The Issue Is National Honor

The wartime internment of an estimated 120,000 Japanese Americans 47 years ago was a sweeping assault on civil liberties for which both official acknowledgement of the injustice and proposed redress for its victims have come with inexcusable slowness. Only last year did Congress finally authorize payments of $20,000 to each of the approximately 60,000 survivors among the former internees. But even this promise of largely symbolic reparations is more and more beginning to look hollow. The survivors are collectively due $1.25 billion for the lost freedom and hundreds of millions of dollars in lost property they suffered. It’s beginning to look as if only a fraction of that token sum will ever be paid.

The House has voted for payments of only $50 million for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, an amount so small that it would cover the awards due fewer than 5% of the claimants. The Senate next month may approve no more than $20 million, which is what the Bush Administration has requested. First payments from the limited funds would go to the oldest among the survivors. Rep. Robert T. Matsui (D-Sacramento), himself a former internee, says a claimant would have to be at least 87 years old to expect early payment. Since the compensation program was approved last year as many as 2,400 claimants have died. It doesn’t take an actuarial wizard to figure out that at the proposed level of funding, tens of thousands of other claimants are likely to die without seeing a single dollar in compensation.

All this adds gross inequity to the enormous injuries and indignities produced by the initial internment policy. The forced relocation to remote areas of the ethnic Japanese, many of whom were American citizens and many of whom were eventually to serve with courage and distinction in the U.S. Army, was an example of wartime hysteria at it worst, a wholly unnecessary response to a wholly unfounded fear that saw resident Japanese Americans as potential spies and saboteurs. That this fear was largely a product of the racism prevalent at the time is clear; no similar mass wartime lockup of German and Italian aliens was ever considered or even seriously suggested.

The reason given for the inadequate funding of the reparations program is the usual one of scarce budget dollars and more pressing priorities. Funds are indeed scarce, other demands are indeed great. But there is also an issue here of national honor--the word, for a change, is apt--which in this case requires that after such long delay equitably distributed amends should at last be made for the great wrong that was done.