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TK: Were the recommendations already written when the final draft was done? Or was there a time gap in terms of the recommendations itself? I know the printing time was different, but was everything already finished when PJD was published?

AM: No. The broad outlines of the recommendation, we knew from discussion essentially where they stood. But the final approval of all right, this is what we're going to do, and this is the language we're going to do it in, was kind of guessing a little bit at the time, but I think a month or six weeks after the report was published. I think I'm right on the timing there.

TK: Okay. And then the addendum was written. Was that done after everything was published or was that done...? How was the addendum written? Could you explain the addendum, sorry, and then tell when it was written?

AM: Well, now (...) let me just be clear we're talking about the same thing. Because there are two somewhat different things that were done separately and one was dealing with a claim about the "Magic" cables, which clearly followed publication, and another was studies particularly on the economics and what the economic losses were, that was done separately from the main text. And there were actually two, and I think only two, additional -- projects isn't quite the right word, but it's pretty close -- that the commission decided to undertake at the point when most of the text was written, but wasn't off to the printer yet. And one was this, one was the economic study and the point of that -- well, there were a couple of things that we were aiming at. One obviously was, in a way, to put the $20,000 or whatever that monetary amount would be, in context. So that one could show without too much trouble that this is not excessive, in fact, this really is something that in most cases is symbolic and lends weight and seriousness to what the government would do accepting the recommendation, but it is not full recompense. And also, it helped deal with what had happened under the Japanese Evacuation Claims Act and that was always a difficult problem (...) because it's very hard out of individual cases of that age to get a sense of how fair was this or how unfair was it. So it was trying to fill out one whole side of what the impact of the exclusion had been. And then we also had a workshop, conference of academics, Harry Kitano was there, for instance, for a day or two in Washington, talking again about some of the longer range impacts of the camp experience on the Japanese American community. And, I mean, in the nature of things, the commission wasn't there coming to any sort of set conclusions, but felt that this was, it was a very important topic and one (...) it's not easy to sketch out with precision, how this really affected people's lives in the succeeding years. Because obviously, there are lots of things that play into life histories and a lot of changes that took place in the surrounding American society. But we thought it was something that was important to explore and to at least have some opportunity to air and to talk about. Those additional papers are really drawn together much closer to the point when the recommendations were put out and, I may be a little off on the timing, but I think that the additional material and the recommendations were released more or less at the same time.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.