Mike Murase, president of the Little Tokyo Service Center and long-time community organizer, testified before the CWRIC on behalf of a federation of 13 social service organizations serving Japanese Americans in Southern California. His testimony drew on years of direct service and the painful legacy of camp still visible in the community.

• Community Perspective: Represented a broad coalition providing social services, legal aid, mental health counseling, and anti-crime programs. He stressed that nearly every Japanese American was “deeply and irreparably affected” by the camp experience, even those who did not speak of it.

• Unspoken Stories: Shared composite stories gathered from clients—

  
  

  • A woman’s last memory of her husband was his face as the FBI dragged him away.

  • A man, embittered, whose education was cut short and family business destroyed.

  • A woman suffering chronic illness from camp stress, burdened by medical costs.

  • Another woman, assaulted by soldiers en route to camp, left unable to speak of it.

  • A farmer forced to sell everything for a fraction of its worth, left broken and alcoholic.

  
  

• Psychic Wounds: Believed these traumas left deep scars that still surface, even in younger generations who grew up pressured to “prove loyalty” by abandoning Japanese culture.

• Assimilation Pressure: Recalled friends as children who hid rice balls or begged fathers not to drop them off in gardener’s trucks. He connected shame, high intermarriage rates, and destruction of ethnic enclaves to the war years’ forced assimilation.

• Losses Beyond Dollars: Japanese Americans lost land, property, privacy, dignity, pride, and opportunities. While no price tag could capture this, he endorsed the National Coalition for Redress and Reparations and demanded justice now, reparations now.