Kristen Hayashi
speaker
189 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Kristen Hayashi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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But it's the people who either are older, like older Issei, or these young families that stay in camp a really long time because they don't have the means to sort of restart their lives. They don't have something to return to. There's really fear of the outside. And so the War Relocation Authority gets really panicky because They are not meant to be this permanent organization.
And they look around in 1945, and there's 70,000 people still in these camps, and they don't know what to do. So they go against their own objective, and they decide they're going to send people back to their point of origin. And for many of them, that's California or Southern California. Some of the biggest challenges, like in LA, in Los Angeles, for example, was housing.
There was a huge housing shortage. There was a lot of, you know, discrimination in terms of like employment. And there were only certain jobs that Japanese Americans were sort of eligible for. And, you know, so it was really difficult, I think.
And I think the government really left people behind because the War Relocation Authority dissolves and sort of just leaves people to sort of fend for themselves when they return after World War II.
We've mentioned 1952 as a shift in all of this. What happened? How did they change that law that suddenly citizenship was available?
Well, I think this has to do with a lot of Cold War politics, too. Because the United States was victorious and Japan quickly becomes kind of like this ally, then, you know, that's sort of like this.
I think that's one of the reasons why ECA are eligible for naturalization as part of the Walter McCarran Act in 1952, and why immigration is allowed to continue after that long period of no immigration from Japan.
People of my generation, I was born in 61. I mean, it's still kind of a strange shift in American history that Japan goes from being such an arch enemy to being such an arch ally. You know, we're such a dependable ally. But what's lost in that conversation is still prejudice and still problems, certainly for those decades afterwards, 50s and 60s. It takes a long, long time for this wound to heal.
That's right. And that's something that's really important, too, is I think that former incarcerees, you know, didn't talk about what happened to them during World War II. They felt like there was a lot of shame, even though they didn't do anything wrong. They just wanted to look to the future.
So the next generation who, you know, many of them are either born during World War II or after start to ask questions about, you know, what happened to our family during World War II? Why was I born in a place like Wyoming? And they had no idea. But I think this next generation, the Sanse, are sort of influenced by the social movements of the 1960s.
And they start to question what the government has done in the past. They're inspired by the anti-war movement, the women's movement, civil rights movement, and ethnic studies movement. And they start to ask these questions. And they feel that what the government did was wrong. And they want to get some kind of recourse back.
And so this is kind of when discussions of redress come up in the 1960s and 70s. But it's really because of the next generation who pushes for this.
And we're talking about reparations. When does that happen? And how much are people paid? And what effect does that have on Japanese Americans, would you say?
So we talk about how, you know, what did you need to get a formal apology from the United States government? I mean, that's a profound act by the government. So you needed political representation in Congress. So in the 1950s, that's when you start to see Japanese Americans elected to Congress, first with Senator Inoue, who was a World War II veteran.
And I think in the 60s and 70s, there were like six Japanese Americans who were elected to Congress. And you need these elected officials in Congress to introduce a bill. This bill was H.R. 442, which was a Civil Liberties Act, which became the formal apology or redress. And then you also needed, you know, this grassroots effort of Sansei who are trying to
advocate for this so in 1980 that's when president carter creates crick which is the commission on wartime relocation and internment of civilians and this is a commission that's meant to study the consequences the reasons for and the consequences of the mass removal and incarceration and so crick they decide to hold these hearings in 10 cities across the united states in 1981
And they want former incarcerees to testify about their experience. And so it's the Sansei who are really pushing Nisei and older Ise to talk about their experiences during World War II. And so many of them are doing it for the first time and they're doing it in public. And so it's very, very powerful and emotional to hear their testimonies.
But it's through these testimonies and through the commission's findings that that they kind of determined the causes. And the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Determination of Civilians determined that the mass removal and incarceration happened because of wartime hysteria, racial prejudice, and the failure of political leadership.
And, you know, you could really argue that those things remain today and this could easily, you know, happen again. But so you have Congress members like Norman Mineta who introduced the bill in the House of Representatives. It passes there. You have senators like Spark Matsunaga and Daniel Inouye who helped push it through the Senate.
And then you needed a sign off from the president of the United States, who at the time was President Reagan, you know, a very conservative president. So, you know, what makes him sign this bill? We're not sure, but it's possible that he sort of reflected on his World War II experience as a U.S. Army captain. And when he gave a speech about the role of Nisei in fighting, you know, the war.
Showing 161–180 of 189 · page 9 of 10
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