Redress Is a Small Price for Monstrosity of Internment

The relocation and internment of more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II--most of them American citizens--is only a partly acknowledged wrong. Although President Gerald R. Ford admitted so during his Administration, the 1983 congressional Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians reported that not only were rights traduced, but that Japanese Americans lost between $108 million and $164 million in income and between $41 million and $206 million in property for which no compensation was made after the war.

Under the guise of national security and military need, the evacuation violated at least three articles of the Constitution and six of its amendments. Legislation has been introduced with strong support as potential acts of Congress to redress these great wrongs. The commission concluded that the evacuation was motivated by “racial prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.”

The legislation provides for a formal admission of injustice done and an official apology for the infliction of suffering, the establishment of a fund for research and public education activities on the issue, monetary compensation to surviving evacuees in the form of one-time payments of $20,000, and a legislative judgment on the illegality of the relocation decision that cannot be appealed as a court case might be and is, rather, federal law. Full redress would cost taxpayers about $1.3 billion.

Before the House vote, scheduled for today, a few legislators voiced misgivings about the bill, urging that, although a memorial and a national program of education about relocation are appropriate responses, redress in the form of payments to individuals should be eliminated as impractical, too costly and unnecessary. These congressional dissenters urge that a more limited approach be taken.

The stratagem to delete the financial provision from the legislation is a move that would take the truth, power and sincerity out of the redress bills.

The direct payments to individuals are deemed “appropriate compensation” in the language of the document, and, indeed, they are so. The cash endowment is a direct and intimate way of acknowledging suffering, swiftly and measurably affecting the lives of about 60,000 surviving evacuees in a fashion almost as dramatic as was relocation itself. Without the payments, the redress program would be depersonalized and its significance evaded. Moreover, the large outlay of public funds would establish a precedent that would act as a strong fiscal deterrent against any future violation of our constitutional freedoms.

To limit redress to a memorial and educational program would also usurp the collective will of the people who have survived the relocation-camp experience and have been gathering together for many years to devise proposals seeking an official enactment of redress. These bills have emerged as the legislative climax to the long drama of evacuees and their children organizing themselves in pilgrimages to former relocation centers, in days of remembrance, conventions, law caucuses, veterans’ reunions and legal teams to bring the issue before the public. The story since relocation is the chronicle of a group of people undertaking to redress wrongs through reasonable, responsible, informed actions guided by the very constitutional principles of democratic due process that were denied them. The bills and the commission report, then, have been invested with the will of these people.

Redress is now a bill that could be made into law this year, the 200th anniversary of the Constitution. Sen. Spark M. Matsunaga (D-Hawaii) has said that “Congress would honor the bicentennial . . . by passing redress legislation.” The passage of the full bill and its enactment would be a reinvestiture of full citizenship and rights to Japanese Americans. It would bring a kind of peace and closure to a psychic wound. It would be a reaffirmation of the basic document of our democracy in such a way that our country would not only certify its own loyalty to the principles of government by consent of the people but also fix that reaffirmation in the hearts and minds of all Americans as an event central to our history.

Congress has an opportunity to invoke redress as part of the pageantry of our history, and thus correct what was a grim spectacle in a travesty of justice. Redress, in this way, should be seen as it is--a celebration of our human rights and an expression of the will of the people.