<Begin Segment 3>

TH: Well, I want to get to more of that, but also I wanted to ask you -- kind of backing up a little bit -- what was your knowledge or experience in regards to the history of Japanese American incarceration?

EK: Sure. So I grew up in Hawaii. And as I came to learn, there was no mass incarceration or rounding up of Japanese Americans during World War II, despite the fact that Pearl Harbor was in Hawaii. What ended up happening was, unlike on the mainland, there were a lot of unique individual cases where people were rounded up on an individual basis. So my family had not really been impacted by the incarceration during World War II. My father and his family were living on Maui, and he was a little boy at that time. And so I had heard about it more in terms of from history books, I had heard about the redress program that Congress had passed, redress legislation. And really at the time that I was in law school and just getting ready to graduate, that was the period of time that the first apology letters and checks were issued. I think the first apology letter was actually issued about thirty years (ago) today, in the first week of October. So I just knew about the existence, I didn't really have a personal connection to it as far as my family went. But I was aware in general about the internment as well as the search for reparations.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2020 Emi Kuboyama. All Rights Reserved.