Long Wait for WW II Reparations Almost Over : Internees: As payments, which were authorized in 1988, come closer for Japanese-Americans who were relocated from 1942 to 1946, the reasons behind the internments still touch a raw nerve.

Bruce Kaji remembers his 16th birthday particularly well. It was May 9, 1942. Carrying all the clothes and belongings he could from his family’s Boyle Heights home, Kaji boarded a train that day with his two sisters and parents under the watchful eyes of U.S. soldiers who distributed box lunches for the ride.

Although they weren’t even told their destination at the time, the Kajis were headed to Manzanar, a World War II internment camp where thousands of Japanese-Americans were held against their will from 1942 until 1946.

“We were so scared that we burned everything that had Japanese writing on it--all my father’s books and newspapers,” said Kaji, who now runs a real estate firm with his son in Torrance.

Last week, Kaji and about 350 other Japanese-Americans crowded into Gardena’s Japanese Cultural Institute to find out more about the U.S. government’s plan to recompense about 65,000 surviving victims of wartime internment by awarding them each $20,000. In all, 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry were held in the camps.

Although former President Reagan signed the bill authorizing the payments in August, 1988, former internees have yet to receive a dime. The funds, which have been blocked by congressional budget battles, are expected to be released over a three-year period starting in October.

At Thursday’s meeting, the Justice Department’s Robert Bratt, who heads the office in charge of the reparation payments, explained the documentation and the forms that must be completed in order for internees and their families to receive payments.

Bratt said he accepted an invitation to speak in Gardena because a large number of Japanese-Americans who qualify for the reparations live in Gardena and elsewhere in the South Bay. About 3,900 of those eligible for the payments are from the South Bay, 2,700 of them from Gardena, Bratt said.

The U.S. Treasury-issued checks are meant to “acknowledge and apologize for the fundamental injustice of the evacuation, relocation and internment,” according to Justice Department leaflets.

But for the hundreds who attended the Gardena meeting, the internment and now the reparation payments had varying meanings.

Kaji stressed the symbolic significance of the government’s actions. “The payments are important not just for the recipients, but also for the perception and understanding of the public. In our society, if there was a wrong committed and it is to be righted, there has to be money attached to it.”

Michiko Ohye, 63, said she felt slightly embarrassed to be taking the money. “Why aren’t other people, like the American Indians, getting money?” the Gardena resident said.

“It’s been so confusing. We are still carrying the burden of those memories,” added Ohye, who was sent to a camp in Poston, Ariz., at the age of 13 with her parents and sister.

More than 40 years after the fact, the reasons behind the internments remain a topic of debate that touches a raw nerve with both Japanese-Americans and other Americans.

During Thursday’s meeting, a white Capitol News Service reporter sent angry whispers running through the crowd when he referred to some of the internees as “enemy aliens.” Later, a brief fistfight broke out between the news service reporter and an angry Japanese-American who interrupted the reporter’s questions.

Former internees pointed out that more than half the Japanese-Americans who were detained during the war were born in the United States and were American citizens. Most of the others were resident aliens, Japanese immigrants who never had been given the opportunity to obtain U.S. citizenship because of racially biased laws that blocked naturalization for those of Japanese ancestry. Those laws were eventually overturned in 1952.

“Japan is a foreign country to me. The U.S. is my country,” said Kaji, who was born in Los Angeles. “The day after Pearl Harbor, I was delivering newspapers. A few days later, on Friday, the circulation guy says: ‘You can’t sell anymore. You’re Japanese.’ I said, ‘I’m what?’ Nobody had ever called me that before.”

Kaji, in fact, left Manzanar in 1945 to join the U.S. Army, and he served as a linguist in the postwar American occupation forces in Japan and the Philippines.

The Federal Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, created in 1980 by President Carter, determined that the internments were not justified militarily and that the decision resulted from “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.”

That study recommended that the government, which had paid $37 million in property-loss claims filed after the war, make additional amends, which prompted the reparation payments now being prepared.

Checks will be issued first to the oldest people qualifying, Bratt said. The first round of payments this year should cover former internees 70 and older, he said.

Children and relatives of those people who have died since the bill was passed two years ago are entitled to the payments too, Bratt added.

Bratt was deluged Friday with questions from dozens of people about their personal situations.

Ohye, for instance, is entitled to a payment herself but asked about her father, who passed away three months ago and would have been entitled to a $20,000 payment. Ohye was adopted by him as an infant, and she wanted to know what proof she needed for the government to split the money between her and her half sister.

Others wanted to know what documentation was required to show that their family evacuated the West Coast specifically to avoid the mandatory internments. Under the legislation, those individuals are also entitled to the funds.

Despite the scuffle at last week’s meeting, most Japanese-Americans questioned said they felt sadness about what happened but little bitterness. Some, like Ohye, noted that the camps protected them from harassment they would have surely faced from other Americans.

Nearly all mentioned that the America of those years was much different in its assumptions about other races and countries. “Looking back over the years, there’s a kind of feeling of guilt from having gone into camp,” Kaji said.

“My children ask me: ‘Why didn’t you protest? Why didn’t you raise your voice?’ We were devoid of any power in the society then. They put us in a position of pawns and pushed us however they wanted to. Society then was different.”