Three influential figures in the effort to preserve Hawai'i's Japanese internment stories will be honored today by the Honolulu chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League.

Robert Bratt, the first director of the Justice Department's Office of Redress Administration, along with Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai'i volunteers Betsy Young and Jane Kurahara will be presented with Distinguished Service Awards at an annual JACL luncheon.

The three recipients, all of whom are retired, have each played an important role in keeping the stories of Japanese internees alive.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Bratt led an extensive effort to identify surviving internees across the country.

In five years, he helped to find 75,000 to 80,000 Japanese Americans, whose civil rights were stripped during World War II.

About 2,400 of them were interned in Hawai'i. Another 1,500 were forced to relocate from their homes.

"My work with the internees was really a labor of love," Bratt said. "After repeatedly listening to their stories, it really affected us and made us work even harder."

Although Bratt worked out of Washington, D.C., he refers to Hawai'i as his "second home," spending much time here working with organizations such as JCCH and vacationing, he said.

While internment levels were lower in Hawai'i than in states such as California, Bratt said he was deeply moved by Hawai'i residents' stories about being forced to leave their homes and give up their property.

Young and Kurahara, retired librarians and devoted volunteers at the JCCH Resource Center, helped to uncover a former internment site at the bottom of Honouliuli Gulch in Central O'ahu two years ago. In March, they organized a pilgrimage to the site, attended by nearly 100 people eager to see where their relatives were imprisoned during the war.

"It was amazing to me that so many people didn't know an internment camp existed in their own backyard," said Young, whose cousin was among the internees.

In the coming years, the women hope that proper signage and some kind of memorial will be erected at the site to honor the people held there.

"If Honouliuli became a national park, that would be a dream come true," Kurahara said.

To help educate Hawai'i's youth about Japanese internment, Young and Kurahara have put together a "World War II Hawai'i Internees' Experiences Resource Folder," a binder filled with historical documents, personal poetry and letters from the internees. Last year, two binders were distributed to every Hawai'i public high school.

With the encouragement of not-for-profit organizations such as JCCH, the history of Japanese internment has also been integrated into 9th- and 10th-grade social studies curricula, Kurahara said.

"We want young people to see that there are a lot of parallels between what was happening then and what is happening now with discrimination," Kurahara said. "We want to sensitize our kids to how it feels to be judged for our personal differences."

With the discovery of Honouliuli and new developments occurring every year, "we can keep learning," Young said. "We're learning by discovery, and we hope that kids can come to feel that way about learning, too."

The JACL luncheon will honor the work of Bratt, Young and Kurahara, as well as commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. The act granted $20,000 in reparations to each surviving internee, along with a presidential apology.