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(The article refers to Wayne Collins, an ACLU lawyer who represented
Isamu Shibayama. I am pretty sure that this is the same Wayne Collins
who is on Marxmail.)
NY Times, Aug. 19, 2018
Isamu Shibayama Dies at 88, His Quest for Reparations Unfulfilled
By Sam Roberts
Until he turned 11½, Isamu Shibayama’s childhood was idyllic.
His father was a successful textile importer and dress-shirt wholesaler
in Lima, Peru. His house was staffed by servants. He was chauffeured to
private school. He spent summers living on the coast with his
grandparents, who owned a department store, and swimming in the Pacific.
Then, on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
Isamu’s father was playing tennis when news of the air raid was
broadcast. He was immediately summoned home. His family and their
friends were frightened. But even with anti-Japanese sentiment spreading
in Peru, nobody predicted what would happen next.
The Shibayama family, joining nearly 2,000 others of Japanese heritage
living in Peru, were rounded up by the police, turned over to American
troops and shipped to prison camps in Texas and other states. They would
remain there from 1942 to 1944, sharing the fate of tens of thousands of
Japanese-Americans who were also interned.
In boarding a chartered military troop ship bound for New Orleans, Isamu
Shibayama embarked on what would prove to be a three-decade struggle to
become an American citizen. Until then, his wife, Betty Shibayama, said
last year, “he was a man without a country.”
Even more, his forced removal from the country in which he was born set
him on a lifetime quest for a formal apology and reparations from the
United States government.
Mr. Shibayama did become a citizen. But when he died on July 31 in San
Jose, Calif., at 88 a retired gas station owner, his ultimate mission
remained unfulfilled.
Just last year, after he had given up on getting satisfaction in United
States courts, he appealed to the Inter-American Commission on Human
Rights, an agency of the Washington-based Organization of American States.
At a hearing to determine whether Mr. Shibayama and two of his brothers
had been victims of human rights violations during World War II, the
commission’s president, Francisco Jose Eguiguren Praeli, a former
Peruvian justice minister, expressed his personal apologies. But the
commission had yet to issue any formal findings when Mr. Shibayama died.
Washington’s agenda in expatriating the Peruvians of Japanese descent
from Latin America was twofold. One aim, the government said, was to
make the nation’s southern border less vulnerable to infiltration or
attack; the other was to provide a pool of people of Japanese ethnicity
who might be traded for American civilians stranded in Japan after the
Pearl Harbor attack.
Whatever resistance the policy generated in Peru, it was tempered by the
same kind of anti-Japanese prejudice that the war had stoked in the
United States.
Moreover, there was a growing consensus that expelling the ethnic
Japanese, particularly those who ran businesses, would reduce
competition for other Peruvians struggling in a depressed economy.
Japanese began migrating to Peru in the late 19th century, mostly as
contract laborers, but many moved to the cities and had become, like Mr.
Shibayama’s father, successful entrepreneurs.
Isamu Shibayama was born on June 6, 1930, in Lima, Peru’s capital. He
was the eldest of eight children of Yuzo and Tatsue (Ishibashi)
Shibayama, immigrants from Fukuoka, on the southern Japanese island of
Kyushu. He was baptized Carlos Arturo Isamu and came to be called Art
for short.
After the war broke out, his grandparents in Peru were among the first
to be seized. Sent to the United States, they were put in a detention
camp for enemy aliens in Seagoville, Tex., near Dallas, until they were
deported to Japan in an exchange for Americans held there.
In Peru, Mr. Shibayama’s father went into hiding, but he turned himself
in after his wife and 11-year-old daughter were arrested.
After being shipped to New Orleans, the family was taken by train to the
federal government’s largest wartime internment camp, in Crystal City,
Tex., southwest of San Antonio.
Mr. Shibayama recalled that as a schoolboy he had difficulty in classes
taught in English and Japanese — his primary language was Spanish — but
managed to finish the eighth grade. Around the camp, he delivered mail
and ice and joined the baseball team.
When the war ended, in 1945, the family was warned that they would be
unwelcome in Peru. But neither were they embraced in their new home. The
American authorities classified them as illegal immigrants on the
grounds that they had entered the country without proper authorization.
Mr. Shibayama said he was confounded by the government’s position. In an
interview with Discover Nikkei, an advocacy group that says it supports
“Japanese migrants and their descendants,” he asked, “How can I be
illegal when we didn’t want to come here in the first place, and the
government brings us, brings us here, forces us to come here, and they
bring us at gunpoint?”
With the war over, his family was scheduled to be deported to Japan, by
then a devastated country enduring shortages of food and other staples.
The family was unwilling to go.
They were rescued by Wayne M. Collins, a lawyer with the American Civil
Liberties Union, who intervened and arranged to have Mr. Shibayama’s
father hired by Seabrook Farms, a frozen-vegetable packing factory in
New Jersey. The family was paroled and moved there, settling in the town
of Seabrook.
In time the family moved to Chicago. In 1952, though still classified as
an illegal immigrant, Mr. Shibayama was drafted into the Army and
deployed to Germany. He was honorably discharged two years later.
After returning to Chicago, he took the advice of solicitous immigration
officials and traveled to Canada so that he could re-enter the United
States from there. Once he did, he was told that he could qualify for
permanent residency but would have to live in the United States for
about five years before he was eligible for citizenship.
In the interim, he took a mechanics course, was hired by a car dealer
and married Betty Morita, a Japanese-American who had lived on a farm in
Oregon before she, too, was sent to an internment camp.
She survives him, along with their children, Bekki and Brian; his
brothers, Ken, Tac and George; and his sister, Rose Nishimura. His death
was confirmed by his daughter.
Mr. Shibayama received permanent resident status in 1956 and was finally
granted citizenship in 1970, the same year he moved to California.
After the Office of Redress Administration was established as part of
the Justice Department in 1988 to indemnify Japanese-Americans who had
been interned, Mr. Shibayama applied for reparations. His request was
denied; only Japanese-Americans who had been citizens or permanent
residents during the war were eligible, and he, of course, had been neither.
Years later, a coalition of Japanese Latin Americans called the Campaign
for Justice sued for reparations and won its case. In 1999, the federal
government expressed regret and awarded each of them $5,000 (compared
with the $20,000 in tax-free restitution being paid to Americans of
Japanese descent).
Mr. Shibayama, however, declined the payment and sued on his own. When
he lost in federal court, he and two of his brothers, Ken and Tac, filed
their petition before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in
2002. That body can issue findings, mediate and refer cases to the
Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which is also overseen by the
Organization of American States.
Sixteen years later, Art Shibayama’s brothers are still awaiting a decision.
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