Web site chronicles Matsui's crusade
Sacramento Bee 2/20/07
On Monday, 65 years to the day after FDR signed Executive Order 9066 that launched the internment process, Kimura attended a tribute to a fellow prisoner, one of the champions of redressing that wrong.
In a ceremony at the California State University, Sacramento, library, CSUS unveiled the Robert T. Matsui Digital Archive, a Web site (www.csus.edu/matsui) containing the history of the late Sacramento congressman's battle to win reparations for those unjustly imprisoned.
Matsui, who died in 2005, was 5 months old when he and his family were forced out of Sacramento and relocated to a series of camps in California and Idaho.
Included on the site are video clips, documents, photos and other source material chronicling the years that Matsui and others fought for $20,000 payments for those interned.
"I feel proud to be here," said the 82-year-old Kimura, who spent three years in a camp near Tule Lake in Modoc County. "Congressman Matsui was a great statesman."
Addressing a gathering of nearly 100, Rep. Doris Matsui, who was born in the Poston, Ariz., relocation camp, said the project should serve as a reminder that it's never too late to right wrongs committed by your own government.
"We live in a beautiful country where different voices can speak out," the Sacramento Democrat said. "But that wasn't the case back then ... This project demonstrates what this country can do. It made a mistake, but along the way, it righted that mistake."
Her remarks were punctuated by a small but vocal group of protesters outside the library who were demanding an immediate cutoff of funding for the Iraq war. Matsui said she opposes the war but doesn't support an immediate funding cut.
In a video clip from 1989 shown at Monday's ceremony, Robert Matsui took the House floor to argue for the reparations to those interned. Matsui's voice quivered with barely suppressed anger as he responded to a fellow congressman's objections to the "entitlement" of $20,000 to each imprisoned Japanese American.
"We were all American citizens, and I can't think of anything more horrible than being accused of being a spy," he said. "This is a fundamental issue of right and wrong and what our country stands for."
Commenting on the clip, Doris Matsui earned a sympathetic chuckle when she said, "I haven't seen or heard Bob for a while, but, damn, he was good."
After years of fits and starts, the legislation calling for reparations was signed into law by President Reagan in 1987, and the first payments were disbursed in 1990.
Intended as an educational resource, the archive is designed to be useful for anyone from fifth-grade through postgraduate students, said Timothy Fong, director of the CSUS Asian American studies program.
It includes a timeline of the reparations battle, video and audio clips, copies of the reparations legislation and news stories from Japanese American publications that aren't generally accessible to researchers.
Even as she honors her late husband's battle over the reparations issue, Doris Matsui hears echoes of 1942 in current events, particularly, she says, the eroding of civil liberties in the post-9/11 era.
"When we're in a time of war, people want to find an easy way to decide who is the enemy," she said.
"We just can't assume (by their appearance) someone will be doing egregious things."