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BN: And then after the legislation, after the bill was signed and it passes, I know NCRR plays a key role in the process of actually helping to identify people and disputing these different cases that are being denied and so forth.

KM: Yeah. So I remember before that we weren't getting any money, right? The bill passed.

BN: Right, the appropriations.

KM: There's no money, so then we had a Day of Protest, which was great. The Day of Protest was, actually, some people joined NCRR then, too, because it was like, yeah, we're going to protest this.

[Interruption]

KM: So that was like a thousand people in the plaza, and students from UCLA, all the NSUs were there, and they spoke, and we got somebody to come from Canada. And I think I made that contact, because Canada had gotten reparations before we did, that year, '88. And so we said, "What's going on? We should have them come and speak." And so I don't know how we must have funded the flight down, but this guy came.

[Interruption]

KM: Edward James almost came to speak, our own people spoke, Frank Emi spoke, but yeah, Canadian Japanese spoke. So that was really a good event, and I think it really energized people and was even more like, "People are dying every month, two hundred every month." So it got people pretty fired up, and I don't know if that influenced Inouye to do more, or other congresspeople to do that. But anyway, so we got it passed. Was it legislation or was it more like... what did they call that? It's like social security.

BN: Right, yeah. So it doesn't have to be appropriated every year, I forget the term for it, too.

KM: So you asked me another question? What was the question?

BN: About the subsequent work, helping, working with the ORA, helping to identify people and also to advocate for those, because it's very complicated and different groups were denied.

KM: Yeah, it was like another decade, another decade of work, because the bill was going to sunset in 1998, and people had to be identified. And so we were not sure about these people from Washington. So we called, we had community meetings, and we wanted to make sure that they were responsive to the community. And there were people in the San Fernando Valley that were also very good n reaching out to people and working with the ORA. So Bob Bratt was the person that, I think was the first Office of Redress Administration director, and he listened. So he was pretty good, and I think he bent over backwards to try to answer the questions and also make it much more possible for people to get redress within the limits of what the law was. So I remember even things like the person wasn't in camp, but they lost their freedom or they lost their possessions, things in California or something like that, they got redress. A military person, for example, they got redress. A military person, for example, it's like, "Oh, that was a pretty liberal reading of it." Obviously, it made more sense with the railroad workers who later, they had to fight for it, but they lost their freedom, they lost their jobs, so anybody impacted by the order and the other laws that came from it. So we learned a lot from that. We had to work with different administrators in the ORA, not all of them were great, and we had to organize lawyers in the community to work pro bono, which was also great. So a lot of lawyers came out that were not just JABA (Japanese American Bar Association) attorneys, but maybe a lot of them were. And then out of that, also the Campaign for Justice is organized, mainly through the initiative of Grace Shimizu, but we also had people down here that were... well, actually, Hector did qualify, because residency dated back to 1942, but a lot of the people didn't. So we became part of the Campaign for Justice campaign, and worked with people in Northern California and some of the lawsuits, and also, of course, just finding people and making sure that people knew about it. And then we had calls coming in to Little Tokyo Service Center, people had questions about reparations, we would call at night, return calls at night. Ichikawa, the guy that was part of the work organizing, he would take his time between shifts, go to Little Tokyo Service Center, take down, answer the phone, and then write down some of the questions that people were calling about, and their names and phone numbers, so that we could call them later. So I would make calls from home at night, and I remember how hard it was because my kids were like three... no, they were older than that. I'm sorry, that's wrong. But they were young, and it was very distracting. I just remember phone calls at night were just really hard when the kids were little, but trying to return calls and stuff like that. So we did a lot of work, just responding, getting the word out, having community meetings, dealing with the ORA. Again, I was not the person that dealt with the ORA that much, I didn't want to. In fact, I think I always felt like I don't want to deal with these people. I don't like D.C., I don't have any love of these legislators. I mean, I'm kind of intimidated by then, but I didn't really, I didn't feel that I wanted to do that. And I didn't really love... I mean, I liked Bob Bratt, but I didn't... he was doing his job. But everybody said, "Oh, Bob Bratt." So I did not attend the big party that we had for him. I sort of did a silent protest, I said, "I'm not going to go." That was kind of dumb, but anyway.

BN: In that decade of work, are there particular cases or people or incidents that kind of stand out in your memory as being just really memorable for you personally?

KM: I remember this woman, the railroad worker lady, because we heard some of these things at community meetings, they would say, "My family was a railroad..." it was like, "Wow." So it was sort of like this whole period of fighting for cases of people that were denied, it was like we were learning about all these things that we had never heard about. We didn't know about the railroad workers, we didn't know about the people that lived across the Glendale, Arizona, line, and couldn't go to their church, school or whatever it might have been because they lived on the wrong side, but they were not detained, but they were still there. Those were some of the cases I remember most. There were people that were born outside of camp or after camp. So obviously, the people that voluntarily relocated were eligible. I'm trying to remember.

BN: There was a dispute, I think, about their children?

KM: Oh, the minor?

BN: No, the children of the so-called "voluntary evacuees" were, I think, a contested category, as I recall.

KM: Yeah, but I think if they were born during that period of time, because they couldn't really return to California, so they were restricted. Yeah, I think the minor, the children that went to Japan with their parents, that was a significant case, and we got to know some of the people pretty well, Reiko Nimura and their stories were...

BN: That was my mom.

KM: Their stories were really horrible. And then I think Jude Narita, we had some people do some enactments, tell their story. There were some dramatic readings, Jude Narita and maybe Chris Tashima. At some DOR we did something. So those stand out because we also got to know some of the people better.

BN: Now, kind of at the same time this is going on, there was this whole legal coram nobis stuff going on.

KM: In the '80s.

BN: Yeah. Does NCRR have any involvement in that?

KM: Not really, no. We were focused on the legislative stuff. I mean, we were aware of it, but I don't think we had an disassociation, but we just didn't connect to it. They were doing their own thing. They didn't really require community support.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.