With a new generation of interest in the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans, I’m fielding more inquiries about the JACL’s 1990 research report into its own wartime activities, a document commonly known as “The Lim Report.” One thing led to another, and we’ve quickly put together this workshop for the Tule Lake Pilgrimage on Sunday, July 5, at 8:00 am in the big College Union Auditorium:
“The Lim Report in the 21st Century, and what it says to us today”
Was segregation at Tule Lake conducted at the suggestion of the wartime Japanese American Citizens League?
That was one of many troubling questions examined in the research report on JACL’s wartime policies and actions compiled in 1990 by attorney Deborah Lim.
Moderator Frank Abe will take us inside the origins of that report, activist Chizu Omori will reflect upon the report’s findings, and Tule Lake descendant/JACL Mineta Policy Fellow Katie Masano Hill will speak to how a new generation at JACL is addressing this difficult legacy.
To prepare you for this workshop, it’s useful to understand the context of the report’s origins — and for that you have to go back 38 years to the August 1988 JACL National Convention in Seattle.
The Civil Liberties Act was signed that week, capping a decade of activism that began with the first Day of Remembrance in Seattle and winding through the Commission hearings, direct lobbying of Congress, the William Hohri lawsuit, and the reopening of the Supreme Court test cases through the write of coram nobis. With redress secured, we were able to turn our attention to one piece of unfinished business — the recovery of the story of Japanese American resistance in the camps and the contesting of the wartime JACL’s policy of cooperation with the government and its suppression of resistance. People like Frank Chin and me, and Emiko and Chizuko Omori, were interviewing the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee and journalist James Omura. Segregation and renunciation at Tule Lake had yet to be unpacked and understood as much as it is now. 
So at that 1988 convention, the Seattle Chapter JACL introduced Resolution #7, which called for JACL to acknowledge how it ostracized the draft resisters and what it called “NO-NO BOYS” (in all caps) through “persons acting individually and in the name of the JACL and that the JACL apologizes for their injuries, pain and injustice born [sic] by them.”
But Mike Masaoka raised the fear that this and a similar resolution from the Golden Gate Chapter, by acknowledging JACL erred in some way in WW2, could lead lawmakers to believe they acted improperly in relying upon testimony from JACL and cause Congress to reconsider the redress legislation, refuse to authorize appropriations, or enact new legislation to repudiate its vote for redress. Someone at the convention had a brilliant idea: let’s defer action on Resolution #7 and instead commission a study to investigate the actions of the wartime JACL to set the record straight once and for all.
The JACL National Director at the time was Carole Hayashino. Carole and I knew each other from working on the TV-movie of Farewell to Manzanar and her organizing of the first San Francisco Day of Remembrance at the Tanforan Racetrack. Carole called to ask if I would write this research report as mandated by the National Council. As tempting as the idea was, I was working full-time as a reporter at KIRO Newsradio in Seattle and knew I couldn’t devote the time to do the report justice, so in June 1989 Carole hired an attorney and instructor at San Francisco State University, Deborah Lim.
Deborah read all the books and talked to all the right people. Most importantly, she had access to the JACL’s own archives. By late 1989, she produced what she called her “Research Report Prepared for Presidential Select Committee on JACL Resolution #7.” Follow-up questions were asked of her, for which she wrote a 44-page addendum.
As an occasional stringer for the JACL’s Pacific Citizen newspaper, I arranged with the editor to interview Deborah and write a story for the PC. 
I talked with her and obtained a copy of the 94-page report she had submitted, on condition that I not share it with anyone else before its intended release at the JACL National Convention in San Diego on June 17-22, 1990. But unbeknownst to me, JACL leadership had wigged out when they read Deborah’s report. They asked her to reduce it to 25 pages, or to narrow its focus to address just the Heart Mountain draft resisters.
I wrote and submitted my profile story to the PC in March 1990. Because it framed the outlines of the report, the editor said he wanted to hold the story until the report’s release at the convention to avoid trouble with the old guard. There was a clamor for information and I felt it couldn’t wait so I offered the story to 
JK Yamamoto at the Hokubei Mainichi and Chris Komai at the Rafu Shimpo. The profile appeared in early April in both vernacular newspapers.
The national office then commissioned another friend I knew from the Asian American Theater Workshop and the first two Days of Remembrance, Karen Seriguchi, to write a substitute report of 28 pages that ignored Lim’s findings, for distribution at the 1990 convention. But I still had the original report from Deborah, 
so I wrote a second article in early June that broke the story of the report’s suppression and summarized key points of her findings.
From that moment on, as William Hohri put it, “the original 95-page version began life as ‘The Lim Report’ and was copied and distributed informally as though it were samizdat in some communist country.”
At its 1994 National Convention, JACL distributed unexpurgated copies of the original report. That practice ended in 2000, prompting 
William Hohri to self-publish the report out of his own pocket in 2002 as a booklet to which he wrote a new introduction and distributed through a friend at an attorney’s office. William also laboriously retyped the text and encoded it in HTML, hypertext markup language, so that he could post it online in the infancy of the Internet on the now-defunct JAVoice.com, a website created in 2000 to condemn the description of Mike Masaoka as a civil rights hero on the new National Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism During World War II in Washington DC, and to demand removal of a quote from his “Japanese American Creed.” William sent me a CD-ROM with the HTML files so I could repost it on this site, where it remains today as the only online source for the report.
That’s where things sat until 2025 when Chizu held the JAMP “Changing Perspectives on Japanese American Incarceration” conference in Oakland and she asked for my original copy of the Lim Report to hand out. I couldn’t immediately locate it, so she reformatted it from the web version. Over dinner at that conference, then-JACL executive director David Inoue also asked if I had the original version of the Lim Report. He said they’d searched the national office and couldn’t find one!
Then in May, Lorna Fong with the Tule Lake Committee asked for the original report to post on their site and I finally found it and scanned it and here it is, the original 94-page report as submitted and copyrighted by Deborah Lim.
Why is this all resurfacing now? With the passing of the old guard at JACL, a new generation of leaders and policy makers is revisiting the organization’s history in a more thoughtful and inclusive way. 
On March 30, on the 80th anniversary of the closure of Tule Lake, JACL issued an unexpected formal statement citing the findings of the Lim Report and noting that “JACL leadership played a critical role in cooperating with the WRA and perpetuating negative attitudes towards those deemed ‘No-No’, including directly leading the charge against those who resisted and protested. Despite the thoroughness of this investigation, JACL has continued not to fully acknowledge the Lim Report, its findings, and the organization’s overall role in fragmenting our community.”
The statement also effectively apologized for the organization’s backhanded 2019 apology to the Tule Lake resisters, acknowledging that “the Resolution included language that criticized and condemned dissent, creating additional harm. Pain, anger, and rightful distrust remain.”
By chance, at the Association for Asian American Studies conference in Honolulu in April, I was helping Nancy Ukai and others late at night locate the breakout room for their presentation the next morning when I met Katie Masano Hill, who identified herself as a Gosei from Indiana, a JACL Norman Y. Mineta Fellow, and the principal author of the March statement. She will join us on the Lim Report panel at Tule Lake.
At “healing circles” to be held later on Sunday, pilgrims will once again grapple in small groups with the lingering trauma not only from the forced removal and incarceration, but from the social ostracism endured by many Tuleans. Will seeing the clear context for the origins of those divisions help lift the burden? Come back in July for a follow-up report, and if you’re there, let me know what you think about all this.
