It took the United States 46 years to right a grave wrong.
August 10, 1988: President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, issuing a formal apology and $20,000 in reparations to Japanese Americans who had been unjustly incarcerated during WWII.
Between 1942 and 1945, the U.S. government forcibly removed and imprisoned over 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, roughly two-thirds of them U.S. citizens, in what it called War Relocation Centers. They were stripped of their homes, businesses, and rights, and confined behind barbed wire in remote camps. The government called it military necessity. It was fear, prejudice, and wartime hysteria wearing an official name.
For decades, most survivors carried this in silence, guided in part by gaman, a cultural instinct toward quiet endurance, and a real fear of public backlash if they spoke up.
That began to change in 1979, when Senator Daniel Inouye introduced Senate Bill 1647, calling for a federal commission to investigate what had actually happened. President Jimmy Carter signed it into law the following year, creating the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. In July 1981, the CWRIC held its first public hearing. Survivors who had never told their own families what they’d been through stood up and testified. Ten more hearings followed across the country. By the end, nearly 750 people had spoken.
Personal Justice Denied
Their testimony was raw, emotional, and hard to dismiss.
It was also backed by something harder to argue with: paperwork. Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, a former incarceree turned self-trained researcher, spent those same years digging through the National Archives and found the one surviving copy of a government report proving incarceration had never been a military necessity at all. The military had rewritten and tried to destroy the original. She found what they’d missed.
The commission’s 1983 report, Personal Justice Denied, laid the case out plainly: incarceration wasn’t security. It was race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership. It became the foundation for the bill Reagan would eventually sign.
Getting there wasn’t simple. Reagan spent two years publicly opposed to the redress bill. His advisers argued the $1.25 billion price tag was too high, and pushed him to veto it.
Reagan vs. Reagan
What changed his mind traces back to 1945, and a young Army captain named Ronald Reagan, four decades before he became president. That December, the Distinguished Service Cross was presented to the family of Kazuo Masuda, a Japanese American staff sergeant with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team who’d been killed in Italy the year before. Masuda’s own family had spent the war incarcerated while he fought. At a rally that followed the ceremony, Reagan told the crowd, “The blood that has soaked into the sands of a beach is all one color.”
Decades later, with Reagan still opposed to the redress bill, advocate Grant Ujifusa and Masuda’s sister, June Masuda Goto, wrote letters aimed at reminding him of that day. New Jersey Governor Tom Kean carried the message directly to the president. It worked.
Reagan closed his signing remarks by returning to that same 1945 afternoon, reading from the old newspaper clipping himself, before adding: “We gather here today to right a grave wrong.”
Late for Many
The apology came too late for most of the people it was meant for. By the time it reached them, roughly 40 years after the incarceration began, most of the Issei who had lived through it, and more than half of everyone who had been imprisoned, had already died.
Even signing the bill didn’t mean the apology arrived right away. It took two more years to actually distribute it. On October 1, 1990, the government held its first payment ceremony, and made a deliberate choice: the oldest survivors went first. There was no guarantee everyone else still waiting would live long enough to receive theirs. For those who did live to see it, it was never really about the $20,000. It was proof that the government could be made to say, on the record, in writing, that it had been wrong. Proof that decades of silence, testimony, buried documents, and stubborn advocacy had actually mattered.
It took more than four decades, and the collective effort of researchers, survivors, lawmakers, and ordinary people who simply refused to let the record stand uncorrected. Justice was delayed by 46 years. But it finally came.
Thank you for sharing the history of Japanese Americans, all these historical events are truly touched my hearts. I had a difficult time to reading this article because a tears were filling my eyes.
Thank you so much for sharing your feedback. We also have a difficult time writing and editing these stories because of the emotional weight behind them.
The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 was the culmination of decades of pain, perseverance, and determination by so many Japanese Americans who refused to let their experiences be forgotten. Many who had remained quiet for years finally came together to be heard.
May we continue to honor their courage and carry their work forward.