Interviews

1. Importance of self-representation in legislation

2. The lawsuit set the standard for restoring people’s rights

3. Japanese American, not Japanese

4. Euphemisms

5. People have to believe in what they are doing in order to gain trust

6. Outhouses and showers at camp

7. Interned at age fifteen, I saw camp as an adventure

8. Going to camp with the Terminal Island people

9. Education in camp

10. Trying to get back into camp

Hohri,William

(1927-2010) Political Activist

Importance of self-representation in legislation

Well, one of the fundamental things was to take ownership, that people would feel it was their lawsuit, not somebody else’s. That’s also been one of the problems in the past with legislation. Most of the legislation that was passed on behalf of Japanese Americans was done by others on behalf of Japanese Americans, not by Japanese Americans. There’s some problems with that, maybe it was necessary early on. I’m not sure. But there’s some problems with that because you don’t necessarily get what you want. It was important for people to sort of step in and represent themselves—speak for themselves.

Date: June 12, 1998

Location: California, US

Interviewer: Darcie Iki, Mitchell Maki

Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum

Interviewee Bio

In 1927, William Hohri was born the youngest of six children in San Francisco, California. Following the outbreak of World War II, he and his family became incarcerated at Manzanar concentration camp in California. A week after his high school graduation, Hohri was released from camp to study at Wheaton College in Wisconsin. In March 1945, Hohri attempted to visit his father in Manzanar and was instead imprisoned for traveling without a permit. Hohri was given an individual exclusion order and forced at gunpoint to leave California by midnight that same day.

Later, Hohri became a member of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), but was disappointed with their disregard to the anti-war and Civil Rights movements. When JACL moved towards supporting a congressional commission to study the concentration camps, a group of Chicago and Seattle dissenters led by Hohri formed the National Council for Japanese American Redress in May 1979, seeking redress through direct individual payments. Initially, Hohri and NCJAR worked with Representative Mike Lowry (D-Washington), but when the resolution was defeated, Hohri and NCJAR redirected their efforts to seek redress through the courts. Hohri, along with twenty four other plaintiffs, filed a class-action lawsuit on March 16, 1983, against the government for twenty-seven billion dollars in damages.

He passed away on Nov. 12, 2010 at age 83. (November 2011)