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TI: So today is Thursday, August 8, 2013. We are in Seattle in the Densho office, and we are doing interview number four with Roger Daniels. On camera is Dana Hoshide, and the interviewer is Tom Ikeda. So, Roger, at the end of the last interview we were talking about the '80s and the redress movement, coram nobis, all the things that happened in in the '80s. And before we move on from there, I wanted to first note that this week is the 25th anniversary of President Reagan signing the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, August 10th, so two days from today. And I just wanted to spend some time discussing the significance of the redress, or the Civil Liberties Act, Reagan signing that. And I thought I was going to try it this way. As a university professor, you've dealt with lots of undergraduate students over time. And I'm curious, if you had a U.S. history undergraduate student, how would you want him or her to answer the question: was this legislation important, and if so, why was it important?

RD: Well, I would hope that even the slower students, or the less interested in history students, would get the point that it was a great deal for the Nikkei community. That's indisputable. It wasn't a perfect deal, but it was a great deal. A deal... if you want to talk about twenty-five year anniversaries, a deal that Harry Kitano and I could have had no conception of when, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the signing of 9066, in other words, in 1967, when he and I put on that program that was the first academic symposium, public symposium on the incarceration, we could have had no notion that in such a relatively short time thereafter, not quite twenty-five years, there would be a thing called redress. We didn't think that was... that wasn't even on the horizon. That wasn't even our thought. We just wanted somebody to pay attention to this and wanted it to become at least a little note in the homefront history of World War II. I would hope even the slow students would understand that significance; the significance for the Nikkei and the fact that, even in a "good war," quote/unquote, there were bad things. I went through the whole essay on what I call "Bad News from the Good War." But I would hope that the better students would understand that this was important to the nation and for the Constitution, and even for other nations. Because if there had been no redress in the United States, as Mr. Kruhlak, whom we interviewed, made clear, the Ukrainian Canadian who was a high ranking civil servant in Canada, and responsible for emulating redress in Canada, which came almost instantaneously, within weeks of American redress. Suddenly, Canadian redress, which had been stonewalled, it wasn't going anywhere, was a done deal. And it didn't even take the Parliament, it was done by the Prime Minister's office, which was legal there. So it had some international implications. And in addition, it has helped to inspire attempts -- none of them really very successful -- in other nations, to get some kind of reconciliation, the most prominent case is South Africa where they've had all these hearings, and it's done some good, but it's not really achieved anything very much. But there are attempts,  and this is necessary. And the whole thing ties in with other things that have happened between 1942 and 2013, such as the genocide in Rwanda. And when books are written, and when lawyers look at these things, as Eric Yamamoto has done in some interesting speculative articles and law reviews, he's a professor of history in the law school at the University of Hawaii.

So this has had international impact, and it has, as we could observe, and today, if we're talking about college students... well, college students today really don't have any notion about what 9/11 was like. But in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we could see some of the benefits to the nation of redress, because redress brought the whole issue before the American public in a way that had never been done before. So that, on the night of 9/11, all kinds of people, when they heard about various Muslims, quote/unquote "Arabs" being picked up, they said, "Hey, we've done this before, and it wasn't right then, and it's not right now." And that on the night of 9/11, all three television networks called my house in Cincinnati, managed to figure out where I was. And I said yes to the first one and no to the next two because it meant going downtown and this sort of thing, and I wasn't going to run all over Cincinnati in the middle of the night. And so we were on, and then asked questions about this: "Is this going to be like that?" and we couldn't answer the question, but we did that. As a matter of fact, I was interviewed in Cincinnati, and the other person they were interviewing was George Takei, and I don't know where he was. I'm sure it said then, but I wasn't paying that much attention to where he was. He said some very, very good things, and he got more attention than I did. But, again, that's something that would not have happened. So I would hope that the good students, and certainly the graduate students, should see all of these things and perhaps more. Because right now, the fact that there was an incarceration of Japanese Americans back in World War II is part of the general knowledge of the American people, which was not the case during the war and for decades after the war. And it was redress, and the discussion of redress, and the celebration of successful redress, that made this to be part of it. And the cases in the '60s and '70s and even in the early '80s. I talked to lawyers and law professors who'd never heard of Korematsu or Hirabayashi. And today, it's part of the general population.

My wife, who reads a lot of contemporary fiction, was reading a book not too long ago, and the novel was reviewed well in the New York Times, so she got it from the public library, I think that's where she got it from. And it's a book about these three young women in law school, and it goes back and forth, but it opens at a time when one of them is being prepped for being examined by a Senate committee about a judgeship on the Supreme Court. So they talk about what she had to learn, and it was to learn to praise certain decisions and to downplay others: Dred Scott, Korematsu, etcetera. That would not have happened until very, very recently.

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