"The bigger story is that redress is a triumph for all Americans, giving us the heart to pursue other ideals."—from the Foreword by Chizu Omori
When President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, tens of thousands of Japanese Americans could finally claim redress from the government that had violated their constitutional rights during World War II. Films and books have explored the appalling circumstances of these 120,000 Japanese immigrants and their families, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, incarcerated in ten camps situated in eight western states from 1942 until 1946.
What is not commonly known is that the roots of redress began to take shape with a few second-generation Japanese American engineers at the Boeing Company in Seattle in the late 1960s. Tired of being disregarded by their hakujin (white) colleagues, they decided to change the perception that most Americans had of hardworking, silent Asians. Their decision coincided with the opening of a 1970 museum exhibit in Seattle that examined the history of Japanese Americans in the Northwest, depicting in compelling images the consequences of Executive Order 9066. From these initially unrelated circumstances a movement was born that involved national organizations and eventually gained congressional attention in the 1980s. Robert Sadamu Shimabukuro has constructed a very personal testimony from hundreds of interviews with those who lived in the wartime camps and with those who initiated the campaign to seek a public apology from the United States government.