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EK: And then you also mentioned outreach. Could you talk a little bit about how outreach was conducted and where you went and who you might have worked with?

LJ: The Japanese American community did a great job of being a conduit for us to get to a lot of people that I don't think we would have reached otherwise. And so we worked pretty closely with the JACL and other organizations to go out to ask them where do we need to be? Where do we need to be to be to help people who need help getting their paperwork together? Either there was a language issue and it was hard for them, or they were just elderly, or they were just, it was a lot for them to take. So we went, we found that most of our eligible people were living on the West Coast, living out to the west, some in Hawaii, some in California, some in Utah, all over, but predominately were still on the West Coast. And so we would work with whatever local community group, local churches, we were in schools, we were in churches, but we would work with them to set up. Where's a good place for us to go where we can reach a lot of people? They would help us publicize, ORA is coming for a workshop, come out and see us. We had, depending on what we expected, some trips two or three of us went, some trips we took a number of people and we just would sit for three or four hours at a time. People would bring their stuff that they had. We would sit down and work through case stuff with them and help get them verified, hopefully on the spot, but if not, at least we helped move the process through. The Japanese American community was, community leaders were instrumental in helping us find people, get them there, helping them get what they needed together. So it was a system that worked well, and it was gratifying to be able to go out and see the people that you just talked to on the phone, or traded mailings with otherwise.

EK: Were you involved with any of the archival searches for documents?

LJ: Some, a little bit of that. Not a lot of it.

EK: Were they for individuals or group cases?

LJ: I think group cases...

EK: I'm thinking about, like, railroad workers or the...

LJ: Yeah, I'm trying to remember. We did some of that, and I'm just not remembering all the specifics. But some of that for sure, because it was, I just remember we came in with a pretty clear set of historical documents and then as we went on, I think we discovered, oh wait, we've got the railroad workers and we've got this group of people who, it won't be as easy to prove that they're eligible. But many of them are, and so I remember... I don't know how directly involved I was in all of that, but a lot of need for, okay, we need to go out and find more, there's more out there that we need to help get these people processed.

EK: What about how the process evolved? My understanding was in the early years it was thought that it was going to be primarily checking individual names against camp rosters, and then as the program went on, it became clear that there were other groups that were eligible. So did the process change?

LJ: It just got a little... I guess it did change a little bit in that, you're right, I think in the beginning and the early cases, we tried to go, people were verified in the beginning, we tried to go date of birth order since you had to be alive when the law was passed to be eligible. We tried to, in the beginning, it felt like a little bit of a race against time to get to some of those oldest internees before they passed away. And it was, we felt like, yes, they might have had a surviving spouse or child that would have been eligible, but there was a sense of urgency to get to people who were eligible while they were still living. And so there was a lot of that systematic, kind of, let's work through the years. And then as it went on, and the initial big batches of people were verified, and had been, payments had been sent, we did, then people would start to come to us, "Well, this is my case, how do I fit in?" And I remember there being a lot of discussions of, okay, well, this is somebody that seems like they would be eligible, they were definitely affected by what went on, but they weren't on a camp roster, or something was different for them. So, yeah, so then it became, cases got a little harder, case files got thicker. We went from, you know, those early case files, they were thin, it only took maybe five or six pieces of paper to go in the file folder to say, yep, someone was eligible. And by the end, we had case files that were an inch or two thick. So yeah, so the process definitely got trickier for those last few years of trying to get the tougher cases verified. But there was still that same sense of urgency, how are we going to do this? These are people who deserve redress, and so how can we work to figure that out?

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