William Morris Shigeta, born in Seattle in 1919, testified before the Commission about the personal toll of incarceration and its lasting effects on his mental health and livelihood. His life story traced a path from childhood in Japan and the freedom he found in America, to being drafted for military service, institutionalized with depression during the war, and eventually confined at Puyallup and Minidoka.

• Interrupted Youth: Left the University of Washington and work to prepare for military service, but after Pearl Harbor was hospitalized for depression. Upon release, he was handcuffed and taken directly to camp.

• Life in Camp & After: Worked in surveying, architecture, and farm labor while his family stayed uprooted in Idaho. Later held jobs at Sun Valley and Japanese newspapers, but recurring breakdowns and hospitalizations marked his adult life.

• Moments of Light: Described a powerful moment of spiritual clarity in 1949 that helped him emerge from his isolation and reconnect with the world.

• Lifelong Struggle: Despite efforts to work again, his health prevented full-time employment for most of his later life.

• Redress Beyond Compensation: Warned the Commission that reparations must address not only money but also the root causes — the hysteria and racism that enabled mass incarceration. Without that reckoning, America risks repeating the injustice against other communities.

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.

George Takei, actor and activist, testified before the CWRIC reflecting on his childhood memories of incarceration during WWII. Speaking not as a celebrity but as a former child prisoner, his words captured the innocence of not understanding and the lifelong weight of shame that followed.

• Childhood Memories: Recalled the family’s forced moves — from the horse stables at Santa Anita racetrack, to the swamps of Arkansas, and finally to Tule Lake in the California desert.

• Scenes of Fear: Remembered women weeping as belongings were piled on trucks, armed guards herding families, and waking at night to hushed conversations between worried parents, his mother sometimes in tears.

• Unspoken Tension: Too young to grasp the meaning of those discussions, but old enough to feel the anxiety and fear saturating camp life.

• Shame & Identity: After the war, his growing awareness left him with a painful sense of shame — about his years behind barbed wire, and even about being Japanese when teachers mispronounced his name in class.

• Democracy’s Fragility: Declared that ideals are fragile, and America must be strong and honest enough to admit its failure.

• Call for Restitution: Urged that restitution was not only for Japanese Americans but for the very integrity of American democracy — to redeem the ideals betrayed when citizens were incarcerated.