Postwar compensation for interned Japanese Americans covered a sliver of their true losses.

Evidence

At the outbreak of war with Japan, Masato Uyeda lost his bottling store in Seattle’s Pike Place Market and twelve years’ worth of savings to arson; as a survivor, he received a mere 200 in compensation in 1957 under the Japanese American Evacuation Claims Act. Shuzo Chris Kato’s family owned a forty-five-room hotel, restaurant, and several other businesses that they were forced to sell at a loss before being relocated. “I believe my parents received only about 7,000 total for all the businesses mentioned above,” Kato later testified. “The true value must have been ten times as much.” — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 200

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Direct analogue evidence for the saturation/under-compensation argument in the reparations architecture; the 200 and 7,000 versus ‘ten times as much’ quantify the gap between nominal and true restitution that Brown deploys.
• SHARE: The Masato Uyeda example, a Pike Place Market bottler who got $200 after losing store and savings to arson, is a specific detail worth sending to anyone versed in Pacific Northwest Japanese American history.