Reframing Redress: A "Social Healing Through Justice" Approach to United States-Native Hawaiian and Japan-Ainu Reconciliation Initiatives

Abstract

The year 2008 marks the twentieth anniversary of Japanese American internment redress under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. Its impact has been far-reaching. On an individual level, redress was cathartic for many Japanese Americans—a measure of dignity restored. Long stigmatized with the taint of racial disloyalty, former Japanese American internees could finally talk about their trauma. One woman in her sixties recounted that she “always felt the internment was wrong, but that after being told by the military, the President, and the Supreme Court that it was a necessity,” she seriously doubted herself. But now “[r]edress and reparations, and the recent successful court challenges, have freed [my] soul.”