Interviews

1. Don’t Rock the Boat

2. Speaking with Sparky

3. The Scale of the Issue

4. A Common Cause

5. Evolving History

Henry Miyatake

(1929 - 2014) One of the earliest proponents behind the redress movement.

The Scale of the Issue

Well, to me, I guess, I did not feel that money was the most important issue at large. This was a constitutional point of view that we were trying to address. And it related not just to Japanese Americans, but to Aleuts, and the Peruvian and Bolivian Japanese Latin Americans, and other people that were involved this entire process. It was not just E.O. 9066, it related to what the State Department did, what the department of army did in Alaska and whole bunch of other things. So it related to the constitutionality of whether or not the government could enforce incarceration on us. And so the issue become very, very clouded.

Date: October 28, 1999

Location: Washington, US

Interviewer: Tom Ikeda

Contributed by: Denshō: The Japanese American Legacy Project.

Interviewee Bio

Henry Miyatake was born in 1929 in Seattle, Washington. During World War II, he was incarcerated while a teenager at Puyallup Assembly Center and Minidoka incarceration camp in Idaho. In camp, he wrote and defended an essay criticizing the United States' treatment of racial minorities. His teacher refused to accept his paper, resulting in a failed grade and preventing him from graduating.

Although it was a radical idea, Miyatake was one of the earliest proponents behind the redress movement from the early 70s. Along with a few others, he prepared a plan for the Seattle chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) to seek redress from the U.S. government for the incarceration of persons of Japanese ancestry.

Miyatake’s efforts met resistance from the community until the first “Day of Remembrance” was held on November 25, 1978 at the site of the former Puyallup Assembly Center. This event, that Miyatake helped organize, was one of several watershed moments that helped galvanize the Japanese American community on the road towards righting a wrong.

He passed away on September 16, 2014 at age 85. (April 2015)