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EK: Emi Kuboyama with Stanford University. It's September 12, 2019, and we're here in Alexandria, Virginia. Good afternoon, Alice.

AK: Good afternoon, how are you?

EK: I'm fine. Why don't we get started with you introducing your full name and your Office of Redress Administration role or title?

AK: My name is Alice Kale. And I have to say, before I say anything, I'll be answering from memory, and some of those memories are a little dusty. And one thing I was sitting here thinking about is I had a title and I don't remember what it was. But I was with ORA from the very beginning, before we were even ORA, when we were just some people in the administrative office, the Executive Office in the Civil Rights Division. And Bob Bratt, our Executive Director, had gotten very, very interested in Personal Justice Denied and the legislation, and he really, really, really wanted to run this program, which could have really landed in any available spot in the Civil Rights Division. Civil Rights was a very natural home, but the administrative office, not necessarily so. And he went out and got it for us.

EK: Could you talk a little bit more about your professional experience before you started working with the office?

AK: Yeah, I had been with the government for I don't know how many years, and I worked at several agencies. I worked at Treasury, at GSA, Defense, and I had decided I wanted to work part-time. And so I was working with the Civil Rights Division doing things like administrative studies, I was management analyst. Writing publications, writing this, that and the other. And I was working very closely with Bob Bratt and Shirley Lloyd. And when this came along, I was somebody he might naturally ask to go fetch something. Go fetch something, and the first thing he asked me to fetch, the camp rosters. He knew they were at the Archives, but he didn't know really where. The Archives is an enormous place. And so the afternoon he asked me, I made a few phone calls, found the rosters were right next door, and he and I went over and looked at them for the very first time. And from that point on, I was with ORA. And we were, of course, first the Office of Reparations Administration, very temporarily, and we found that name was offensive. So within the first, I don't know, two or three weeks, we quickly made a change, ditched some stationery, and off we went.

EK: So how did you find that it was offensive?

AK: Members of the Japanese American community came forward very quickly.

EK: What do you recall about the passage of the legislation or the time leading up to that period?

AK: I had paid no attention whatsoever, until I saw Bob reading Personal Justice Denied. I was completely unaware of the legislation, I knew about the internment mostly from being a graduate student in a con. law class reading the Korematsu case.

EK: So can you talk a little bit more about your educational experience?

AK: I have a bachelor's from George Washington and a Master's from UVA. And it was during that Master's in Public Administration, during that program, that I took the con. law class. And I also remember, as a child, my father talking a little bit about what a shameful thing it was for the United States to have done that. But those were the only two things, and within days, it was all-consuming.

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

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EK: So what do you recall about those early days when you and Bob and a few others were setting up the office? What were you thinking about? What resources or types of people or skills did you think would be involved?

AK: At first it was very hard to tell. We knew we had to have an attorney and that was Valerie O'Brien. We knew we had a lot of study and research to do. We knew we were going to need computer support, and that we were going to need a lot of operational machinery. But the first few days or a month or so was such a steep learning curve. You know, it seemed like, if you looked at it just on the surface, 120,000 people who were interned in camps. And as we learned on that first day when we were at the Archives, that's a piece of cake. That was all recorded meticulously, and it was a matter of locating the people. But then we started to realize there were many, many more issues. And all of us who were initially involved were very concerned that the Justice Department did the right thing. Because after the war, as you know, there was a piece of legislation to compensate the victims. It was handled by the Civil Division and I don't think it was necessarily their fault. But I think it was the legislation, it was an administrative nightmare. And they (former internees) had to produce records they couldn't possibly produce, they had lost everything. How do you have a receipt for anything? You don't even have your high school diploma, you don't have your marriage certificate, and somebody wants a receipt? And so they got paid about ten cents on the dollar.

EK: And as I recall, that was for property only.

AK: Yes. And we didn't want that to happen again. The assistant attorney general was Brad Reynolds, and he was very conservative. And it took some talking to get him to see that this was a broader case, but he eventually went along with it.

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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.

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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.

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EK: So I wanted to move on to some personal reflections. What, having worked so many years on this program, what were your biggest takeaways from that experience?

AK: I think I was amazed that administratively, we could do such a good job. I think we really did an excellent job. Checks went out quickly, as quickly as we could possibly crank them out. We were deep in the business of identifying people, and it was the Justice Department's responsibility to find the people, not to have them apply. We were doing that within days of getting the responsibility for the program. It took a lot of years to get it all done, but it was pretty miraculous and a testament to what the government can do right.

EK: Do you think a program like this could happen today or be established in today's environment?

AK: If the underlying question is compensation for slaves, that would be very different. I think a lot of the administrative procedures could apply, a lot of the efficiencies we achieved could apply, but it would be so much larger and so much more complex that it would be a new thing.

EK: Alice, could you talk a little bit about your involvement with the community outreach efforts?

AK: From the very beginning, we were working with the various organizations, with JACL and NCRR, and some other individuals who weren't necessarily parts of those organizations, but came forward to the Justice Department, we met. And I think we had excellent relationships, and they were so incredibly helpful and so incredibly sharing, and led us to all kinds of things we would have maybe come across on our own, but wouldn't naturally have thought about. The plight of the railroad workers would be one of those things. But very early on, Bob and I met Jack and Aiko, he had made contact. He and I went over to their apartment, which was in Arlington, and Aiko had a big piece of wire, barbed wire from the camp, in the living room on a table. But they had been so involved in the legislation and had done so much research. They were a constant source of information, very, very, very helpful.

EK: And this is Jack and Aiko Herzig.

AK: Yeah, but others were, too.

EK: Were there any other instances where your conversation with the Japanese American community or community organization might have spurred you to learn more about an issue or about a location?

AK: Well, sure, yeah. I went on any number of outreach visits and spoke to groups and so forth and so on. And one thing that I remember getting from them was the situation of the soldiers, the guys who had gone into the army, and they would be on leave and want to go visit mom in camp, and there was a lot of red tape involved. And because they described that situation, we started looking at their potential eligibility. And so quite a few of those guys who had never been interned became eligible.

EK: Were there any other instances that you can recall at this point where that was the case?

AK: That's the one that leaps to mind, but it was very enjoyable meeting them and talking to them and getting their points of view. I know once in a group conversation, where they were talking to each other as well as to me, they were saying and kind of agreeing that for children in camp, life was generally pretty good. It was like being at summer camp all the time, you were there with your friends right next door and doing things together. And then for the old people, it was kind of a safety net, that they seemed to feel comfortable there because they were right with their families and their community, and they knew they were cared for. But it was the ones who were adults, who were yanked out of their working life and lost their homes, lost their jobs, lost their savings.

EK: Were you involved with those first check presentation ceremonies?

AK: No.

EK: No, okay.

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EK: Could you talk a little bit about your day-to-day work when you were doing research? What did a day like that look like?

AK: Well, we started from ground zero, we started reading Personal Justice Denied and went from there. And for me, it involved reading all day every day, everything that was available. Like the DeWitt report was invaluable, it was yea big, and I read every bit of it, most of it more than once. Because the Army was doing what the Army does, and they were being very precise and had tons and tons and tons of very specific information. But then you'd get into the Archives, and one thing would lead to another, and you'd see people in a slightly different circumstance, and then try to follow any thread you have, whether this was an issue with the Defense Department for a period of time, and it might have been covered in memos and so forth and so on, or some other agency might have a series of records that would be of some use. So if you like to read, and I do, it was a ton of fun. It was really, really, really interesting.

EK: Are there any others whose contributions that you'd like to mention that you might not have already mentioned?

AK: Oh, my gosh. Well, Joanne did a fabulous job running this rather unwieldy thing. I think what made it a little different is everyone who was there wanted to be there. We didn't have people... and we had mostly new hires. And so they were there because they wanted to be part of the program, makes all the difference in the world. No one was sitting there bored, no one was sitting there with a jaded attitude, it was really, really, really nice, and very, very unusual.

EK: Do you have any other final thoughts or stories that you'd like to share?

AK: One thing I remember from my trip to Crystal City. Crystal City, Texas, is right near the border, and it's a very poor town. I got there and I asked directions, how many blocks was this courthouse I was going to. And this guy looked at me like I'm crazy, "What are you talking, blocks? It's that way, that way." And there weren't really any blocks, it was just a paved road, lots of dirt, there was this little courthouse. And they were very, very nice to me. They do close down shop completely for lunch, locked the door, turn out the lights. But while I was there, this guy from the newspaper came over, and he had been there when the camp was there. And his attitude was a little bit different because in his view, the people in the camp were living a lot better than the people in Crystal City, Texas, at the time. Of course, the people in Crystal City were walking around free, they weren't in camp. But I imagine they probably were.

EK: Thank you, Alice.

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