The Japanese American Redress Movement refers to the efforts, from the 1940s through the 1990s, to obtain the restitution of civil rights, monetary compensation, and an apology from the U.S. government for the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Japanese Americans protested their mass incarceration with defiance and protests while living at the camps, and afterwards continued demands for redress through judicial and legislative campaigns at state, local, and federal levels. The eventual passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 granted a token payment of $20,000, as well as an official apology, to surviving Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated, with the first payments made in October 1990. Ultimately the Office of Redress Administration (ORA) made payment to 82,250 former incarcerees before it officially closed in February 1999.
Redress payments began with the oldest surviving former incarcerees. At a ceremony held at the Nisei Veterans Hall on South King Street in Seattle’s Chinatown International District, the first five Washington state residents, all over 100 years old, received their formal letters of apology from the US government. This photo shows 103-year old Kichisaburo Ishimitsu, second from left, after receiving his letter. His friends Shigeko Uno, left, and Margaret Uchimura, right, share his joy, while Fusako Kamihara examines the letter of apology he received. Ishimitsu, his wife, and their six children spent four years in camps, the first at the Puyallup Assembly Center, and then at the Minidoka camp in Idaho.
Caption information source: “U.S. delivers apology with token payment to Japanese” by Joe Mooney, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, October 10, 1990, p. 1; “Japanese-American internees finally get nation’s apologies” by Gil Bailey; photo caption Seattle Post-Intelligencer, October 15, 1990, p. A1, B1-2 Caption information source: Densho Encyclopedia at encyclopedia.densho.org Caption information also derived from captions written by Seattle Post-Intelligencer staff and attached to the back of the photograph.
