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The Japanese American Redress Movement refers to the various efforts of Japanese Americans from the 1940s to the 1980s to obtain restitution for their removal and confinement during World War II. This included judicial and legislative campaigns at local, state, and federal levels for recognition of government wrongdoing and compensation for losses, both material and immaterial. The push for redress originated in the late 1940s as the Cold War opened up opportunities for Japanese Americans to demand concessions from the government. During the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese Americans began to connect the struggle for redress with anti-racist and anti-imperialist movements of the time. Despite their growing political divisions, Japanese Americans came together to launch several successful campaigns that laid the groundwork for redress. During the early 1980s, the government increased its involvement in redress by forming a congressional commission to conduct an official review of the World War II incarceration. The commission’s recommendations of monetary payments and an official apology paved the way for the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 and other redress actions. Beyond its legislative and judicial victories, the redress movement also created a space for collective healing and generated new forms of activism that continue into the present.

Racism and xenophobia, but also resilience and community building, characterize the return of thousands of Japanese Americans, or Nikkei, to the West Coast after World War II. Although the specific histories of different regions shaped the resettlement experiences for Japanese Americans, Los Angeles provides an instructive case study. For generations, the City of Angels has been home to one of the nation’s largest and most diverse Nikkei communities and the ways in which Japanese Americans rebuilt their lives and institutions resonate with the resettlement experience elsewhere. Before World War II, greater Los Angeles was home to a vibrant Japanese American population. First generation immigrants, or Issei, and their American-born children, the Nisei, forged dynamic social, economic, cultural, and spiritual institutions out of various racial exclusions. World War II uprooted the community as Japanese Americans left behind their farms, businesses, and homes. In the best instances, they were able to entrust their property to neighbors or other sympathetic individuals. More often, the uncertainty of their future led Japanese Americans to sell off their property, far below the market price. Upon the war’s end, thousands of Japanese Americans returned to Los Angeles, often to financial ruin. Upon their arrival in the Los Angeles area, Japanese Americans continued to face deep-seated prejudice, all the more accentuated by an overall dearth of housing. Without a place to live, they sought refuge in communal hostels set up in pre-war institutions that survived the war such as a variety of Christian and Buddhist churches. Meanwhile, others found housing in temporary trailer camps set up by the War Relocation Authority (WRA), and later administered by the Federal Public Housing Authority (FPHA), in areas such as Burbank, Sun Valley, Hawthorne, Santa Monica, and Long Beach. Although some local religious groups and others welcomed the returnees, white homeowners, who viewed the settlement of Japanese Americans as a threat to their property values, often mobilized to protest the construction of these camps. The last of these camps closed in 1956, demonstrating the hardship some Japanese Americans still faced in integrating back into society. Even when the returnees were able to leave the camps, they still faced racially restrictive housing covenants and, when those practices were ruled unconstitutional, exclusionary lending. Although new suburban enclaves of Japanese Americans eventually developed in areas such as Gardena, West Los Angeles, and Pacoima by the 1960s, the pathway to those destinations was far from easy. Ultimately, the resettlement of Japanese Americans in Los Angeles after their mass incarceration during World War II took place within the intertwined contexts of lingering anti-Japanese racism, Cold War politics, and the suburbanization of Southern California.