Bittersweet Harvest : Horrors of Internment Spur Survivor’s Fund-Raising for Restitution Bill

Four years ago, Harry Kajihara of Oxnard concocted a fund-raising tactic that he felt would surely pull at the heartstrings--and the purse strings--of three generations of Japanese-Americans.

He called it “the Shame Chart,” and it revealed which branches of the Japanese American Citizens League were not contributing enough to the lobbying effort for legislation to compensate Japanese-Americans interned during World War II.

The league, a civil-rights organization, was founded 55 years ago to stem prejudice against Japanese-Americans.

At the time of Kajihara’s fund-raising chart, some warned that it would be more offensive than persuasive, but he published it in the league’s newspaper anyway--and it worked. So did countless personal appeals from Kajihara, a Ventura College engineering professor who had been interned himself. He raised $40,000 locally and another $300,000 nationwide during one three-year period, more than a third of the $1 million the organization has amassed in the last four year.

In fact, his bag of fund-raising tricks worked so well that Kajihara was elected president of the 29,000-member league and became a key force behind the passage of the bill in the House last month.

The bill is expected to clear the Senate by the end of the month, but aides to President Reagan are urging a veto because of its $1.6-billion cost. Detractors also object that, in the words of Rep. Daniel E. Lungren (R-Long Beach), the measure would send the message “that the dollar sign is the only genuine symbol of contrition.”

Others question the equity of a bill that would compensate former internees equally without regard to the widely varying lengths of their internments. Still, the redress movement cannot fail, Kajihara says, even if it is defused by a presidential veto.

“We’re in a win-win situation,” he said. “If Congress had given that $20,000 one week after the bill was first introduced in 1982, this would be a forgotten issue. But $20,000 is just enough money that the congressmen are shaking their heads, saying, ‘Shall we? Shall we not?’ And that’s gotten the American people aware. This reminds people to never do something like this again.”

Ten weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized military commanders to round up Japanese-Americans living along the West Coast and detain them in 10 desolate inland camps, where they were guarded by military police. At the time, the federal government contended that the internment was justified by military necessity, even though citizens with Italian and German surnames had not been similarly detained.

A committee appointed by Congress concluded in 1982 that racial prejudice, war hysteria and failure of political leadership--not the dictates of national security--were to blame for a grave personal injustice to the Japanese-Americans. The internees suffered enormous damages and losses, both material and intangible, the commission said, recommending a public apology and $1.6 billion in compensation.

Not only farms, businesses and homes were lost, but careers and professional lives were disrupted for years, creating long-term loss of income, earnings and opportunity.

Kajihara’s opportunities--and those of 20,000 others interned at the Tule Lake relocation camp in Northern California with him--were blocked for more than three years. The son of a fisherman, Kajihara was president of his school and shortstop on its baseball team in Oyster Bay, Wash., when the town’s 10 to 15 Japanese-American families were ordered to report to the state capital.

They were incredulous. “We were way out in the sticks,” Kajihara remembers. “How could we be a threat?”

FBI agents visited the Kajiharas’ houseboat, confiscating what they believed could be the tools of espionage: a radio and a camera. Friends offered to adopt Kajihara, who was then 13, but the effort was thwarted. “The government told them that I was a jeopardy to my country,” said Kajihara, now 59. “I was heartbroken.”

The family packed up as many of their belongings as could fit in three suitcases and a canvas bag. Kajihara still fights back tears when he remembers parting with his favorite possession.

“I had a desk I was so proud of,” he said. “It was very thick wood with an old-fashioned drawer and a battery-powered radio at one corner. I would sit up until 1 o’clock at night with the Seattle Rainiers and pretend I was playing. If there was a home run, I hit it. If the batter was left-handed, I switched my grip.”

No School for a Year

During his first year at the camp, there was no school. Sand and scorpions invaded the unheated one-room cabins where families slept on Army cots. Food was so scarce that a thin slice of bologna and a scoop of rice served as lunch. Later, there were food riots.

Like many of his generation, Kajihara said, he chose not to think about the experience, devoting himself to a successful career as civilian engineer with the military and later as a professor of mathematics and engineering. He was drafted for the Korean War in 1950, but still did not express his anger.

“Even after 45 years,” he said, grabbing at his chest, “it’s knotted down there.”

Kajihara barely realized his own desire to vent those feelings until the ‘60s. Younger Japanese-Americans were looking critically at their parents, asking, “Mommy and Daddy, why did you go off to camp so willingly?” he said.

Then too, the Vietnam protests provided a valuable lesson: “It taught us that, if we raised an issue, then the nation would listen,” he said.

In 1975, the league began pressing for the congressional investigation that led to this year’s bill. Although such organizations as the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Education Assn. have supported the measure, the league has been responsible for most of the lobbying.

The league has indeed been the leader in the redress movement, said Daryl Huff, an aide to Sen. Spark Matsunaga (D-Hawaii), the sponsor of the Senate bill. In 1980, Kajihara reactivated the long-dormant Ventura County chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League with the hope of rallying local support for compensating internees. He then embarked on the fund raising that absorbed him until his election last year as national president.

Kajihara is a graying, soft-spoken man, with the ability to strike up an easy intimacy with new acquaintances. Still, he says, he is not the movement’s most eloquent spokesman. Unable to speak English until he started school, he occasionally lapses into odd turns of phrase or leaves the gist of important points to great flourishes of his gentle hands. “Harry,” he remembers a league member telling him, “you’re a terrible speaker, but I look in your eyes and I can tell your heart is in the right place.”

Does His Homework

Now, Kajihara said, he painstakingly plots every pause in public speeches and then crosses his fingers against the unexpected: “I’m no Lincoln. I have to think things over. If someone shoots a question at me, I’m lost, but an hour later I’ve got a well-thought-out answer.” Grace Uyehara, the league’s chief lobbyist, acknowledges that she’s “known others with much more personality and polish” than Kajihara. But, she said, his hard-work speaks more eloquently than the words of some of the best orators.

“He sends a message to people,” she said. “Anyone who would devote so much time to a cause wouldn’t be doing it if it weren’t going to succeed.”

Others similarly praise his dedication to the volunteer job that is almost full time, taking six hours each weekday and most of his weekends. Cary H. Nishimoto, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge and a former league official, said he expected to be turned down when he asked Kajihara in 1982 to head the league’s fund raising. “Because of the enormous amount of time this assignment would involve, I expected anyone I asked to decline,” he remembers. “But, when I asked Harry, I was persuading him long after he agreed.”

Usually Deliberate

Volunteering was one of the few activities the teacher of such abstruse courses as descriptive geometry and engineering graphics undertook spontaneously. In other ways, he was the picture of deliberation. It was Kajihara, for instance, who sat down in the early 1980s and plotted five pages of actuarial tables that persuaded the league’s leadership to abandon a plan to compensate internees over a 26-year period.

“By that time,” he said, “most of them would have been dead.” Kajihara also was the one who, when directed in 1984 to hurriedly fill the organization’s war chest, instead spent six months conceiving a nationwide fund-raising approach still used by the organization today. Similar to a chain-letter, it relies on 50 “prime solicitors” who dun another tier of potential fund-raisers, and so on. Without the money raised by these efforts, the bill, which failed twice, would not have progressed as far as it has this time, others in the organization said.

Kajihara said his diligence is buoyed by an experience early in the fight. While driving to work one day in 1982, he heard his first commentary by an Anglo urging passage of the legislation.

“I was all by myself, and the tears started coming out,” he said. “This whole camp experience is a very deep wound, and sometimes when the white people say they understand, it’s therapeutic.”