Justice Delayed : Elderly Japanese Internees Wait for Government to Fulfill Reparations Promise

Once before they were gathered together like this--only in those days, nearly five decades ago, they lived behind barbed wire fences under the watchful gaze of rifle-toting sentries.

Today, these 125 Japanese-Americans, who were interned at 10 relocation camps during World War II, are living out their final years at the Japanese Retirement Home in Boyle Heights.

Lost Homes, Businesses

Two-thirds of the 180 residents of the five-story retirement home were incarcerated during the war because of their race. They lost their homes, businesses and farms because of suspicion that they threatened national security.

Now these former internees, some of whom are in their 90s, often sit in groups playing cards, watching television or knitting, and occasionally exchanging accounts of their days in the camps.

As they walk with measured steps from their sparsely furnished apartments to an adjacent dining hall on Boyle Avenue, where they dine on Japanese-style rice and fish, several former internees recall those years in detention. They talk of promises made, but not yet kept.

They are waiting for letters of apology from the U.S. government as well as monetary reparations of $20,000 per internee for the three years they spent in the relocation camps. But many wonder whether they will still be around when the apology and reparations finally arrive.

Difficult Time Recalled

“I wouldn’t put another person through the hardships we had,” said Dorothy Utsunomiya, 71, as she sat under the shade of a tree at the retirement home.

The small woman, a widow who speaks with a tremble that comes from Parkinson’s disease, recalled what life was like in the relocation camps.

Utsunomiya was 24 when she was sent to a relocation camp in Gila, Ariz. She recalls being forced to live in horse stalls and enduring almost daily sand storms that lasted three hours at a time.

“The experience we went through as American citizens was wrong,” she said.

As she spoke, another elderly woman overhearing the conversation was surprised to find that they had shared the same camp but had never met. Both women expressed fear that reparations may not come.

“I hope to get redress before I die,” Utsunomiya said, “(President) Reagan said that we would get it, but it’s been a long time coming now. We may be dead before we get it.”

No Money Appropriated

One year ago, the former President signed a law earmarking $1.25 billion to Japanese-Americans who lost their homes and businesses after they were interned. The funds were to be distributed over a 10-year period, but to date no money has been appropriated and not one former internee has received reparations.

About half of the original 120,000 internees already have died--and they continue to die at a rate of more than 200 a month, according to the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Redress Administration.

Of the estimated 60,000 who were living on the day Reagan signed the bill, 2,400 have since died. And, officials said, there are 16,000--like those at the retirement home--who are over the age of 70.

“Every day you look at the local obituaries and you can see people in their 60s, 70s and 80s dying,” said Bert Nakano, spokesman for the National Coalition for Redress/Reparations, a group considered largely responsible for raising grass-roots support for reparations.

In the aftermath of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Americans of Japanese ancestry--U.S. citizens and aliens alike--were rounded up on the orders of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and placed in relocation camps across the country.

Shame Enforced Silence

For decades, most former internees were reluctant to publicly discuss their experiences because they were ashamed and did not want to bring attention to themselves.

But the civil rights movement of the 1960s created an awareness of the camps among Japanese-American youth, and this awareness spawned the redress campaign.

Now, because of publicity the issue has generated, former internees speak openly about “violations of civil rights” and of the U.S. Constitution.

Residents of the retirement home talk freely about the years they spent incarcerated in camps, which were lined with row upon row of Army barracks surrounded by guard towers.

For Utsunomiya and her husband, Ken, the incarceration began 30 days after their wedding, and they were forced to leave their Santa Maria home.

She said the mouse- and scorpion-ridden quarters in Gila, Ariz., did not particularly bother her. Nor was she extremely upset with the holes in the floor covered by tops of tin cans and walls patched with boards. She also got used to hanging sheets to divide the room that housed two families.

It was her freedom that she missed.

“There were guards in very high towers all night with lights and rifles,” she said. “We could go nowhere.”

“They said that the guards and rifles were there for our own protection,” another resident said. “But why were they pointed into the camps at us?”

Partly to provide food, and mostly to add a sense of hope to an otherwise empty environment, the internees planted gardens and tended small farms around their barracks.

Masato Uemura had once farmed carrots and green onions on a plot in North Hollywood before losing everything.

Photos of Camp

Uemura, 91, lives in a sterile-looking one-room apartment in the retirement home. He shuffles through the building with the aid of a metal walker. He eagerly shows visitors black-and-white photographs of the relocation camp at Manzanar, in the California desert, where he spent 18 months during World War II.

From there, the Uemura family was separated, with seven of the children being sent to Tule Lake, Calif., while Uemura, his wife, and their oldest child were placed in a camp in Bismarck, N.D.

Now supported by his children, Uemura said he hopes to see the reparations in his lifetime. He said he wants to give something back to his children for the years they spent at the relocation camps.

“I feel sorry for my children,” Uemura said. “We are Japanese, and that’s why we were in the camp. If we were Chinese or (any) other nationality, we would not have to go.”

Retiree Tom Tsubone clutched a copy of the U.S. Constitution. Underlined in red ink was a portion of the Fifth Amendment that read: “No person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.”

Tsubone stopped reading and lifted his head.

“That’s what it’s all about.”