U.S. May Settle Suit Over Internment

Fifty-six years after Alicia Nishimoto and Carmen Mochizuki were forced from their homes in Peru and deported to American internment camps, an apology may finally be nearing from their kidnapper: the U.S. government.

Federal lawyers have indicated they are considering settling a lawsuit brought by those involved in a little-known chapter of American history, when an estimated 2,200 people of Japanese descent from 13 Latin American countries were taken from their homes and shipped to the United States during World War II.

“Even after so many years I can’t believe what happened to us is real,” Nishimoto said during a news conference Thursday at the Los Angeles office of the American Civil Liberties Union. “The way I see it, the U.S. government committed a crime.”

Nishimoto, 64, of Gardena, made her remarks on the 56th anniversary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s signing of Executive Order 9066, which allowed the military evacuation of more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast to 10 internment camps in seven states. At the same time, the U.S. government was rounding up Japanese Latin Americans, the bulk of whom were shipped from Peru to an internment camp in Crystal City, Texas.

After years of lobbying by Japanese Americans, the U.S. government formally apologized in 1988 for the imprisonment of the American residents and offered payments, under a measure known as the Civil Liberties Act, to those still living. Under the bill, the government has paid more than 81,000 Japanese Americans $20,000 each as part of the effort to make amends for their relocation, which historians today condemn as both unnecessary and a blatant violation of civil rights.

But when the Japanese Latin Americans applied for redress under the reparations law, most were told they were ineligible because they were not legal U.S. residents when they were deported to the United States.

Two years ago, Mochizuki and other former internees filed a federal lawsuit seeking redress, a case that government lawyers have been trying to get dismissed. Last week, however, the government attorneys requested a two-week postponement of a court decision in order to consider a settlement.

“My wish is that they won’t wait too long,” said Mochizuki, 65, of Montebello. “It seems that every day somebody dies and at the same time the sunset is approaching on the law that authorizes reparations.”

The expiration date is in August, 10 years after reparations were ordered, according to Julie Small, co-chairwoman of the Campaign for Justice, a lobbying group representing the Japanese Latin Americans. She estimated that there are 513 Japanese Latin Americans who have applied for redress but have yet to receive a formal apology or money.

“This is a very critical time,” she said. “The government must act now.”

Small was part of a 26-member delegation that traveled to Washington last week to lobby Congress and meet with Bill Lann Lee, acting civil rights chief in the Justice Department and the first Asian American to hold the post, on behalf of the former internees. Although advocates such as Small and Robin Toma, the civil rights lawyer representing Mochizuki in the federal lawsuit, characterized the postponement request as a significant development, they remain guardedly optimistic over the possibility of a settlement.

“We’re hoping for the best, but expecting the worst,” Toma said.

In Washington on Thursday, Rep. Robert Matsui (D-Sacramento) and 20 other former internees gathered to launch the first National Day of Remembrance to mark Executive Order 9066 and to share painful memories from their childhoods, when their families were sent to internment camps.

“Fifteen years ago, I would not have been able to stand up here and talk about this,” said Matsui, 56, who was 5 months old when he and his family were uprooted from their Sacramento home and sent to a camp at Tule Lake, Calif. “I’m afraid it’ll be three, four, perhaps five generations before the stigma of the internment is finally eliminated from my family alone.”

Matsui, who said he intends to introduce legislation that would establish Feb. 19 as the internment remembrance day, was joined by actor George Takei, who played Sulu on the original “Star Trek” television show and who also spent part of his boyhood in internment camps.

“The 19th of February should be as important a day as the Fourth of July is,” Takei said. “On the Fourth of July, we celebrate the ideals of this people’s democracy. . . . And on the 19th of February, we observe the failure of these ideals.”

But if Japanese Americans have received some measure of compensation from the U.S. government, the absence of redress for Japanese Latin Americans has become an enduring source of frustration. Japanese American members of groups including the National Coalition for Redress/Reparation have said they feel obligated to fight for their Latin American counterparts, who suffered the same injustices as they did.

“This is a source of pain for Japanese Americans and source of shame for the rest of us,” said the Rev. Jesse Jackson during Thursday’s news conference in Los Angeles. He seized the occasion to throw his support behind the redress movement, to invite its members to join his Rainbow Coalition and to mark the anniversary of Executive Order 9066.

When it was issued, he said, “Democracy failed and injustice prevailed.”

After the war ended, many of the Japanese Latin American internees found it difficult, if not impossible, to reestablish the affluent lives they had in their native countries. Mochizuki’s father was deported from Texas to Japan and died on Okinawa a short time later.

Nishimoto said it took her parents, who once owned a cotton plantation in Peru, 20 years to “establish a good life” after the war. The redress, she said, can never replace what her family lost, but will hopefully “teach our children so that this never happens again.”

“To me, it’s very inhuman,” Nishimoto said. “We didn’t get killed, but our lives were destroyed.”

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Tamaki reported from Los Angeles and Schultz from Washington.