What It Takes To See Justice And Accountability

Sometimes it feels like justice will never be served, but in these moments we must remember that accountability is a road to walk, not just a destination.

George Takei testifies before the Commission for Wartime Relocation Hearings on August 4, 1981. Photo provided by Brad and George Takei.

“Wake me up when Trump’s in prison.” 

It’s a common sentiment. People have grown tired, and even feel gaslit, over the maddeningly slow pace of justice.

That an ex-president plotted to overturn the 2020 election, incited insurrectionists, and then stole and deliberately refused to turn over some of our nation’s top secrets, yet still dances around Mar-a-Lago, albeit badly, two years later as a free man understandably gets many people’s blood boiling. 

If it were any of us, we’d be in prison long ago.

I’d like to offer some perspective and guidance here. In keeping with the theme of The Big Picture, my thoughts derive from my own life experiences trying to seek justice for my community and official accountability for what was done to us during World War II. 

My work in this area taught me valuable lessons about what it takes to see justice and accountability delivered by a system that feels designed to crush the most vulnerable, even while protecting both itself and the powerful people who control it.

Most of you here know about my personal story, how when I was just a child of five years my family and I, along with 120,000 other Americans of Japanese descent, were summarily rounded up and sent to internment camps simply because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. 

We lost our homes, our businesses and our liberty, and we were held without charge and without trial for years behind barbed wire in ten of the most desolate places in the country. It was a grievous injustice and the very opposite of what the Constitution promised: due process and equal protection under the law. 

When a case challenging our unjust incarceration finally made it all the way up to the Supreme Court in 1944, the justices affirmed the government’s actions to evacuate and then intern us in an infamous opinion, Korematsu v. United States. With that 6-3 decision, a split that we tellingly often see in cases today, it seemed to all of us that justice was simply an illusion, or even worse a cynical, heartbreaking lie. 

At the end of the war, they sent my family with nothing but $25 each and a train ticket home, where we had to restart our lives on skid row, the most dangerous and destitute part of Los Angeles.

It would be easy to understand if many, who had endured what my family and community did, simply gave up on America. Why believe in a country that seems founded on a laughably false promise?

The Big Picture is a reader-supported publication tackling the big questions of our day. Both free and paid subscriptions are available. If you want to support our work, the best way is by taking out a paid subscription.

The same of course could be said for many other minority communities.

From Indigenous people who were nearly exterminated, their land seized and their cultures and tribes scattered and almost destroyed; to African Americans who were first brutally enslaved for hundreds of years then, throughout more recent history, racially terrorized, segregated, and mass incarcerated; to the LGBTQ+ community that so many politicians and right wing extremists today are determined to silence and erase through openly discriminatory and hateful laws, minorities know from long experience that America very frequently fails to live up to its promises of justice, freedom and equality. 

So for many of us, justice and accountability have taken far longer than two years. Sometimes, it never comes at all.

But here’s the thing of it: That must never mean we stop trying. 

Justice and accountability are not magical end points, just as a journey is not just about a destination. To reach that promised land requires walking a long road, cooperating and striving with many other people, learning and nurturing and, yes, strengthening ourselves along the way.

When I was a teenager, I became curious about our internment and the trumped up reasons behind it. I had studied civics in high school, and what happened to us didn’t line up with the ideas we were being taught. 

While my mother, like many other Japanese Americans of her generation, didn’t want to talk about those years, my father spoke to me about our internment and encouraged me to participate in our democracy. 

I felt a burning desire to see a great wrong righted. So I joined a national effort by my community to seek redress and an official apology from the United States for what it had done to us.

I eventually set about with others to found a center of history and learning, the Japanese American National Museum in downtown Los Angeles, so that we could teach future generations about the grave injustice of the internment and help ensure something like it never happened again in America. 

My own efforts culminated at the Congressional Commission for Wartime Relocation Hearings at which I, as both a survivor of the camps and an actor known for my television role as Lt. Hikaru Sulu on Star Trek, had the privilege to testify. 

Here is in part what I said back in 1981:

“I have come to understand that as noble and as precious as our American ideals are, they can also be very fragile. Democracy can only be as good or as strong or as true as the people who make it so."

"It is my belief that America today is strong enough and confident enough to recognize a grievous failure. I believe that it is honest enough to acknowledge that damage was done. And I would like to think that it is honorable enough to provide proper restitution for the injury that was done."

"For in a larger sense, injury was done to those very ideals that we hold as fundamental to our American system. We, all of us as Americans, must strive to redeem those precepts that faltered years ago when I was a boy."

"And in that role as an American, I urge restitution for the incarceration of American citizens of Japanese ancestry, because that restitution would, at the same time, be a bold move to strengthen the integrity of America.”

It would take seven more years from that testimony, till 1988, before we would finally receive an apology from the government and any redress for our injuries, in the amount of $20,000 per internee.

If I were to only have looked upon the ultimate goals—recognition and acknowledgement of the great injustice of the internment and redress for our losses—I and others working with me might have despaired during those long years. After all, it took over 40 of them to get American officials to that point, and many of the people for whom the money and apology would have been most meaningful were long gone. 

And while $20,000 would have helped a lot more back in 1946 when my family had to start again from nothing, I was still proud to donate my own check immediately to the Japanese American National Museum. 

I look upon the very process of holding America to account as valuable in and of itself. We educated millions as part of our efforts. We forged new bonds with other communities. 

We helped ensure that the history books would tell the truth about what happened, though now that truth and others have come under attack from the right. This is what I mean when I say accountability and justice is a path to walk, and not just an end point.

So how should we look upon our modern day effort to hold powerful people like Donald Trump to account and bring them to justice? 

I don’t urge patience; that is not my meaning. We should all be impatient for action and for justice. Instead I urge that we view each step on the path as important, and that we keep up the pressure and lean into the task as members of the public, demanding our system live up to its promises. 

Criminals, no matter who they are, must face the music. To ensure that happens, we must demand that prosecutors, politicians and judges are ready with their instruments, the ones we pay them to sound on our behalf. 

So to the tantalizing question posed by the title of this piece, “When will we see justice and accountability?” I say this: We are already seeing it, through the January 6 Committee Hearings, the methodical work of the Justice Department, and the accelerated and more focused work of Special Counsel Jack Smith. 

But we the public can and must demand more, following closely with each next step in the process. 

As my father once said to me, ours is a participatory democracy. A free and robust press keeps the pressure on our elected leaders and on investigators and prosecutors precisely because we, the public, remain insistent on seeing progress toward justice, progress toward accountability. 

Our eyeballs on the day’s news, our letters to the editor, our presence at town halls and in phone campaigns, these are the myriad actions that produce the very accountability our system both promises and requires.

So my advice is this: Don’t sit this out and simply wait for an outcome. 

Remain engaged, vigilant, and demanding of the truth and of results. That is how we move down the path toward an endpoint as satisfyingly cathartic as seeing Trump in prison. That is how we create accountability and nurture true justice in America. 

We must view our present point in the journey toward accountability as no less important than the endpoint itself—perhaps more so, because only with continued engagement and vigilance by all of us will we achieve the justice we seek.