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TH: Well, now moving back again, thank you for that. Wanting to kind of discuss when you joined in 1994, a lot of the easy, as you said, easy and kind of clear cut cases were already... already went through the process. Leaving, of course, you to deal, you and others in the office then to deal with what you would call very special cases, unique cases that didn't really fit within the parameters of the program or that needed more attention to that. Can you discuss some of those cases and the issues and challenges you confronted during your work at the office?

EK: Sure. So as I mentioned before, Hawaii was definitely one of those things where there were areas that were affected, geographic areas, or classes of people, say a Buddhist priest or a Japanese language newspaper editor, where there was certainly some sort of action, people were told they had to leave an area or they couldn't live in a place any longer, or they couldn't work in a particular role any longer. So definitely there was harm established. But in Hawaii and other places, it was unclear whether this was as a result of federal government action, which was one of the requirements under the Civil Liberties Act. So a lot of these unique cases, and on the mainland they included things like the railroad workers where many folks were not allowed to continue working on the railroad as some sort of vital transportation. Or we had, I learned what a chick sexer was. [Laughs] I don't know if you know what that is, but apparently there is a job where you determine the sex of chicks. And so we had a lot of these really unique cases. And sometimes they were individual cases and sometimes there were groups of individuals where we heard similar stories and we would have to do either archival research or talk to witnesses and get sworn statements from them. So these were all cases where it was just unclear why something happened. We could readily establish something happened, but why it happened was often what we went to the archives for or we called up the railroad companies to try to really figure out what happened. And so those are the types of cases that I worked on primarily.

TH: I wanted to kind of, you know, because you were just again discussing those very hard and more unique cases to document eligibility. Maybe, could you... let's maybe jump back a little bit and span out to what was the overall process for documenting that eligibility for, say, even the clear cut cases? Could you just maybe go through that process briefly for us?

EK: Sure. So there were a number of historical records like the incarceration camp records where people were identified with their family as having been incarcerated. So for those people it was a matter of establishing their identity to verify their name, their date of birth, those are the types of information that the camp rosters contained and so they basically had to prove that they were the ones who were in that record, and so those were the more clear-cut cases. For the other ones where there was really no readily-available government record, it became a lot trickier to try to track down the sequence of events that led to what this person experienced. And so those were the cases where we would have to go to the National Archives, or go to Suitland, Maryland, sometimes to San Bruno, California, just various repositories where information might be, and oftentimes it was really not clear whether you would even find relevant information. And so we had people like Alice Kale, who were able to just spend their most of their time just digging through records, and it was back in the days where we could actually go down into the bowels of the archives and go through boxes and try to figure out whether a particular box contains useful information. So it was just a lot of legwork and trying to piece together what had happened in conjunction with the statements of the individuals. And the way the information was considered was by a preponderance of the evidence, so if it was more likely than not, that what someone claimed was true, actually happened, then that person would be determined eligible.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2020 Emi Kuboyama. All Rights Reserved.