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TI: Okay, so you had just talked about who was there from the JACL. So you've set up the meeting really well, let's talk about now that meeting and how it... describe that meeting.

JT: You know, Dan Inouye was very gracious. We met in the capitol, his capitol office. And you know, you have to be a real ranking member to get a capitol office. We met there, it's a very majestic office, I mean, it has a lot of history, etcetera, long table. And he asked, he told Cliff to sit at the head. Clifford was really taken aback, he didn't know what to do. And I was standing next to Cliff and I was saying, "Go on, Cliff." And he said, "Mr. President, this is your meeting." And so we sat down, and Inouye sat towards the end of the table, and I was sitting a couple of chairs from him. And what we did was present our different proposals: one, the twenty-five thousand dollar appropriations bill, and the Seattle Plan. And I brought Ron Mamiya specifically to present that plan. I didn't want him saying later, "Well, you guys probably didn't do a good job." I wanted him to present it, it was their plan. And right off the top, after they were done, after we were done presenting our proposals, Mineta said, "You know, the IRS thing, it's not going to work. We'd have to get a bill passed," I mean, he gave all the reasons why. And he said, "Good try, but it's really not going to go anywhere." And then we started talking about this twenty-five thousand. Of course, they all knew, the four of them, knew what this was because they're JACL members and they were keeping track. And so we got into this discussion of how to do this, what it would represent. And I sat there and I thought, "It's really interesting, Inouye's not saying anything." This is all Sparky and Norm, back and forth. About how they were going to push it, and how much harder it was going to be in the House. And then about a half hour, forty minutes into the meeting, Inouye says, "Have you fellows thought of" -- he looks at me and he says -- "have you fellows thought about a commission?" And I... I knew that he was thinking of it because someone had told me, because of the Hawaii effort, the bill. They were trying to get a commission to study what happened in Hawaii, the native Hawaiians, that whole thing. And I thought, "I'm really opposed to a commission idea." Someone else had already mentioned a commission to me and said, "Why don't you guys think about doing this?" And I just reacted. So when he said that, my heart dropped. Because I knew if he even mentioned it -- I was hoping he would be quiet through the whole meeting. But I knew the minute he said "commission," we were bound to it. Because that was the most feasible way to get to where we wanted to get. And Mineta said, "Oh, hell, Danny, I don't think that's a good idea. Commission's bullshit." And I just sort of gulped and I thought, "Oh, Mineta's going to take on Inouye, this is going to be really fun." But they talked about it, and then Inouye said to us, "There are certain advantages. One is, you and us, we know it was wrong. I mean, we know the government did wrong. It was unjust, it never should have happened. But the rest of America thinks it was a good thing. And you need to convince the American public." And he said, "I'll guarantee you, most of our colleagues in the Congress believe it was right, and would say, 'We should do this again if we needed to.'" And he said, "So what you need to do is have an investigation, a study. And what we'll do is get a blue ribbon commission. We'll get really distinguished members on the commission, and have them issue a report. Then it's in the government records." And he turned to me and he said, "You've done a lot of research." And I said, "No, not a lot, but I've done research in the Archives." And he says, "What is your view?" And I said, "You can't read documents in the Archives without coming to one conclusion: that it was unnecessary and it was wrong." I said, "Even as little as I've looked at at this point, it was obvious." He said, "So, okay, we know, and you can trust the commission's staff to do research if you get the right researchers. And the other is you'll get publicity out of this, the likes of which you could never pay for. It would be so overwhelming. You'll get national publicity."

And so we went away from that meeting with his advice, with Norm saying, "No," and he didn't like the commission. It wasn't until a week later that Norm finally called and said, "You know, I think Inouye's got a good, good point. I think that's probably the best way to do this. It would be hard to get a money bill through.

TI: And so at that moment, the Senator sometimes jokes that he said, he was afraid that you were going to take away his JACL card.

JT: Yeah, I was pissed. I was really angry.

TI: Because at that point, was it clear what you had to do? I mean, was it still kind of...

JT: Oh, no. It was, in my mind, and in Clifford's mind, it was absolutely clear that we had no other options but to try to get the... or to do the commission strategy. Ron Ikejiri being new in Washington as our rep, and Karl Nobuyuki being the national director, having to have certain kinds of responsible responses to the members of Congress, I think was pretty convinced that that was the way we had to go. We came out of that meeting and I said to Ron -- I was standing next to him as we came out of the meeting room -- I said, "You know, we're gonna get creamed for this. We're gonna get killed." And he said, "It's your job, you're the chair." And this point I was still a volunteer. This was early in my tenure as the redress chair, probably, I don't know, eight months into my chairmanship. And I was running this national educational process, this campaign to try to get it, get the word about the internment out into the public arena, with fairly, surprisingly good success. And so I was battling on that front, and then we got this suggestion. So we came back, and I talked to Inouye and he said to me, "I'm going to depend on you carrying this in the JACL." He says, "They're not going to like it, and," he says, "they're probably going to hate my guts for it." [Laughs] It's the first time I ever joked with Inouye, and I said, "We already do." [Laughs] And he's really good natured. And he said, "Yeah, well, I'm not surprised." So I brought Bill Marutani onto the committee at that point because I needed a conservative vote, and I knew Bill would vote for the commission strategy. And I wrote to the committee, told them what had happened in the meeting, I wrote to the national board, and I held a meeting in early March of, this would be 1979. And the purpose of which was to make a decision: which strategy do we do, the money, the bootstrap, or the commission? And so the committee debated the issue for a day and a half, and it was the toughest committee I ever chaired, because I kept it really, really tight.

TI: Because going into the meeting, you knew kind of what you had to come out with.

JT: Yeah.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.