Were Japanese Americans ever reconciled for the Internment Camps and cruelty they experienced?

by thatonekoolkid15

Were Japanese Americans ever reconciled for the homes, jobs, and lives (lives meaning the fact that they lost everything) they lost along with the racism they experienced? I'm reading about George Takei and Pat Morita's experience in the camps, and they say that Morita's family lost their home, and successful dry cleaning business and had to start over with nothing.

rocketsocks

Not fully. Also note that a parallel set of interments happened in Canada as well.

Citizens of Japanese ancestry in the US and Canada were forcibly interned during WWII, many had their personal property and homes seized and sold off. This included many valuable businesses especially farms and fishing boats. Conditions under internment were very much sub-standard at best, and poor even for typical treatment of POWs let alone citizens. After the war in Canada many Japanese-Canadians were not allowed to return to the West Coast, some were forcibly deported to Japan and those who remained in Canada were typically forced to take jobs below their skill level as white color and high skilled jobs were barred for them. In 1949 the restrictions on Japanese-Canadians were finally ended but by then they had already been deprived of land, property, earning potential and thousands had been deported, so it was an uphill battle to get back on their feet.

In the US Japanese-Americans were in theory able to return to their homes in 1945 but in practice they were stripped of their property and denied the ability to own land by state laws on the West Coast so their family farms were by and large lost. Some were lucky enough to have caretakers who had tended their farms during internment though some of these used their positions to extort very favorable sales out of the original owners, only a tiny fraction held onto the farms they had owned for decades. In 1952 Japanese-Americans were finally able to become fully naturalized citizens and by 1965 the extreme limitations on East Asian immigration was finally removed. Along with the other civil rights advances of the 1960s Japanese-Americans finally became full citizens of the US legally (I won't address all the institutionalized racism that still exists in the US as that's too large a topic).

In the late 1940s both the US and Canada made token efforts to try to redress what was essentially state sanctioned looting of property of citizens of Japanese heritage. These commissions recovered a tiny fraction of the enormous financial losses that had been incurred but they laid the issue to rest in the eyes of their respective governments. Over the decades after the war activism grew to more properly redress the wrongs of internment during the war, spurred especially by younger Japanese Americans and Canadians. This culminated in the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 in the US which paid $20,000 (roughly $50k today) per survivor of internment as reparations along with a formal apology and other measures such as funding public education of the tragedy. A month later the Canadian government did something very similar with a comparable reparations payment and reinstatement of Canadian citizenship to those who had been deported.

While this was a fairly remarkable effort to admit wrongdoing and attempt to redress the harm that was done through internment it was a far cry from fully making things right. Many people were excluded from being able to receive reparations payments though. Compensation wasn't given to the families of those who had died before the reparations payments were made and non-citizens from Latin American countries who had been swept up into the US internment camps were not compensated. And the enormous loss of businesses and property was never fully compensated. Especially in terms of the farms on the US West Coast, many of those farms became very valuable businesses after the war and the real-estate property value alone on all that land has become astronomical within the last about 40 years or so.

A proper reconciliation, even solely on financial levels, would look at least an order of magnitude larger than what was done in the 1980s. Very little reconciliation has been attempted in depth for all the wrongs that were perpetrated through internment.