Village Dialogue: Reparations for War, Slavery, and Internment

Response to reader's letter on 'The Art of Apology' article and anger over reparations

The following dialogue was initiated by a Letter to the Editor in response to S.D. Ikeda's feature, "Internment, Redress and the Art of Apology".  The article originally ran in Asian-American Village's 2000 special section commemorating the February 19 Day of Remembrance, marking the anniversary of FDR's issuance of Executive Order 9066.   It compared two presidential administrations' approaches to enacting the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which authorized reparations and a formal apology to surviving Japanese Americans who had been detained in U.S. concentration camps during World War II.   The article's conclusion invited readers to share their own opinions on the topic, asking "How would you 'grade' these apologies?"

Reader "Fran M." writes in our Village Views letters section:

Subject: "'The Art of Apology' Grading System" and Reparations

I wouldn't grade these apologies. I wouldn't even think twice about it. Reparations means that monies are being paid to people that claim they have been damaged by all the wars, the racial prejudice, the malice, and the hatred that is and has been in evidence since Adam.

Since both presidents gave money to quell dissent, I question their motives.

What is going to happen when George W. gives or denies reparations to those who think they can claim damages for slavery?

My grandfather came from China, he was put immediately to work on the railroad. He did not speak English, nor did he understand why he received such blatantly harsh treatment for being a foreigner. He worked hard and was punished if he slept late, yet his integrity held out and he became a United States citizen, thus raising his family as Americans because he believed in the land of the free.

He didn't complain, nor did he demand restitution.

How did the USA become the land of the free? We fought for it. Our presidents can give money away for damages due to slavery, and war and other imagined injustices, when no one wants to be a part of the Grand USA.

- "Fran M."

Asian-American Village Editor Stewart David Ikeda writes:

Dear Fran M.:

Thanks for your frank response. It raises certain points that had indeed accompanied the controversial decision to offer reparations and an apology to Japanese Americans before, during, and after the lifetime of the Office of Redress Administration. As you further point out, the justification for internment reparations is likely to see renewed interest—and controversy—as other populations seek government redress for historical wrongs against them. While I’ve little qualification to speak to the specifics of current calls for reparations to the descendants of American slaves, I can speak more certainly to some of your points in regard to the WWII internment.

While knowing few details of your grandfather’s specific circumstances, I can at least appreciate that he must have been dedicated and strong-willed to have endured the harsh conditions of railroad work, as did my own immigrant great-grandfather and American-born grandfather. My great-grandparents faced the same frustration of discriminatory laws that barred them from citizenship by virtue of racial background and national origin. Nonetheless, they too chose immediately to become U.S. citizens when those legal barriers were removed (which occurred slightly later for Japanese than for Chinese immigrants), and raised their children as "patriots" committed to contributing to the nation. My great-grandfather aided the American intelligence effort upon his release from internment camp, while a number of his children served in the military, as did so many Americans of Japanese ancestry who both volunteered and were drafted directly out of concentration camps – whether to serve in segregated units in Europe, in intelligence units in the Pacific, or in homefront service.

As President Truman told those Nisei soldiers while bestowing the Presidential Unit Banner, "You fought not only the enemy but prejudice – and you won." We must admire the fortitude and forbearance of pioneer immigrants such as your grandfather, who faced down the pervasive anti-Asian sentiments of that era and won. We must similarly respect and seek to understand those Japanese Issei whose wartime uprooting elicited little more than comment than shikatta ga nai (it can’t be helped), a Buddhism-inflected refrain that largely silenced any community protest for the next quarter-century.

CIVIL LIBERTIES ACT

That said, it must be understood that the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 was not passed to offer reparations for prejudice or apologize for wartime hatreds against people of Japanese ancestry. As you unarguably observe, hatred -- including racial and tribal hatred -- has marked the entirety of human experience. Hatred, the Issei knew, "can’t be helped." And, hatred in itself is not illegal. As private American citizens, we are absolutely free to hate whomsoever we may deem hate-worthy, for any reason we fancy.

Yet, as Americans we may feel doubly fortunate that our government enjoys no such freedoms, but is instead bound by institutional laws, so that our baser, individual human tendencies are not permitted to become the formal law of the land. In fact, a variety of Constitutional principles specifically prohibit certain government actions – including those that are racially discriminatory – that would intrude upon many individual liberties or state rights.

In passing the Civil Liberties Act in 1988, Congress was following a formal commission’s findings that Japanese Americans were unjustly denied their civil liberties and due process during their wartime dispossession and detention through direct action and a failure of leadership by government. Whether or not Congress members felt remorse or sympathy for the treatment of Japanese Americans is beside the point. The Act recognizes the government’s responsibility in having wrongfully – unlawfully – curtailed citizens’ civil liberties. In an oversimplified way, the federal government in 1988 found itself guilty of not having done its job in 1941.

In this sense, to be fair, neither George Bush nor Bill Clinton can be credited or blamed [depending on your view] for reparations. Nor did either man "give money to quell dissent," as the money was allocated before they took office. Their unenviable job was to provide an accompanying cover letter that expressed the government’s remorse – or at least responsibility – for its past failure to uphold internees’ civil liberties.

IS MONEY APPROPRIATE?

But of course, these technicalities don’t address what I expect is the heart of your objection: money. For many, the real questions are: Is monetary restitution patriotic? Is it moral? Is it appropriate? Is it fair?

The answer, I suppose, must be: It depends.

When you write "damages due to slavery, and war and other imagined injustices," I assume you do not mean to suggest that institutionalized slavery and war crimes themselves are "imagined" rather than actual injustices. Perhaps you might agree with me that these are at least as morally unpalatable as the grievances of our own grandfathers we’ve mentioned here – even if you don’t think them necessarily deserving of restitution.

In my own moral reckoning, I would say that yes, the experience of slavery is deserving of restitution and apology and absolute future prohibition. It is a mark of massive shame for our nation those who experienced this great wrong never quite saw it set right. And could mere money have "set it right" anyway?

Many principled Japanese Americans argued forcefully against internment reparations; some refused to apply for or accept it. These argued that monetary payment was inadequate – or just irrelevant – to satisfying their grievances with the government’s wartime conduct. Some felt it was an insult. Of the hundreds of Japanese Americans I’ve met personally, not one has suggested that money by itself could have remedied their grievances. Most will say that the altogether more important and long-lasting commitments they sought are expressed in the Presidential apology and the creation of Civil Liberties Public Education initiatives. But in America, money talks. The payment offered a symbolic demonstration of the government’s sincere commitment to ensure that something like the internment will not happen again.

IS IT FAIR?

Is it fair, however, that former internees received an offer for reparation when former slaves – or former abused railroad workers – have not?

It has been common in public debates over "slavery reparations" to compare grievances of descendants of slaves to those of the Japanese-American internees. While I believe it is right and instructive to make these comparisons, I also suspect it will ultimately not be useful to proponents of slavery reparations, because they are not precisely parallel for two reasons: First, the Civil Liberties Act specifically sought to redress improprieties in government action, and second, reparations and apologies were offered only to those whose civil liberties were directly impacted by that action.

Redress recipients were surviving former internees, as well as some people who may have avoided camp (because they were in the military, for example) but were subjected to the same suspension of their civil liberties. Therefore, as an heir to former internees, I am not personally eligible to receive reparation or an apology, because my individual liberties were not at stake in the government’s action. To the extent that I may have suffered any indirect damages due to my family’s dispossession, remedies are also indirect: I indirectly benefit from the Civil Liberties Act and the Public Education Fund, in the manner that although I am not an African American, I have benefited from the Civil Rights Act.

This distinction has been commonly misunderstood – and sometimes misrepresented – by slavery reparations proponents, which may come back to haunt their cause. Using internment reparations as a parallel model would diminish the compelling argument that slavery has left behind a legacy of dispossession, under-representation, and second-class status whose damaging effects have continued to be felt since its formal elimination, even in generations of people who were not themselves enslaved. Closer parallels may possibly be found in WWII POW slave labor cases, especially in civil actions. Corporations, of course, may be sued for committing wrongs—individually or in class actions—and suits have been won or settled against corporations in Japan and Germany for their use of forced POW labor during WWII. In these, the plaintiffs were most frequently surviving former POWs (both Americans and Asians), but widows and dependents of the deceased also occasionally claimed damages.

AND IS IT ENOUGH?

As reported by Elizabeth Mullener of New Orleans Times-Picayune, a three-day symposium on war reparations was recently held at the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans. Guenter Bischof, the organizer and director of Center Austria at the University of New Orleans, pointed out that restitution does not have to be monetary, but that "the principle, on the most basic level, is…to make up for past injustices…Amends [can] be done through symbolic restitution -- through apologies." Bischof further observed that "Germany apologized soon after the war, but the Japanese government had to be prodded to admit its guilt in committing war crimes in World War II -- like, for instance, the Nanking Massacre where they killed some 300,000 Chinese."

Without a doubt, mere money or apology cannot erase the atrocities of that too-often romanticized war – the Holocaust, the atomic bombs, the brutal Japanese Imperial occupation of Asia and the Pacific, the vicious devastation of Russia by Germany and its also vicious vengeance march through Eastern Europe. What can erase these histories – and the lessons they hold for the future – is when a nation is permitted to discount, forget, or deny that they occurred. Holocaust denial remains alive and well today in parts of Europe (and the U.S.), and revisionist accounts of the Japanese occupation, use of slave labor, and abuse of "comfort women" remain unacknowledged and officially taught in parts of Japan.

In this sense, a nation’s restitution to an individual and apology to a group symbolize something altogether more significant. It forces a nation to acknowledge the wrong paths it has taken, accept a sense of justice that made those decisions wrong, and (it is hoped) to make a course correction so that the same path is not taken again – before it’s too late. In this sense, yes, the citizens of a nation do have a vested interest in seeing its government   come clean and responsible leadership restored.  In America, we believe that if a government goes astray, we as citizens can indeed engage in democratic civil actions -- voting, Constitutional amendments, protests -- to make things better.  One might say that this is very much our patriotic duty.

So, as you suggest: Discrimination and hatred, slavery and injustice are human constants. The question for you, for  myself, and for all the Villagers is: Do we accept this state as natural, inevitable, and "normal"? Or, do we fight it and continually strive for better -- in both our governments and ourselves?

Again, my thanks for your addition to the Village dialogue.  I hope that it will encourage other Villagers to share their views on this topic, which has become all-too relevant again in our country since September 11.

Sincerely,

Stewart David Ikeda

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Related Readings

• Internment, Redress and the Art of Apology
  By Stewart David Ikeda, Editor
  Grading Ex-Presidents Clinton and Bush on their Internment Lessons
• February 19 Day of Remembrance
  AAV's annual special section on the anniversary of EO 9066 recalls the impact of the WWII internment historically and today
• Asian-American Village: Views
  Villagers' letters to the editor page, part of our new Village Dialogue section collecting editorials, guest op-eds, Village opinion results, and other Villager views