Interned Japanese Latin Americans Seek Redress

Fifty-six years after Art Shibayama and his family were forcibly brought to the United States from Peru and placed in a Texas internment camp, he vows to continue his battle to right the wrong committed by the U.S. government against hundreds like him.

“I am very tired,” said Shibayama, 69, Monday at a news conference at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo, “but I have no choice but to continue.”

Shibayama and members of two other Japanese American families were on hand as Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Los Angeles) announced that next week he will introduce legislation to help Japanese Americans who did not benefit from earlier reparations.

The measure, titled the Wartime Parity and Justice Act of 2000, calls for an official apology and a $20,000 payment to each Japanese Latin American forcibly apprehended from Latin American countries and interned in the United States during World War II. It would also extend $20,000 to a small number of Japanese Americans who were disqualified earlier for technical reasons.

Under a policy little known until recently, more than 2,200 women, men and children from 13 Latin American countries were forcibly relocated to the United States and interned for possible prisoner exchanges for Americans trapped in Japan. About 80% of the victims were from Peru.

In 1988, the government formally apologized for the internment of Japanese Americans and offered $20,000 to each survivor under the Civil Liberties Act. However, when Japanese Latin Americans applied for redress under the act, most were held to be ineligible because they were not legal U.S. residents at the time of their detention.

It took a 1996 lawsuit spearheaded by Japanese American human rights activists to get the government to admit to the injustice inflicted on Japanese Latin Americans.

In 1998, President Clinton issued an official apology, and the government pledged $5,000 to each of the Japanese Latin American internees as a way to make amends for the relocation.

Shibayama was among those who chose not to accept the settlement because the letter of apology made no mention of how Japanese Latin Americans were brought here and the amount was one-fourth of what the government had offered other internees.

“I feel justice must be done because we were discriminated [against] in so many different ways,” Shibayama said.

His 1944 uprooting from Lima haunted him because he was labeled an “illegal alien.” His repeated efforts to become a citizen were rebuffed, he said.

Who could be more legal than people like him who were brought here by the government and processed by the Immigration and Naturalization Service? he asked.

The label dogged him even after he served in the U.S. Army in the 1950s. It wasn’t until 1970, after he reentered the United States by way of Canada, that he could become a U.S. citizen, he said. He later operated a gas station and worked as an auto mechanic in San Jose.

“We would try to redress those wrongs the best we can,” said Becerra, a candidate for mayor of Los Angeles. “America made mistakes, and we must own up to them in order to heal the scars of the past and move forward.”