Many people were against the reparations. Including Japanese Americans.
August 21, 1939: John Tateishi, who would go on to lead the JACL’s fight for redress, was born in Lawndale, California.
Tateishi was three years old when Executive Order 9066 uprooted his family. He spent the war years incarcerated at Manzanar, one of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans held behind barbed wire without charge or trial. When the family returned to Los Angeles after the war, they did what so many others did: they put their heads down and tried to rebuild.
Tateishi went on to study English literature at UC Berkeley and later taught at City College of San Francisco. He didn’t set out to become an activist.
He became involved with the Japanese American Citizens League in 1975, and three years later, at age 39, he was named chair of the JACL’s newly formed National Committee for Redress. He would spend the next decade fighting for something almost nobody, on either side of the political aisle, believed was possible: a formal apology and monetary reparations from the United States government for the incarceration of its own citizens.
Opposition From Every Direction
Conservative lawmakers pointed to the federal deficit and argued it was fiscally reckless to compensate a wrong committed by a previous generation of taxpayers. Public figures like Lillian Baker, who founded a group explicitly to oppose redress, insisted the incarceration had been a “military necessity” and fought the movement at every hearing, once drawing a mass walkout of over 200 Japanese Americans during her testimony before Congress.
But the resistance wasn’t only external. Tateishi’s own community was divided, sometimes bitterly.
Many older Nisei, the generation that had actually endured the camps, had spent decades processing that trauma through cultural values like gaman (endure with dignity) and shikataganai (it cannot be helped). To them, reopening the wound publicly for what some saw as a “government handout” felt neither dignified nor worthwhile. Even the JACL’s own wartime spokesperson, Mike Masaoka, opposed monetary compensation outright. Senator S.I. Hayakawa took to the Senate floor to argue against reparations directly.
Convincing Everybody
Tateishi found himself caught in the middle: distrusted by more confrontational Sansei-led groups like the National Coalition for Redress/Reparations for being too establishment, and resisted by JACL elders for pushing too hard, too fast, on something many of them had spent forty years trying not to think about.
What eventually shifted the Nisei generation, Tateishi later reflected, wasn’t the money at all. It was reframing redress as a defense of the Constitution itself, and a guarantee that no future generation, Japanese American or otherwise, would be made to suffer the same fate.
Campaigning also meant something harder than lobbying Congress: explaining incarceration to a public that largely didn’t know it happened, and often didn’t want to believe it had. Tateishi spent years on radio programs and in public forums facing open hostility, people who assumed Japanese Americans must have done something to deserve it, or who denied the camps had existed at all.
A Decade of Hearings and Doubts
The campaign’s first real breakthrough wasn’t a reparations bill at all. In 1980, Congress created the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, a federal panel tasked simply with investigating what had happened. Over the following year, the commission held hearings in ten cities and took testimony from more than 750 witnesses, many speaking about their incarceration publicly for the first time in their lives.
In 1983, the commission published its findings in a report titled Personal Justice Denied, concluding that the incarceration had not been driven by military necessity but by “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” It recommended a formal government apology and individual compensation.
Even with that report in hand, it took five more years of lobbying, coalition-building, and legislative maneuvering before a bill reached the President’s desk. Tateishi left the campaign two years before it finally succeeded.
Ten Years, Thousands of Voices
On August 10, 1988, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act into law, granting a formal apology and $20,000 in reparations to every surviving Japanese American who had been incarcerated. The first checks weren’t distributed until October 1990, in a small Washington ceremony.
Tateishi later wrote about the fight in his book, Redress: The Inside Story of the Successful Campaign for Japanese American Reparations, reflecting on a movement that, by nearly every rational political calculation, should not have worked.
It worked anyway. Not because everyone agreed it should happen. Because enough people, including some who doubted it themselves, kept pushing until it did.