World War II Internees to Hear ‘We Apologize’ : Civil liberty: The first round of payments to Japanese-Americans starts Tuesday. More than $1.5 billion will go to 60,000 to redress the detainment.

WASHINGTON —  When a top Justice Department official presents a letter of apology from President Bush and separate $20,000 checks Tuesday to six Japanese-Americans who were forcibly interned during World War II, there will be no grand entrances and exits.

U.S. officials quickly abandoned any thought of having the recipients enter one by one from behind the curtain at the Justice Department’s Great Hall to accept America’s symbolic effort to live down its own days of infamy following Japan’s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.

The decision, officials said, was made in deference to the recipients’ ages--the youngest is 101, the oldest, 107. Understandably, some are not “too mobile,” noted Robert Bratt, administrator of the Office of Redress Administration.

In fact, the oldest living internee--a 108-year-old residing in Phoenix--is too elderly to make the trip to Washington, and an unexpected toothache blocked plans to present the check in person.

Instead, a 107-year-old man from Santa Monica will be the oldest participant in Tuesday’s ceremony, to be conducted by Assistant Atty. Gen. John R. Dunne. (The Justice Department will not divulge recipients’ names unless they give their permission after arriving in Washington.)

“The injustice of the forced evacuation and detainment of citizens without due process of the law was a constitutional travesty,” said Dunne, who heads the Justice Department’s civil rights division and supervised the redress effort mandated by the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.

The legislation calls for $1.5 billion to be distributed to more than 60,000 surviving internees or heirs of those who were still living when the law was enacted.

Tuesday’s ceremony, to be followed by similar presentations in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Fresno, San Jose and four other cities, kicks off a first round of payments totaling $500 million. Another $500 million will be distributed next year and a final $250 million in 1992. Most of the checks will be sent by mail.

“In the annals of civilization, there aren’t many instances of a government apologizing this way,” said Rep. Norman Y. Mineta (D-San Jose), who led the drive to enact the redress legislation. “Here we have a government saying, we were wrong, we apologize. It’s just exhilarating to see these things happening.”

The effort required some intense detective work. The 1988 law placed the burden on the government to identify and locate people eligible for redress, rather than requiring that the Japanese-Americans prove their eligibility.

To solve the puzzle, officials ferreted out boxes of records that were all but abandoned in a downtown Washington building about to be renovated, an unexpected cache at a University of California library in Berkeley, and data kept by the former president of a chick-sexers association.

Bratt launched the search by walking across the street from the Justice Department on Pennsylvania Avenue to the National Archives, where an archivist who took a special interest in the internments had safeguarded such valuable information as cards bearing the names of families interned and records showing children born to couples in the relocation camps.

The material produced by the archivist included two pages of “potential records that didn’t look like much,” Bratt recalled. But the two pages led him to the basement of a library at the University of California in Berkeley, where a 200-page index of internees was found, along with thousands of boxes of relevant records.

Bratt and his team “stumbled onto boxes with more names” in the basement of a nondescript office building in downtown Washington that was about to be renovated. Because names on the records often were misspelled and birth dates recorded incorrectly, the use of such secondary sources to verify other information was essential.

Only three months ago, the searchers found a man who served in 1942 as president of the Chick Sexers Assn., a group of individuals who specialized in identifying the gender of chickens, an occupation to which a number of Japanese-Americans were attracted. His records produced the names of 10 to 20 people who had been working outside of California at the time of internment and were not allowed to return to their homes.

As a result, they may be eligible for the $20,000 payment and presidential apology, a matter that Bratt’s office is examining on a case-by-case basis.

The basement of a Crystal City, Tex., courthouse produced records of men and women of Japanese ancestry who were rounded up in South and Central America, many from Peru, after war broke out. They were moved to a relocation camp at Crystal City and thus may be eligible.

Bratt said the search and verification effort could not have been conducted without “a great deal of help from the (Japanese-American) community.” As a result, the presidents of the Japanese American Citizens League, the National Coalition for Reparations and Redress and the National Coalition for Japanese American Redress will be given citations and thanks at Tuesday’s ceremony.