Senate Debates Paying Japanese-American Detainees

The Senate on Tuesday began debating historic legislation that would pay $20,000 each to as many as 60,000 Japanese-Americans who were forced from their homes in California and other West Coast states and placed in detention camps during World War II.

“This bill is a long-overdue remedy for one of the nation’s worst violations of individual civil liberties in our history,” said Sen. Spark M. Matsunaga (D-Hawaii). “For most Americans of Japanese ancestry who are over the age of 45 years,” the relocation was “the single most traumatic event, the one which shaped the rest of their lives.”

Several critics, including Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), are likely to offer amendments to weaken the bill, which would cost up to $1.2 billion. An aide to Matsunaga said Helms has drafted several amendments intended to reduce the proposed payments or eliminate them altogether.

Simon Supports Bill

But one supporter of the bill, Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.), said: “There is no basis for watering down this bill. The historical injustice is clear and the U.S. Congress has the responsibility to act.”

The bill’s sponsors are predicting that the Senate ultimately will approve the bill by a margin equivalent to the 243-141 vote in the House last year.

The bill is designed to make amends for the period after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, when the U.S. West Coast was swept by fear that another Japanese attack was imminent. President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved an order giving military commanders the power to exclude “any and all” persons from certain areas to protect against sabotage and espionage.

Mandatory Evacuation

Several months later, the federal government required the mandatory evacuation from the West Coast of all individuals of Japanese ancestry. Without benefit of hearings to determine their loyalty, individuals were required to report to so-called assembly centers and then taken to relocation centers throughout the interior of the country.

During the next four years, more than 120,000 people were relocated, of whom 77,000 were American citizens. The rest were legal and illegal resident aliens.

Most of those taken from their homes were given short notice, in some cases as little as 72 hours, and many had to leave behind virtually all of their belongings. Many were forced to sell or lease their personal or business real estate at substantial losses.

Although most of the evacuees spent the duration of the war in the camps, often under Spartan conditions, about 35,000 were able to leave after taking a loyalty oath by joining the U.S. Army, accepting employment or attending college outside the West Coast. The exclusion policy officially ended in December, 1944.

Redressing Grievances

The legislation debated by the Senate would implement the recommendations of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, which was formed by Congress in 1980 to redress the grievances of the Japanese-American citizens who were detained in the camps.

Members of the commission determined that the detentions “were not justified by military necessity” but had instead been ordered because of “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.”

The panel estimated that, as a result of the detentions, the evacuees lost between $149 million and $370 million in property and income--between $810 million and $2 billion in 1983 dollars.