<Begin Segment 22>

BY: Do you share in the Sansei attitude, I think Bob mentioned, of this kind of, "What took you so long?" I mean, the thirty years from the camps 'til the rise of the redress movement, did you ever have that feeling?

TI: No. Again, I think back to what I said earlier about the posttraumatic stress. I think it's this evolution in terms of what a community goes through. In many ways, I admire, actually, how the Japanese American community has come through this. I mean, to go through such a traumatic experience, and from that, to be able to organize, speak out, to have something like this redress movement. Historically, it's pretty rare that the U.S. government offers an apology for something that they'd done in the past. Where it's a full-blown apology, where Congress, where they'll have hearings, a commission to look at this, Congress will enact legislation, pass that, and the president will sign it, including payments, is pretty extraordinary. And so for them to have healed enough to do that, and then to... and I think through organizations like Densho, the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles and other places like that, to memorialize this, and to make sure these stories will be preserved and be accessible. And then this next phase that I see the community really waking up to is now really being very thoughtful and strategic about helping other communities. And when I think about it in that way, sure, it takes a long time, but I just see it more clearly in terms of what happens. I think what will be big that will also emerge, when I think about the redress and this process of, how does a community heal? Or how can our country heal? I think of reparations for slavery, and reconciliation that we need to do. We have an example with the Japanese American experience, that we can look at that. A clear wrongdoing by the government, and the harm it happened, having those same people part of this process of redress and reconciliation, to talk about this, for the government to apologize, for the community to memorialize and to learn from it and to connect it with others, we have to do that in other areas, too. And I think if we can share and learn from what Japanese Americans have gone through, and the country can learn from this, I think it's very important. The fact that we have so many now memorials at the sites of where the incarceration happened is part of this healing process. I think about slavery and what's happening in the South, I mean, most of the monuments are about the Confederacy and things like that, nothing about, hardly anything about the victims and what happened to that. So I think there's a lot to be learned. I'm trying to think about this more, because I think that is also a very powerful part of what the Japanese American experience will uncover and grow from.

BY: Do you ever sense that there's a large part of America that seems tired of apologizing? Because there's a lot of apologizing to be done.

TI: I'm sure there is. And more than "tired," I think maybe there's a resistance to go down this process. Which, again, I think is kind of natural in the sense that I think it's human nature. But something that my wife would always say, "What you resist will persist." And until we get through that resistance and start having these conversations -- and I'm not necessarily saying that it has to be reparations for a certain amount or anything, it's just having this open conversation. That until we do that, we're not going to advance. There's always going to be this resistance and fighting. For instance, if the government had not apologized for Japanese Americans, probably the Japanese American community would still be focusing on "righting a wrong." We'd be spending resources and doing this, and angry, and now our focus can be on really trying to help other communities and using our story to do that. I think that would be so valuable for our country to do more of that.

BY: I ask that question in part because I think, it seems to me that a component of the "Make America Great Again" movement is resistance to apologies. And I feel like I've read, once or twice, somebody saying that. Because a part of this kind of enlightenment a number of Americans have experienced is about recognizing some of these horrors and incidents in our pasts and apologizing for it. And I'm just finishing this profile of the longest serving Chief Justice in the state, Gerry Alexander, who led the court in bestowing the posthumous bar membership to Mr. Yamashita. And I think, like you, Justice Alexander is optimistic about the country, more optimistic than I am. And when I asked him about that optimism, he says it's because we have, for him, it's because we have this ability to recognize our mistakes and to try and make amends for them. So I find that tension between the people who don't want to face up to what America too often really was, and the importance of apologies. These kind of two channels I see.

TI: Well, and the Japanese American experience. When you think of redress, there were flaws along the way, but overall, it is this incredible success story that our country went through, and with the community involved, and we can learn from that. So it's not like it's never been done before.

BY: It seems to have been incredibly healing, as difficult as it was.

TI: Yes. And, of course, it wasn't perfect, but overall, I think if we did more of that, it's very powerful. And I'm just coming clear about that, because I think so much of our energy -- and we say this a lot -- is "never again." "Never again is now," I mean, focusing on trying to raise these red flags about, "Oh, it's happening again," which we have to. But this healing process, too, this resistance to forgiveness that stops us so much, if we can address some of that, I think it gets to the root of some of the issues that we have as a country. And until we do, I think we're destined to just keep fighting, and that's not going to be good.

BY: Yeah, I think it's hard for, it seems like it would be hard for a lot of white people to deal with that, I agree. Is it your view that the payments were really, it wasn't the amount that was important, it was more the symbolic gesture and an admission that people were owed something from that experience.

TI: Yeah, I'm of that camp. But I'm glad that there was a payment, because if there wasn't a payment, I think, looking back historically, because, oh, that was nice, but it was probably not, it was just an apology. It's kind of like what California did today, they passed an apology, which is, again, nice and brings attention, but the process that the feds went through in terms of having, again, this commission, spending the resources to really have hearings, to listen, to hire researchers to go through the archives, to do the findings, Personal Justice Denied, and to have findings that show recommendations for the government to apologize for this. And then for Congress to debate it, at the time that was controversial, and to have a conservative Republican president sign it, going through that process, as arduous and difficult as it was, is really, really important. That it meant something, and we have to, forgiveness and reconciliation isn't easy, and I think we have to take it really seriously. But it's healthy. I just think of personal relationships, right? I think all that is healthy to be able to do that. And if you just keep pushing away, ignoring, it just causes more and more tension and separation.

BY: Whose attitudes about expulsion and incarceration, I mean, this history just of the times, wow, blows me away. But whose attitude surprised you more, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Earl Warren's, or Michelle Malkin's and S.I. Hayakawa's?

TI: Huh, that's a good one. What surprises me more? I mean, what disappointed me more was the Earl Warren, FDR. That historically, I have so much admiration and respect for both of those men, and still do, and it's tainted by their views on what to do with Japanese Americans during World War II. Earl Warren has apologized and FDR never really did. Yeah, you would hope that they would have seen more clearly, and so I'm more disappointed with them. I think Michelle Malkin... I think of FDR and Earl Warren being in positions of really deciding and making an impact with their decisions. Someone like a Michelle Malkin, who is this partisan hack, in my mind, was just trying do something, so I don't have much credence in what she had to say.

BY: How about...

TI: S.I. Hayakawa? I don't know enough about him. I don't have a good opinion about S.I. Hayakawa right now, I don't really know enough to say much.

BY: I guess what interests me is he's a man of letters and a deep thinker, and that's one thing that makes his views at the time so surprising to me. But then again, people were all over the place on this issue. You think about J. Edgar Hoover.

TI: Yeah, so someone who we demonized at a point, but he was actually sort of against the mass incarceration.

BY: Yeah, people were all over on this.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2020 Densho. All Rights Reserved.