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EK: Emi Kuboyama with Stanford University. It's September 11, 2019, and we're here in Washington, D.C. Hi, Tink, could we start by having you introduce yourself, your name and your ORA title or role?

TC: My name is Tink Cooper, and I was the legal counsel for ORA for approximately ten years.

EK: And where were you born and raised?

TC: I was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, and I went to school there. I received my Bachelor of Arts from George State University in Atlanta. I received my law degree, my Juris Doctor at Florida State University, and then I came to Washington, D.C. at Georgetown Law Center and obtained my master's of law, my L.L.M., and focused on international law.

EK: Could you talk a little bit about your professional experience prior to starting with the Office of Redress Administration?

TC: When I came to D.C. to attend Georgetown, I loved Washington, D.C. so much, I decided I didn't want to return home. And I stayed here and worked with the Department of Treasury and did international trade law there. And then I had heard there was a job opening here and applied for it and was interviewed by Bob Bratt, the former administrator, and I was hired in early 1991 for redress.

EK: So you were with redress from 1991 until approximately when?

TC: Approximately 2000. The ORA program was a ten-year program, it sunset after ten years, there was a six month closing period, but then we ended up running out of money and we needed to get extra appropriations to pay claimants, and there were a number of lawsuits, so I probably continued working in ORA for, probably until around 2000.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2019 Emi Kuboyama. All Rights Reserved.

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EK: So that's actually a great lead-in to your role with the Office of Redress Administration. What do you recall about the early years and the establishment of the office?

TC: From things that I had heard is that when the law was passed in 1988 and then Bob Bratt had petitioned at the Civil Rights Division to administer the program instead of the Civil Division, which was approved. And then he quickly collected a key group of, like, four people, and it was Bob Bratt, Shirley Lloyd, Alice Kale, and Valerie O'Brian was the first attorney. Valerie wrote the initial regulations, Bob was getting the office up and running, Alice Kale and Shirley Lloyd were doing the research and collecting a wealth of data from the National Archives. They coordinated with the Social Security Administration to get current addresses, they worked with INS to get information. They also obtained the vital statistics, the birth and death records from the states of California, Washington, Oregon, and Arizona, to come up with the master list of the 120,000 internees in the ten WRA camps.

EK: So this master list, was it actually a physical master list, or was some of it in a database or in a computer of some kind?

TC: Well, all of the information they collected were documents. For instance, the camp rosters were these huge documents about three feet long and two feet tall that were very detailed, everything was put in an electronic database. And the other information, they also received IBM cards from the Bancroft Library at the University of California in Berkeley, they put that data in. They put all the data in, they removed duplicates, they were able to put dates of death and dates of birth, because the act required you to be alive on August 10, 1988. So all of these hard copy data was downloaded into an electronic database, and I believe, the first database was called Aspen.� Aspen was one of the contractors who did it. And then a later database, I think, was Super Mario, and then eventually it became the JARVIS database.

EK: Do you remember what JARVIS stands for?

TC: Yeah, Japanese American Redress Verification System.

EK: Great. I also recall there was microfiche. Do you remember what was on that?

TC: The microfiche had the Form 26 cards that also came from the National Archives. And the Form 26 cards were the forms that were input for each family into the WRA camps. So it had a wealth of information with the family name, the history, the children's names, the pre-evacuation address, and then if they were transferred to another camp they would have transfer dates, the names of the camps, and then when they eventually left camp, it would also include information about where they went, I think. I mean, that was on the camp rosters, and I think much of that was on the Form 26.

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

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EK: Could you talk a little bit about your responsibilities within the office?

TC: There were multiple roles as legal counsel for the office, and it varied depending on the times. I did research in a number of areas: there was outreach to the public; there was a lot of litigation; there was legislation; and then there was drafting the regulations. And one of the first legal challenges to the redress program was a lawsuit from Arthur Jacobs versus the Attorney General Barr claiming that the Civil Liberties Act was unconstitutional because it did not compensate Italian and German ancestries for those who were interned. And so he filed the lawsuit, and Arthur Jacobs was the American-born son of a German alien who was interned at Crystal City in Texas. Crystal City was the INS family camp. So when the aliens were interned, it was generally the male, and then that was the one camp where they could bring their spouse or children. So he sued, the lower court threw it out saying he did not have standing. He appealed, and the District Appellate court found that he did not have a valid claim, that the act was constitutional, that the Commission report, Personal Justice Denied, clearly showed how persons of, Americans of Japanese ancestry were discriminated against in the war, and that there was a basis not to pay the Germans and Italian aliens. And the court also found that the numbers of the German and Italian internees were so much smaller, and that generally they would have due process rights. And most of them were released, it was only a very small number who were interned. So the court upheld the constitutionality of the act and said, yes, there was discrimination against those of Japanese ancestry.

EK: What might a typical day have looked like for you, and did that change over the course of the program?

TC: Well... oh, it did change over the program, but I guess one other early aspect to the program is that we had worked on the 1992 amendments to the Civil Liberties Act, and one of the major portions of the amendments was to include non-Japanese spouses and parents to be eligible, because they had a terrible choice. They either had to accept internment or be separated from their families. And so there was pressure from the communities and also within the Justice Department to ask Congress to amend the Act to make them eligible. So that was a key point in the early part of the program, to have it amended to include the non-Japanese spouses as eligible. It was also key because we realized there would be more potentially eligible claimants than Congress initially envisioned. So those '92 amendments increased the appropriations to $1.65 billion from $1.25. It also established there would be judicial review in the federal claims court for appeals. And there was also pressure to make the redress payments exempt from federal taxes, and so that was included in it. They also included a six-month period for ORA shutdown, and finally that amendment added a benefit of the doubt standard, which gave the ORA more latitude in order to make favorable determinations.

So that was another part of my duties, and I guess one of the primary parts of my duties was research, and as part of the research efforts, they realized there were some cases that required extensive historical research or had very unusual circumstances. So they established a new office, a sub-office called Special Verification Unit. So I was in charge of that unit, and initially, the records were fairly clear for the internees and the persons who evacuated [based on] the government action. But then it was also hard to meet one of the requirements of the Act, permanent residency status.

[Interruption]

TC: So as I was saying, a Special Verification Unit was set up to help conduct extensive research into certain areas or unusual circumstances. One of those was to meet one of the eligibility requirements-- the permanent residency status or U.S. citizenship. And many of these aliens had their immigration status back from the 1910s, '20s, '30s, so we had to work closely with the Immigration and Naturalization Service to determine if they had immigration status during the time of this. And INS was very cooperative, and they would obtain some of their files that were forty-five years old for us to review. But in addition to eligibility, we were also required to research the statutory heirs. That under the Act, if the potential claimant was deceased, there were three classes of heirs who could inherit. One was the spouse, and if the spouse was deceased, it would go to the children. If the children were deceased, it went to the parents. And so, in those kind of instances, we would have to go to the particular state and look at the state law to see if it was a valid marriage, if it was a valid divorce, or remarriage or adoption. For instance, I remember one case where the claimant was deceased and the wife claimed the proceeds. And she said she was married, but there were no marriage certificates, and she said it was a common law marriage. And in the state they lived in, it did not accept common law marriage, but where they lived before, it did, and they were there for a significant period of time. So we found that, yes, it was a valid marriage. We also had to research other countries' laws, and we found that in Japan particularly, they would adopt adults in order to carry on the family name. So we would have to go back and obtain documents showing it was a valid adoption in order to prove they were a correct heir. So that was a big part of our group, too.

The other thing we did was handle litigation, there was probably about thirty cases where the ORA was sued because individuals had been found ineligible. We also drafted regulations. In addition to the 1992 amendments, there were two cases where groups were found eligible. One of them were the minor children who relocated to Japan, and that was one of the lawsuits that I'll talk about shortly. Another group were the children who were born after their parents' evacuation or internment, and they were made eligible. So we amended the regulations to include those as eligible.

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

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EK: Could you talk a little bit more about who you worked with? It sounds like you had a variety of roles. So why don't we start maybe with things that led to the '92 amendments or regulatory changes? Were there people inside the department or in the community that you recall working with?

TC: I think it was both. It was within the department, and at that point the administrator was Bob Bratt, and I think Paul Suddes came on shortly thereafter as the deputy administrator. And they were always pushing to get the non-Japanese spouses eligible, and the communities also wanted the non-Japanese spouses eligible. And we had submitted the proposed bill to Congress. We worked closely with individuals from the Office of Legislative Affairs, and I know the attorney at the time was Faith Burton. We had a few hearings on the Hill and then Congress ended up passing that.

EK: And when there were hearings on the Hill, do you recall who was representing the department?

TC: Probably Faith Burton from Office of Legislative Affairs.

EK: And what about with respect to when something was in litigation? How did that work within the department? You talked about the '92 amendment's creating this...

TC: Oh, well, that just clarified that if people wanted to file a lawsuit, then it made the U.S. Court of Federal Claims so there would be one venue for that. That was just establishing the process.

EK: Was there always an appeal process within the department?

TC: Yes, there was an administrative appeal process, that was part of the initial regulations for an administrative appeal that went to the appellate section, and they did a de novo review.

EK: So what are some of the groups... actually, let's zoom out a little bit. What, in your recollection, were some of the program highlights in terms of successes that you felt like you and the department helped?

TC: Well, one thing was just the enormous outreach efforts. I mean, there were close relationships with the Japanese American community, there were three major groups we worked with, one was the JACL, Japanese American Citizens League; one was NCRR, the National Coalition for Redress and Reparations; and one was NCJAR which was the National Council for JA Redress. We worked closely with them, we worked with local community groups, churches, schools, they were just fabulous. I mean, there was such a wonderful relationship, and there were workshops going out to meet the people. And we would go a few times a month, primarily to the West Coast. But I remember trips to Chicago and New York also to meet eligible people. And the Civil Liberties Act was quite unique in a federal claims program in that the attorney general was given the legal obligation to identify and locate eligible claimants instead of making them apply to us. So because of that unique statutory mandate, there were just enormous efforts to meet the JA community. There were radio announcements, media, I believe initially Bob Bratt did some television interviews, and there was just so much, and it was just a wonderful caring group that really supported the program, and so everyone worked well together.

EK: Were you involved with some of the first check presentation ceremonies?

TC: No, because I came a few months after that. I came in early 1991, and the first check ceremony was October 1990.

EK: So as a result of the first check presentation ceremonies, were you aware of the program before you joined it or were you not?

TC: I was aware of the history. I mean, we learned about it in school, so I knew about the history of the program. And then when I saw the job opening and then I did research and found out about the Civil Liberties Act, and I went out and bought a copy of the commission report, the Personal Justice Denied, and had read all that. But I was aware of the internment program, period.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2019 Emi Kuboyama. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 5>

EK: What, in your mind, were some of the biggest challenges that the office faced, and how did they work to address or overcome them?

TC: Well, a lot was just the logistics and the fact that there were so many elderly individuals and that there may be some language issues. But it was just astonishing the job that Bob Bratt and the initial group did to identify and locate the people. It was amazing. And then I guess when I first came aboard and then the first challenge was about the constitutionality of the Act. So we were glad to win that, but it was a very unique chapter.

EK: What would you say, on a personal level, were some of the takeaways from your time at redress?

TC: Oh, it was just... it was just a fantastic group to work with. I mean, everyone in ORA gave their best. There was a standard of excellence, everyone just cared so much about the program, so it was a pleasure to come to work, to be with the people, it was also fascinating to learn about the history and some of these other little nuggets of history you didn't know. Then another special relationship was with the JA community and going out and meeting so many people. There were a few individuals who were just tremendous, one of them was Sox Kitashima from San Francisco, and she was a petite woman, but just a dynamo, and she was so helpful. She found some homeless individuals who were eligible and was able to get an address for them and work with them to get them paid. Another strong supporter was Kay Ochi, who was in Los Angeles. But, I mean, the people in the office and the people in the Special Verification Unit, it was really unique and special.

EK: So continuing on that line, what personal impact did it have, working with this office?

TC: Oh, I mean, it was just very rewarding and fulfilling. It was such a unique opportunity, and I know some of the colleagues in Justice who defended the department in lawsuits. They seemed somewhat envious about the special role that I had, and the ability to go out and provide an apology letter and benefits to these individuals who were harmed during this period in history. So there were many people who felt this was a really, really special opportunity, and I agree, it was.

EK: Do you think a program like this could happen today?

TC: Oh, yes. I mean, I think it is happening. Part of my knowledge that I learned from redress with the World War II archival research information, I was able to [then] have other opportunities at Justice. I went to the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission [note: originally misidentified as the "Federal Claim Service Commission"] and worked on their program for the Holocaust survivors because I was helping to do research for that program. And then there was a similar World War II report about Guam and what had happened in Guam, and I worked for research in that and then drafted the report for that. And then based on the report that we wrote several years ago, recently, maybe last year, the Guam Compensation Act was passed, and so they are getting compensated for injuries that happened to them during the war. So, there were a number of opportunities, and I know other programs, Justice, the Civil Division, is working on the Vaccine Act, there's a more recent, the 9/11 Compensation Fund. And during redress, the Civil Division contacted me to discuss our procedures about identifying potential claimants and how we resolved issues about the correct statutory heirs, and that was for their radiation program. So I worked with them a few times on that, and then again I'd worked with the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission.

EK: Thank you.

[Interruption]

EK: Tink, could you continue talking a little bit more about some of the other programs?

TC: Yes. I think before I came aboard in 1991, a group from the Japanese Canadian redress had stopped by ORA to see how things were being processed here, and there was information about it. I think they also called us later on. And then it was interesting to learn about what had happened in Canada, that I did not realize that something similar had happened in Canada that about between twenty and twenty-five thousand Japanese Canadians were evacuated from the West Coast. And they started also paying compensation, I think, in the late '80s. And then something I found interesting was that Canada had the internment camps until 1949, until a few years after the war ended. And then the one other aspect that came up out of the Japanese American redress, is that there was a law passed about the Italian Americans, and it required the attorney general to draft a report in less than a year just to describe the circumstances of the Italian Americans during World War II in the U.S. And then I think no one in the Justice Department realized about it for the first few months, and then all of a sudden they said, "Oh, you have eight or nine months to finish this report." And so what happened is that they contacted the AAG for Civil Rights, spoke to the executive officer who was, DeDe at the time, DeDe Greene, and said, "Can you collect some of the former ORA staff to do this Italian American research?" and we said, "Sure." And we had a lot of the information from the Japanese American program, that there was a lot of things from INS that reflected both the Japanese, Italian and Germans. So a big group from ORA was called back, Joanne Chiedi, I was, Aaron Zajic, Kay Roso and number of them. We were able to get that report out in a year and provide it to Congress, and then it's also published on the DOJ website.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2019 Emi Kuboyama. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 6>

EK: So could you also talk further on your recollections about different Japanese American groups who might not have originally been considered for eligibility under the original legislation?

TC: And I've already mentioned about the former non-Japanese spouses, and they were made eligible by the amendments to the Act. Another large group of individuals who were made eligible later were for the children who were born after their parents' evacuation or after the parents had left camp, and there were several lawsuits about this. There were split decisions in the lower court that some of them held they were not eligible under the Act, and there were one or two that said they were. And so the case in the U.S. Court of Appeals was the name of Ishida vs DOJ. And so that's how we sort of referred to it as the �Ishida Children�. And the appellate court reversed and found that the children had been legally excluded from their parents' original home and deprived of liberty. And with that court case, then the Office of Redress Administration amended the regulation to make them eligible. And I believe there were like several hundred children paid. And another group of children who were found eligible based on a lawsuit were the minor children who relocated to Japan during the war. That was one of the exclusion provisions of the Act, that anyone who returned to Japan during the war was found ineligible. And the suit was named Kanemoto, and it involved fourteen individuals who had been minor children during the war, and who had to go back to Japan when their parents took them back. There were two sailings of the ship Gripsholm during the war, and they were primarily diplomats, but then it was also individuals from the camps. And the children were arguing that they did not have a voluntary choice to return to Japan. But since they were minors that the law should not exclude them. And the department agreed with that position. We made the caveat that if they were emancipated or married, or joined the Japanese government, [or] military, then they would be excluded. But, again, those minor children were made eligible under the Act.

Then another big group of individuals who were found eligible dealt with Hawaii. And the report Personal Justice Denied mentioned the approximately 1,800 internees from Hawaii who were moved to the mainland, but it did not go into these other areas of internment in Hawaii. And circumstances were quite different in Hawaii, that there might be a general order evacuating all people from an area versus an order evacuating only those of Japanese ancestry. So we had to do a lot of additional research to look into the Hawaii circumstances. So the research efforts continued. I know I went to the San Bruno, California [National Archives and Research Administration (NARA)], twice, because they had U.S. military research about Hawaii. We went to the University of Hawaii, Hamilton Library for information. We went to the Army Corps of Engineers in Hawaii, we went to the Hawaii State Archives, and we also hired two graduate students in Hawaii to do research for us. And based on that, some initial groups that had been found ineligible were found eligible. And that was, there was a big group, Lualualei, there was another group called Puuloa, one called Waiau, and then were was one called Iwilel. And then Iwilei was initially found ineligible because all persons of many ancestries were evacuated, and then we later found documents showing that, although most could return to that area, the small portion of those of Japanese ancestry could not. And then there were other small pockets in Hawaii that we would find individual basis, and it could be anywhere from half a dozen people to maybe a hundred, but there were probably more than, like, thirty areas in Hawaii that we later found to be eligible.

One other group that was found eligible were the Arizona residents in southern Arizona. What was unique in Phoenix and Glendale is that there was a major highway through the middle of town. And the north of town was the free zone, and the south of town was the exclusion zone. And so those who lived in the free zone, initially they were not found eligible for redress. And then in researching it and getting more information, we found there had been a significant disruption in their daily lives, where they could not attend schools, they could not go to their churches, they could not go to their businesses. And so the Department made the decision to make that group eligible. And then another large group that was mentioned in Personal Justice Denied were the Latin Americans and Japanese Peruvians who were brought to the U.S. or who were sent from their governments to the U.S. to be interned here and repatriated to Japan during the war. Many of them returned to Japan during the war right after, but several of them had children. Born here in the U.S., they were in the family INS camp in Crystal City, Texas. So the children who were born here were citizens and were found eligible, but for those who stayed in the U.S. after the war, the timing determined whether or not they were eligible as to when they applied for their permanent residency status. There was a difference in the immigration laws, which were very complex, and there were differences between the 1917 law, there was a 1948 law, and also 1952. And depending upon which immigration law they applied under, some of them might receive retroactive status, some would not. So that was a big issue, so there was a lawsuit called Mochizuki, and they filed saying they should be eligible even though there was a group that did not have their permanent residency status. And the government had recognized what had happened to them during the war and agreed to settle for five thousand dollars and an apology. So they did not receive the full twenty thousand dollars, but they received five thousand. And then there was a small group from that who refused to accept the settlement, and they also filed a later lawsuit asking for the full twenty thousand and also punitive damages, and their suit was not successful.

And I guess the last big group of claimants that had been ineligible and then found eligible were the railroad and mining workers. And again, that was another lawsuit called Kaneko vs the U.S. And in that case, both the lower court and the appellate court upheld the Department's decision saying there was no federal government action involved in the firing, but it was the private companies' determinations to fire individuals. And ORA conducted quite a bit of extensive research, we worked with some historical societies from the states, we worked with a number of the railroad companies, and gathered a lot of research, but there was really no smoking gun for the railroad workers. But there was some implication that in being rehired, there may have been army security regulations that might have impacted, and I believe the Department at that time used the benefit of the doubt standard to make them eligible, which gave us greater latitude. Those are the major groups unless you can think of something else.

EK: No, that hit all those different areas.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2019 Emi Kuboyama. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 7>

EK: Tink, are there any others whose contributions you want to mention?

TC: Oh, yes. I know I probably mentioned them briefly, but part of the reasons for the success of ORA were the three administrators, Bob Bratt, Paul Suddes and DeDe Greene. Bob was instrumental in getting the program off the ground and starting it from the four employees to the approximately a hundred, and for the first payment group. I don't think we would have been so successful without him. Paul Suddes was the redress administrator for a few years in the middle. He was also instrumental in conducting a lot of the Hawaii research and overseeing that for us. And then the last administrator was DeDe Greene, who came on in 1994 and then who was here for the ending of the program. And Bob and DeDe were federal career employees at the time, and they both won the federal government's highest honors for senior management, and it's called the Presidential Rank Award, it's for the federal executive managers, and I believe less than one percent of the people get that. And I know at the time, Paul had not been here as long as they had, but all three of them were so outstanding. And just in general, the ORA staff, I know I mentioned it, they were just so talented, they gave their best, and there was like a key group that was there through most of the program. That was Kay Roso, Aaron Zajic, Martha Watanabe, Lisa Johnson, and Joanne Chiedi. There were others I worked with at the beginning of the program who were just so helpful. Alicia West Simpson, Louise Ayres, Phyllis Chappelear, Jay Kim, Cheryl Watanabe, and Meredith Louthridge. And then I also want to give a special thank you to the Special Verification staff, and that was the small unit that I worked with for a lot of the historical research, both for eligibility and for the statutory heir classes. That was Eileen Fukuda, Cynthia London, Angela Gant, Frank Pfeiffer, Cora B. Shelly, Bella Kang, Hagos Lemlem, and then one attorney, Joe DeSanctis, he was here for a few years. And then, Emi, I want to thank you, because you were here for a few years for that. That it was a very outstanding special program.

EK: So are there any final thoughts or stories that you'd like to share?

TC: Yes. I was, in attending some of the workshops, and sometimes you would meet some of the JA community staff over and over and you became familiar with them. But I remember particularly, and what was so wonderful about the workshops is that we brought our laptop with all the information, you could verify somebody on the spot. But on a few different occasions, I would be speaking to a military veteran and they would relate the story about how they had been so proud to join the U.S. Army after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but then once the Executive Order 9066 was issued in February 1942, they were discharged from the military as "unfit." And they had to go back home, and I know one gentleman was saying he was so ashamed and embarrassed, and he started crying. And he just said he was so ashamed at the time, and then what was so meaningful to him is that the Act was passed and they received the presidential apology. And so many people mentioned how significant the presidential apology was as to what happened to them. And so it really helped heal some of the wounds and what had happened from those wrongs from fifty years ago. But that happened more than once with a few of these military veterans, and they would be just so ashamed and they were crying about it. But, so it was a very special part of the program. But it was just, I was so proud to be a part of ORA, and it was a unique opportunity in order to contribute to the program that was such national significance.

EK: Thank you, Tink.

TC: You're welcome.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2019 Emi Kuboyama. All Rights Reserved.