U.S. Reparations Too Late for Many Internees

Forty-seven years ago, Edna Uraguchi was a housewife in Los Angeles. Then suddenly, Army officers took her to a camp called Gila River in Arizona, and she became a statistic--one of 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry interned during World War II.

Sunday, Uraguchi, now 76 and a retired barber, was one of 400 attending the annual Day of Remembrance for those who were incarcerated.

This might have been a celebration of sorts, since former President Ronald Reagan had signed a law last August for redress in the form of $20,000 payments to those interned and a formal apology.

Instead, Uraguchi and others attending the event at Los Angeles Trade Technical College in downtown Los Angeles said they felt frustration. The federal government is not moving fast enough to implement reparations, they said, and given the age of many of the internees, time is running out.

Many Have Died

About 1,200 of the estimated 60,000 surviving internees have died since the law was signed, according to Robert Bratt, director of the Office of Redress Administration in the U.S. Department of Justice, and one of the speakers Sunday.

“Everybody says, ‘Oh, you’re going to get all that money,’ ” Uraguchi said. “But I don’t know if I’ll be here that long.”

So far President Bush has not made specific recommendations on the payments in his budget proposal, Bratt said.

In his final budget, Reagan had requested an initial payment of $20 million--enough to pay only 1,000 people--to begin Oct. 1, 1989. Reagan did not ask for funds to start making payments during this fiscal year, which runs up to Sept. 30.

“We believe there is going to be no difference” between the Bush and Reagan requests, Bratt said.

Former internees said the money--a total of $1.2 billion to be paid out over a 10-year period--should come faster.

“A wrong has been recognized, but it has not been redressed,” said Alan Nishio, co-chair of the California-based National Coalition for Redress/Reparations, the organizers of Sunday’s program.

“It will not be redressed until those who have been wronged are compensated,” added Nishio, a 43-year-old college administrator who was born at the Manzanar internment camp in California’s Owens Valley.

“The first generation are all in their 80s, 90s or even 100s,” said Frank Emi, a 70-year-old retired postal worker who was interned as a young man at a camp called Heart Mountain in Wyoming. “Half of them will be gone by next year.”

Jim Saito, a 66-year-old Westside resident, who was incarcerated at a camp in Colorado, said he was “bitter” and felt that without prompt payment, the redress bill “is a bunch of rhetoric. . . .”

“Remember the old saying, justice delayed is justice denied,” he said.

During a candlelight commemoration part of the program, organizers hung placards containing the names of 300 former internees from Southern California who had died recently. Sunday was also the 47th anniversary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s order to authorize internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry.

Bratt, a speaker along with Assistant U.S. Atty. Gen. James Turner and Rep. Robert Matsui (D-Sacramento), said his office has so far confirmed the identities of 45,000 internees through Social Security, motor vehicle or tax records. A search is under way for several thousand others, who are believed to be living in Japan or Canada, he added.