The San Francisco chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League recently honored Grace Shimizu, an advocate who has spent 37 years fighting for peace and justice. Grace’s warm smile and friendly, open face make her appear like an unlikely warrior when you first see her. However, when you learn about the hardships endured by her family and her decades-long quest for justice for her father and other Americans of Japanese Latin American ancestry, you understand why the JACL award was so richly deserved.
Thanks to the redress movement that won a major legislative victory in 1988, many people have heard about the unjust internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry behind barbed-wire fences during World War II. Less well-known is that the camps were set up partly to remove Japanese Americas from the West Coast, and partly to create a hostage barter reserve in case Americans of European ancestry were captured by the Japanese Imperial Army.
As noted in Michi Weglyn’s Years of Infamy and other authoritative books, our country’s highest military and civilian leaders saw Americans of Japanese ancestry as the same as Japanese nationals when it came to hostage bartering, despite the fact that two-thirds of Japanese Americans were American citizens by birth.
An even less well-known but equally unconscionable part of this scheme was a plan to kidnap Peruvians, Bolivians and other Latin Americans of Japanese ancestry to use them in the hostage barter reserve plan. More than two thousand Japanese Peruvians and others were forcibly taken from their homes by local law enforcement officers, transported to coastal cities, and shipped by American authorities to the same type of barbed wire-enclosed “internment camps” as Japanese Americans.
Unable to speak English, these kidnapped Spanish-speakers of Japanese ancestry endured a worse nightmare than that faced by Japanese Americans, most of whom understood English. Spanish-speaking American immigration officers confiscated the passports of those transported under guard from their homes in Lima or Quito, so these unfortunate JLAs became people without a country.
Grace Shimizu’s father was one of the JLAs who endured years behind barbed wire, and then faced further indignities when the war ended. Their former home countries in Latin America refused to allow them to return, and many JLAs were forcibly sent to a war-ravaged Japan, where they had little or no family or community support. The Japanese American community, itself facing financial and social pressures, did what it could to help those JLAs who stayed here. Many JLAs were forced into exploitative economic situations, such as working for long hours at low pay in the newly emerging frozen food industry.
Like many of the children of wartime internees, Grace did her part to help JLAs sign up for the redress payments under the 1988 redress bill. However, the bill was interpreted by the Department of Justice to exclude from redress anyone who was not an American citizen, legal permanent resident or otherwise staying here “under color of law.” That final phrase excluded JLAs, whose status as kidnap victims meant that they were here illegally, even though their entry had been against their free will.
As an advocate, Grace understood that the exclusion of JLAs from the 1988 redress bill meant that JLAs would not receive the $20,000 and apology that other Japanese Americans received between 1988 and 1998. She earlier had co-founded the Japanese Peruvian Oral History Project, but now she felt compelled to participate in meetings, lawsuits, lobbying and other activities that eventually resulted in some JLAs receiving a partial measure of compensation. Most remain uncompensated or unfairly under-compensated, however, for an injustice that was comparable to the much-criticized rendition process used by the Bush administration today.
Grace has gone on to found the Campaign for Justice (www.campaignforjusticejla.org), collected oral histories about the JLA experience, become a vocal opponent of the war in Iraq, and supported Muslim Americans and others who are being targeted the way her family was targeted during World War II.
She continues to work with JLAs and other supporters to achieve redress for JLAs through the courts and Congress, and her community education efforts have helped a new generation of Americans understand the international dimensions of one of this country’s greatest human rights mistakes.
Grace’s father has passed on, as have most of the members of his generation, but her 94-year-old mother was there at the San Francisco JACL dinner. When Grace received her award, her mother smiled proudly at a daughter who not only learned about her peoples’ history, but helped to shape it as well.