Densho Digital Archive - John Tateishi Interview

<Begin Segment 1>

TI: So today is Saturday, July 5, 2008. We're in Denver at the JANM national conference, and we have John Tateishi here. I'm Tom Ikeda, I'm the interviewer, and on camera we have Dana Hoshide. So, John, I'm going to jump right in and really focus on redress. And so the first question is when did you first hear about the idea of redress for Japanese Americans?

JT: You know, in the '60s, I was at Berkeley, and I got wind of it through some people I knew on campus, Japanese Americans. They talked about reparations, there was this thing going on in Los Angeles. But it really didn't amount to much. I mean, this is in the latter part of the '60s, after the civil rights movement. And there was some talk going on on the street, mainly, street activists, guys like Warren Furutani, Alan Nishio, Ron Wakabayashi, a group called EO 9066. This is a, sort of a... I don't know if I'd call 'em left wing, but they were, they were the activists, the more radical group of Japanese Americans, young Japanese Americans, kind of the yellow power raised fists type. And they were talking about reparations. And that was really the first time I'd heard about it. And then I went to grad school, and after I had been in grad school for a while, went to England. Lived in England until '71, came back, and moved to -- my wife and I decided San Francisco. So we moved to San Francisco, and I would hear things every now and then about reparations. I was really interested in the issue and the topic, because it's something that, personally, I had an interest in. But there was no cohesive movement or discussion going on. It was all bits and pieces at the time.

TI: And so when you said you had an interest, I mean, interest in seeing it happen, or just interest in watching the process? What do you mean by interest?

JT: Oh, I definitely had an interest in seeing something happen. Some way to rectify the injustice of the camps. Because I was in Manzanar as a kid, and growing up after the war, I had to deal with all this crap that we had to deal with, the prejudice. Not from only our schoolmates, but teachers, and from adults, the kind of look you get from adults that really kind of burn your soul. And so I grew up feeling somewhere we need to do something, or I need to do something. "We" meaning me or my brothers and me, or my family, or the community.

<Begin Segment 2>

TI: In those really early days, what was reparations and what did that look like in terms of, what was the form that you guys were talking about?

JT: You know, in the early days, in the '60s, when I first heard the word "reparations," I sat there and I thought, "What the hell is reparations?" And it wasn't in the sense of redress of redressing a wrong, as reparations as "make it right." And reparations to me always meant money, 'cause I would hear about black reparations. And so when I first heard the term "reparations" in the community, I thought this was a discussion about money. Subsequently, I learned that it was more the Sansei telling their parents, "You gotta talk about camp." I mean, that's really where the reparations movement was in the very nascent days of what ended up being the redress campaign. And so I would hear the, about these discussions going on in the community. There were never any rallies, any meetings, or anything like that, certainly not in San Francisco, except for the JACL. I joined the JACL because of the redress campaign. In 1970, there was a resolution introduced by Edison Uno and a guy named Ray Okamura, and that really called for more than just redressing the wrongs to Japanese Americans, but redressing the wrongs to African Americans, to Native Americans, to everybody under this huge umbrella. And that was the kind of person Edison was, that we need to do something as a civil rights organization to correct the wrongs that had been committed historically against people of color. And he never... you know, I knew Edison fairly well, we became pretty good friends. He never set boundaries for injustice. He always felt that whatever was wrong, any injustice that was occurring, or that had occurred, if an individual had the will or the power or a way to try to correct it, and to help those who couldn't help themselves, it was a personal responsibility. And Edison was a true civil rights activist in that sense. That, along with a man named Clifford Uyeda, Dr. Uyeda, who became one of my closest friends, the three of us would talk about this notion of reparations. And the JACL, it was a very -- I wouldn't say it was codified, but it was certainly an issue that was discussed as a major concern of the organization.

Once Edison introduced that resolution in 1970, and then in 1972, it was brought up again at the JACL convention. And JACL meets every two years, so in '72, '74, '76. In '74, the convention in Portland, it was significant because the issue of compensation came up. That really codified the issue around a focus of what reparations would be. And then in 1976, the convention in Sacramento, that was the first convention I ever attended in JACL. I joined in 1975, became very quickly involved with the Northern California District Redress program, mainly by criticizing. You know, I'm one of those people who can't keep his mouth shut. If something's wrong, I get really impatient. And I went to a district council meeting, and there was a guy who gave a report. Well, my wife had gone to a district council meeting three months earlier and told me about this report that had been given. So I'm at this next meeting, and this guy gives this report, and I raise my hand and I say, "You know, I wasn't here the last time the council met, but according to what my wife told me about your report, this is the same report." And he got a little uncomfortable and said a few things. I said, "In other words, you haven't done a damn thing." And he laughed, it was a real jovial laugh, and said, "Yeah, well, I guess that's it." And he says, "But actually," he said, "I need to resign because my work is becoming too time consuming." And during a break, he came up to me and he said, introduced himself and he said, "Would you be interested in the chairmanship?" And I said, "Yeah, absolutely."

TI: And at this point, was this a volunteer position?

JT: Yeah. And that was Mike Honda. And so Mike and I became very good friends from that point on. And when I took over as the Northern Cal District chair, I asked Mike to be on my committee.

<Begin Segment 3>

TI: So it sounded like the whole issue of reparations and then later on calling redress, really evolved over time.

JT: Yeah, it did.

TI: I mean, you first talked about it been more about just getting the story out to make sure that happened, and then pretty soon money started, was talked about. And then '74 is when it really was put on the table a dollar amount. The other thing that was evolving was the scope of this. Edison's first thoughts was very broad, beyond what happened to Japanese Americans, but with African Americans and others. And so it's... I just love to capture this because it's... people sometimes don't get or understand how these things progress over time, and in some cases, how an individual can really influence what shows up at the very end. I mean, it goes through all these, sort of, turns in the bends and things like that. So you started the JACL in 1975 as a staff person?

JT: No, no.

TI: This was just joining?

JT: I just joined as a member.

TI: As a member. So why weren't you a member before 1975?

JT: Oh, 'cause I hated the JACL.

TI: Talk about that.

JT: Well, my father, my father was a Kibei. We were at Manzanar. I grew up in Los Angeles, we were in L.A. before the so-called "evacuation" took place. There were meetings being held after Pearl Harbor was attacked, in communities. We lived in west Los Angeles. My father -- you know, Kibeis were very different from the Nisei, they were very outspoken. They didn't take crap from anybody. They're kind of like Hawaiians in that sense, Japanese Hawaiians. But anyway, there were these meetings that were taking place, and as I understood it, my father was always very critical of the government, of these restrictions that were being imposed one after another. And then there was that big meeting where the JACL made that decision to cooperate. And then the word got out in the community, and there was this big meeting in Los Angeles. And my father -- I heard the story from a few different sources, and then confirmed it when I was running the redress campaign. I did a lot of research at the National Archives and came across this document about Tateishi doing this and saying this. But my father got up and said that the JACL was selling us out, that we cannot cooperate, this is wrong, we're Americans. And I don't know if it was Mike Masaoka or George Inagaki, one of them said something about, "If we don't cooperate, there'll be violence." And my father's view was, "Let there be violence. Let them shoot and kill some of us. And in fact, if they want people up against a wall, I'll stand there," and challenged whoever was leading the meeting, that, "You stand there with me. The men need to do this, and let them kill us. Because then this country will know what's happening." But, of course, that didn't happen, and we ended up at Manzanar. My father hated the JACL, I mean, despised the JACL because of that one moment. And then in camp, the Kibei were sort of disenfranchised by the JACL. You know, the JACL being what it is or what it was, became sort of the quasi-government of each of the camps. And they set up the structure, they assigned the jobs. And the Kibei got the crap jobs, you know, the garbage collectors, the guys who worked on the sewers, and the people who worked in the mess halls.

Well, my father was in one of the mess halls on our block, and there was a man with him in the next block, a Harry Ueno. And together they discovered that the government, or the administrators at the camp, at Manzanar, were stealing some of the supplies that were meant for the internees. And so they decided they would confront the chief administrator, which they did, and they both ended up getting thrown in the jail. And that occurred right, simultaneously almost, as the "Manzanar riot" broke out. And it was a bloody riot at Manzanar, and people got taken away, some of the Kibei. I mean, these were mainly Kibei who were rioting against the JACL. Not against the administrators or the guards, they were rioting against the JACL and the bad treatment by JACL of the Kibeis. And, you know, the inu and selling us out, all of that. And my father and Mr. Ueno were in the... I guess some kind of a jail at the camp. They weren't in the jail, they were being held. Then when the riot was over, they took twelve people away, among them, those two. Didn't hear from my father for about four months. And after a year, he returned to Manzanar right before the war ended, right before we got out. And my father never forgave the JACL for any of that. You know, before the war, during the war, the treatment of the Kibei. And he was a really principled man. I mean, he was a man who really believed that -- and he used to say this to me all the time, my brothers -- "You have to live by your principles, and if you have to, die for them." And he just felt that you don't sell each other out in the community, ever.

TI: And yet, so with that background, with that context, you joined the JACL.

JT: I grew up hating the JACL. You could not mention that word in our household. My father would go in a rage.

TI: And so in 1975, was your father alive?

JT: Yeah, he was alive.

TI: And so what was his reaction when he heard that you were joining the JACL?

JT: We lived in Marin County, which was really a homogenously white area. Very outdoorsy, I mean, you know, it's a place that you live if you like the outdoors. And we did, so we chose Marin County, and there was a meeting of local Japanese Americans who wanted to start a group. And I said to my wife -- it was in the local paper -- I said, "That smells like JACL. I want nothing to do with it." But she wanted to find where the Japanese lived in Marin County. So she was gonna go to the meeting, and I said, "Fine, but I want nothing to do with this." And the day of the meeting, my son got sick. He was two years old at the time. So I went to the meeting -- I guess he was about five, I don't know. Anyway, I went to the meeting, and indeed, it was the JACL organizing a chapter in Marin County. I was really critical and said that there really wasn't a coherent need for it that I understood, and if they knew of a reason why, to tell me. Or is this just to get more members and more money? And so -- and all the big wheels of the JACL were there. David Ushiro, who was the national director at the time, and Don Hayashi, who was associate director. The governor of the district, and, I mean, all these people. They explained why it was so important. And I kept asking, "Well, what it is your after? Is it the money from membership or what?" And no one could really understand or explain to me why there was a need for a chapter. So at the end of the meeting they said, this guy who was running it, he's a Sansei guy, said, "All right, let's meet again to discuss it." And I said, "See? That's the problem with JACL. All you guys do is talk, and you don't do anything. No action." So he asked me what I thought they should do and I said, "Why don't you form a steering committee and form a chapter? If you're going to do it, do it. Otherwise, stop talking." And so he asked me to be on the steering committee. And when we met, I said, "I think we ought to just write a check. Let's form a chapter right now," which we did.

I went home, I told my wife, and she said, "You better tell your dad." And it just hit me like a truck. I thought, "Oh, God, I can't call my dad and tell him this." I think it took me about two weeks to get up the nerve to call him. And I said, "You know, I joined the JACL. I need to tell you that, and you need to know." And there was this long pause, and I said, "The reason I did it is because JACL is talking about reparations, and I think that's where it's going to happen." And then he said, after this long silence, he said, "That's good. What you need to do is make sure they do more than just talk about that, that something happens." And in a way, it was his way to forgive me for doing something he thought was unconscionable. For decades, he'd felt that.

<Begin Segment 4>

JT: And so then I got involved with reparations, I got to know Edison really well. And Edison's the one who told me, "If it's going to happen, it's going to happen in the JACL. All this other stuff is fine, but it's only gonna happen in the JACL, that's where it going to start." And then I got to know Clifford Uyeda, who was also a community activist, really a wonderful, wonderful man. And Clifford really distrusted the organization. He had been involved in several issues that were relevant to the JACL, but would not get involved with the organization. The most telling was when he led the campaign to get an exoneration for Iva Toguri for her conviction as Tokyo Rose. Which in itself was really absurd, but, you know, it was a conviction. And so Clifford led this campaign, and the JACL national board invited him to come and do a presentation. And he did, and then they said, "We'd like to have the JACL involved in this campaign," and Clifford said, "No, absolutely not. This is an independent campaign." He didn't trust the JACL. I had very similar feelings, but I joined him on the Iva Toguri campaign, joined him on the whole protest of the Sierra Club boycotting J-town in San Francisco. And so we crossed paths at different points. And I was running the Northern Cal District program, the redress program, and I did this survey. I decided, I started going on media, doing television and radio. And the question always came up... or the comment and question about, "I understand," the hosts would say, "I understand that a lot of Japanese Americans are opposed to this, this reparations thing." I said, "Oh, no, that's not true at all. You know, we're about ninety-eight percent unified on this issue," which was absolute nonsense, because we were split. We weren't even split down the middle, I would say forty-five percent supported redress, and fifty-five percent were against it. It wasn't they were against redress, they were against doing anything, bringing up the past.

TI: So I'm curious, why did you then respond to these radio people...

JT: Oh, I just lied. I felt like I needed to convince the public that Japanese Americans felt strongly about this issue, that we needed to have a unified position on the issue. Otherwise, the public would never buy it.

TI: But within the community, though, they would know that they heard you say that. They'd say, "Well, John's just inflating that number."

JT: Yeah.

TI: And so how did the community react to that?

JT: Well, I remember going to one meeting at the cultural center not long after I had done the program. And this one Nisei guy got up just angry at me and said, "You've been lying to the public about this. We're not in favor of redress." And he said, "How many of you in the room?" And there were maybe a couple hundred people. Said, "How many of you are in favor of redress or reparations?" And a sprinkling of hands went up. And I said, "You're right, I haven't been telling the whole truth." I said, "But you're not opposed to redress, you're just opposed to not having to deal with the camp issue. And that's fine, and I understand that, but at some point, you're going to have to, and this going to happen." And I said, "If we don't, if I don't get out there and give the public the view of Japanese Americans being unified on this issue, it discounts everything camp was about. It tells them that we don't believe we were treated unjustly." I said, "So all of you in here, how many of you think it was okay? How many in the room think camp was okay, that it was right, that it was justified?" And not a single hand went up. And I said, "So what I'm inferring from this is that you don't oppose the idea of trying to rectify the injustice, you just don't want to have to deal with this publicly." And I said, "I've got to tell you, as the chair of the JACL committee here in Northern Cal, if this goes anywhere, you're going to have to talk about it." And I said, "I apologize at this point for forcing this, but you're the only ones who can talk about camp. I can talk about it. Mine was a very different experience."

TI: Still, that was a very bold move, though. I mean, you're really pushing the community faster than they wanted to go. So that's very bold. Again, I mean, it makes sense, but there still must have been a lot of resistance.

JT: Oh, tremendous resistance. I mean, I was, I was really criticized in the community, the JACL was criticized, and there were those who were the more radical thinkers in the community, younger people who had this view of, "How dare the JACL even talk about camp and try to do something like this?" That we had no right in the organization to do this, after all, we're the ones who led the community into the camps.

<Begin Segment 5>

TI: Can we kind of fast forward to when you started working at the JACL? Is that all volunteer, or did you actually become a staff member of the JACL?

JT: I was a volunteer... well, I was the chair of the National Redress Committee appointed by Clifford Uyeda at the 1978 convention in Salt Lake City. We had come to the convention with these guidelines, and Clifford asked me to take the chair, to run the committee. He had changed -- he changed the committee when Edison Uno passed away in '76. And Clifford changed the whole notion of what redress was all about by calling it redress instead of reparations. And what he did was encompass this idea that redress wasn't just about us and about money, but it was about the injustice. And he shifted the focus that way. Or I guess more accurately, really put the focus on rectifying the wrong, which was really important at that point. And so he asked me in '78 at the convention to take over the chair of the committee, which I did, and I launched the committee out of Salt Lake City at our convention. And my idea was to run it as an educational campaign. Because on the one hand, the American public had no idea this had happened. And before we could do anything in the Congress, we needed to educate the public. We needed them at least to know. And my strategy was, okay, we put it out there and let them fire back and say, "The Japs deserved it," and, "They bombed Pearl Harbor after all," etcetera, and then we would respond. That was the whole strategy that I used. And, in fact, that's exactly what happened. As soon as it hit the press anywhere, I'd have the chapter send me clippings or call... days before the fax, days before the computer. So it was all very slow, but as soon as we'd get the word, I'd start responding. And then I'd go to those cities and do media. And I was doing all of this as a volunteer. And in the meantime, we got a bill in the Congress to seek the commission.

<Begin Segment 6>

TI: So let's talk about that. Because right after the 1978 convention, or at the convention, there was a resolution passed to do a legislative strategy.

JT: Right.

TI: And as part of that, you were, you and others from the JACL went to Washington, D.C., to meet with Senator Inouye and Spark Matsunaga, Bob Matsui and Norm Mineta.

JT: Right.

TI: Talk about that meeting. Describe what happened at the meeting. Who with the JACL was there? Talk about that.

JT: What happened was my committee -- the problem with the JACL Redress Committee is it never met. I mean, Clifford brought people together. One of the key people under Clifford was Peggy Nagai. She was a lot of the intellectual thinking, along with Clifford, to what resulted in a book that they did, booklet, called The Japanese American Incarceration: A Case for Redress. And there was a guy named Raymond Okamura from Berkeley who had drafted the resolution that Edison introduced in 1970. So they had set the stage for this whole effort. And, but the committees never met. I mean, that was one of the failings of the redress program from year to year to year to year. And then I took it over, I had five thousand dollars on my budget for two years. And so I thought, "The hell with this. I'm going to use it all up at the beginning and bring in" -- I'm sorry, I had ten thousand, five thousand each year -- "bring in the committee." And I appointed the committee, brought two Seattle people onto the committee, Ron Mamiya, who was a young attorney at the time, and Henry Miyatake, who was a redress activist and really a good thinker. Hard to get along with, hard to deal with, but I had a lot of respect for Henry. And then Min Yasui. Min and Henry hated each other's guts, and they let it be known in meetings. But, you know, I thought I needed both of them. Phil Shigekuni, and Ray Okamura. I was really criticized for not having a representative committee with people from each district, eight districts. I wasn't interested in democracy at this point, I wanted people who were activists and who could get something done. And later, I brought Bill Marutani onto the committee. But first, we met as a committee, we talked about what our direction should be. And the Seattle guys, Henry and Ron, really were advocates for the "bootstrap plan," the tax write-off. Most of us didn't like it. I really didn't like the plan. I thought, "You know, people aren't going to know anything about this. I mean, come on, let's get real." And ten thousand bucks, that to me was... we were slapping ourselves in the face. And you know, it was a really well thought out plan that they had, it just, I thought the method and the amount was wrong. But other than that, I thought it was great what they did. So we met and we talked about it, they advocated bootstrap, and I advocated the twenty-five, the guidelines, twenty-five thousand dollars, an apology, and a trust fund of three billion dollars. That this would serve as a perpetual trust for scholars, for people who want to do, do projects, etcetera.

And so we were talking about all this, and Phil Shigekuni was the one who asked the question: "Gee, maybe we should talk to the JA members of Congress, because they may not like either plan." So I called our Washington Rep. and I said, "I need a meeting." Clifford Uyeda went to that meeting, Karl Nobuyuki, who was the national director at the time, Ron Ikejiri, who was our Washington Rep., and Ron Mamiya. I wanted the Seattle Plan to be presented. I wanted, I really wanted a fair shot at that. And if was gonna get rejected, then they could live with that, I thought, and me.

<Begin Segment 7>

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.

<Begin Segment 8>

TI: Okay, so a day and a half you go through this, talking about three options, and you're trying to steer or manage it to a conclusion of the commission.

JT: Yeah. What happened was, I didn't want any outside influence. So I said, as I convened the meeting, Mike Masaoka was there, Kazuo Shiki, who was a chief of staff for Katzenmeyer, very, very liberal member of the House, and a few others. And the, of course, the staff heads, and Clifford. So as I convened the meeting, I called it to order, I said, "Here are the ground rules for this meeting. Only committee members will be allowed to speak, and only when I call on them." And I'm going to allow debate for a day and a half or something like that." We started on Friday, debated all day Saturday. And I said that, "By the end of Saturday, I'm going to bring this to a vote." And the guys sitting on the side, Mike Masaoka and Shiki, and these others who had a lot of Washington experience were really miffed at me because I wouldn't let them participate. I didn't want them to participate. It wasn't their meeting. You know, what they thought -- they could try to lobby the members later at dinner or whatever. But I was going to conduct this as a very, very tight meeting. I wouldn't even let Ikejiri or Nobuyuki speak. And I, every now and then, I would call on Clifford. He was the national president.

And so I brought it to a vote. I'll be really honest with you -- I've never talked about this publicly. But I arranged the seating to ensure that I would get the vote that I wanted. I had three people I knew -- and I'm going to get killed for this, I know -- I had three people I knew would vote for the commission. Well, that I thought. I was sure that Min Yasui would, I was sure that Bill Marutani would, I kind of hoped that Phil Shigekuni would vote for the commission. Phil was this very gentle guy, really a great thinker, out of Los Angeles, the San Fernando valley. And I had asked him to be on the committee because he was a real activist down in L.A. Part of EO 9066, Inc. from the very beginning, so he had a long history of redress. I thought he would be inclined to support whatever the Nikkei members were suggesting. And then I had Ray Okamura, who I was sure would just reject this idea. And then the two Seattle members, who I knew absolutely were against the commission. So I arranged the seating so I would get the first three votes from... and I took a chance and put -- and it's the only time I ever put name cards at a meeting. I put Phil first, and then Marutani and then Min, and then Okamura after Min. My thinking was I'd get a split vote, and I would have to cast the deciding vote, which was okay. But when I brought it to the vote, I said to the committee, after a day and a half of really tense meeting, I said that I was going to allow them to make a statement for the record, because this is going to be an historic vote. It was going to change the course of Japanese America. And so I let them each make a statement as they cast their votes. And the common theme among the three first votes was that, "We don't like this idea. I don't, my heart isn't with a commission. It's gonna take too long, Issei are gonna die, we're gonna see this stretch out, and we have no control," etcetera. But given the political realities of Washington, they had to vote for the commission. Phil and then Bill and then Min, and then it went to Ray. And Ray just totally trashed the idea of a commission. And then he said the most amazing thing. He said, "But given the realities of Washington," I thought, "Oh, my God, he's going to vote for a commission strategy," which he did. And so we, we had the votes.

TI: So you had the votes even before you voted?

JT: Yeah, I didn't have to vote anymore. I thought I was gonna have to cast the vote that would push it to the strategy for the commission.

TI: And you think that by arranging the progression of the votes, you would possibly influence the others, and that's what happened. So you wanted to have -- I want to understand this. So those guys who were in favor of the commission voted first, and people heard their statements. And your thinking was that would influence the others.

JT: Yeah. I was hoping for a unanimous decision, because this was going to be a very, very tough and very unpopular decision. I knew that. It was going to be extremely controversial. And I kept thinking, "Okay, 1942, JACL sold the community out. In 1979, we're doing the same thing again." But you know, in all honesty, we had absolutely no choice. We had to go with the Commission. There was no way we could do anything else. We could have voted for a money bill, and Dan Inouye would have said, "Fine, I'll do what I can," Sparky would have done what he could, Norm would have tried, Bob would have -- Bob was a freshman, he had no influence. But it would have been killed. It would have been absolutely dead in the water, and I knew that. And so I felt a real commitment to trying to get the strategy they were suggesting as the only feasible way we could reach that point where we would have a money bill in the Congress, and it was this commission. So I called Inouye and Mineta the next Monday, told them what the vote was, and said I was recommending this to the national board.

TI: And what was the final vote? Was it unanimous?

JT: No, not at all. It was four to two.

TI: And the two Seattle were...

JT: Seattle voted against, yeah, the two guys. And you know, at that point, they knew their votes were meaningless. You know, to be really honest, I felt really sad for them. I felt sorry that they were put in a really bad situation, and that they couldn't embrace what this was going to be. And I thought, well, okay, but this is what we have to do.

<Begin Segment 9>

TI: Okay, so, now, John, because of the time, I'm going to jump way ahead.

JT: Okay.

TI: Because you actually just finished a key part that I wanted. The next part is actually post-signing. I mean, it's really a reflection of what redress really means to our country and the community. And so you have to really switch gears here now. But just now, looking back, reflecting, what does redress mean?

JT: You know, in terms of the country, of what we accomplished and what we did for America, it has a huge implication. Much, I think much more than any of us even envisioned as we were doing this. But it was, it was an achievement that had these various ramifications for the future. The Nisei all along said, "This isn't for us, this is for the future." And I think they were in some ways... you know, they understood how this could happen again, even though we all never thought there was a possibility that it could happen again. I think what it means for the country is that we've played a part, the Japanese American community has played a part in strengthening the Constitution and ensuring that no other group in America ever experiences anything like what we had to go through. Post 9/11 tells you that it had an impact. That it was, it was guidepost, a moral guidepost for members of Congress in my conversations with hundreds of them after 9/11, of what was right and what was wrong. That in 1942, the government had no evidence. It was just this feeling that we weren't, we couldn't be trusted, and that we were a danger to the security of the United States. Post 9/11, the words were being echoed again, that we have terrorists among us. Yeah, we do, of course. But we don't know who they are, and you can't indict an entire class of people simply because you think they might do something. That's now America works, that's not how or justice system is set up. So I think what we did is insure the safety of this country for the future. And I think without realizing it and without taking credit for it, it was a magnificent thing that we really gave to the country. And it was the entire Japanese American community.

TI: Talk about redress as it affected the community. What was the impact on the Japanese American community?

JT: Yeah, the impact on the community was enormous. For one, it forced the Nisei to finally shed their fears of talking about it. It was difficult for them; it was awful for the Nisei to have to talk about their personal experiences, to be confronted with the truth. But even more so, to be confronted with the pain, the wounds that never heal. I'd like to think it was catharsis, and I do think it was in a sense because now, where the Nisei wouldn't talk about their experiences, now you can't get them to shut up about it. I mean, they want to talk about it, it's important for them to do so. And so I think for the community, it's been really healthy to have gone through this whole process. As difficult and at times as ugly and as painful as it was, but it's done something for us as a community. And it's made us realize that we have a place in America. That this is indeed where we belong, and we have a right to be here.

TI: Great, well done.