“The Lim Report” now back online: the Mueller Report of its time

The Lim Report book coverThanks to your requests, we’ve spent some time to make “The Lim Report” available online once again. In many ways, it was the Mueller Report of its time.

Deborah Lim’s work was explosive for the details she revealed of  JACL cooperation and collaboration with the government in our own wartime incarceration, its suppression of resistance, and its demonization of the no-no’s and renunciants at Tule Lake.Lim was commissioned by JACL itself to investigate these charges of Nikkei collusion and submit findings that could be presented to delegates at the 1990 JACL National Convention in San Diego. JACL leaders freaked when they saw the 95-page result, and attempted to bury it by commissioning a second writer to sanitize it into a 28-page summary.  Sound familiar? Copies of the “unredacted” version eventually leaked out.

We’ll leave for another time the story of how this blog’s author was the one first asked by younger JACL executives to write the report. Time did not permit, and that was probably for the best.

For years, this blog was one of only two places online where one could read the uncensored Lim Report. William HohriThe HTML code behind it is the same legacy programming originally created by William Hohri in 2000, which he posted on his own site, added his own introduction, and shared the code with us. Kenji Taguma wrote about this development in 2000 for the Nichi Bei Times.

A published version, pictured above, then appeared in 2002 under somewhat mysterious circumstances. It was evidently self-published with the permission of Deborah Lim by prominent New York attorney Francis Sogi, a one-time board chair of the Japanese American National Museum. William outlined the curious history of this volume in a 2002 Rambler’s Nemesis column for the Rafu Shimpo newspaper. This book has been long out of print, and the other online source for the report folded with William’s passing in 2010.

Our own legacy posting of “The Lim Report” was the victim of a recent switch in our web hosting service. Several of you noticed and appealed for its return. Wrote one, “Some within the JACL are working on a resolution to apologize to the no-no’s, and I think it would be helpful for everyone to understand.'” “With the JACL no-no resolution under discussion, the Lim Report is back in play,” emailed another. Pleased to be able to oblige.

The two parts of “The Lim Report” are posted across eight web pages. For a hard copy, click on the sections marked with roman numerals to open the page, use the print function in your browser to save each file as a PDF to your local drive, then print each PDF.

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