<Begin Segment 9>

GK: Even though JACL came up with the idea for... or at least they're the ones who passed the resolution for $25,000 to each internee back in 1978, would the community have followed the JACL had they gone through with this, this proposal?

SE: Maybe if it were the only organization doing it, I think they would have. But see, they had NCJAR and they set up NCRR, and they had the court cases. I think all of that combined, coming almost on top of each other, helped it more. I think that NCRR did the most in terms of the younger people, and JACL had to convince their older members. 'Cause a lot of them were opposed to it. They just thought it would be welfare. "We don't want to take that money from the government." And you have to explain to them, it's not welfare, it's what you're entitled to, you know, you can sue someone for that kind of wrong that's committed against you. You do it for an automobile accident, you do it for personal injuries, it's part of the American system, and there's no reason to think that it was welfare. And I know some of the people that testified at the commission hearings asked for a lot more, individually, they felt they lost more, and they wanted... one, I know one young man asked for a million dollars, 'cause he said he lost his younger sister, and that he suffered tremendous racism when they moved out to Idaho on the farms. He said he was, "I would rather have been working on the farm with my dad than going to school because it was such a terrible time for us."

And so I think if JACL had been the only group, they probably might have gotten more other kinds of leadership besides Mike Masaoka. Because a lot, I think, depended on his decision. And he was very much against redress in the beginning. And I don't know if people know that he was the one that cut out the sibling receiving the money -- brothers and sisters -- but only the children and the parents. Because he didn't want the people who went to Japan to get it, in case the families were separated and one brother got redress, and he died and he was gonna leave it to his other siblings who were in Japan, because Mike Masaoka thought they were all disloyal. He never considered that there was family reasons for people to go, or that people were really disillusioned with the United States because of what they did, and they were gonna go to Japan. It was not a matter of disloyalty. But he was not brought up in a Japanese community. In our workshop they kept talking about the cultural heritage of being, you know, reticent about talking about your experience, about complaining, about asking for redress. Mike Masaoka did not grow up in a Japanese community. He was a Mormon. He grew up in Utah among hakujin, you know? So I don't think he understood that family obligations sometimes mean a lot more to people, you know. And that he had no right to expect that, or to believe that every one of them who went to Japan was disloyal. Because I'm sure a great majority were not. You know, they went because their parents had to go. A lot of them came back -- and they were minors, too. But see, they lost out on the redress because of that.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.