Friday, November 14, 1997
Japanese victims deserve noticeBy Ayako Hagihara
I am proud to be Japanese American. I carry with me a history of
the struggle to survive in this country as an immigrant in the
fight for civil rights and in a history of working together with
other communities of color to reclaim history and gain dignity.
During World War II, over 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent
were removed from their homes on the West Coast and placed in
concentration camps throughout the United States. They were
stripped of their constitutional rights and denied civil liberties
simply because of their Japanese ancestry.
On Aug. 10, 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the
Civil Liberties Act (CLA). This act provided monetary compensation
and a letter of apology signed by the president to each Japanese
American who was interned or otherwise denied his or her civil
liberties.
The CLA was a culmination of over 10 years of work by the
Japanese American community to seek redress and reparations for the
injustices that it suffered at the hands of the U.S.
government.
Spurred by the young, college-educated Sansei (third-generation
Japanese Americans), the redress movement was not only a fight for
compensation but also a struggle for the Japanese American
community to reclaim this part of U.S. history which was hardly
mentioned in schools.
Japanese Americans sought to educate the public about their
experiences so that no other group of people would experience the
humiliation, helplessness and the myriad other emotions felt by the
pioneering immigrants and their descendants as their liberties were
taken away, and civil and human rights were violated. The struggle
for redress also gave many Issei and Nisei (first- and
second-generation Japanese Americans) who suffered during the war a
chance to talk about and come to terms with their experiences.
But, the injustices committed against people of Japanese descent
continue to this day. Hundreds of Japanese Americans are still
denied redress despite having suffered losses of liberties when,
for example, railroad and mine workers were fired from their jobs
at the onset of the war. In addition, 2,264 Japanese Latin
Americans, who were kidnapped from their homes in Central and South
America to be interned in U.S. concentration camps, are denied
their redress.
Even before its entrance into the war, the U.S. government began
to address the need to repatriate American citizens from war zones
in Europe and the Far East. A hostage-exchange program was
conceived whereby the United States would send Japanese nationals
in exchange for the American civilians in Japan. Unable to secure a
pool of people of Japanese ancestry that it could send away without
facing the legal and international implications of forcibly
exchanging American citizens of one race and ancestry for other
U.S. citizens, they looked south of the border.
There, they found concentrations of Japanese Latin Americans in
countries such as Peru where anti-Japanese sentiment was on the
rise.
Soon after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S.
government began to apprehend Japanese Latin Americans, many of
whom had established successful businesses and had planted their
roots in Latin American soil. Latin-American government officials,
with the assistance of FBI agents, deported these Japanese Latin
Americans without warrants, hearings or indictment. The U.S. State
Department explicitly ordered U.S. Consuls to not issue visas to
deportees. Army and Navy officials who took the deportees into
custody confiscated their passports. Upon arrival to the United
States, the Japanese Latin Americans were labeled "illegal aliens"
and were sent to Department of Justice concentration camps.
From July 1942 to September 1943, in two exchanges with Japan,
the U.S. government traded over 860 Japanese Latin Americans for
U.S. citizens. As "illegal aliens," these Japanese Latin Americans
had no recourse against the U.S. government.
It is undeniable that the civil liberties and human rights of
Japanese Latin Americans were violated as they suffered abduction
from their homes, the confiscation of their businesses and
properties, and were incarcerated and deported to a war-torn
country or exploited as cheap labor to U.S. farms and factories.
However, according to the CLA, they are not eligible for
redress.
On Aug. 28, 1996, a class action lawsuit, Carmen Mochizuki vs.
The United States of America, was filed in federal court to seek
inclusion of the Japanese Latin Americans in the CLA on the grounds
that denying them eligibility for redress violates constitutional
guarantees against such irrational and unjust discrimination. At
the same time, a letter-writing campaign was launched by the
Campaign For Justice, a coalition of individuals, human and civil
rights organizations, to urge President Clinton to use his powers
as chief executive of the U.S. government to settle this
lawsuit.
As Americans, we cannot let justice be denied any longer. Join
this struggle for justice, their stories must be told as well as
our own.