Mitchell Maki: Preserving the Courageous Legacy of the Japanese-American WWII Heroes

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. We are on a mission to make you remarkable. Helping me in this episode is Mitchell Maki. Mitchell is the president and CEO of the Go for Broke National Education Center. This is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the legacy of Japanese American World War II veterans.
Prior to this, he served as acting provost and vice president of Academic Affairs at Cal State University, Dominguez Hills and acting dean of the College of Health and Human Services at Cal State University, Los Angeles.
He was also an assistant professor in the Department of Social Welfare at UCLA. Mitch is the author of Achieving the Impossible Dream: How Japanese Americans Obtained Redress, which details the Japanese-American redress movement. This book received the Gustavus Meyers Outstanding Book Award in 2000 for addressing bigotry and human rights in North America.
Just in case you don't know, I am Sansei, which is third generation Japanese American. I was raised in Honolulu Hawaii, and as you'll hear, I was shielded from much of the experience of the Japanese-Americans who are living in the mainland of the United States.
Just a warning, this conversation may leave you in tears like it did for me. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. And now here is the remarkable Mitchell Maki.
Mitchell Maki:
My wife is originally from Waipahu, and my parents are originally from Hilo. They came up to LA in the fifties, but I'm a Katonk.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow. I was born and raised in Kalihi Valley.
Mitchell Maki:
And what high school you went to?
Guy Kawasaki:
I went to ‘Iolani. It's a long story, but the sixth grade teacher in Kalihi Elementary convinced my parents to take me out of the public school system and put me in ‘Iolani so I could go to college. And that was a turning point in my life.
Mitchell Maki:
She was the remarkable person in your life.
Guy Kawasaki:
She definitely was. And even more so my parents listened to her and made the sacrifices to do that, so they were remarkable too. So tell us what you do right now. You have a very interesting job.
Mitchell Maki:
I'm very blessed to have the position that I have. I am the president of Go For Broke National Education Center. And we tell the story of the Japanese American veterans of World War II, of their courage, their patriotism, and their sacrifice at a time when the nation did not trust them.
And they would go on to become the most highly decorated unit of their size in American military history for their length of service. And we oftentimes say at Go For Broke National Education Center that this is not a great Japanese-American story. This is a great American story.
Guy Kawasaki:
I just want to point out in case people don't quite catch the subtlety of this, is that these people were fighting for America while their families were interned in America.
Mitchell Maki:
That is correct, and it's a long complicated story, of course. But in the end, there were about 33,000 young men and some women who joined the army at a time when Japanese Americans were considered the enemy and untrustworthy.
Now, about two-thirds of them came from Hawaii where there wasn't mass incarceration, but still the leaders in Hawaii were picked out and sent to these incarceration camps. Japanese-Americans in Hawaii faced their own level of discrimination and racism, but certainly on the continental United States, the Japanese-Americans, as we know were incarcerated en masse, no charges, no trials.
People lost their homes, their jobs or communities. And yet these young men and women knew who they were. They knew that they were Americans, and they also knew that it was important that they had to demonstrate their loyalty at that time because in 1943, 1944, 1945, loyalty needed to be demonstrated in blood.
Guy Kawasaki:
And was this attitude, which I got to tell you I'm Japanese-American obviously, but I still scratch my head. Why would you go and risk your life for the country that just put you in camp? But was this like a unanimously held belief or were there some Japanese-Americans in those camps who said, "Why the hell would I go fight for America? I ain't risking my life."
Mitchell Maki:
Now, Guy, you're putting your finger right on the pulse here that this was a question that tore the community apart, tore families apart as they would argue back and forth. It's like, "How can you fight for a country that has done this to us?"
Others would say, "Give me back my rights and I'll go and fight." And there were young men who resisted the draft and paid a heavy penalty for being principled. And for example, at Heart Mountain Wyoming, one of the camps up there. There were sixty-three young men, they were known as the Fair Play Committee.
And they said, "Give us back our rights and we will go and fight." So it was very principled what they were doing, and unfortunately many of them were branded as cowards and as traitors. And in fact, they weren't cowards because some of them would go on and fight in the Korean War years later.
They were just very principled in knowing that dissent when something is wrong is an American value. But for the most part, the Japanese-American young men and eventually young women knew who they were as American citizens. They also knew that they were seen as the enemy.
If they didn't step forward, it would just be validating that perception that we weren't true Americans. So many of them understood that they were fighting for much more than just the nation. They were fighting for themselves, their families and the Japanese-American community to have a chance in America. And there was a young Japanese American sergeant at the time, his name was Kazuo Masuda. And they asked him, "Why are you fighting for America when your family is behind barbed wire?"
And his answer, I think is the answer that the Nisei soldiers would've given, which was, "Because this is the only way that I know that my family can have a chance in America." Right or wrong, agree with him or not, Sergeant Masuda and the thousands of other Japanese-American soldiers understood that they had to demonstrate their loyalty at that time.
Guy Kawasaki:
I was born and raised in Hawaii, and I got to tell you, I never heard these stories until I came to college. In college, I met my first Katonks. And people listening to that, the term Katonk is a derogatory term for Japanese American born on the mainland versus Hawaii. At least people from Hawaii look at it that way.
Mitchell Maki:
Guy, do you know where that term comes from?
Guy Kawasaki:
The story I heard is that when you hit them on the head, their head went Katonk.
Mitchell Maki:
And it's related to the Japanese-American veterans because it happened where when they brought all of these Japanese Americans together to form the 442nd and the 100th/442nd, many of them, two thirds of them were from Hawaii, the other third were from the mainland. And those are two very different cultures.
And the Hawaii boys and the mainland boys, they could not get along. And they would just beef all the time, fight all the time. It was to the point where the army said, "Hey, this isn't going to work. They can't even get along with each other. How are they going to go fight the enemy together?"
And they would fight. And the term Katonk came exactly from what you said, is that when the Hawaii boys would hit the mainland boys and the story would be when they fall down and their head hits the floor, it goes “katonk.” It wasn't a complimentary term. It's a very derogative term.
But the other part of this story is it got so bad that the army thought they were going to just disband the unit. They said, "This is not going to work." But finally what they decided to do is they took several busloads of Hawaii boys that were at Camp Shelby in Mississippi, and they took them to one of the camps in Arkansas and to show them firsthand what was going on.
I get real emotional when I tell this story, but Senator Inouye would tell the story. And he said they were on the bus going to the camps, they didn't know what to expect. He said, "Oh, they had their ukuleles. They put their cologne on because they heard they were going to meet a bunch of Japanese American girls.
They were looking to having a fun weekend." And he said after several hours, the buses started to approach, would look to them like a military installation or a military camp. And they said, "What is this?"
And they got closer and they saw the barbed wire and they saw the white military police at the gates with armed guards and bayonets on their rifles. And as they pulled into the camps, they saw all of the Japanese American families. And Senator Inouye talked about how it just hit them what was going on.
These families were being imprisoned behind barbed wire. And he said they tried to have a good time when they were there. The inmates at the camps put on a dance. They had saved a week's worth of rations to put on a nice party for the soldiers.
But as Senator Inouye said, "How do you have a good time when you're in the middle of a prison and you know that there are people that look like your families behind barbed wire?" He said, "On the way home, nobody was singing.
Nobody was laughing because all the Hawaii boys were asking themselves the same question, would I serve if they did this to my family?" And when they got back to Camp Shelby, they told the other guys, "Hey, leave the Katonks alone. They're the real heroes here. They're fighting for their families." Sorry.
Guy Kawasaki:
No, no, you're making me cry too. I mean, basically, if you were from Hawaii, I'm seventy years old. Literally, I don't think any of my peers at ‘Iolani or Japanese-Americans knew this story. It was a complete shock to me when I got to Stanford and I heard these stories and I always thought, "Man, these Katonks, they really have a chip on their shoulder. They're angry about something. What are they angry about?" And I could not understand that until I learned about this.
Mitchell Maki:
As I mentioned to you, my parents were from Hilo, so they're like your folks. They didn't experience the incarceration during World War II. And I was born here in Los Angeles, and I was raised here. And I learned about this story when I was about ten years old, that they had incarcerated people of Japanese descent.
And I thought, "Oh, it's got to be like people from Japan or something. Couldn't be people like me, like you." And then I realized it was people like us. If your family had been here, if my family had been here at the time, we would've been sent off to camps.
And Guy as a ten-year-old kid, that just blew my mind. It's like, "Wait, I'm not American? They would do this to me." And it really made me question, what does it mean to be an American as a ten-year-old?
And then right after I learned about the camps, I then learned about the 100th/442nd and later the MIS and what heroes they were. And that blew my mind. But this time in a more positive way, right? It's like, "Wow, these are people like my father, like my uncle. And they did this crazy thing that nobody else could do, and they earned the respect of America."
And from that moment, it was like your sixth grade teacher, where it was a remarkable experience. And I said, "I got to learn more about this." And because my parents were from Hawaii, and I asked them what happened? They said, "We don't know. Go find out." Which is very different than what the mainland parents would tell their kids oftentimes, which was more like, “Shikata ga nai; it can't be helped. We don't talk about it anymore."
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm glad you brought up this term ‘shikata ga nai’, just to repeat what you said. It's this attitude, it can't be helped. It's like you just go with the flow. Now with hindsight, do you think that ‘shikata ga nai’ was the right way to go? Was that the right attitude?
Mitchell Maki:
The first thing we have to understand is what ‘shikata ga nai’ means. It doesn't mean just give up and don't care. It's a healthy kind of fatalism in the sense that there are some things that you can't change in life, so you have to adapt to them.
For example, if there's a mountain in front of you, you're not going to move the mountain. ‘shikata ga nai’; It can't be helped. The mountain is there. You go around the mountain. So you find ways to adapt. When we think about World War II and the camps, the ‘shikata ga nai’ with another value, which is ‘gaman’.
Which is you work your way through it, you keep fighting and find that a different way of dealing with things that can't be helped. Together they formed a very helpful way for the Japanese American community to deal with an impossible situation.
Because the truth is, if the Japanese American community on the mainland had resisted going to camp, the army had plans to physically remove them by force at gunpoint and at bayonet point. It would've been incredibly messy, incredibly bloody. And the Japanese-American community had no friends at that time to speak of.
Individual friends, yes. But the general public attitude towards us was not positive at all. And for your listeners, I think it's important for them to realize that in 1942, the Nazis were seen as evil men. The Japanese were seen as an evil, subhuman species. So we were not on the same level as even the Nazis. We were seen as evil, but they were still seen as human beings.
Guy Kawasaki:
And why do you think no Germans or Italians were interned? Same war.
Mitchell Maki:
We could talk about that for hours and hours. There's certainly levels of racism involved in this. Germans and Italians are white, Japanese are Asian, and there's just this vitriol. This really negative racism as to how Asians were viewed by white America. The other reality is that Germans and the Italians had heroes in America.
Joe DiMaggio was Italian-American. So people were acquainted with Germans and Italians as Americans in a way that they weren't acquainted with Japanese-Americans at that time because we were primarily in Hawaii or on the West Coast.
People in the Midwest, East Coast, they had never seen or heard of Japanese-Americans. But there's another element that I think oftentimes is overlooked, and that is the element of greed. If you think about it, why weren't the Japanese Americans in Hawaii, why weren't they incarcerated?
That's where we had been attacked. Why didn't they scoop up all the Japanese Americans and put them on another island or incarcerate them in a camp? And the answer is because 40 percent of the workforce in Hawaii at that time was Japanese American.
So if you had incarcerated the Japanese-Americans in Hawaii, you would've killed the economy of that territory at that time. So for financial reasons, Japanese Americans were left alone in Hawaii. On the mainland on the West coast, Japanese Americans had taken what had been very infertile farmland, worked it to the point of it becoming very fertile, very productive.
And there were many white farmers at that time said, "How do we get our hands on that land? The best way to get our hands on that land is to get rid of the Japanese-American farmers, and we'll take over that very productive farmland."
So greed played a different role on the mainland in terms of facilitating the exclusion of Japanese-Americans into these camps.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow. So let's go down a potentially very dark alley here. Let's say that on November Fifth, Donald Trump is elected, God forbid. So he's elected and all of a sudden him and his crew, they're like, "We're going to deport all the illegal people. We're going to put Mexicans and Muslims in camps. We're going to register them.” It's like Manzanar two, right? Everything comes back. Now, first of all, in modern America, do you think that's conceivable? Could that happen?
Mitchell Maki:
Without a doubt, it could happen. And there's the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who was a very conservative justice. Before he died he said, "What happened to the Japanese-Americans was wrong, but you're kidding yourself if you think it will never happen again. In times of war, the laws fall silent.
In times of war, the laws fall silent." Those are very chilling words for any American, whether you're on the right or whether you're on the left. To think that our laws in a nation, we pride ourselves of being a nation of laws, that the laws will fall silent.
And so that's why it's so important for me to tell this story because it's a reminder that in times of crisis, we have to be ever vigilant about protecting our laws. In the 1980s, there was a commission that studied this whole experience of the incarceration, and they also studied the Japanese American Veterans response and so forth.
But they issued a finding called personal justice denied, and they said that the camps were wrong and that the camps were the result of race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.
I share that with young people all the time right now, race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership. When does that sound like? You're laughing. It sounds like 1942, but it also sounds like 2024. Race prejudice.
I don't think we have to belabor that point in America today that racism is still rearing its ugly head in our nation. War hysteria, whether it's war across the globe or even war within our own borders. I think we are at war with ourselves at times here in the United States. And a failure of political leadership.
And I want to be clear, that's not a swipe at the Democrats or a swipe at the Republicans or at any person individually, but I think most of us would agree that right now, at least in Washington DC, things are not working. That everything is so partisan and the word compromise has become a dirty word and reaching across the aisle to find ideas that are for the betterment of our nation and moving us to be in a more perfect union. We're missing that in a way that I think it was more present several decades ago.
Race prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure political leadership. Maybe we're not so far away from 1942 as we thought we were.
Guy Kawasaki:
So let's say that I am a Mexican person and I'm listening to this. Are you telling me that we should embrace the ‘shikata ga nai’ attitude in 2024? Or we should be protesting, we should be doing everything we can to prevent this? What role does ‘shikata ga nai’ have in 2024?
Mitchell Maki:
I'm definitely not saying to roll over and let things happen because I don't think that's what ‘shikata ga nai’ means in this case. I think ‘shikata ga nai’ is a healthy recognition of what is. How do you adapt to that? How do you address that?
And there are times when protests and fighting back is the appropriate response to something that is a very bad situation. I think it's clear at Go For Broke National Education Center, we have a young adult program called the Torchbearers. And what we ask of our torchbearers is get engaged, be civically engaged so that your voice matters.
So that you can begin to address the issues of today and make sure that it just doesn't happen with us not being aware of it and not being involved in this. So I think, Guy, the answer to the question is there's so much going on in our nation right now, and what we have to take from the Nisei Veterans story is get engaged, fight for America's promise.
And what we always say is, our veterans fought for and embodied America's promise, and that's the promise that in our nation, no one should be judged by the color of their skin, the nation of their origin, the faith that they choose to keep or the person they choose to love.
And that's what our veterans fought for, a more perfect union that upholds America's promise. That's what we say to our young torchbearers is we don't tell them exactly how to feel about every issue, but get involved so that you can address and uphold America's promise.
Guy Kawasaki:
To back up a little bit, is there a Black equivalent to the 442? You could also make the case you're Black and you're risking your life in World War II. For a country that is so deeply prejudiced against you, why would you fight for America? Is there an equivalent story there?
Mitchell Maki:
Yes. In World War II, yes and even before World War II. Black Americans served our nation all the way back to the Revolutionary War. But during World War II in particular, that's my wheelhouse, what I know more about. There were the Tuskegee Airmen who were an all African American unit of fighter pilots and airplane pilots.
And there were also the Buffalo soldiers who were a segregated unit of African American soldiers. And the really neat story about this is towards the end of the war in Italy, the army was trying to break through what was known as the gothic line.
And that was the Nazis last line of defense, and the 100th/442nd and the Buffalo soldiers were stationed very close to each other and both took casualties. And there was a triage center behind the lines where blood transfusions were going back and forth between Black soldiers and Japanese American soldiers.
And even Senator Inouye would jokingly say, "I think I have some Black blood in me because of the transfusions that went back and forth." But you're exactly right, these young soldiers, they were fighting race prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership as it pertained to the African-American community and the prejudice that they face.
And what's even more horrendous is after the war, these guys would come back, these African-American soldiers would come back oftentimes in their uniforms, and some of them were lynched, not just denied service at a restaurant, not just having their hair cut. They were lynched. They were beaten in the streets and physically hanged. It's an incredible thought to think that these young men would serve our nation just to receive that type of treatment when they came home.
Guy Kawasaki:
And I come from this sheltered background called Hawaii where I didn't know about Katonks and I didn't know about these internment camps, but it seems to me that Japanese Americans have gotten past that. But to this day, Black Americans have this incredible, it's such a disadvantage. So what happened here? If there's Tuskegee airmen and there's these Buffalo soldiers, how come they didn't have the glory and prove that Black Americans are Americans too? And why are they not the same?
Mitchell Maki:
Again, that's a question that deserves hours and hours of response. And I think that the racism that our African-American community, our African-American brothers and sisters face, in my mind, there's no denying it. A few years ago, as you might remember, we had the summer where there were a lot of Black Lives Matter protests going across the nation.
At Go for Broke National Education Center, we wanted to signal our support of the concept of bringing attention to the violence that African Americans face, but we didn't want to just write another letter that would be sent into the file somewhere.
So what we did is we produced four videos that you can see on our YouTube channel along with our Japanese-American videos. But we produced four videos of what African Americans did during World War II, of their courage, of their patriotism, of their sacrifice, so that it would be in our wheelhouse of addressing this.
And there are just some incredible stories of African Americans during World War II serving our nation in ways that is mind-boggling given what was going on back home with the Jim Crow laws and all the things that would happen and that would continue to perpetuate the discrimination that African Americans had to face.
One of the differences, I think, is that when Japanese Americans came back, especially the ones from Hawaii, they went into a relatively small territory that eventually would become a state in 1959.
And Japanese American veterans initiated and led what was known as the Democratic Revolution in Hawaii, where they went back to school using the GI bill and they became the business leaders, the political leaders, the educational leaders of the state of Hawaii. And because Hawaii is so small, their presence was able to really be felt.
And I jokingly say to all my friends, "You can't be Japanese American in Hawaii, go to public school and not have had a Japanese American teacher or a Japanese American principal because Japanese Americans are so pervasive in the educational system."
We've had two Japanese American governors in Hawaii, we've had numerous senators and representatives. The business leaders are dominated by Japanese-Americans, and it's because of the unique makeup of Hawaii, which is unlike any other state in the union.
And I think that plays a part in the changing of the Japanese-American experience from World War II, that African-Americans haven't had that kind of experience because there isn't a state where they are the majority in the same way that Japanese-Americans are such a, if not a numerical majority, at least an economic and educational majority in the state of Hawaii.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'll tell you something I recently learned. It's just completely unrelated to what we've been discussing, but I learned this about a week ago. I hope it's true because I'm about to repeat it, but I learned that Hawaii is not considered part of NATO. So NATO doesn't have an obligation to defend Hawaii. What happened there? We don't need to answer that, but I found that so bizarre.
Mitchell Maki:
And you are correct because it is the continental United States that is a part of NATO. And because Hawaii is not technically a part of the continent and not the contiguous states, that technically they are not included. It raises the question, what would happen if something happened in Hawaii? Would NATO rise to the occasion and say, "No, that's part of the United States." And I would hope that they would.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, if Russia invades Hawaii, I guess we'll find out, right?
Mitchell Maki:
No, it would put the question front and center.
Guy Kawasaki:
Can we shift now to redress? Can you explain exactly how did Japanese-Americans get redress? What was the process?
Mitchell Maki:
Wow. That's what I've dedicated my career to telling that story. It's an incredible, and to use your term remarkable story. It's the story of how the small, disenfranchised community was the victim of one of the most egregious violations of our constitution, and how forty years later it would get the nation for the first time to apologize and to pay monetary reparations to this community.
It's a story of how did the Japanese Americans find its voice, and then how did it negotiate with a nation and convince the nation to apologize?
So it's an incredible American story, and I think it speaks to the strength of our nation. But very quickly, and I'll try and do this as quickly as I can because we could literally talk about this for hours. When Japanese Americans came out of the camps in the mid-forties, after the war was over, they were given twenty-five dollars and a one-way train ticket to go and reestablish their lives.
So as you can imagine, they're worried about, "Let's put food on the table, let's put a roof over our heads, let's get the kids back to school. Let's rebuild our community."
But there was another pervasive feeling for most Japanese Americans, and that was a feeling of shame, that somehow we had done something wrong to bring this incredible violation of the Constitution upon ourselves. We had not been American enough.
So there was this feeling of let's be so 110 percent American that this will never happen to us again. It really was that classic identification with the aggressor kind of thing. We blamed ourselves. The fifties comes along and we start to see change in America, civil rights movement starts, Brown versus Board of Education says separate but equals no longer the law of the land.
And then 1959 happens. And that's significant because what happens in 1959? Hawaii becomes a state, and with statehood, we start to get representation of Japanese Americans because the first representative from Hawaii was none other than Daniel Ken Inouye, who was a 442nd veteran who lost his right arm in battle.
What better symbol of loyalty could we send to Congress than someone like Daniel Inouye. The sixties come along. We have more civil rights movement. It's in its full bloom. We have the women's movement. So young people are starting to question what really is equality?
We have the anti-Vietnam war movement where young people are learning to say, "Hell no, I won't go." And dissent becomes an American value. And finally, we have the ethnic studies movement in the sixties where young Japanese Americans start to ask, "What the hell happened? Why did our parents and our grandparents go to camp and not resist?"
In the seventies, the community was basically divided between, one part said, "Let it go, happened a long time ago. We want to forget about it. We don't want to relive this." Another group said, "No, we deserve a good clean apology.
Just give us a good clean apology. Don't insult me. Don't throw money my way and try and buy me off and pay for my civil rights. Just give me a good clean apology." And the third group said, "No. What happened to us was wrong. It wasn't like they just called us names and hurt our feelings. There were real property losses, financial losses.
Give us an apology and money." That argument raged in our community throughout the seventies. Also, in the seventies, we started to get more representation in the Congress, Spark Matsunaga from Hawaii becomes the second senator along with Dan Inouye.
And then we had two Japanese-Americans from California, Norman Mineta, who was from San Jose, California. He was a ten-year-old boy when he was in Heart Mountain concentration camp and Bob Matsui from Sacramento. And Bob was a six-month-old baby when his family was sent off to Tule Lake.
So now we start to have representation of two former inmates of an American concentration camp and two former heroes of the World War II. So again, I'm only hitting the highlights here because otherwise we'd be on for hours and hours.
But it wasn't until the early eighties that we were able to get a commission to come and study the problem, as a federal commission that went across the nation. The hearing testimony, it was called the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. And they heard stories from Japanese Americans and from the people who built the camps and who implemented the camps.
So they got a full 360 view. But I'd like to share just one story about the commissions because getting Japanese-Americans to talk about this in the early eighties was so difficult because so much of our community had said, "We're not going to talk about this anymore.
We're going to try and forget about it. We're going to try." So just getting people to a point of being able to articulate this and being able to share their stories. And I was at the hearings in Los Angeles in the early eighties. And there was a gentleman named Kiyoshi Sonoda. And Kiyoshi Sonoda was a dentist when he was sent off to camp.
And he testified that because he had some medical training, he was put in charge of the infirmary at his camp. And he talked about his first patient, it was a young, dehydrated infant. And Dr. Sonoda said that with the right supplies, with the right equipment, he would've been able to treat that baby and make him well.
But because he didn't have the right supplies, he didn't have the right equipment, all he could do was hold that infant in his hands and feel his last twitch before he died. And when he told that story, Dr. Sonoda had tears streaming down his face and his wife was sitting in the audience, and she said to her friend, "Kiyoshi is crying. Kiyoshi doesn't cry. Kiyoshi didn't even cry at his own father's funeral."
But on that day, Dr. Sonoda did cry. And I can tell you, because I was there, a room full of people, hundreds of us were crying with him.
It is a story that reflects how much courage it took for the Japanese community to find its voice and to finally be able to tell its stories and say what happened to us was wrong. And as powerful as that testimony was, I would submit to you, Guy, that the more powerful testimonies took place around people's dining rooms and in their living rooms.
As the young people would ask their parents, "Tell us, please tell us what really happened. Why did you go to these camps?" And their parents and grandparents would tell them maybe for the first time, the horrors of what happened during World War II as they lost everything and were imprisoned behind barbed wire.
And the parents and grandparents had then asked her young Sansei children, "Can we really get this apology? Can we really get this redress?" And the answer was, "We don't know, but we have to try." The commission found that the camps were wrong. And then we went to Congress.
And on September Seventeenth, 1987, it passes the House of Representatives. 243 representatives voted in favor of a presidential apology and monetary redress payments. 180 of them were Democrats, sixty-three of them were Republicans. It was a bipartisan effort.
People like Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde, Dick Cheney, they voted in favor of this bill because they understood it was a violation of the Constitution of us violating the rights of fellow Americans. Seven months later, it goes to the Senate, and we knew it was going to pass the Senate because Spark Matsunaga had gone and lobbied every single senator, all ninety-nine other senators, and he had seventy-one co-sponsors by the time it hit the floor of the Senate.
So we knew it was a done deal in terms of the Senate. So it passes the House and the Senate, and it's 1988, and we just need one more signature, one more person to sign on.
And that of course is the President of the United States. And in 1988, that president was none other than Ronald Reagan. And for your listeners who remember Ronald Reagan, he was a very conservative president whose own administration had been fighting against this bill and fighting against the issue in the courts.
And there were a number of us, and I got to admit, I was one of them who said, "There's no way Ronald Reagan is going to sign this bill. Just no way." But the thing about Ronald Reagan, whether you agreed with him or not, most people would agree that Ronald Reagan was a great communicator.
He had the ability to tell stories that would touch people's hearts and move them in a certain direction. The opposite was true of Ronald Reagan. If you could tell him a story that would touch his heart, you could have a great advocate on your hands.
So the question was what story could we tell Ronald Reagan that would help him to understand this on a very personal level? Remember I told you about a soldier named Kazuo Masuda. He was the sergeant who said, "I'm fighting because this is the only way I know my family can have a chance in America."
Two weeks after he said that, Sergeant Masuda was killed in battle fighting in Italy during World War II. After the war, his family is released from Gila River concentration camp, and they want to go back home to Santa Ana, California where they lived. And they were met with nothing but hate speech, racial taunts and threats of bodily harm, even though their son had died fighting for this nation. The army realized that this was a PR fiasco, that one of its own fallen heroes, his own family couldn't go back home.
So they sent out a contingent of Army officers to have a medal ceremony for the Masuda family, and they bestowed the Distinguished Service Cross onto Kazuo's sister. Amongst those officers that night, there was a young white American captain who spoke in front of an audience, and his name was Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was a captain in audience, and he was there.
And he spoke to the audience, and he said, "The blood that is soaked into the sands of a beach is all of one color. America stands unique in the world, the only country not founded on race, but on an ideal. Mr. and Mrs. Masuda, as one member of the American family to another for what your son Kazuo did. Thanks."
That story was relayed to President Reagan in the eighties, and his response was, "I remember what those soldiers did for America." And it wasn't the only reason he signed, but it aligned the story, it aligned the issues with his personal vision of what America should be.
And President Reagan, I truly believe, I didn't agree with all of his policies, but I do believe that he understood that America was a nation of immigrants and a nation that embraced being multicultural. And on August Tenth, 1988, he signed the bill.
Guy Kawasaki:
There's two ways of looking at this. One is, yes, it took a long time, but it did happen. We got the apology, we got the redress. But another way of looking at it is, "They totally ruined my life. They took all my property and decades later they gave me twenty grand. That's an insult." So how do you look at that?
Mitchell Maki:
I look at it as this is a story of what it means to be an American. That our Nisei veterans, both the men and the women were the sons and daughters of immigrants. And in one generation, they demonstrated the true essence of what it means to be an American. And they served our nation in a time of war.
And even there were Japanese Americans who served in the Pacific fighting against Japan, the nation from which their own parents had immigrated. And our nation in that moment of crisis abandoned its commitment to our values as a nation. Our constitutional laws, our constitutional values.
But forty years later, we were able to look at that as a nation and say we were wrong. And yes, it was only 20,000 and the 20,000 was never meant to truly compensate people for all the losses. It was always intended to be symbolic. But as I mentioned earlier, it was important that there be some monetary money attached to this.
Yes. Should the camps have happened in the first place? No. If we had lived up to our values at that time, we would not have incarcerated people. Should we have had segregated units? No, that's not the American way either.
But I think it demonstrates that our nation continues to evolve to being that more perfect union that we hope to someday be. And as I mentioned earlier, the Japanese-American story is not a great Japanese-American story. It's a great American story. And our veterans are American heroes. I'll give you an example, Guy.
Today when I shared this story, the young Japanese Americans were oftentimes fifth and sixth generation. They've heard this story or they like it and so forth, but the story really resonates with other young people. I had a young Latina listen to the story and become involved in our activities, and she came up to me and she said, "These were the sons of immigrants.
I'm the daughter of an immigrant. If they can do great things, so can I." I had another young Latina bring her father over to our monument that we have in downtown Los Angeles. And she said to her Father, "Papa, they didn't fight just for themselves. They fought for all of us." And in that moment, I know that the story has been positioned that it can inspire all Americans to be part of something greater than themselves and to continue to push our nation in the direction of living up to its values and its laws.
Guy Kawasaki:
I got to tell you, this has been just an eye-opening, eye watering episode for me, and I realized how lucky I am to have been raised in Hawaii. I mean, I hit the jackpot there. And I have often thought recently all the madness that's happening and all the talk about deportation and camps and all this stuff that I don't know about how you feel, but I think the moral obligation of anybody Japanese-American is to stand up for all these other people. What else can we do?
Mitchell Maki:
Guy, you said a number of things that really resonate with me. I would agree that growing up in Hawaii, you were protected from much of this. And yet what I see you doing now is not shying away from exploring all that happens in the world that you didn't know about as a youngster in Hawaii.
And I think that's admirable, that many of us come from very privileged backgrounds where we had what we needed when we were children. But along with that privilege comes a responsibility to give back, to make people aware that not everyone is privileged and that not everyone has been treated equally.
And I think that speaks to your second comment of it's important that we not let history repeat itself, and it's not going to repeat itself in the exact same way. There's going to be variations. As some people say, history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes. But it's important for us to take these lessons and apply them to current day issues and say, "How do we learn from our mistakes of the past and how do we make sure we do better?"
Guy Kawasaki:
Never in a million years did I think democracy in America would ever be at the precipice that it is. And depending on what happens in November, we really could have a very different country. I hope that everybody learns from the lesson of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. This and anything like it should never happen again.
Thank you Mitchell for coming on the Remarkable People Podcast. I hope many people learn from history and it not only doesn't repeat itself, but it doesn't even rhyme. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People.
My thanks to the Remarkable People team. That would be Madisun Nuismer, producer and also co-author of Think Remarkable. Then there's Tessa Nuismer, researcher. There's Luis Magaña, Fallon Yates, and Alexis Nishimura, and also the remarkable design team. This is Jeff Sieh and Shannon Hernandez. I'm asking you now do whatever you can to prevent the degradation of human rights. Until next time, Mahalo and Aloha.