NCRR, Redress/Reparations, and Becoming a Proud Sansei
By KAY OCHI
On the 45th anniversary of the November 1980 Founding Conference of NCRR, then the National Coalition for Redress/Reparations, I reflect on the tremendous impact that participation with NCRR and the redress movement has had on me.
My 44 years of involvement changed the trajectory of my life into one of greater purpose, willingness to write, to speak to media, and to serve the people.
NCRR’s Sansei, now elders, continue to serve the community. Back in the 1980s, we were inspired and led by the Issei and Nisei who testified before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) and all who continued in the community’s fight for reparations. I heard for the first time the tragic stories of families separated, Ewan Yoshida; health ruined and lives of loved ones lost, Dr. Mary Oda; a brother shot and killed at Manzanar, Martha Okamoto; homes and businesses lost, Tetsu Saito … it’s dizzying in the recounting.
They broke our hearts with shared stories of the forced removal, wartime incarceration, and dehumanization. From that collective pain and the anger that their testimonies created, the redress movement was fueled, fired up for a fight for justice for our community. Angry as we were, many, including me, felt that this fight could not be won. But fight we must.
Together, the community had meetings, wrote letters and telegrams, and shared stories of loss and imprisonment … our stories, finally, being shared, recorded to create our true history.
The much-needed process of truth-seeking and truth-telling began to heal and empower us. Together we unearthed the history that was buried for over four decades by the racist, oppressive strong-arm of government and the outright denial of our rights as Japanese Americans. I had grown up feeling subservient, ashamed of being Japanese, ashamed of working on Saturdays with my gardener father. Things only began to change when I became a teacher, and then when I joined NCRR.
Over the past four-plus decades, we have learned much. Learning our Japanese American wartime history has helped me to understand the suffering and trauma that our parents and grandparents endured. They not only survived, but afterwards they rebuilt their lives and provided good lives for us Sansei. Because of them, we too persevered. Here are just a few of my top lessons from the redress movement:
HISTORY 101: Most folks have heard of the 10 main camps; however, in addition to the War Relocation Authority (WRA) concentration camps, the government used 37+ Department of Justice (DOJ), Department of the Interior (DOI), Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and Army camps to intern our Issei community leaders abducted after Pearl Harbor. This drained our communities of leadership needed to help navigate the treacherous waters of forced removal. The Issei were “interned” in Department of Justice camps spread all over the country.
NUMBERS MATTER: In the 1980s, NCRR used the number 110,000 for the number of Japanese Americans impacted by Executive Order 9066. By the 1990s, that number rose to 120,000. Only recently, Dr. Duncan Williams listed over 125,000 names of those incarcerated and interned for the “Ireicho: Sacred Book of Names” project. The Ireicho project enabled us to remember and thank our elders.
GOVERNMENT HASTE MADE WASTE: The U.S. government needed to appear strong and responsive to the attack on Pearl Harbor and the early losses in the Pacific. The WRA was in no way ready to house, much less care for, the needs of 125,000 men, women and children. Some of the 16 temporary assembly centers used fairgrounds and racetracks, existing infrastructure, to hold the families with babies, children and the elderly. There and in the WRA camps, the medical facilities were wholly inadequate, the food barely tolerable, the toilet facilities were horrible. These were crimes against humanity.
OH, THE MEDIA PROPAGANDA! I urge you to go to YouTube and enter the name “Milton Eisenhower,” then the director of the WRA. His 1942 newsreel is full of the government’s propaganda, obfuscation and lies. Desert concentration camps were called “new pioneer communities” and government actions reflected “Christian decency.”
The media was against us. The Hearst syndicate of newspapers, among others, shared the government’s propaganda about the need to remove “dangerous hordes” from the West Coast. Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel) was complicit by drawing for major media ridiculous caricatures of Asians as slant-eyed, buck-toothed threats to real Americans. He was part of the media’s dehumanizing of Japanese and Chinese Americans.
INTERNMENT VS. CONCENTRATION CAMP? The word “internment” has not been used correctly. Internment applies to non-citizens, e.g. our immigrant grandparents. The Issei leaders rounded up after Pearl harbor were interned. Nisei were U.S. citizens who were imprisoned or incarcerated (not interned). It was not until 2024 that The San Diego Union Tribune officially changed its stylebook and adopted the term “incarceration” for our wartime imprisonment.
These are just a few of the “lessons learned” through the redress movement. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988, though flawed, provided some justice. Over 82,500 survivors of the wartime incarceration received the president’s apology and monetary reparations. However, as a Sansei born after the war, the fight for reparations was key to our understanding the community’s reticence to talk about the pain and trauma of incarceration.
Involvement in redress was a healing process that led to personal empowerment and the proof of a strong and resilient community. NCRR members are a passionate and compassionate people, all working for justice, not for only Japanese Americans, but for communities who have suffered or are suffering injustices.
These 800 words cannot approach the extent of NCRR’s work and the lessons learned. I encourage you to read NCRR’s book, “NCRR: The Struggle for Japanese American Redress and Reparations.” It shares NCRR’s story over 40 years from many different amazing participants. It is still available at the Japanese American National Museum and through NCRR.
Because of all that I have learned and experienced through NCRR, I am truly grateful. I have become a very PROUD SANSEI.
Speaking Out (Yakamashii) and Standing Up (Solidarity)
By KATHY MASAOKA
What a journey and gift the last 45 years have been with NCRR. From the formation of the National Coalition for Redress/Reparations in 1980 to the transition of the Los Angeles chapter into the Nikkei for Civil Rights & Redress in 1990/91, it has been a difficult but always rewarding journey of learning about the strength of our community and the meaning of solidarity.
Our community embraced the idea that it was good to be “yakamashii” (see Yuji Ichioka’s testimony) when 750 individuals, Sansei, Nisei and Issei, testified at the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians hearings across the country in 1981. Who knew that this would be a turning point for our community and that the power of speaking would be the fire lighting the ten-year campaign for reparations?
I listen to the testimonies of people no longer with us and still tear up with both sadness and pride at how clearly and honestly each person spoke. They were not intimidated by the panel of mostly white male commissioners. From that day on, Sansei had the privilege of getting to know and work with the Nisei who joined NCRR, including:
Frank Emi was a leader of the Fair Play Committee, which supported the draft resisters at Heart Mountain.
Jim Saito was a feisty Nisei and meter reader who would not back down when the LADWP (as promised) refused to compensate him for a money-saving idea.
Lily Okamoto, who played tennis into her 70s, was a proud member of the Toastmistresses organization.
Tim Nabara, a quiet-spoken man, retired from the IRS and kept his friends updated on redress progress.
Tom Shiroishi, a truck driver, submitted no-nonsense articles/letters to The Rafu about redress.
Bernadette Nishimura was a volunteer for the City of L.A. and at the Pioneer Center.
Even though our Japanese was limited, there was no missing the anger and determination of the Issei who testified at the hearings. As Sansei, we were fortunate to benefit from their presence at community meetings and walk alongside them at candlelight vigils in Little Tokyo. Even though meetings may have taken twice as long with translations, I miss this reminder of the history, hardship and strength of the Issei and Kibei.
We had many others who guided NCRR and served as models for us. Lillian Nakano was fearless in speaking out and pushing others to do the right thing. Bert, her husband, never let us forget that NCRR was about the “grassroots,” and Jim and Alan made sure we kept our eyes on redress.
One of the periods of greatest learning about solidarity was after 9/11. I saw NCRR and our community spring into action to speak out against the attacks on Muslims. NCRR initiated a call for a vigil in Little Tokyo along with several community groups and organized the NCRR 9/11 Committee that very night.
We learned that others in our community had called mosques to offer support — a practice of solidarity that we had learned during the redress and reparations years. The next 20 years were about building an understanding of Islam and getting to know organizations in the Arab American and Muslim communities through annual iftars (breaking the fast) during Ramadan, by traveling to Manzanar together, and creating programs like Bridging Communities so that Muslim and Japanese American high school youth could learn about each other’s values and communities.
We educated ourselves and our communities through workshops on the Patriot Act, Peace in the Middle East (yes, about Palestine) and through Days of Remembrance programs featuring Muslim speakers and information about the unjust war in Iraq.
NCRR spoke out against the monitoring of the Muslim community and the detention of individual Muslims for visa violations. We supported Chaplain James Yee, a Muslim chaplain who had been unjustly charged with spying after serving prisoners at Guantanamo, and we sponsored a tour for the parents of Lt. Ehren Watada who refused to deploy to Iraq, which he considered an illegal and immoral war.
In 2011, NCRR joined supporters of 11 students at UC Irvine and Riverside who faced criminal charges for peacefully protesting the speech of Michael Oren, then the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., on the UC Irvine campus. NCRR was a co-founder of Vigilant Love, which formed in response to the need to oppose the Muslim ban and the continued vilification of the Muslim community.
NCRR was always ready to respond to requests for support for workers and others within our community. We support the Rafu workers in the print shop who were being laid off without compensation, we picketed with the New Otani workers organizing for a union and traveled with them to Japan to build alliances with workers in Japan, and we supported the JACCC workers whose executive director, a man wanted by Interpol for evading a conviction in Europe, was mistreating long time staff.
We also responded to calls for support outside the JA community, from supporting the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and protecting the lands of the Hopi and Navajo to reparations for the comfort women.
I am happy and grateful to be working with Nikkei Progressives in the NP/NCRR Reparations Committee, where we are supporting the work of reparations for the Black community. We are learning about the history of enslavement and its continuing harms and how the long fight for reparations goes back to women like Henrietta Woods, who won reparations for her enslavement, as well as Belinda Royal, who sued her owner for her 50 years of free labor.
What is even more encouraging is to see younger people who are curious about our community’s fight for reparations. They are eagerly reading NCRR: The Grassroots Struggle for Japanese American Redress and Reparations, as part of a book club and asking us questions that help us reflect and re-evaluate our own history.
I am confident that our community will continue to be a loud voice for solidarity, ever evolving, learning and getting stronger.
Finding Community with NCRR
By MIA BARNETT
In many ways, NCRR and its members helped me to find my identity. I grew up in the Midwest knowing only a few other Asian Americans outside my family. As a queer, Asian, mixed-race person in a predominantly white area of a red state, I didn’t feel like there was a place for me in that community.
As I got to know the NCRR members and read their book, “NCRR: The Grassroots Movement for Redress,” I learned about how the fight for redress and reparations accomplished much more than an apology and monetary compensation. It was a process where people learned about their own family’s history, many for the first time. The community worked together to determine what the redress demands should be, and through that experience, solidified their own political identity. Collectively, the community began to understand who they were and where they came from.
The idea of political identity being closely tied to ethnic identity, the importance of solidarity, and the right to a community’s self-determination are deeply held values that come through in all of the work that NCRR does. I feel extremely fortunate to work alongside NCRR members in Nikkei Progressives, learning by their example.
Although my family immigrated after the war and I don’t have an incarceration family history like so many JAs do, I feel connected to this community. It isn’t because of a shared history, but a shared identity — one that propels us to fight for a better world for all people.