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EK: Emi Kuboyama here in Washington, D.C., with Aaron Zajic, May 17, 2019. So, Aaron, could you start by stating your name and giving us your role or title with the Office of Redress Administration?

AZ: Well, my name is Aaron Zajic, and my role when I first started, I think I was a file clerk. I progressed from file clerk to the team lead for, I think it was called Team 2 Evaluation or something like that. And basically as the cases were processed through to eligibility and payment, or possibly needed to get sent back to the potential recipient for follow up, for more information, we had a group that would just basically look to verify that the person who was applying had some historical record that we could track them down, whether it was the little index cards that were in our file cabinet, or some of the other documentation that could show that this person was also one of the folks that was listed on one of the camp rosters or one of the little index cards. And we would often look at birth certificates because when they were on the camp roster, they were listed as who were their parents. So if they provided a birth certificate, it had the name and date of birth, and the parents all matched, we were pretty sure we had the right person.

EK: And I understand that this was one of your first jobs after college. Could you talk a little bit about where you went to school and how you ended up in this role?

AZ: So I went to school at, it used to be called Western Maryland College, now it's called McDaniel College. It's a small liberal arts school sort of in central Maryland. And after I got out of school I was working at the beach in the summer, so I went back to the beach because I didn't really have a job lined up. And this was in 1987 when I graduated from college. Then I worked at Macy's, I was in a factory, and then I got a job at a sign company working installing and designing signs. And it didn't pay very well, so at night I was working at Macy's. I met a friend of one of my buddy's dad, who knew a person that worked at Department of Justice and said, "Hey, I hear of this project that is looking to hire. So I applied for the job and I think I got lucky, and I got the job. I had a funny story, on the way to the job, I was going to meet a friend for lunch and I got a flat. And I had my nice suit from Macy's that I had gotten at a Macy's discount, and I got soaking wet and filthy because it was kind of raining and slushing. By the time I got to the interview, I was way too late to meet my friend for lunch, but I didn't have a cell phone back then, because I had to change a tire. When I got there, the person that was interviewing me noticed how wet I was, and I think that came to my benefit because most people have an excuse for not coming because they had a flat tire. I actually had the flat tire and made it. So just maybe my bad luck of a flat tire was good luck in that I was covered with dirt a little bit.

EK: Do you remember who it was that interviewed you?

AZ: Alicie West Simpson. I have completely lost track of her, I don't know if she'll remember that, but I definitely got a flat on the way to the interview.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2019 Emi Kuboyama. All Rights Reserved.

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EK: So when you first started, can you describe a little bit about the office structure? Who was working? Who was in charge? How the whole office was set up?

AZ: So we were in a building on 1333 F Street which wasn't, it was kind of more of a tall row of different office spaces. Were you there for that?

EK: No, I started at DOL (Department of Labor).

AZ: So it had like five or six floors, it was an older building, and I think we had two of the floors. On one of the floors was the main processing, on the second floor was all the files, and I think it was the fourth and the third floor, I can't remember because this was 1990. And we had our Special Verifications Unit, which, if anyone had any issues where it wasn't clear cut, if we were looking at it and we weren't sure that this was the same person because the names didn't quite match or the date of birth didn't match, we would send it to our Special Verification Unit which would do verification of more difficult cases that weren't super clear cut. And when I first started, I was just doing mail. The program had already started in August of, I guess it started in 1988 after the bill was signed. And by the time I started, it was March of '90. So we were not making any payments yet, but we were processing lots of mail. And unfortunately, it had been so long, a lot of people had passed away but were alive in August 10, 1988, when the bill was passed, so they were eligible. Once they passed away, there was a series of triggers for how the heirs would come out. If a spouse was alive -- and I think the spouse was the primary heir -- if the spouse had passed, then there would be child heirs. In some cases, if the spouse had passed and there was no children but the parents were alive, the parents would be eligible. We did have cases where the parents were eligible as the heirs. So when a parent had passed, what my initial role was, was to match the mail up with a folder. If the parent had passed away and we got this information, then maybe we would send out a whole bunch of letters to all of the children. In some cases there was up to a dozen children. They wouldn't all send it in at the same time, but this was, again, 1990, so we didn't have some automated system with bar codes where we would scan them. They would go to the folder, and there was a guy that would get the mail and match it to the folder and hand the folder to an analyst for review. If the folder wasn't there, he would just put 'em in a bin. And as the bins were filling up, there wasn't enough staff for someone to actually go and try to figure out what happened to all of the folders. So when I started, I had probably five or six bins of mail that I needed to catch up to the folders. And I ended up just spreading 'em all on the floor and sorting them alphabetically and trying to match them with the folders. And sometimes the folders were back in the file cabinets by the time I got to 'em, and in some cases they were still out on the floor with an analyst. So I would come in with a stack, "Anybody got any of these five people?" I would just yell out names. "Oh, I got it," I would hand it out to them.

EK: So it was just one big open space?

AZ: There was two sections. Again, this wasn't office space that was designed specifically for redress, it was whatever the cheapest space that someone could get was. So there were two, sort of, bubble rooms. There were two rooms where you would just have a bunch of desks, maybe kind of like a big conference room. And the office that I shared with Martha Watanabe just was all windows, so we could, I guess, look out on the floor and see who was working and who wasn't, but we never did it that way. But it was just odd to have an office that was all glass that everyone could look in and see what we were doing. But it took me a couple months to fully catch up all the mail to the files. And a lot of times people would send something in and realize, "Oh, I should have sent additional documentation in." But that would be four days behind, and by then, the folder was in the process.

EK: So did you ever reach out to the individuals directly? Did you pick up the phone and call them to verify any information?

AZ: So when I first started as the mailroom person... we didn't even have a mailroom, but just the boxes of mail guy, I never reached out to anybody. But once I caught up, then there was a need for people to help with analysis. So I, for a while, was just an analyst doing it, and then I got to be sort of the team leader. So I would keep track of the stats of what was going through, track all the case numbers that were in my group, and as they would get sent to the next section, we would always kind of know how many we had, where things were going. And then as stuff got tricky, we had a very international crew. So some folks wouldn't feel comfortable calling, so they would give it to me and I would call and say, "Look, you sent me this particular document, but it doesn't really meet our needs. I'm going to send you a request for another document, but please don't send me the same thing that you sent before because the photograph of a headstone isn't the proof that we need that your parent has passed. I need a death certificate." So we would just have to... that happened a couple times. I don't mean to make light of it, but we would get a lot of the wrong type of document, or we would get photocopies of stuff. And then people had, there was a certain statement, "I declare, under penalty of perjury, the following statement to be true and correct," or that this is an original, and sometimes you wouldn't put the right statement on there.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2019 Emi Kuboyama. All Rights Reserved.

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EK: So I'm trying to get a sense of, kind of, the size of the operation. You said at one point you were a team leader, so how many teams would you say there were and how many people were on each team?

AZ: So the process... there was stage 1, I guess, I think we called it stage 1 or stage 2. I hope I'm not contradicting what others have said. But the mail would come in and certain research would be done in stage 1 just to totally verify that that person is the same person that we have historical records for. Once the historical research was done, and I believe that was the stage 1 team... are you nodding because that's right?

EK: Yeah.

AZ: Good. Then stage 2 would be my more administrative staff, I guess, and we were just making sure that now that we've identified that this is the same person, have they given us the right information? That they're still alive, because again, a lot of this unfortunately took so long for the bill to be signed and people were old, we needed to make sure that they were still alive, we need to make sure that it wasn't fraud, and that it was the right person, and that we had the specific documents on our checklist that we needed to make sure that we had proven that name changes, a lot of folks, if they were in the internment center, internment camps, and they were, got married afterwards, I needed a marriage certificate. And some people didn't have marriage certificates, so sometimes we had to work with our Special Verifications Unit to find some way to get witnesses or something just to show that there was a legal name change.

EK: So as the program progressed, how did your role change, if it did at all?

AZ: Well, as the program progressed, I was more of the team lead for the stage 2 analysts. As we got through the three, I guess it was two or three main... I guess it was three main payment sections over a certain amount of years, and it was just a humongous rush to get twenty-five or twenty thousand per year. Once we got through that, that was the majority of the folks. I don't remember exactly how many folks were determined eligible and given the formal letter of apology and payment, but I think it was, was it twenty-five thousand per year?

EK: I don't remember, but I know it was based on the congressional allocation for that year.

AZ: So once we got through the first three years, whether it was sixty or seventy-five thousand, most of the people had already been paid, most of the people that would have been clearly eligible. There was a lot of legal issues that came out, mainly people that were in certain areas that weren't interned but were definitely restricted in their movements. But I couldn't, we didn't have, for the main team 1 and team 2 verification, we couldn't do that. We just could compare them to records of folks that were actually interned. So it kind of trickled down. So as the office was winding down, we started working on other cases in the Civil Rights Division because the Office of Redress Administration was part of the Civil Rights Division. So we kind of morphed into a litigation support unit, so we were working on redress, but we didn't have enough redress work to keep us all busy full time. So all of the staff started working on employment discrimination cases, housing discrimination cases. And eventually, as redress completely wound down, we were only maybe working one percent of our time on redress. And even, so I've been in Health and Human Services now for about three years. Even three years ago I was still having some redress responsibilities. Folks that did get the formal apology and the twenty thousand dollars, the twenty thousand dollars had, there were certain, I guess it was tax exempt, and there were certain other exemptions. So now they were getting folks all along that would want verification of payment to prove that the money that they were having was, it didn't count, I think, as regular earnings. I'm not an attorney, I don't remember exactly what the legal jargon would be. But that money, if you went into a state or federal senior living community where they would take all your assets, that, I think, was exempt from that. So we were still forming those -- and still today, I talked to, earlier today, one of my colleges, Jay Kim, who still gets one or two a month, folks asking for proof of payment, so they could prove that the money that they have came through this program.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2019 Emi Kuboyama. All Rights Reserved.

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EK: Interesting. So I want to move on to talk a little bit about your recollections for certain key aspects of the program. What are your recollections around, the community outreach efforts? What was your role in it and how was that handled by the office?

AZ: So there were quite a few of us in the office that traveled. And sometimes we would go to a JACL event, and I would go to these events and I'd have a little booth, and I would have all the forms that you would need to fill out if you wanted to apply for redress. Because we had, I think, a lot more people in the camp rosters that we probably never found out, if maybe they passed away before the act. But as I would go to different events in different cities around the country, I would help people fill out their forms and make sure they knew what documents were acceptable. And in some cases, they would bring the material, they would go home and get it and bring it back, and I could just take it back with me.

EK: Do you recall which cities you had a chance to go to?

AZ: I know I went to Utah and I went to Phoenix and I went to Chicago and I went to New York and I went to Los Angeles a couple times.

EK: Were these always in conjunction with JACL or Japanese American Civilian League...

AZ: Citizens League.

EK: Citizens League. Were they all part of the conventions or did you go on other occasions?

AZ: No, I just went for big conventions where it would make sense to have a presence where we would have lots of people coming by. And a lot of people would come by and say, "Oh, I've been telling my mom or dad to fill that out and they don't want to, but can I just have the literature?" So I think, again, I'm not an expert on this, but I got the sense that some people just didn't, this was not a pleasant time in their life, and this would bring up some bad memories and they just didn't want to get involved. Some people filled it out and said, "I'm going to take this money and donate it to a charity, I don't want it for me." But I think it was great exposure. Because while we did put a lot of ads in radio, newspaper, and the local communities, having someone at the events, I think... I know when I was there I would have lines at my booth of people asking questions for themselves, for their family members, or just wanting to talk about it.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2019 Emi Kuboyama. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 5>

EK: So were you there when they did the first check ceremonies?

AZ: I was.

EK: Could you talk a little bit about what those were like and your involvement in them?

AZ: It was neat being part of such a high profile... I mean, we were in the news all the time. So an anecdote about it, I know in the beginning there were actuarials that were guessing how many checks would come out and what ages of the people. And as we were approaching the deadline, and I wish I could remember if it was twenty or twenty-five thousand, but whatever it was, we did it by age, because we wanted to make sure that the oldest folks got paid first. Because it was sad, but we would get people that would send in documentation, and then I'd follow up and find out that they had passed away. So we wanted to make sure that those folks, the oldest ones would get paid first. And my memory was, when we first started, we thought, okay, we got the first twenty thousand or twenty-five thousand, and the date of birth would be 1924. Anyone born after 1924 will have to wait until the next year. And then another week would go by, and now it's 1923, because we've gotten so many more processed. And I think it just kept... and the year might not be right, but as the deadline came and we were getting so much, and we were working fifteen, twenty hours a day trying to get everything that we had processed when the final cutoff had to go to Treasury. And we'd come running, "Oh, I got a guy from 1905, get this one in there quick." And I just remember that the date just kept going and going and going, and we were just working so hard to make sure that at the end, that we were just looking through 'em to find anyone who was elderly, pretty old, to make sure that they got in there in time to make the first payment.

EK: Right, because I recall there were a lot more people that were in that age range than was expected. In other words, a lot of them were surviving until...

AZ: I think they lived a lot longer than the actuarials had expected.

EK: Exactly, exactly. So, actually, that brings to mind, so the ceremonial check presentations happened for that first round of payments, and my recollection is it happened in D.C., but it also happened in other areas of the country. Were you a part of, didn't they have a West Coast one?

AZ: I'm not... I don't know that they didn't, but I wasn't aware of it. They might have had a ceremony, but the one that I do remember was the first one, and I can't remember, 1992.

EK: Can you describe that that was like?

AZ: Well, people were coming in from all over the country, and I remember going to the airport in my little car and picking up people. And there was a gentleman, I think he might have been like a hundred and some years, a hundred and three years old, he came, he came with his son who was only in his seventies. And I think he might have been a reverend and he spoke at the event. And there's pictures, there were pictures in the newspaper, and I was just honored to be part of this event, it was an amazing event. And even though I was sitting in the last row, it was just great to be part of it. I remember it was in the Justice, I think it was in the main Justice building, so you have to have an ID to get in there. So I got to stand out in front, and as people come in, I can escort them in. People needed, like handicap access, I could take them through the routes that did not involve stairs or in an elevator. So it was a pretty amazing event. And then seeing it in the paper... of course, right afterwards, we got a lot of hate mail. Not a lot, but we got some awful mail.

EK: Because people weren't supportive of the program?

AZ: Yeah. We didn't process them. [Laughs]

EK: So for the people that didn't receive payment at these ceremonies, can you talk a little bit about, there's a check, there's a letter of apology, so how was that, were you involved with that?

AZ: Yeah. So we had, a formal letter of apology would go out, and we would, we had this big computer list that was on the old dot matrix printer with the little holes in the side. I think we sent these lists on these big reels of data to Treasury, and I think they cut all the checks. And then the checks would come to us, we would... you'd think I'd remember it better, but I believe we put the checks in with the formal letter of apology and had all these labels. And I believe that we mailed them out through the DOJ mail.

EK: I have a vague recollection of having, like, envelope stuffing parties where we did the letters and the checks and we all just, I remember batching them and sending them out.

AZ: And just to tell a, to me, an anecdote, we had, you had one year to cash the check, and some people never got around to cashing the check. I mean, I get it in some cases, it was elderly folks that just didn't have a lot available, but again, it was 1993, you couldn't take a picture of the check with your phone and get it deposited that way, you had to go to the bank. And we had some people that lost it, I remember one guy that called and he had had it with some other papers, and then he was grilling, and he took the newspapers to start the grill and the check went in there. And he didn't realize it until it was too late to get it back, so we ended up cutting checks again, but that was if you lost it or never cashed it.

EK: Well, I spoke to at least one person who said they didn't cash it because they wanted to symbolically keep the letter and the check. I think they framed it rather than cashing it.

AZ: Yeah, and we had a lot of requests to say, "Look I don't want the money. It's not about the money to me, can you just send it to the cancer society, or send it to some other charity in my name?" and we couldn't. We could just send it directly to the person and then they could do that.

EK: Were you involved with any of the archival searching? Going to the archives, digging around for information?

AZ: No.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2019 Emi Kuboyama. All Rights Reserved.

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EK: Do you have recollections of particular individual claimants that you have anecdotes about that you'd be willing to share?

AZ: I shouldn't say their names, but I do remember that there were some folks that, I would send them a request for information, and it would come back undeliverable. So then I would track 'em down again and call them and send them the thing, and it would come back undeliverable again. And apparently this one particular person, had multiple homes that they lived in at different times of the year, and I just couldn't track her down because by the time I would get the stuff out to her, she was on to her next address. So it wasn't like you had a cell phone that stuck with you wherever you went. If we couldn't find you at that location, it just took a lot of time. So I remember just over two years or so, trying to get all the paperwork from this particular person. And just a lot of really nice people. I, somewhere, have a folder of thank you notes of people that I spoke to and worked with and then they would send me, to our office, I'd be processing the mail and it would come to me. People would say, "You have a document," and I'd open it up and it would just be a card saying, "Thanks for, I got the letter, I got the check, and thank you for helping me."

EK: So that's actually a great segue. I wanted to next talk about the personal impact that working at ORA has had on you. I mean, what would you say is the biggest impact in hindsight, having had the opportunity to work at ORA?

AZ: Well, I didn't... back to how I got the job, I didn't know a lot about it. I mean, I'd heard about it a little bit in school, but I didn't really know that much about it. And I was working at my mom's elementary school library, just helping her file books and stuff. And she had a book, and I can't find it, somewhere I have it, I would have brought it today if I could have found it, about a little girl that was interned and how it impacted her life. And I read that before coming to the job, and that was my... I looked it up in an encyclopedia, too, but what really impacted me more and gave me more information about it than an encyclopedia entry was the story of a girl getting kind of ripped up from her friends and not quite understanding why she had to go to this place. And then her life in the internment center and how, when it was time to go home, it wasn't all that great either, because home wasn't really home anymore.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2019 Emi Kuboyama. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 7>

EK: So what would you say were kind of the biggest successes and biggest challenges of the office?

AZ: Well, to go back to the impact, after learning more about it, then as other things happened, September 11th, or other events, it would make you think, "Oh, here we go again." And you would even, I would see news pundits also bringing up the Japanese American internment as other issues would come about and saying, "Are we not going to learn from our past mistakes?" So that was a big impact to me about just sort of remembering the past and how could this awful thing have happened, and how could we possibly even start heading that way again?

EK: I'm curious, do you talk to your kids about that?

AZ: I have one, I talked to him about that, and how we judge people. I guess, even, to us, September 11th doesn't seem like that long ago. I have a fourteen year old, it was way before he was born. But I did tell him about the program, and as Jewish people, we also think about the Holocaust and what happened there, and then what's happening in current politics, sort of makes you... I don't want to get too political. Just makes you think about how... so we discuss that at the dinner table, about how important it is to not let these types of things happen again. So I interrupted you, what was the next question?

EK: No, no, I was just going to say... are there any other people whose contributions you want to mention? I know that you know who else I'm interviewing with, but are there others that you just recall having had an impact that I might not have been set to interview?

AZ: Well, Kathleen Rosso was a colleague of mine that was at the program before I was in the program. There was an attorney, I think her name was Val O'Brien, and I remember she was our go-to if I had any questions that I wasn't sure what to do.

EK: Was Val before Tink?

AZ: Yeah.

EK: Were they there together, or was she....

AZ: Again, it was...

EK: Not clear.

AZ: It was a very impactful time in my life, but it was from 1990 to maybe 1995, and it was just for those maybe five, 1996, just that short period of time. And once we had gotten through a majority of the payments, then it was all to the sort of more legal issues which I wasn't involved with.

EK: What were your recollections just about the office and the people that worked there?

AZ: Well, I do remember, in the office we had a super amazing international crew. We had people from probably dozens of countries. I remember coming there as a, I think I was twenty-four years old and managing these people that were doctors in their country, or politicians, but because of the political climate, they had to leave. And some of those international issues, you know, you have people from India from different castes. And I remember telling this one, "It doesn't matter, I don't care what, you were there and what she was, we're all equal here, so you're going to have to talk to her." And just eating, our holiday parties would have cuisine from so many different countries, it was amazing, so that was great. I think a majority of the staff was contractors, and I don't know that we'll ever have another situation like that, because a lot of these folks weren't U.S. citizens, and I don't know that they'd be able to get hired as contractors today. But this was, again, 1990s, it was a different world.

EK: So now, are many of those contractors, did they have the opportunity to stay on with Justice after redress was over?

AZ: I don't believe most of them did. I think as the redress program was winding down, there wasn't a need for... now, some of them, I think, got absorbed into other projects, but I think most of them just got, as we were downsizing, there wasn't a need for twenty stage 2 analysts, twenty stage 1 analysts.

EK: So if you had to summarize kind of what your biggest takeaway from the whole experience was, or the impact on you would be, what would you say it would be?

AZ: Well, I was lucky to be at the right place at the right time to work on this historical event. If it weren't for what happened during World War II, there wouldn't have been a need for this. But the fact that the recognition of a wrong being done, and then being able to be part of that was an amazing experience. I've never had an office of people that were so interested and dedicated to what we were working on and what we were trying to accomplish. We worked hard, we played hard, and everyone, there was no slacker attitude, like, "I'm not into this, I don't care," everyone that you got was a person that was put through this. And we would often talk about, look what happened to this person, look what happened to that person. So it was a long time ago, but it was definitely very impactful. I do remember being out at some of the events and talking to some of the kids and saying, "Look, you should have your parents fill this form out for us, and they can get this." And they said, "But my parents don't trust the Department of Justice because it was the government, it was you people that put them away." And I never really experienced an individual telling me that, but it was more of a secondhand, from, "This is why parents aren't doing it."

EK: Is there anything else you want to add about anything related to redress?

AZ: After all these years, I still have a group of friends that I work with that we are still in touch with, and we have dinners once or twice a year, we'll all get together and have dinner. Now we talk about, instead of what we're doing, we all talk about what our kids are doing.

EK: Thank you.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2019 Emi Kuboyama. All Rights Reserved.