RD: No, actually, there are no recommendations in Personal Justice Denied. Personal Justice Denied comes out in January.

TI: The first...

RD: Yes.

TI: And so let's go there, let's walk through that. So when it first comes out, what was the reaction?

RD: Well, great skepticism. It just so happened that Personal Justice Denied was published a day or so, or a few days, before a big conference on redress that Harry and Sandra Taylor and I -- and Sandra did most of the work because she was located in Salt Lake City -- had in Salt Lake City. All kinds of people participated. The book From Relocation to Redress recapitulates all the papers from that conference. And I gave the keynote address opening up. And I had to insert into the address the comments from the preamble of the report, and I was pretty optimistic about it. And the questions everybody asked me, Peter Irons in particular, pushing and pushing and pushing, "What's the Commission going to do? You know, don't you?" And I said, "No, I don't know." And they pushed and they pushed and they pushed. And I guess about the fourth time the question was asked, I said, "All right, look. I don't know, but I know that they're, as a group, highly favorable. I think they're going to come through with a good offer. There's no way they can award twenty-five thousand dollars. My notion is that it will be twenty thousand dollars." And when that turned out to be correct, there are still people who I see who tell me, "You really knew that, didn't you?" I didn't know it. But that's common sense. Sure, they could have come out with $2,250, $24,999, but it was more logical that they would go down to a round number. You're not going to have fifty cents at the end or something like that. It should be a simple number. Twenty thousand dollars was a good guess. Could have been fifteen, but I thought twenty thousand was where they'd go, and that's where they went. And if you're going to go down a little... and I think twenty-four would have seemed like a concession.

TI: And what was the rationale that twenty-five thousand was not the acceptable number?

RD: Because it's what they asked for. That was the dumb thing, they asked for a specific number. The specific number was everywhere. So they couldn't politically give them everything they asked for. I thought that was a given from the very first, that it would be somewhat less. Cliff Uyeda agreed with me. The number came from Seattle, and from Lowry.

TI: Let's talk about it; let's go back to the Seattle group. In some ways, their activities were a little bit earlier than this period. It was sort of back probably when Cliff Uyeda became JACL president was when...

RD: No, no, no. That's very late.

TI: Even earlier then?

RD: Yes. Uyeda takes over as president at the same meeting in Salt Lake City, although not the meeting I'm talking about, because that was in the previous summer, that was in '76. He was first organizer, whatever the title was, of the redress commission, and he oversaw that. But the redress committee had adopted, being pushed by the Seattle members, this twenty-five thousand dollar thing, and there were some real cockamamie other proposals before that. The twenty-five thousand dollars wasn't a bad idea, but it was a bad idea to name a real figure. Because what that does politically is sets a top. It can't be over that, and it probably won't be that. But when the redress commission found out from the Nisei representatives, who nobody had checked with beforehand, they just sort of assumed that these guys were their errand boys. Nobody's ever said that, but that's obviously... "if we do this, they'll do what we want done, because we're the people." Well, that's not what happened, as you know. But when they came back from Washington, and then accepted that proposal by a split vote, the Seattle people resigned.

TI: So let me make sure I understand this. So when they went back to D.C.... because I think many of the people wanted to push a legislative effort right then...

RD: That's right, for twenty-five thousand dollars.

TI: For twenty-five thousand dollars. But in that meeting, attended by Senator Inouye, Norm Mineta, representative Matsui, Sparky Matsunaga, I think those were the four, plus members of the JACL redress committee, the decision at that point was to push for the commission or the hearings approach.

RD: Well, that's not really what happened. What happened is that the... the first thing that happened was that the Nisei reps just shot down the whole notion of a direct bill, of a bill. "We can't introduce this, it will never get anywhere," etcetera, etcetera. And then Inouye gave them a lifeline, and I think it was his intention, and I think he let everybody in on it beforehand, I mean, his colleagues, in on it beforehand, but if they adopted a procedure, a request for a commission of inquiry, they'll do that. And they also thought that they could get... they had reason to believe that they could even get Hayakawa on board, which for Republicans would be important. So that was the decision they had to take, and when the JACL redress committee took that decision, the Seattle people left. And Lowry, who had no real influence in Congress, he was a short-timer, the Lowry Bill went nowhere.

TI: And Mike Lowry was a U.S. Congressman from the Seattle district.

RD: Yes, I think in his second term.

TI: No, I think it was actually his first term, because he barely squeaked in, and a lot of it had to do with a lot of community support from the Japanese American community, because Lowry agreed to do this. And so I think he won by less than two thousand votes or something; it was a tight race.

RD: And did he get elected? He got elected governor later.

TI: Governor, yes. So he went from there to governor. I'm not quite sure. We'll hear him next week at the JANM conference.

RD: You'll hear him; I won't. I'll listen to you.

TI: [Laughs] Okay.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.