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EK: So you mentioned the INS cases earlier. Were there other types of cases or maybe even an individual case where, perhaps, there was insufficient information, or there was, it seemed like you were leaning one way about eligibility and the documentation totally, that you found, totally changed the way that the case was looked at?

AK: Not that so much, but it was the out of ordinary things, like the Latin American Japanese. Who on earth would think that we had interned, that we had brought these people here and interned them? It was such a bizarre thing. And I went to Crystal City, Texas, to research birth records. Because clearly all of those -- and I think there were about two hundred who were born in camp -- those people were very clearly eligible. But then they had their parents, and what happened at the end of the war is some of them were sent to Japan even though they'd never been to Japan in their lives. There were pictures of them wearing sombreros. These were Spanish-speaking people, mostly from Peru. And some of them remained there until, I think, the early 1950s in limbo. And then an ACLU attorney whose name was Wayne Collins, I think, helped them. And some of them, but not all of them, got permanent resident status retroactively, because the U.S. government had bizarrely classified them as "illegal aliens," even though we yanked them up and brought them here. So that was an odd circumstance because I think there were some who were never declared eligible.

And then there were the Gripsholm people, the ones who were returned to Japan. And there were two sailings, and there were lists, but the lists weren't completely correct. And it was very hard to figure out who actually went, and especially the first sailing. We made the Japanese mad because it was supposed to be an equal exchange and our side came up short. The second sailing, to make sure we had enough, too many people were sent to the ship, and so a few were turned back. And this was very hard to figure out because you'd have multiple rosters, nearly identical, but not quite. And in one case, it turned out that a person who had been sent back had gone back to a WRA camp, but not the camp he came from.

EK: And so these were prisoner of war exchanges.

AK: Yeah. And one of the most interesting people I met, I met in Hawaii, was a woman who was a little girl in Honolulu on Pearl Harbor Day. And her dad was picked up and put in an INS camp. And somehow or another, she went with her mother and her aunt to a WRA camp. Her mom died and so she stayed with her aunt. Her dad was to be repatriated, so she was sent with him as a minor. And she was in, I believe, Hiroshima, on the day the bomb fell. And she was safe because she was sick that day and hadn't gone to school, otherwise she probably would have been out on the street and she would have been killed. And she was back living in Hawaii.

EK: So, actually, speaking of Hawaii, there were many unusual cases in Hawaii. Were you involved with researching a number of these Hawaii cases?

AK: Not too much, not too much.

EK: Do you have any other recollections or stories about the research that you did, perhaps on individuals or groups that you want to share?

AK: Maybe in a few minutes I'll think of something else I want to talk about. Oh, and the minors who went on the Gripsholm were eventually ruled eligible because they had to go with their parents' decision.

EK: Right.

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