Most Americans today aware that the U.S. government imprisoned Japanese Americans in internment camps on no other evidence than the fact of their heritage during World War II. But one chapter of this history has remained much more hidden
That March morning in 2017, Art Shibayama had come to Washington by choice. The organization that had invited him is housed in an imposing marble structure adjacent to the White House that has stood since 1910 as a reminder that, outside U.S. borders, the word “America” doesn’t describe a country but a whole continent.
Most Americans today are well aware that, during World War II, the U.S. government imprisoned Japanese Americans, including U.S. citizens, in internment camps on no other evidence than the fact of their heritage. They know of the wartime hysteria that cloaked the government’s logic, and the racism and xenophobia Japanese Americans faced.
But as the country praised itself for righting that historical wrong, it excluded those it had kidnapped from abroad. Although many of them were exiled to Japan after the war, the Japanese Latin Americans who remained in the United States were ineligible for the reparations program. They later received some compensation through a court settlement, but the sum was so much lower and the apology so formulaic that some decided not to accept.
In the first public acknowledgment of this case since Biden’s inauguration, a State Department spokesperson said the agency takes IACHR petitions “very seriously” but noted that the United States has not ratified the 1969 convention that created the commission, “so any recommendations made by the IACHR are non-binding for the U.S. government.”
On Dec. 9, two days after the 80th anniversary of the bombing at Pearl Harbor, Biden plans to host a “Summit for Democracy” that aims to cast respect for human rights as crucial to democratic well-being. That 80-year chasm also underscores how long interned Japanese Latin Americans have been waiting for redress. The path forward for the Campaign for Justice looks difficult, but Shimizuthat whatever the Biden administration does, “we will continue until our demands for justice are met.
For Shibayama, it all happened very quickly. According to biographical details in his IACHR testimony, the subsequent IACHR report and a 2004, Shibayama’s childhood summers in Peru meant waking up to swim in the beaches of Callao, a coastal district in the Lima metropolitan area where his grandparents lived. Every morning, they watched him dip into Pacific waters before it was time to open the small shop they ran.
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