<Begin Segment 16>

TI: I always heard that Ed Meese was kind of anti-redress, that he didn't think it was a good idea.

JS: Well, I don't know. Ed never expressed that to me. Even if you were opposed, it would not be politic to state opposition. I mean, that's what I sort of got the impression, was that there were people who, for a variety of reasons, which I found out later, the National Security side, the State Department, well, it's going to interfere with our relationships with Japan.

TI: Yeah, so as you were talking about it, I heard the same thing. I never understood that, though. Why would Japan, why would they think Japan would be opposed to redress? I didn't ever understand that. If anything, I would think it would be the opposite, that they could use that to say, "They're not Japanese citizens, but their parents were, and they still have connections to Japan, and we're trying to do the right thing for them." I mean, that would seem to be a very simple thing to say to the Japanese government, and that they would appreciate that. So I never quite understood that argument.

JS: Well, I didn't either, but they made the arguments, you know.

TI: So this is from the State Department?

JS: The national security community. That community, the State Department, the CIA...

TI: I understand the OMB or the budget concerns, you're talking about a chunk of money, and so that was that side.

JS: How much.

TI: Yeah. But then there was something else you just mentioned that was actually, I think, really important. And that was the precedent issue. If we apologized and gave reparations to Japanese Americans, are we setting a precedent for slavery for African Americans? And I think that was a real issue.

JS: I think it was, too, but it's not one that people argued openly about.

TI: Oh, but eventually they changed the legislation. I'm not sure if you... they did a very nuanced thing. That as the legislation approached the end, they changed it to say "only living survivors," living people who were impacted, could get the reparations.

JS: Right.

TI: Which was put in there so that it would not be a precedent for giving reparations to people who had passed away but were affected.

JS: It would be an argument why you wouldn't give reparations to people that...

TI: Yeah, but an argument for that, yes. So that was done very intentionally and it caught a lot of people by surprise that it was done, actually, very quietly and not publicly. And so it wasn't caught, I mean, people saw it a little bit later, so it's really interesting.

JS: Well, I kind of discounted the argument because I viewed one as something that existed before this was a country, and this country worked for almost a hundred years and fought a very, very bloody war to eliminate that vestige of the English colonies. On the other hand, the internment was an action by the President of the United States against his own constituency that was upheld by the United States Supreme Court. And I could make a differentiation pretty easily, it's a different case.

TI: Yeah, I agree.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.