Interviews

1. Duties of the Witness Chair

2. Too Ashamed to Tell

3. Don’t Make Waves

4. What to Do Next

Tomihiro,Chiye

Chaired the Chicago JACL's Redress Committee.

Duties of the Witness Chair

Well, I think that the commission hearings really moved me. And I, see, I was a witness chair. I started out first by being the witness chair, and I was the person who went out to get the witnesses to testify. And as I got more and more involved at this, well, I became more and more interested, especially when you heard about a lot of the... heard the stories of what happened to so many people. And the stories were so moving and all. ... A lot of the people were willing to write testimony, but getting them to get out there and talk about it, it was really difficult.

And so when we finally had a group of people ready to testify, we had sessions, you know. I mean, a lot of people talk about having their mock hearings and things like that. Well, we had television monitors, and we had a psychiatric nurse helping us, and we had sessions where we would get together and we only had five minutes, you know, to testify. So we practice in front of the monitor, but the first time we got together and we had small groups, I mean, it was so emotional. And I remember, I myself, how I just broke down and I wept and I couldn't talk.

Redress movement

Date: September 11, 1997

Location: California, US

Interviewer: Becky Fukuda

Contributed by: Denshō: The Japanese American Legacy Project.

Interviewee Bio

Chiye Tomihiro was born and raised in Portland, OR. She was 16 years old when World War II broke out. The FBI detained her father shortly thereafter because he was a former president of the Japanese American Chamber of Commerce. Tomihiro was first held at the Portland Assembly Center and later incarcerated at Minidoka in Idaho. Her father meanwhile, was placed in a jail camp in New Mexico for the next three years.

After the war, her family was reunited and resettled first in Denver, CO and later in Chicago, IL. Tomihiro became an active member of the Chicago chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League. In 1981, Chicago was one of the sites for federal hearings by the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. Chairing the Chapter’s Redress Committee, Chiye Tomihiro mobilized local volunteers to speak about their experiences. In 1983, the CWRIC concluded that the incarceration of Japanese Americans had not been justified by military necessity, but instead was based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership." (April 15, 2008)