WRITTEN TESTIMONY
FOR
THE COMMISSION ON WARTIME RELOCATION AND INTERNMENT OF CIVILIANS

The deepest wound that the WW II internment experience gave me was psychological. For almost 40 years in the back of my mind there has been a feeling of humiliation because my government herded me into a desert detention camp surrounded by barbed wires and machine-gun towers. My government questioned my loyalty without giving me a chance. It could not trust me. All these years I haven't felt really certain about my constitutional rights because my government still hasn't changed the law about detention camps. Racist hysteria could do it again for us or other minorities.

When a family doesn't have much to begin with. any economic loss hurts. My father had to hire people hurriedly to run our small skidroad hotel because of the evacuation order. As a result over the three years we were absent, we got ripped off by dishonest help. We felt lucky just to keep a hold of the business. We wanted desperately to have something to go back to.

Then there is redress. If our American government can afford to send millions of dollars overseas to strangers, it can compensate some of its wronged citizens like us, Niseis, in a reasonable manner. White Americans have gone to court to receive monetary compensation for unlawful detention through the years, so why can't we receive equal consideration? We were definitely victims.

I don't want to believe that somewhere in our U.S. Constitution there is an invisible amendment that states that American constitutional rights are for the white American majority only.

So I want my government to rectify a wrong and to tell the whole country that such a thing won't happen again.

[Signed]

Henry Itoi