The Internment of Japanese Americans in United States History (10 page)

Attorney Peter Irons called Korematsu in 1982. Irons had discovered new evidence in the case and offered to challenge the Supreme Court verdict.

Irons and Korematsu’s other attorneys alleged that the government had lied to the Supreme Court. Government lawyers had suppressed, altered, and destroyed key evidence.

Government attorneys approached Korematsu with the idea of offering him a pardon. One Korematsu attorney recalled, “Fred Korematsu said, ‘We shouldn’t accept a pardon. If anything, we should pardon the government.’”
³

Irons told the court that the government had withheld evidence that the Nisei were overwhelmingly loyal as a group. The government lawyers also presented falsified evidence of supposed acts of espionage by Japanese Americans. In 1982, Fred Korematsu said:

As long as my record stands in federal court, any American citizen can be held in prison or concentration camps without a trial or hearing. . . . I would like to see the government admit they were wrong and do something about it, so this will never happen again to any American citizen of any race, creed, or color.
⁴

His conviction was later overturned. Min Yasui and Gordon Hirabayashi also were cleared in later hearings.

Redress

For nearly four decades, Issei and Nisei remained silent about their wartime experience. In the late 1970s, they began to make their discontent known. They sought redress (compensation) for injustices that were done. White America was now more willing to support them.

Thirty-four years after Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, another president revoked the order. In 1976, Gerald Ford declared, “Not only was that evacuation wrong, but Japanese Americans were and are loyal Americans.”
⁵

Ford’s successor, Jimmy Carter, also sympathized. He created the Presidential Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC). In 1983, the commission published its final report,
Personal Justice Denied
. It called for a formal apology by Congress, a presidential pardon for persons who ran afoul of the law while resisting wartime restrictions, and a one-time, tax-free payment of twenty thousand dollars to each surviving Japanese American who had been interned. The first two issues met with no opposition. The third faced a struggle.

The Japanese American Citizens League sought a monetary compensation bill in 1970. The civil rights group asked for money, tax-free, based on the number of days each person was held. The bill went nowhere. In 1979, United States representative Mike Lowrey proposed a bill offering fifteen thousand dollars per evacuee plus fifteen dollars for each day served. This bill, too, failed to find support.

A redress bill passed the House of Representatives in 1987 and the Senate also passed it a few months later. President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Rights Bill of 1988 on August 4, 1988. It contained a formal government apology but no funds for internees.

In late 1989, Senator Daniel Inouye added redress funds to another bill of law. This time, Congress passed the monetary compensation bill. President George H.W. Bush signed the bill on November 21, 1989.

Checks went to camp survivors, in order of age. Reverend Manoru Eto, a 107-year-old man, received the first check. At least half of the victims of Executive Order 9066 did not live to see the bill passed. They received neither an apology nor a penny from the government.

The Price They Paid

The evacuees went on with their lives after the camps closed. Some became quite successful. Shigeo Wakamatsu became a doctor, and served as president of the Japanese American Citizens League. Gordon Hirabayashi became a professor of sociology at the University of Alberta. Yoshiko Uchida wrote dozens of books, including some about her wartime internment experience. Yuki Okinaga, the bewildered- looking girl pictured at an evacuation point, became an assistant dean at the University of Illinois.

But even those who made material gains lost because of the war. They lost most or all of their property. Some estimated the Japanese American losses were six billion dollars.

They were not the only losers. The rest of America spent millions of dollars to build the camps, and to feed, house, and guard the evacuees. They also lost the brainpower and labor of hardworking, innocent civilians who were treated as traitors. Those 120,000 evacuated people lost something even more important than money—time. Paul Shinoda commented, “I lost about five years—I just lost them. . . . The sad part of it is, there’s no glory in being evacuated, you can’t say I’m an evacuee—veteran of the evacuation.”
⁶

Protect All Citizens

The movement to provide redress and court decisions had an important result: the determination that injustices such as those imposed upon Japanese Americans would never be repeated.

Judge Marilyn Hall Patel summed up the danger when she commented on the Fred Korematsu case:

Our institutions must be vigilant in protecting constitutional guarantees . . . our institutions, legislative, executive and judicial, must be prepared to exercise their authority to protect all citizens from the petty fears and prejudices that are so easily aroused.
⁷

TIMELINE

1884
—More than two hundred fifty immigrants, most students, move from Japan to the United States.

1905
—Japan defeats Russia in Russo-Japanese War. Anti-immigrant and anti-Japanese groups start forming in California.

1906
—San Francisco transfers Japanese students from its white schools to segregated schools in Chinatown.

1913
—California enacts the Alien Land Law, prohibiting aliens ineligible for citizenship from owning land.

1941
—
December 7
: A Japanese air armada destroys much of the Pearl Harbor Naval base, causing the United States to enter into World War II.

1942
—
February
: Japanese fishermen and their families are forcibly removed from Terminal Island.

1942
—
February
19
: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, giving the military the right to exclude “any or all persons from designated areas, including the California coast.”

1942
—
March 2
: General John DeWitt declares two military zones, covering most of the West Coast.

1942
—
March 18
: Executive Order 9012 establishes the War Relocation Authority, the governing body for Issei and Nisei evacuees.

1942
—
March 27
: DeWitt issues Public Proclamation Number 4, prohibiting Issei and Nisei from leaving Military Zone 1.

1942
—
March 28
: Minoru Yasui is arrested for violating curfew in Portland, Oregon. He fights and loses the case in the Supreme Court.

1942
—
April 30
: Fred Korematsu is arrested for violating evacuation orders.

1942
—
June 2
: DeWitt declares the entire West Coast an evacuation area.

1942
—
June 3
: Japan suffers a crushing defeat at the Battle of Midway. This loss ends any chance of a Japanese invasion of America.

1942
—
Spring
: The evacuation to assembly centers begins.

1942
—
Fall
: Ten relocation camps open.

1942
—
November 14
: Hooded assailants beat a suspected informer at the Poston camp. Soldiers suppress a potential riot.

1942
—
December 4
: Military police kill two and injure ten during the “Manzanar Massacre.”

1943
—
January 28
: Secretary of War Stimson announces plans for a Japanese-American army unit, the 442nd regimental combat team. Soon afterwards, the army begins administering loyalty oaths to adult Japanese Americans.

1943
—
Summer
: Issei and Nisei who are considered disloyal to America are transferred to Tule Lake.

1943
—
October
: The firing of forty-three workers leads to a strike at Tule Lake. The strike lasts until January 1944.

1944
—
December
: The War Department revokes its relocation order, thus allowing evacuees to return to the West Coast.

1944
—
December 18
: The Supreme Court upholds the exclusion of Fred Korematsu from the Pacific Coast. The same day, the Court declares that Mitsuye Endo and other loyal citizens cannot be imprisoned indefinitely.

1945
—
August 6
: The first atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima. Japan surrenders a few days later.

1945
—
November
: Attorney Wayne Collins files the first lawsuit claiming that Issei and Nisei renunciations of United States citizenship are invalid. Thirty-five hundred such lawsuits take place over the next twenty-three years.

1946
—
March 21
: Tule Lake, the last of the relocation camps, closes.

1952
—
June 27
: The Walter-McCarran Act allows thousands of Issei to become United States citizens. The Alien Land Law is declared unconstitutional.

1976
—
February 19
: President Gerald Ford revokes Executive Order 9066.

1983
—
November 30
: Court overturns Korematsu conviction. Later hearings also clear Minoru Yasui and Gordon Hirabayashi.

1988
—
August 4
: The Civil Rights Bill of 1988 contains a formal apology to Japanese and Japanese Americans interned during the war.

1989
—
November 21
: President George Bush signs an appropriations bill granting $20,000 to each camp survivor.

CHAPTER NOTES

Chapter 1
. Japs

1
. Interview with Shigeo Wakamatsu, November 26, 1994.

2
. Ibid.

3
. Bill Hosokawa,
Nisei: The Quiet Americans
(New York: William Morrow and Company, 1969), p. 231.

4
. Bernard Schwartz,
Super Chief: Earl Warren and His Supreme Court—A Judicial Biography
(New York: New York University Press, 1983), p. 17.

Chapter 2
. Aliens Ineligible for Citizenship

1
. John Armor and Peter Wright,
Manzanar
(New York: Times Books, 1988), p. 26.

2
. Roger Daniels,
Prisoners without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), p. 10.

3
.
Strength and Diversity: Japanese American Women 1885–1990
, exhibit, Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago: January–March, 1995).

4
. Daniel S. Davis,
Behind Barbed Wire: The Imprisonment of Japanese Americans During World War II
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1982), p. 18.

5
. Yoshiko Uchida,
The Invisible Thread
(New York: Julian Messner, 1991), pp. 14, 55.

6
. Daniels, p. 23.

Chapter 3
. We Looked Like the Enemy

1
. Roger W. Axford,
Too Long Been Silent: Japanese-Americans Speak Out
(Lincoln, Neb.: Media Publishing and Marketing Company, 1986), p. 40.

2
. “Chronology of World War II Incarceration,”
Japanese American National Museum Quarterly
, October–December, 1994, p. 12.

3
. Paul Bailey,
City in the Sun: The Japanese Concentration Camp at Poston, Arizona
(Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1971), p. 3.

4
. Ibid., pp. 32–33.

5
.
Strength and Diversity: Japanese American Women 1885–1990
, exhibit, Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago: January–March, 1995).

6
. Ibid.

7
. Bernard Schwartz,
Super Chief: Earl Warren and His Supreme Court—A Judicial Biography
(New York: New York University Press, 1983), p. 15.

8
. Yoshiko Uchida,
The Invisible Thread
(New York: John Messner, 1991), p. 67.

9
. Robert Wilson and Bill Hosokawa,
East to America: A History of Japanese in the United States
(New York: William Morrow and Company, 1989), p. 192.

10
. Roger Daniels,
Prisoners without Trial: Japanese Americans in World
War II (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), pp. 25–26.

11
. Ibid., p. 25.

12
. Ibid., p. 30.