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.

Alan Nishio, born in Manzanar and a founding member of the National Coalition for Redress and Reparations, testified before the CWRIC on behalf of the Little Tokyo People’s Rights Organization. His testimony connected personal history, community loss, and the fight for justice.

• Who He Is: Sansei, activist, and community leader. Spoke as part of the Little Tokyo People’s Rights Organization, representing residents and workers of the community.

• On the Camps: Declared that incarceration was not about military necessity, but about racism, greed, and hysteria.

• Beyond Individual Loss: While many testimonies focused on families losing farms and businesses, Nishio emphasized the destruction of community itself.

• Little Tokyo Shattered:

  
  

  • Before the war, it was the largest Japanese community in the U.S., with one out of five Japanese Americans living there.

  • After camp and dispersal, it shrank to one-quarter of its size.

  • Postwar attempts to rebuild were further gutted by “urban renewal,” replacing family homes and shops with banks, hotels, and tourist businesses.

  
  

• Division & Assimilation: Inside camp, people were divided—Issei vs. Nisei, citizens vs. non-citizens, English speakers vs. Japanese speakers. After release, the government even encouraged Japanese Americans to “stay away from large groups of Japanese,” eroding cohesion further.

• Need for a Community Fund: Called for government reparations not only as cash payments but as a community development fund to:

  
  

  • Support affordable housing in Little Tokyo.

  • Provide services for Issei elders, many of whom were still in need.

  • Rebuild the cultural and social fabric destroyed by incarceration.

  
  

• Solidarity Across Communities: Framed Japanese American redress as part of a broader fight for justice, citing parallels with Alaskan Natives, Aleuts, and Native Americans.

• Closing Appeal: “It is more than monetary compensation. It is a fight to regain our pride and dignity as a people and as a community.”

Roy Nakano, representing the Gardena Committee for Redress and Reparations, testified before the CWRIC on the deep impact of incarceration and its lingering effects on Japanese American communities—especially Gardena, which held the largest percentage of Japanese Americans in the continental U.S.

• Gardena’s Image vs. Reality: While Gardena was often portrayed as a model of Japanese American success, Roy reminded the commission that this “model minority” image was a facade. Beneath it were serious social problems—drug abuse among youth, isolation among elders, and an unwillingness to admit difficulties for fear of being branded “bad Americans.”

• Silence of the Nisei: Noted that very few Nisei parents had spoken to their children about camp. This silence, born of shame and fear of standing out, shaped postwar generations. Children were taught to “not rock the boat,” to be quiet, and to avoid risk—leading to safe careers, lack of representation in leadership roles, and sacrifices of creativity and cultural heritage.

• Personal Experience: As a counselor at the Asian American Drug Abuse Program, Roy saw firsthand how barbiturate use reflected an inward way of coping with trauma. He tied this to a larger postwar pattern of dealing with problems internally, without voice.

• Restoration of Pride: He pointed out that the Gardena Committee—made up of both Nisei and Sansei—was finally breaking that silence, restoring pride, and refusing to let the “good American equals quiet American” mindset persist.

• Education & Reparations: Urged widespread public and private education about incarceration, noting that even within Gardena, few Sansei, Yonsei, or non-Japanese attended redress programs. He pressed for monetary reparations and full restitution for every dollar lost, carried out swiftly and without bureaucracy, especially for the aging Issei and Nisei.

• Challenge to the Commission: Closed by telling the commissioners not to water down recommendations for political expediency but to “have the audacity to recommend what is just.”

Raymond Wiedemann, a retired teacher and educational consultant from San Pedro, California, appeared before the CWRIC not as a Japanese American, but as a citizen moved by conscience. His testimony highlighted the injustice of wartime incarceration and the moral obligation to make amends.

• Background: Wiedemann traced his ancestry to the Amish of Bavaria and Irish immigrants. A descendant of Captain William Parker of the Revolutionary War, he framed his testimony as part of a long American tradition of conscience and justice.

• Speaking as an Ally: He stated he came to “add the weight of my conscience” for his Japanese American “brothers and sisters” who were denied rights during WWII.

• Racism at the Core: Emphasized that Japanese Americans were incarcerated while German and Italian immigrant communities—who also had ties to enemy nations—were not subjected to mass removal. He charged racism, bigotry, and prejudice as the underlying cause.

• Denial of Rights: He listed what was stripped away—freedom of movement, education, self-improvement, careers, businesses, property, and dignity.

• Educational Lens: Drawing from his career in schools, he compared government treatment of Japanese Americans to unfair practices by authority figures: arbitrary punishments, double standards, and broken promises. He warned these behaviors produce withdrawal, depression, lowered aspirations—outcomes he saw echoed in the community’s struggles.

• Survivors vs. Losses: Urged commissioners not to assume success stories meant there was no damage. Survivors who thrived were “the winners,” but many others had been crushed, broken, or diminished, unable to reach their potential.

• Moral Duty of the Commission: Insisted that only a genuine acknowledgment of error, regret, and reparations could begin to heal wounds—both of Japanese Americans and of American democracy itself.

• Closing Words: Ended with a Japanese proverb he had learned: “In the sky, the sun. On earth, mankind. And mankind—love.”

Hannah Tomiko Holmes, 53 years old at the time of testimony, spoke before the CWRIC with the help of an interpreter, bringing forward a story rarely heard: the forgotten struggles of disabled Japanese American children during WWII incarceration.

• Early Life & Deafness: Hannah had been deaf since age two. Before the war she was a student at the California School for the Deaf in Berkeley, one of 11 Japanese American children forced to leave when exclusion began.

• Denied Education: She testified that every public institution for deaf, blind, and disabled children on the West Coast refused to take Japanese American students back once the war started. At Manzanar, while other children received classes through high school, disabled children were left without meaningful instruction.

• Manzanar Isolation: Assigned caretaker “too busy” to help. Lessons were below grade level; typing she had to teach herself. She felt cut off from other children and stigmatized.

• Failed Attempts at Schooling:

  
  

  • At Tule Lake, a “Helen Keller School” was created but lumped together children with deafness, blindness, and paralysis under a teacher who even banned sign language. It collapsed within months.

  • Attempts to enroll Hannah at schools for the deaf in Arkansas, Idaho, Pennsylvania, and Colorado all failed—blocked by tuition costs or outright refusal.

  
  

• Belated Opportunity: Not until 1943 in Chicago could she continue at the Alexander Graham Bell School (which used only oralism, not sign language) and later at the Illinois School for the Deaf, where she finally graduated in 1948. By then, many peers never returned to education at all.

• Naming the Loss: She named classmates who never picked up the pieces after camp—lives permanently stunted by exclusion.

• On Redress: Called for reparations not only in money but in concrete tools for independence: teletype phones, captioning, hearing aids, Braille writers, mobility aids, transportation—so that disabled Nisei could live with dignity and not burden families.

• A Letter from Helen Keller: In 1943, she wrote to Helen Keller about the Tule Lake school and received a heartfelt reply. Keller’s letter, read into the record, reminded her that “courage in conquering obstacles will be a lamp throwing its bright rays far into other lives.” Hannah said Keller was their only friend.

• Closing Reflection: Hannah framed her testimony as both personal and collective, showing how war and prejudice robbed children not just of freedom but of education, leaving invisible scars.

Alfred Nabeta, a Nisei from Los Angeles living in Huntington Beach at the time of testimony, spoke before the CWRIC about the devastating toll of early removal under Executive Order 9066.

• Forced Out Before Camps Were Ready: As part of the so-called “voluntary” evacuees, Alfred and his family were expelled from Los Angeles before relocation centers had even been built. He reminded the commission that this was not voluntary but coerced under threat of arrest.

• Exile in Utah: The family was pushed into a basement room in Salt Lake City with no jobs, no property, and no government support. They lived in hunger and destitution.

• Father’s Death: His father, though cleared by the FBI in Los Angeles, was interrogated again in Utah. He died soon after of malnutrition, tuberculosis, and what Alfred described as “a broken spirit.”

• Exploitation & Breakdown: Employers took advantage of Alfred’s desperation, paying him little or nothing for hard labor. He suffered both physical injury and a mental breakdown.

• Family Loss: Of nine family members in 1941, only four survived beyond 1946. No funds or provisions were ever offered to them as early evacuees.

• Legacy of Land: Alfred showed the commission family photos, including one of his father farming for the U.S. government during WWI. He noted their lost Los Angeles property would later be valued at nearly $2.5 million, now built over by the state.

• Closing Reflection: He ended by stressing that his health—both physical and mental—was permanently damaged by the government’s actions. He asked that the record reflect the truth: “voluntary relocation” was in fact enforced relocation under threat of prison.