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EK: So could you talk a little bit about what your role was at ORA? I would imagine that it probably evolved over time.

MW: It didn't change all that much. ORA was broken up into different sections. You had a management team, you had people who were trying to identify potential recipients. You also had people who were then sending out the information, the forms, as you found, the forms. And once people had been identified, so then a whole group of folks were basically just matching names, addresses, and sending out information. When the information came back in, that was my job, was to look at the information, make sure that it was correct. Did the name match, did the identification that they had to provide, was it accurate, were there questions, those kinds of things. So we had a team who basically got all the envelopes back, went through it, verified it, and then Aaron Zajic, who was my office mate at the time, the two of us then reviewed what the staff had. Did they match up the name correctly? Because the checks were being done by Treasury, so the names had to be accurate, and some people had changed names, some had gotten married, so that's what we did a lot of. And then identification, driver's license, and many of them didn't have. So sort of like with voting now, okay, what kinds of different IDs were available? So Bob and many of the others in the office did a lot of outreach to community groups all across the nation to try and identify people.

And then initially, one of the interesting things was, I think the Nisei had, there were some mixed feelings. Did they want to do this or not? Even getting to that point, right, because the whole redress movement was basically started by the Sanseis and pushed by the Sansei generation, the third generation folks, whether the parents wanted it or not. So when it came time to, oh, "Did you get your form in the mail, Mom?" "Yeah, but I don't know if I really want to fill it out." They felt, I think, bad taking government money. I mean, most did, and so it was an education thing as well as trying to find recipients.

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