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AT: For the other things that you've done around Seattle, and just in general, I know that you also worked on, more recently, Resolution Three, right?

SS: Yep.

AT: And so what was, I guess, the work that went on, to get that, kind of that ball rolling and things like that?

SS: Oh, yeah, that was another can of worms. So I guess, during the war, JACL nationally had adopted a policy of cooperation with the government. So, basically saying, so we're not going to oppose removal and incarceration. And we're going to cooperate with the government and like, once in the camps, it's like, we'll work with the administration. And so that was the policy and strategy of JACL during the war. And that didn't sit well with a lot of people. Also that JACL was a Nisei organization. The average age of Nisei was like, early twenties. The oldest Nisei were maybe in their thirties during 1942. And a lot of the Nisei, weren't even of voting age, they were still teenagers or something. So, so it also didn't sit well with the Issei generation, because it's like what are all these twenty or thirty year old kids doing, telling us what we should be doing or how we should be reacting? And then there were also people who wanted to protest or were really, really angry, even if they weren't sure what to do. So that ended up coming to a head with the "loyalty questionnaire" because... which was a totally bad idea by the government. But it also might have been a conscious effort. One, I think, on the one hand, I think it was ineptness by the government, because they wanted to have an easy, quick and easy way to say that Japanese are loyal, Japanese Americans are loyal. Because the rationale for taking everybody away is that we couldn't tell who was loyal or disloyal, and there wasn't time. So it was a military necessity to prevent any sabotage or espionage to just move everybody, which even if you think about it, is ridiculous. Like my brother was four years old, my grandparents were in their late fifties and didn't speak any English, or read any English, so it's kind of like, so they're gonna spy on enemy, the U.S. government.

Anyway so... but that that was the rationale given by the army, is that these people are just, it's too dangerous because we don't know who's loyal, who's not loyal, and so we've got to remove them all. So then the WRA wanted to get people out of the camps. It's pretty expensive to feed, house, clothe 120,000 people in cities that you literally build from scratch. So in some... in the WRA was a schizoid organization because there were some people who were really racist, and there were some people who were really liberal. And felt sorry for the Japanese Americans and said this isn't really right so we should do something to try to make things better. So you have this desire to get people out of the camps, either because they want to save money or because they think it was a bad idea to begin with, and we should do something. So they come up with this crazy idea to, "Okay, so let's give us a little questionnaire to determine loyalty." And their expectation was that 99 percent of the people would say, "Yes, I'm loyal," answer "yes-yes." Because the other thing with resettling the Japanese, to take them out of the camps and move somewhere else, like governors, and local officials, these places said, "These people are so dangerous, that you had to take them out of their homes and lock them in a camp in the middle of nowhere. And now you want to put them in our community? We don't want these dangerous people here. So... because they're probably gonna do sabotage or espionage or criminal activity." Kind of like what they're saying about people crossing the southern border now. And so the WRA felt like they had to provide proof that, "Well, we're only sending loyal people out there," and so that was another reason they wanted to do this "loyalty questionnaire." But to their surprise, like, about 16 percent of the people did not say "yes-yes." And that's 16 percent of the adult population people over the age of seventeen.

And then they got sent to the segregation center at Tule Lake, which was the absolute worst of the ten WRA camps, because they turned it into a maximum security prison, double defense, quadrupled the number of guard towers, quadrupled the number of army guards that were patrolling the perimeter. The administration was also really, really bad, very punitive. Had a prison mentality, prison warden mentality, for how to deal with people. So it was just a really bad situation. Then you take... in all the other camps, people were sent from a particular geographic area, so everyone from Seattle went to Minidoka. Everyone from the rest of Western Washington went to Tule Lake. San Francisco people got sent to Topaz. So there was at least some cohesion or sense of community in most of these camps. But then, at Tule Lake, you take everybody from all these other camps, the people who are the most angry, the most resentful, and, and the most outspoken, and then you stick them all in one camp. You have people from San Francisco and Seattle and L.A. and Sacramento and you stick them... who don't know each other. L.A. JAs were pretty different and Seattle JAs who were more urban were really different from people from the Central Valley, who were more farmers and stuff. So it's just, it was just a bad situation. Anyway, so they get stuck in Tule Lake. JACL takes a very bad view of them and says, "Well, these are the disloyal people." They agree with the government that these are the "disloyal" Japanese Americans and they should be segregated.

And then after the war, there's a lot of stigma attached to being a "no-no." Because if you look at the numbers, one in five Japanese Americans ended up going through Tule Lake before and after segregation. Because there were 12,000 people there before, they sent another 12,000 in at that time of segregation, removed six or 7000 of the original people out. So that's a total of 24,000 Japanese Americans who were in Tule Lake. And out of 120, so you're talking... one thousand. So you're talking about one out of five. And I used to tell people, like, if you go into a room full of Nisei and say, "Hey, guys, how many of you were Tule Lake?" you would never see one in five hands go up. Because there's so much stigma attached to it. People wouldn't want to admit it. And so there's all this bad blood because of that, that wartime experience. And so we got to Salt Lake City Convention, and there'd been suggestions or movements to... saying that JACL should apologize for some of the things that they did during and after the war. So the first one was with people who resisted the draft, like the Heart Mountain boys, are the most famous group. Eighty-one, I think, guys at Heart Mountain refused to register for the draft. And all of them said, "We're willing to serve in the army as soon as you release our families from camp, or as soon as you restore my civil rights, then I'm happy to serve in the army. But until you do that, no, I'm not gonna go fight." And they all got convicted, they all got sent to federal prison. And JACL, at the time supported that. Because they really wanted to, because they supported the formation of the 442nd and the MIS, because they felt like we really need to prove loyalty, and the best way to do that is on the battlefield. Because if you do it on the battlefield, then no one can deny it. And the 442 and the MIS had an amazing record and showed immense heroism. So there's no arguing with that. But they also kind of put down the people who resisted the draft. So in 2000, they issued an apology to those people who resisted the draft. And that was a big, controversial thing, actually, a lot of people ended up leaving JACL at that time. A lot of the, especially the ones who were vets, so that created kind of a rift.

So, when we did the apology resolution for Tule Lake resisters, that was also controversial. But I think less so because the population remembered and the membership had changed. A lot more younger people. People who were... who did not live through that experience, because the people who lived through it on both sides, if you're "yes-yes" or "no-no," that whole thing was traumatic, really, really traumatic and very intense emotionally. Even though the Nisei would always deny the emotional impact of it, the trauma of it, it's inevitable. So it was really hard because the feelings are so, so strong among the people who actually lived through it. And there were still some at the convention who were arguing that we shouldn't apologize, "because they were disloyal." [Laughs] And yeah, but we... I hadn't intended to do that, but an op-ed appeared in the Rafu Shimpo. And I think it got reprinted in the Pacific Citizen, JACL paper, about "It's time to apologize, for JACL to apologize to the 'no-nos.'" And then a committee got started up of people within JACL who agreed with that, and said, "Well, we should draft a resolution and present it." And so I kind of got pulled into that and eventually me and Haruka Rotabush from San Francisco kind of became the co-chairs or co-coordinators of that effort. And I ended up being the one who was kind of leading the floor fight at the national council to pass the resolution.

AT: Oh, that's, like just crazy how there's still pushback against that, like in recent years, because it just shows how traumatic that was during the war.

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