<Begin Segment 19>

TI: Well, so can we talk about, my next question was around the California compensation for the Japanese American workers who were terminated during World War II, and so it happened in California. I think it happened first in California, then I know it happened in Washington state and other places where the city, state, county levels, these things started happening. But I think you were, California was the first one. Can you talk about that a little bit?

FS: Yeah, that was engineered by Priscilla Ouchida, and from the Sacramento chapter, that was my chapter. And the other thing is that my mother-in-law was the state employee that was fired, she was among those. She'd just graduated from high school, she went to Sacramento, and she was working for the DMV. And then Pearl Harbor happened, and then a couple months later, like February or March, she said that they got a notice on a Friday that they were supposed to report to the auditorium at four o'clock. And then when she got there, it's like they were all like her Japanese American friends, and it's like, "What are we all doing here?" And that's when they were notified that they had all been fired, and people were so shocked. And you know, like when you were at your first job, your confidence level wasn't real high. So it just was really hard on my mother-in-law, because she said that she and her three friends, normally they took the bus to the DMV office. But after that was over they were all crying and they felt like they had been rejected from the whole community, not just her job, that they didn't even feel like they could ride on the bus, so they walked all the way back to their apartment. And she said they cried all the way back.

TI: So this was a personal issue for you, too, this wasn't just a compensation for the workers, I didn't realize this.

FS: Yeah. And a lot of these people were in the chapter, so it was a personal thing. But my picture is in that photograph, because I'm national president. I'll be candid and say I didn't do a whole lot of work on that, so I'm not... I mean, I was busy doing a lot of other things. But Priscilla really did a lot, and my mother-in-law was one of those that went out and contacted people, because they had to run people down where they were working and where their current addresses were. So she was involved in that.

TI: But the thing that it did, it created momentum.

FS: It did, and it was the first time the people got money, judgment, I mean, money compensation. So we went past the apology, and then it was a one-size fits all thing, each of them got five thousand dollars, whether they worked one day or ten years for the state. And, see, that was one of the questions that the commission was working on. I mean, what's the precedent for just having one dollar amount without individualized sizing or at least subcategories? But after this, the five thousand dollars that they got, it set a precedent that said that this was an appropriate way of doing it. And the other thing is, politically it showed that politicians could support a monetary compensation and not get killed in the polls for it, that it became politically acceptable. I think that was one of the most important parts of it.

TI: That's good, thank you.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.