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TI:. So I'm going to kind of get refocused here. Because I want to talk about an interesting piece of legislation. At the point you joined the White House in 1983, already by that time, so 1980, or before 1980, President Carter formed a federal commission to study the World War II internment and incarceration of Japanese Americans, and this federal commission had started meeting in 1980. And by 1983, they had their findings, it was called Personal Justice Denied. And so this had all happened before you were in the White House. And you talked a little bit about your background, so you knew Japanese Americans and you knew what happened to them, but I'm curious, at what point did the issue of redress, this redress legislation, come to your attention?

JS: Well, when you say come to my attention, I mean, I knew about it. I knew what had happened, I knew people who had been impacted by it, I knew people who were born in those camps. And I personally felt that it was a great injustice. I could not believe that, one, the President of the United States would issue an executive order like that, and two, that it would be held up by the...

TI: So you're talking about President Roosevelt back in the 1940s, a Democratic president who issued the executive order.

JS: Well, you said that, I didn't.

TI: [Laughs] Executive Order 9066, and upheld by the Supreme Court. Which reminds me, when you were in law school, did you, at any time, study the Korematsu decision?

JS: No, I read that on my own, it was not an assigned case. Yeah, I had a fellow who worked for me in the Welfare Department out there, his name was Mike Suzuki, and he was always telling about, how can they do that, and we'd banter back and forth. He was a good Democrat, I was a good Republican, and we'd go back and forth about it. So I was pretty familiar with the subject. It was a subject that I look at it and I say, well, if you're not from the West Coast, you don't know about that issue. People just don't know about it.

TI: But if you go, like you, if you actually read the case as a legal precedent, what were your thoughts about that?

JS: I thought how the hell could they do it? [Laughs]

TI: So tell me a little bit more. Why do you say that? The Supreme Court, in 1944, they ruled on this and it was 6 to 3, the majority ruled that the government was right in rounding up Japanese Americans in particular, Fred Korematsu. So from a legal standpoint, why did you think that was...

JS: Because they only rounded them up because they were Japanese Americans who lived on the West Coast. They didn't round up anybody in Hawaii because that would have been real hard to do. They didn't round up any Germans, they didn't round up Italian Americans, I mean, I had a bunch of relatives who came over from Italy. But nobody bothered them, they only rounded up the Japanese Americans on the West Coast. So when it comes down to it, why did they do that?

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.