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EK: So can you talk a little bit about your first responsibilities and how that process evolved over the program?

AK: I pretty quickly became the researcher, and stayed in that role primarily, I did have some things to do with the operations as a byproduct of the research. For instance, I went out to Berkeley and discovered in Berkeley that there were these IBM cards from the internment, and there was actually a tape. And from the tape, I realized we could do what we called green sheets. We could use that tape with various data points to come up with eligibility, as long as we had identified someone, we could do that, that was a computer job, and we would not have to try to go through every record and find out if the person was a citizen or a permanent resident alien. Whether they were, in fact, in camp, whether they died in camp, those things, that was all done for us. And so I did have operational responsibilities that were an outcropping of the research.

EK: So you mentioned Berkeley. How was it that you determined what documents might be out there and where they might be? This was all pre-computer.

AK: This was all pre-computer. And as I recall, it was a matter of making some phone calls and going out there just to explore. I don't think... we had no idea this wonderful, wonderful document, this tape, existed. It was a gold mine.

EK: And you just happened upon it?

AK: Just happened on it. Eventually, I think we would have discovered it, but we were very lucky to discover it very early in the process.

EK: So can you talk about where you found these documents early on? What archival repositories did you stumble upon?

AK: Okay. At Berkeley, I don't know where they were. I went to the University of Washington, as I recall, I didn't find a lot there. I found a wealth of Army records in St. Louis, and the INS was actually still keeping their files themselves. And it's a miracle that they still existed, but they were all sitting there in dusty boxes, which was absolutely wonderful. And there was one thing we got from INS that was just fabulous if you haven't seen it. They had a film of the camp in Crystal City. It was sort of a publicity piece about how nice these camps were. But this was an INS camp at Crystal City where we had the Latin American Japanese and some Germans and Italians, but mostly the Latin American Japanese. It was pretty remarkable to see this thing.

EK: So back in those early years, you were looking primarily for evidence of people who were interned?

AK: Who were interned and had been affected in other ways. The interned people, as I said, that was relatively easy. Finding them wasn't quite as easy, but documenting them really was. But then we had all kinds of people, we had the "voluntary evacuees." We had these people in INS camps, we had the railroad workers who had been fired from their jobs, we had the people who had been returned to Japan during the war on the Gripsholm, all these odd things that had to be investigated. And the records were all over the place, they were very uneven. In some instances, you had gorgeous records, and some instances it was kind of a little bit here, a little bit there.

EK: So in gathering these types of documents, are you making hard copies of them? Are they on microfiche?

AK: Oh, mostly hard copies.

EK: So were you just sitting there copying page after page?

AK: Or, and a lot of times borrowing things. Like, for instance, all of the INS, we didn't copy the case files. We didn't have to copy the case files.

EK: And so who were you working most closely with at that period?

AK: Bob Bratt, Shirley Lloyd, and Valerie O'Brien, and pretty soon Joanne Chiedi became part of it.

EK: And during that period, the goal was to just get as much documentation?

AK: Well, early on, one of Bob's goals was to locate people and get checks out as quickly as we possibly could.

EK: Because of the claimants' age?

AK: Well, the claimants' age, and in fairness to the people who had been so badly treated with the first round of legislation, we wanted the government this time to be the good guy, not the bad guy.

EK: Can you talk about how the process evolved? As you mentioned earlier, the folks that were in the camps were much more straightforward than, perhaps, some other cases. Can you talk about, perhaps, the less straightforward cases and how we had to go about that...

AK: Well, for instance, the INS cases, initially, Valerie O'Brien, who was our attorney, said this was a whole different ball of wax. These people were picked up under a different legal authority, and they were picked up for cause. And so one day, fairly soon in the process, she and I trotted over to INS and they hauled out these dusty boxes, and we sat there together reading. And as we read, her take on things changed so much. Because you'd read case after case after case, and the crime they had been picked up for was something like "contributing to the Japanese Red Cross." "Nothing in particular, but the person was a prominent member of the community." "Someone who taught Japanese language." And before the day was over, she said, "These people did nothing. We're not going to try to adjudicate these people, these cases all these years." Of course, most of them were men, and most of them -- excuse me -- were middle age or higher when they were picked up. So many of them were gone.

EK: So what would you say where some of the challenges with researching a lot of these less-typical cases or cases where people weren't in the camps?

AK: With the railroad workers, it was trying to put together a factual case of what happened. There had been some incident, and I don't remember it anymore, on the railroad, that had been blamed on the Japanese or Japanese American workers. And so with the government applying a little bit of pressure, they had been fired from the railroads. They weren't living in the excluded areas. They were middle of the country, East Coast. But the fact was, they had lost their jobs, and there was going to be no more employment for them. But it wasn't just like looking at a case of someone who was in camp, it was trying to go through the historical record and put together who sent what memo to whom and so forth and so on.

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