<Begin Segment 35>

AI: Well, you had mentioned earlier that, when we talked before, that at the beginning, you had to be convinced about redress.

MS: That's right. That's right, I have to admit.

LH: Could you say a little bit about what your initial thinking was?

MS: You know, at the very beginning, when word of this movement came out, I said, "Now how, how could you cheapen it by doing that? Because there's no price you can put on the freedom that was abridged. How can you do that?" There's no way any amount of money is ever going to pay us back for those years of being imprisoned and being treated that way. And it took awhile before I began to -- by people explaining it to me -- they said, in our society, if you do not put some monetary penalty on doing something that is wrong, people in years after, in the future, will never believe this is, that there was even anything wrong with it. Because there was no apology, there was not anything that would say this was wrong and the best way to stop people from repeating a wrongdoing is to fine them. And so the monetary thing, it was very little when you compare with the losses that many people had, but it was more the principle that was involved there. And when I began seeing that yeah, it's for really future generations; it's not really for us. The money can't go to some of the people -- they've died. The very people that suffered the most are dead. But the monetary redress is important for future generations because the government will be very careful before they do anything like this again when they remember how much they had to pay monetarily and that's the way our system works right now. So then that made sense to me. It wasn't for us, it was for the future and other minority groups that might find themselves in this situation. We had to do this, and it took us forty, fifty years, but we managed.

LH: The reparations, the monetary reparations was a part of it, but George Bush wrote an apology letter.

MS: Yeah, and we had that framed in our house and that's important for us. But the monetary part is important for the greater society to see that there was some cost to this and that you'd better think twice before it's ever done again. My kids say if anything like this ever happened they would not stand for it. And I said, "Well, that's true, and I think you should approach the way your generation would. But don't think ill of us because we didn't, that we approached it differently. It was a matter of survival. Maybe you wouldn't even be around if we didn't survive." [Laughs]

<End Segment 35> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.