After 56 Years, an Elusive Slip of Paper Helps Restore Family’s Honor

It was just one page, a note typed in 1941, four days after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. But to Fumie Ishii Shimada, it was the elusive piece of paper she had sought for years.

The letter she discovered last summer details how the FBI ordered Japanese railroad and mine workers in the western United States to be fired during World War II because they were security risks.

It has already cost the federal government $5 million in reparations. Shimada, a middle-school math teacher in Sacramento, figures it could cost a lot more, depending on how many more applications are postmarked by Aug. 10.

She is convinced that many more families--perhaps several hundred more--could qualify for reparations from the Justice Department’s Office of Redress Administration.

Since February, about 250 children of fired workers have received the maximum payout: $20,000. Shimada and her two sisters each received checks in late May. (They plan to donate some of the money to the Japanese-American Citizens League for scholarships.) Another 70 applications are under review.

While most applicants are survivors of railroad workers, others had a parent who lost a mining job under the same federal directive.

Shimada credits others for the windfall, but the credit is largely hers.

Her odyssey began in her hometown of Sparks, Nev., on Feb. 18, 1942, when Southern Pacific fired her father after 22 years on the job.

Kametaro Ishii was among hundreds of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans fired from Southern Pacific, Union Pacific, Western Pacific and other railway and mining companies in several Western states.

Her father was only one among many, but it is his shame that his daughter remembers. Although only a toddler then, Shimada recalls now, at 59, “so much of what was happening.”

“I was with my parents 24 hours a day, and this was just patterned into my brain,” she said. “All I knew was my father’s misery.”

Southern Pacific warned Ishii that if he set foot on railroad property he would be arrested. To survive, the machinist worked as a gardener. And every day his family observed a curfew from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. and never strayed more than five miles from home.

Then, in 1945, a day after the war with Japan ended, Ishii was rehired by his boss, Herb “Tex” Covington, who had tried to keep him on the Southern Pacific payroll during the war. This time Ishii stayed and retired after a total of 40 years.

Shimada said her father harbored no bitterness toward the railroad or the government. Her parents, she said, “were very proud, both of them, to be Americans.”

But Congress eventually acknowledged that U.S. treatment of Japanese Americans and immigrants, particularly the 120,000 who were rounded up and confined without charge at internment camps throughout the war, was wrong. Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act in 1988, providing for reparations.

Shimada believed that her father would qualify, even though he had not been interned. But she could not confer with her parents whether to seek payment. Her father died in 1976, her mother in 1979.

Still, this was family business, and taking care of it fell to her, much as it had when she was 12 and the only sibling at home. It was her duty, she recalls, because her parents’ English “wasn’t that good.”

But Shimada’s request for reparations was denied. After all, she was told, the railroad companies--not the federal government--fired the railroad workers.

She refused to accept that excuse.

“We had a statement from [Southern Pacific] that it had to be by government order because [Southern Pacific] wouldn’t discriminate,” she said. “But everything had been done orally. It hadn’t been documented.”

Shimada thought that the proof had to be somewhere in Nevada. From 1994 to 1997, she and her husband, Sam, made 15 trips over the Sierra to Reno and Carson City, driving three hours each way, to rummage through old documents.

They looked at papers, heaps of papers, including the files of Gov. E.P. Carville, who had refused to intervene despite an appeal from her father’s boss, who served as a Nevada assemblyman.

Chris Driggs, a staff member with the Nevada state archives, helped Shimada sift through those papers, but they found nothing. Later, he wrote to tell her of a speech.

Andy Russell, a graduate student at UNLV, had talked about his research on Japanese living in Nevada during World War II.

First, Shimada found Russell’s 145-page thesis at the Nevada Historical Society in Reno. Then she found him. Could he help?

Russell delivered: a copy of a letter written on Dec. 11, 1941, by H.M. Peterson, an official with the Nevada Northern Railway. In it, he spelled out the terms of an FBI order to fire all people of Japanese heritage working for the railroad.

“We’ve got the smoking gun,” Shimada told her husband.

The documents went straight to Washington. Despite many calls, Shimada heard nothing. Then, last February, she and others seeking payments headed to Washington to petition directly.

Within weeks, Shimada found herself in Los Angeles, a guest at a press conference where a spokesman for the reparations office announced an about-face. This weekend, she’s celebrating with an open house, inviting those who helped her and those she helped.

“We’re so proud. If you can beat the government, it’s really something,” she said. “It’s fantastic.”

But even now, Shimada shares the credit: “I think my father was leading me to do all these things.”

*

For information on applying for benefits, contact the Japanese-American Citizens League, 1765 Sutter St., San Francisco, 94115. Telephone (415) 921-5225. Or write to the Office of Redress Administration, P.O. 66260, Washington, D.C. 20035-6260.