For Issei, Apology’s Almost Too Late

They were uprooted twice, once leaving their native land to seek fortunes in a new world, the second time imprisoned in disastrous, disturbing fashion by the freedom-loving government of their new home.

Despite their misfortunes, they persisted. They took the jobs they could get, working as truck farmers, restaurateurs, gardeners, laundresses and maids. These were people who took advantage of the possibilities.

Now it finally is possible that no less than the U.S. government will recognize an error and seek first to find the dwindling number of 70-, 80- and 90-year-old Americans of Japanese ancestry, the oldest survivors of what many officials have called the United States’ worst civil rights mistake: the internment camps of World War II.

During the war, Japanese-Americans were forced to evacuate and eventually lose homes, businesses and belongings when they were taken to 10 camps where they worked for minimal wages and lived, crowded and with little privacy, in cold, dusty tar-paper-covered barracks.

But under terms of a reparations bill passed by Congress and signed Wednesday by President Reagan, a formal apology will be issued to survivors among the 120,000 Japanese-Americans interned shortly after Pearl Harbor. A tax-free $20,000 grant also will be paid to each survivor for injustices suffered.

The U.S. Justice Department is to identify and find eligible individuals, the oldest first. They will have 18 months after they receive notice from the government to accept payments, which are unlikely to start until January, 1990, and will continue for 10 years.

Absence of Rancor

So just how are the most elderly of the estimated 55,000 to 60,000 surviving Japanese-American internees reacting to their windfall? With the same stoicism, the same absence of rancor toward the government and the same eye for possibilities that marked their response 45 years ago to their internment.

“Wouldn’t it have been possible for the government to have corrected the wrong sooner?” ask the Issei, or first-generation Japanese-Americans.

“Wouldn’t it have been possible for the government to have offered more for all they have suffered?” they inquire.

And they wonder: “How now can this money help someone else--our grandchildren, perhaps, or churches and charities?”

Bernadette Nishimura, a member of the City Council board on aging, summarizes one oft-expressed view of Issei internees--that Japanese-Americans were fortunate that worse things did not happen to them, though many of them were taken hundreds of miles from their home and imprisoned, based on the possibility, never-proven, that they might have engaged in espionage.

“I’m not angry as I look back,” said Nishimura, who is 74 and spent 1942-45 detained in a camp called Manzanar. “We were just pawns of war. Worse things have happened to people in wartime.”

But couldn’t better things have happened to those who suffered the wrong of internment? asked Mitsuhiko Shimizu, who at 99 still dons a suit and tie six days a week to work at his Asahi Shoe Store in Little Tokyo.

Shimizu sat last week at his desk in an office overlooking the long rows of shoe boxes in his store. When asked about the reparations, he said he would have preferred to receive the payment years ago.

“How long do you think I’ll be living to enjoy the money?” inquired Shimizu, who will turn 100 on Feb. 20. “All the people who were my friends are gone now.”

Shimizu started his current business after the war, having lost an earlier shoe store because of his internment. He says a $20,000 payment now hardly will compensate him for his losses.

“It’s better than nothing, but it’s not enough to make up for the damages,” he said.

Seiko Kawabe, an 89-year-old, apron-wearing volunteer at a Little Tokyo senior citizen’s lunch program, agreed.

‘I’m Lucky to Be Alive’

“They definitely should have paid us long before this,” Kawabe said. “I feel I’m lucky to be alive, but many who went into the camp and who suffered have long since died.

“I feel we’re definitely entitled to it,” said Kawabe, who spent 2 1/2 years at a camp in Poston, Ariz. “Not only did I lose all my belongings, but the anguish I had through all of that was terrible. . . . We even thought that we might be exterminated. That was the thing that we worried about most.”

The internment caused great sorrow for many Japanese-Americans, said Bernadette Nishimura, who was born in Japan in 1913 and came to the United States 7 years later.

She was married in 1939 and said 3 1/2 years of incarceration in Manzanar left her husband “psychologically . . . afraid to mingle among the rest of the population.”

His state forced her husband to forsake a successful wholesale produce house he had established before the war, Nishimura said. He turned instead to gardening, work that proved unsteady. He eventually took a job as a gardener with the Department of Water and Power but died at 59 in 1969.

Shimizu also suffered discouraging losses during the war, though he fared better than Nishimura did.

Shimizu, who was born on Feb. 20, 1889, in Wakayama, Japan, arrived in Vancouver, Canada, in 1909, and made his way to Los Angeles three years later.

Taking advantage of his ability to speak English, he started a shoe store with a friend in Little Tokyo. By the time the war began, he and his wife had four children ages 17, 19, 21 and 23. They lived in a five-bedroom Boyle Heights home.

A Community Leader

On the evening of Dec. 7, 1941, the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, two FBI agents came to his home and told him they had to take him into custody immediately because Shimizu, who had been president of the Japanese Chamber of Commerce, was a community leader.

His fearful family recalled the agents were suspicious of Shimizu and even followed him into his bedroom while he changed clothes. Shimizu was forced to leave Los Angeles without disposing of his store’s stock, which was sent to Manzanar where it was sold at government-set prices.

When he returned to Los Angeles after 3 1/2 years’ confinement at Manzanar and other camps, Shimizu started a new store. Because of his record with them, the Florsheim Shoe Co. offered him credit. Shimizu’s loyal prewar customers returned. Excluding his years in internment, Shimizu has been in business in Little Tokyo for more than 70 years. His son and daughter run his store today.

Although they suffered in the internment, the Issei have their reasons, which are not surprising, for being so reluctant to criticize the U.S. government, experts say.

That is because the Issei understand the United States was at war in 1941 when roughly a third of the Japanese in this country were not American-born citizens. They “were enemy aliens, the immigrants from Japan,” said Yuji Ichioka, a historian and research associate with the Asian-American Studies Center at UCLA.

“Some immigrant leaders were fully aware of what had happened to German-Americans during World War I,” said Ichioka, author of a recent study of Japanese immigrants from 1885-1924 called “Issei.”

“A whole attack on hyphenated Americans was directed against Germans in (World War I). . . . There were a couple of lynchings. . . . Some Japanese-American leaders said that if war should come, we have to anticipate that we will be treated worse than the Germans were during World War I. It’s a realistic kind of approach, which doesn’t mean they liked what happened to them. . . .”

“The other thing is that . . . since postwar conditions improved, many of the discriminatory barriers came down and Japanese-Americans, especially in 1960s, were able to clearly move into the middle class and achieve a measure of success which up until the 1950s had not been conceivable.”

Ichioka noted that a 1960s movement, the drive for civil rights, benefited Japanese-Americans, giving them “a kind of mental space to say there was nothing wrong with us. Let’s go back and see what happened” during the internment.

The reparations movement that developed in the decade of the 1970s only now, late in the 1980s, holds promise for thousands of younger Japanese-Americans. Many Issei say they are too old to spend the $20,000 on themselves and plan to give it to their grandchildren, churches or charities.

“I don’t need much money in here,” said Tamiko Matsuno, 91, who lives in the South Bay Keiro Nursing Home in Gardena.

“My children have always taken good care of me,” said Matsuno. “I would like to share it with my 15 grandchildren. Of course, it doesn’t go as far with 15.”

Satsuki Shimamoto--an 88-year-old, Hawaiian-born Issei who lives at the Little Tokyo Towers Inc., a senior citizens residence and retirement home--observed: “I go to church and I do contribute to many churches. When I die everything goes there.”

Though the Issei think the reparations are late in coming, the payments reassure them about their faith in the U.S. government, they said.

“I think that is the correct way for America to show it was sorry that it did what it did, especially to U.S. citizens,” said Yuki Oishi, 85, who was born in Oakland but lives in Los Angeles.

Fumiko Takei, 75, cried as she noted that if the payment had come earlier, she could have spent it with her husband before he died in 1979.

But Takei, who spent three years in camps in Rohrer, Ark., and Tule Lake, Calif., said she is not bitter.

Takei, the mother of actor George Takei, said: “I look back and still I’m grateful to America. I’m so happy to have lived my life in the U.S. I’m happy because of the opportunity it offered my children.”