<Begin Segment 3>

EK: So over the course of the ten-year program, I would imagine that the process evolved as more people ended up in special verifications, could you talk a little bit more about how the verification process evolved as well as how the staffing and structure evolved?

JC: So as we got, we would read about different, let's say, professions. There was a small group of what we would learn through the, either the hotline coming in or people writing us, or through the community leaders like Sox Kitashima, we learned of individuals, let's say, who were homeless. So how do we reach the homeless? We also learned of professions like chick sexers, who would literally, that's their profession, was to determine the sex of a chick, so depends upon what box you would go in. And I say all this because maybe those individuals may have lost something that was not documented at the time from the War Department. We learned of people in Hawaii living in gulches, and we're like, "What's a gulch?" Now, they may not have been evacuated, but they lost, perhaps, their liberty. Then we learned of the 442nd, our military force, Japanese Americans who fought in the war, highly decorated unit, and we had to determine what was their loss. I remember one guy saying, "I lost a pair of shoes, a shirt and a girlfriend." And so we're like, okay, I can work on your eligibility on the first two, but not the last, and said I was really sorry that he had lost a girlfriend. And then, through our community outreach and through our workshops, because we conducted probably a hundred workshops across the country where we brought our computers loaded with all the historical documentation, plus people's names, and we would verify them on the spot, which was really cool.

And we learned of a group called the Japanese Peruvians who were forced, mostly there were men first who were forced out of their country with the notion that they were going to be repatriated back to Japan, and then we would, in turn, get American soldiers who were in prisoner of war camps, but that never worked out. So you had individuals, several, and then their family members who were forced to repatriate to the United States, and they didn't enter the country legally. So one of the requirements of the program, which was permanent resident status, I think it was 1924, if I'm not mistaken. So that was an issue that we had to deal with. And again, people who just didn't have the documentation, because these were war records that were created not with the intent of paying reparations. So we had people in Texas, most of our cases were in the Midwest or the western part of the country. And Crystal City, Texas, had a small group of mostly men who were interned, so again, that was off our radar a little bit. So there were things that were not within our vision initially, but our vision then expanded because we realized other people were impacted during the redress program. So it's a loss of liberty, loss of property. So they basically had to fit into those buckets. With the Japanese Peruvians, we did work on the Hill, we did a lot of work on the Hill. Worked on the Hill about expanding the Civil Liberties Act to include this population, which was about five thousand at the time. And in working with Janet Reno, she was a great supporter of the program and very compassionate. And through working with the community leaders, through working with the department, through working the committee members on the Hill, we were able to carve out adding the Japanese Peruvians' eligibility, but not all of them. So some were able to actually get the full twenty thousand dollar payment and some were able to get a five thousand dollar payment. And it became an appropriation issue really at that juncture. So although they had suffered all the consequences of that executive order at the time, because of the eligibility requirement, they didn't receive the full compensation. Which was really hard, because you had some family members who were eligible, you had other family members who were not, but you were listening to all of their stories and they were all the same. But the compensation was different, but they did receive an apology letter, so hopefully that helped. And some of the instances that struck me when we were doing our workshops was because the elders did not talk about what happened during World War II, you had grandchildren just sitting there wide-eyed learning for the first time that their grandparents were interned. And some of the, even the children, because they were so young, learning the full experience of what happened, so that was very interesting as well.

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