Grant Ujifusa, a citizen lobbyist who pressed President Ronald Reagan to reverse course and sign a bill offering cash and an apology to Japanese Americans imprisoned during World War II — a rare example of reparations paid for an official injustice toward an ethnic minority — died on Oct. 21 in Lafayette Hill, Pa. He was 82.
His son Steven said the cause of his death, in the hospital of his retirement community, was pulmonary fibrosis.
Mr. Ujifusa was a book editor in New York in 1982 when the Japanese American Citizens League, a civil rights group, named him its legislative strategist as part of an effort to pass a bill making reparations to Japanese Americans who had been forced from their homes on the West Coast after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Neither Mr. Ujifusa, who was born and raised in Wyoming, nor his family were subject to the evictions and relocations that affected 110,000 Japanese Americans from California and other states over vague fears that they could become spies or saboteurs for Imperial Japan.
But the Ujifusas lived about 90 miles from the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, one of the inland camps surrounded by barbed wire where detainees, the majority of whom were U.S. citizens, were deprived of their jobs, homes and freedom.
Mr. Ujifusa had been a founding editor of The Almanac of American Politics, an insiders’ guide to the districts, voting records and personalities of every member of Congress. Elders in the Japanese American community believed he was uniquely positioned to win support on Capitol Hill.
“What the Almanac did was give me access to anybody I wanted in Washington,” Mr. Ujifusa said in a recent oral history interview for the Washakie Museum & Cultural Center in his hometown, Worland, Wyo.
In meetings with members of Congress, he held out the unspoken threat that anyone who did not support his cause risked a bad write-up in the next edition of the Almanac, a highly influential bible of politics consulted by strategists and the news media.
In 1987, after nearly a decade of effort, a bill passed the House with a bipartisan majority that offered a formal apology and $20,000 to each survivor of the interment camps. The next year, it cleared the Senate.
But President Reagan’s signature on the bill was very much in doubt. For two years, his administration had opposed reparations, which Reagan confidants like Attorney General Edwin Meese III and Senator S.I. Hayakawa of California argued was a fringe issue of the left’s.
Mr. Ujifusa came up with the idea of sending a letter to Mr. Reagan from the sister of Kazuo Masuda, a Japanese American soldier killed in Italy during World War II. In 1945, Mr. Masuda’s California hometown refused to bury him in the local cemetery because of his ancestry.
The Army, sensing a propaganda opportunity, had sent a young movie star — Ronald Reagan himself — to speak at a ceremony that year posthumously awarding Mr. Masuda the Distinguished Service Cross. “The blood that is soaked into the sands of beaches is all one color,” Mr. Reagan said at the ceremony.
Four decades later, June Masuda, the soldier’s sister, reminded the president of the episode. Her letter was delivered by Gov. Tom Kean of New Jersey, a Republican, whom Mr. Ujifusa enlisted in the cause.
In August 1988 Mr. Reagan signed the reparations bill, known as the Civil Liberties Act, which said that the reparations were justified to “discourage the occurrence of similar injustices and violations of civil liberties in the future.”
“I was the first to get a call from the White House once President Reagan had made the decision to sign the redress bill,” Mr. Ujifusa said in an interview with a publication of his retirement community.
Although Mr. Ujifusa said it was the Masuda letter that changed Mr. Reagan’s mind, other accounts of the Japanese American redress movement — as the long quest for reparations is known — questioned whether it was the decisive factor.
A 2015 documentary, “Right of Passage,” drew on presidential archives and numerous interviews to conclude that many people contributed to the success of the movement, and that Mr. Reagan’s surprise decision not to veto the 1988 bill remained a “mystery.”
John Tateishi, who was chairman of the Japanese American Citizens League’s National Committee for Redress in the 1980s, wrote in a memoir, “Redress,” published in 2020, that “who deserves credit for convincing Reagan is ultimately unimportant and unknowable.”
The redress movement for Japanese Americans more than 30 years ago gained new relevance in recent years as African American activists sought reparations for descendants of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. Many pointed to the compensation paid to Japanese Americans as a precedent for making reparations for official injustice.
“In every African American reparations publication, in every legal argument, in almost every discussion, the topic of Japanese American redress surfaces,” Eric K. Yamamoto, a law professor at the University of Hawaii, wrote in 1998.
Grant Masashi Ujifusa was born on Jan. 4, 1942, in Worland to Tom and Mary (Okugawa) Ujifusa. His father farmed sugar beets on land first cultivated by his own father, who emigrated from Japan in 1904 and worked laying tracks for a railroad before settling near the Big Horn River in Wyoming. His mother was raised in Colorado and came to Wyoming in a “semi-arranged marriage,” Mr. Ujifusa recalled in the oral history.
Grant attended Harvard and graduated in 1965. He and two fellow Harvard men, Michael Barone and Douglas Matthews, who met as reporters for the student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, founded The Almanac of American Politics in 1972.
Long before Wikipedia, the Almanac was a nerd handbook of demographic details for every congressional seat, along with colorfully written and often irreverent profiles of states and electoral districts.
Mr. Ujifusa also worked as an editor for Houghton Mifflin in Boston and for Random House and Macmillan in New York, and later for Reader’s Digest.
He married Amy Brooks in 1978 and for many years lived with his family in Chappaqua, N.Y., in Westchester County, before moving to a retirement community in Pennsylvania. In addition to his son Steven, his wife survives him, as do two other sons, Andrew and John; two grandsons; and a sister, Susan Diamond.
In 2012, Mr. Ujifusa was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun by the Japanese government in recognition of his contribution to reparations for Japanese Americans.
The redress movement began in the 1970s when young Japanese Americans learned details of the relocation camps, often from parents and grandparents who had been reluctant to discuss them. Cultural differences between generations and divisions within the movement slowed its progress; some survivors believed it would be insulting to take money as compensation.
In 1980, President Jimmy Carter approved a commission to record testimony from detainees, and hearings were held in 11 U.S. cities the next year.
Mr. Ujifusa attended a hearing in New York. The legacy of discrimination and individual suffering that took place moved him to join the effort for reparations.
“I stayed for the whole day,” he recalled at a conference in 1997. “I took the day off from work. And like a lot of people there, I was crying.”
The post Grant Ujifusa, 82, Dies; Lobbied for Redress for Japanese Americans appeared first on New York Times.
