The welfare rights movement, led by the National Welfare Rights Organization, is one of the least-studied social movements of the 1960s and 70s. NWRO activists insisted on the right to decent clothing, heating in the middle of winter, and other basic needs—along with the right to conduct rent strikes. They fought against involuntary sterilization and advocated for a guaranteed adequate income for all. Yet despite the significance of their discourses and influence in the political debate over “welfare,” their critical narratives have been consistently overlooked.

When the NWRO folded in 1975, scholars have offered explanations for this outcome. Quoting the words of George Wiley, civil rights activist and executive director of the NWRO, Nick Cotz and May Lynn Cotz contended that poor women, like anyone else, had taken advantage of the minor perks of office, and the taste of power it offered. The NWRO eventually collapsed because these poor women were “merely interested in being leadership and maintaining their own position.” Guida West, on the other hand, argued that the demise of the NWRO was due to the contradictions and tensions that existed within the organization from the very beginning: while architects of the NWRO had set up a “new, nonpaternalistic model” that challenged the stereotypes of poor people as subordinates, middle-class, white male staff ended up dominating the movement activities of poor African American women.

Yet, how had these “tensions” surfaced in the early 1970s? Based on Wiley’s papers, NWRO archives, NWRO’s newsletters, and other primary documents, this article illustrates how the backlash against “welfare mothers,” hand in hand with anti-welfare ideology, led to shrinking donations and the contract funds to the NWRO, tightening finances. Politicians and the press came to represent welfare recipients—increasingly African American and unmarried/divorced—as unworthy of public support. Due to these financial difficulties, many organization personnel were eventually fired, exacerbating “tensions” among them, as well as those between the staff and the recipients. The demise of the NWRO cannot be fully understood without considering the changing political and social climate surrounding Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which became increasingly unpopular in the late 1960s with the rapid expansion of membership rolls and its payments.

Johnnie Tillmon, the first chairperson of the NWRO, believed in “working together to do something about the problems that affect poor people across the country.” Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, calls for new imaginings of public safety, addressing the need for divestment from police, prisons, and surveillance, as well as investment in the communities that are most directly impacted by “the violence of poverty.” COVID-19 laid bare “the systemic inequalities within America,” from who dies and who receives good care, to who gets to work from home and who has to choose between making money and risking their health, says William Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign. Centering the voices of welfare recipients—who have long been silenced, both in the debate over “welfare” and the history of American social movements—would be one of the first steps necessary in untangling the connections between systemic racism and the “violence of poverty” in the U.S.

This article investigates how Asian Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area began forming a movement in the 1990s and early 2000s that demanded the Japanese government to issue an apology and reparations to the victims of the war crimes committed by the Japanese military in the 1930s and 1940s.

In the early 1990s, protesting the Japanese government’s revision of history textbooks and some Japanese leader’s denial of the Nanjing Massacre, Chinese Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area began commemorative events for victims of Japan’s invasion of China in the 1930s and 1940s. These activities of collective remembrance led to the formation of an organrzation called the Alliance for Preserving the Truth of the Sino-Japanese War. As its name straightforwardly indicates, the organrzation aimed to excavate, maintain, and educate “the truth” of the Japanese invasion in China, while another goal was to demand that the Japanese government issue an apology and reparations to the victims. The members who had experienced or whose parents experienced the atrocities committed by the Japanese military during the war actively engaged in public education and support of academic research, and created a global network among organizations with the same goals by forming the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia in 1994.

The organization’s endeavors for public education bore fruit in the political arena when a conference by the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia inspired California State Assembly member Mike Honda to introduce Assembly Joint Resolution (AJR 27), which urged the Japanese government to formally issue an apology and reparations to the victims of the war crimes. Honda, a Sensei who experienced the Japanese American internment during World War II, explained that based on the success of the Japanese American redress movement he had learned that an apology and reparations would heal victims’ wounds. He also emphasized the significance of this process of healing to the Asian American community in his district, which was divided by divergent memories of the war. Similarly locating AJR 27 within the history of Asian American activism, such as the Asian American movement and the Japanese American redress movement, other members of the community, including those who formed the “Rape of Nanking” Redress Committee (RNRC), supported Honda and his resolution. AJR 27 was passed in both California State Assembly and Senate in 1999.

Formed by Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans and emphasizing its Asian American panethnicity, the RNRC not only demanded the Japanese government to issue an apology and reparations to the victims of the war crimes, but also criticized U.S. foreign policy for blocking the demand toward the Japanese government based on the San Francisco Peace Treaty. Its criticism was clearly articulated when it organrzed with the Asian American studies program at the University of California, Berkeley a counter-conference against the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the treaty supported by both the Japanese and U.S. governments in 2001. Whereas Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka and Secretary of State Collin Powell celebrated the treaty for providing peace and prosperity in Japan and the Pacific alike, the participants at the conference posed an opposite view that the treaty had harmed international relations in the region. In addition, they demanded that the Japanese government issue an apology and reparations to the victims and the U.S. government to stop supporting the peace treaty.

Thus, Asian American in the San Francisco Bay Area advanced a movement to demand the Japanese government to issue an apology and reparations for war crime victims by placing their endeavors in the tradition of Asian American activism and developing a panethnic Asian American identity.