Infamy

by Richard Reeves

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  On May 20, 2011, the United States Department of Justice, through acting solicitor general Neal Katyal, issued a statement, an extraordinary legal event, according to scholars: “By the time the cases of Gordon Hirabayashi and Fred Korematsu reached the Supreme Court, the Solicitor General [Charles Fahy] had learned of a key intelligence report that undermined the rationale behind the internment. The Ringle Report from the Office of Naval Intelligence found that only a small percentage of Japanese Americans posed a potential security threat, and that the most dangerous were already known or in custody. But the solicitor general did not inform the Court of the report, despite warnings that failing to alert the Court ‘might approximate the suppression of evidence.’” Instead, he argued that it was “impossible to segregate loyal Japanese Americans from disloyal ones. Nor did he inform the Court that a key set of allegations used to justify the internment, that Japanese Americans were using radio transmitters to communicate with enemy submarines off the West Coast, had been discredited by the FBI and FCC [Federal Communications Commission]. And to make matters worse, he relied on gross generalizations about Japanese Americans, such as that they were disloyal and motivated by ‘racial solidarity.’”

  The 2011 statement continued: “The Supreme Court upheld Hirabayashi’s and Korematsu’s convictions. And it took nearly a half century for lower courts to vacate the decisions that sent the two men to jail.”

  The Justice Department statement, however, did not in any way negate the Supreme Court decisions of 1944. In fact, only the Court itself has the power to do that. So the 1944 dissent and warning of Justice Robert Jackson is as relevant today as it was then: the decisions amounted, in his words, to “a loaded gun” that the government could pick up at any time to serve real or imagined threats to national security. That is part of the reason that many Americans, I among them, believe or fear that in times of crisis, real or imagined, innocent members of any group could again be imprisoned without charges as a matter of “military necessity.” The Japanese American experience clearly answered the question, “Could it happen here?” It did.

  The questions now are about how it happened and whether it could happen again.

  Not surprisingly, some of the Japanese Americans who spent time behind bars and barbed wire in the 1940s remained active in the civil rights and civil liberties causes and cases of other Americans as time went on. Within two weeks of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, hundreds of Japanese Americans in Los Angeles gathered to demonstrate against any mass arrests of American Muslims. Fred Korematsu filed amicus briefs in two Supreme Court cases challenging the detention without charges of Muslims at the American naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, stating: “Full vindication of the Japanese Americans will arrive only when we learn that, even in times of crisis, we must guard against prejudice and keep our commitment to law and justice.”

  After too many years, Japanese Americans and others who studied and protested the evacuations of the 1940s became heroes to many Americans who care about civil rights and liberties—and, eventually, to most Japanese Americans and to the many Caucasian civil libertarians who had shunned the few who originally fought or disobeyed the evacuation orders of 1942. One of the great ironies as history was revised was the awarding of the Roger N. Baldwin Medal of Liberty of the American Civil Liberties Union in 2001 to Fred Korematsu—the man Franklin Roosevelt’s friend Baldwin had tried to deny ACLU representation. Both Korematsu and Gordon Hirabayashi were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and both have streets named after them in San Jose, California. In addition, Korematsu was the first Asian American whose portrait was displayed in the “Struggle for Justice” section of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. There is also a thirty-ton monument to him in the “Champions of Justice” Gallery in Oakland, California, along with Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

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  In March of 2006, in the Hood River Valley of Oregon, the county’s history museum, with the approval of county commissioners, opened an exhibit entitled A Circle of Freedom: Lost and Restored. Among the exhibits were documents and photographs found in a barn by a World War II veteran named Bud Collins, who had become the historian of American Legion Post 22, the infamous post whose members had blacked out the names of local Japanese Americans serving in the military in Europe and the Pacific.

  “I’ve been saving them for some reason,” Collins told Linda Tamura, a local history professor, of the two apple crates of papers. “We all want to, you know, quit hashing it over, do away with it. But you can’t turn your back on history.… These are the facts. This is history … it’s too damn late to change it now.”

  The county administrator David Meriwether agreed. “This is a great nation, and we’ve done many wonderful things,” he said. “This isn’t one of them, and we always need to be mindful of how we treat and how we interact with each other.” The museum director, Connie Nice, thought so, too, telling the Hood River News: “I’m hoping that people will just stop and think: Could we do that again? Are we doing that again, with Latinos or Mexicans or Muslims?… I’m not saying this little exhibit will change the world. But I want people to walk away and say, ‘Maybe we didn’t do that right’ and I hope then that they’re not going to repeat history.”

  BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

  Of the 120,313 Japanese, citizens and aliens, incarcerated by the War Relocation Authority, 54,127 returned to the three Pacific Coast states, California, Oregon, and Washington. A total of 52,978 relocated in other parts of the United States and Hawaii. Of the remainder, 4,724 were sent to Japan—most eventually returned to the United States in cases filed by Wayne Collins—and 3,121, including family members, were held in Justice Department internment. A total of 2,355 served in the U.S. military, and 1,322 ended up in state institutions. Over the course of the incarceration, 1,862 evacuees died in the camps.

  Below is a short summary of the postwar lives of some of the men and women mentioned in this book.

  John Aiso served during the American occupation of Japan after the war. He mustered out as a lieutenant colonel. He later became the first Japanese American judge named to the California Court of Appeals. A street in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo is named in his honor. He was killed there in a street mugging in 1987.

  George Akimoto returned to Stockton and became famous as a poster artist for Hollywood films. He died in 2009.

  Karl Bendetsen was appointed assistant secretary of the army in 1950 and then undersecretary two years later. He continued to pad and revise his résumé as the years went by, saying that he had also served in Hawaii and the Philippines and delivered secret messages from General Douglas MacArthur in Manila to General George Marshall in Washington. He also said that he was a pilot—stories that even his own family could not document. His son, a navy pilot, said he had never heard that his father was also a pilot. In 1954, Bendetsen retired from government to become chairman and chief executive of Champion International, the global paper company. In later years, he downplayed his role in the Japanese evacuation but did publicly oppose reparations for the American Japanese held in the relocation camps. He died in 1989.

  Ernest Besig, the first director of the American Civil Liberties Union office in San Francisco, spent a long life taking on the government, representing Communists and the poet Allen Ginsberg. He died in 1998.

  Francis Biddle resigned as attorney general after President Roosevelt’s death and was later named by President Truman as the principal American judge at the Nuremberg trials of accused German war criminals. In his autobiography he expressed regret for not having argued more forcefully against the American Japanese evacuation. He died in 1968.

  Fletcher Bowron served as mayor of Los Angeles until 1953. After being defeated in a gubernatorial primary, he was elected to the California Superior Court. He died in 1968.

  Clara Breed became the city librarian of San Diego, retirin
g in 1970. The Smithsonian Institution incorporated the “Dear Miss Breed” letters into a lesson plan on the use of letters as primary historical documents. She died in 1994.

  Ralph Carr, the governor of Colorado, an anti–New Deal Republican, ran for U.S. senator in November of 1942 and was defeated. Analysts said his stand on the evacuation and relocation was the principal reason for the end of his political career. In 1976, local Japanese Americans raised funds for a Carr statue in Sakura Square in Denver. He died in 1950.

  John Franklin Carter wrote thirty books, both nonfiction and fiction. His syndicated column was titled We, the People.… He joined the presidential campaign of Harry S. Truman as a speechwriter. He died in 1967.

  A. B. Chandler, called “Happy” Chandler, became the commissioner of Major League Baseball in 1945. He resigned in 1951 and died in 1991.

  Tom C. Clark, after the war and after service as attorney general, was named an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, where he served until 1967. He resigned the court in 1967, to avoid a conflict of interest when his son, Ramsey, was appointed attorney general by President Lyndon Johnson. On his retirement Justice Clark said: “I have made a lot of mistakes in my life.… One is my part in the evacuation of the Japanese from California in 1942.… I don’t think that served any purpose at all.” He continued, “We picked them up and put them in concentration camps. That’s the truth of the matter. And as I look back on it—although at the time I argued the case—I am amazed the Supreme Court ever approved it.” He died in 1977.

  Ron Dellums, the Oakland boy who tried to stop soldiers from taking away his Japanese friend Rolland later served in Congress for twenty-eight years and was chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. He was elected mayor of Oakland in 2005.

  Lieutenant General John DeWitt was named commandant of the Army and Navy Staff College in Washington, D.C., and was awarded a Distinguished Service Medal by the army for his role in evacuating the American Japanese from the West Coast. He retired from the army in 1947 and was later raised to the rank of a four-star general. He died in 1962.

  Milton Eisenhower became president of Kansas State University in mid-1943. In 1950, he was named president of Pennsylvania State University and six years later of Johns Hopkins University. He died in 1985.

  Frank Emi, after being released from jail, became a civil servant, working for the post office and for the California Unemployment Division. After his retirement in 1980, he was active in the redress movement and died in 2010.

  General Delos Emmons was commander of U.S. troops in Hawaii and successor to General John DeWitt as Fourth Army commander. He commanded army troops in Alaska before retiring. He died in 1965.

  Mitsuye Endo, the only woman evacuee whose case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, moved to Chicago to work as a secretary after the Court ruled she had “proven loyalty” because of her work for the state of California. She married and had three children. She died in 2006.

  Edward Ennis left the Justice Department after the war and worked for the American Civil Liberties Union for forty years, serving as chairman for most of that time. During his tenure as chairman, the ACLU became the first organization to call for the impeachment of President Richard Nixon in 1973. Ennis died in 1990.

  Charles Fahy, the U.S. solicitor general during World War II, became a judge on the United States Court of Appeals. He died in 1978.

  Dr. Fred Fujikawa, the Terminal Island physician, was released from the Jerome Relocation Center, where he was one of eight Nisei doctors to work at a tuberculosis sanitarium in Joplin, Missouri. A bill in the state legislature to prevent him from working with white patients was defeated. He died in 1992.

  Major General Allen Gullion retired as provost general of the army in April 1944. He died in 1946.

  Gordon Hirabayashi earned a PhD from the University of Washington and then taught at the American University in Cairo and the American University in Beirut before becoming chairman of the Sociology Department of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. There is some irony in that because Canada treated its West Coast Japanese at least as badly as the United States did, not allowing them to return to British Columbia on the Canadian Pacific Coast until 1947. Hirabayashi died in 2012.

  Tetsuzo Hirasaki never fulfilled his dreams of college and worked for General Dynamics in Los Angeles. He died in 2006.

  Bill Hosokawa, the editor of the Heart Mountain newspaper, was a reporter for the Des Moines Register, the editorial page editor of the Denver Post, and an author, whose best-known book is titled Nisei: The Quiet Americans.

  Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston wrote two more books and a television screenplay of Return to Manzanar for the NBC network. She and her husband, James Houston, lived in San Jose, California, and raised three children.

  Daniel Inouye, as noted, became the first congressman and later senator from the new state of Hawaii. His Distinguished Service Cross was upgraded to a Medal of Honor by President Bill Clinton after a review of records showed that the bravery of Nisei soldiers was routinely downgraded in official army reports. His second wife was Irene Hirano, who is president of the U.S.-Japan Council, a nonprofit group in Washington. He died in 2012, after fifty years in the Senate.

  Estelle Ishigo and her husband, Arthur, a broken man who died in 1957, lived in trailer camp poverty for years. In 1972, an exhibit of her camp drawings was mounted by Japanese friends who had lost touch with her. The exhibit and a book of drawings were a success and led old friends from Heart Mountain to find her living alone in a Hollywood basement. She had lost both legs to gangrene. The friends from camp placed her in a nursing home and cared for her until she died in 1990. A film, Days of Waiting, on her life and art won the 1991 Academy Award for short documentaries.

  Margaret Ishino worked for the Department of Labor in Washington, D.C., after the war and then returned to San Diego.

  Harvey Itano, the Berkeley valedictorian sent to Tule Lake, was released to continue his medical studies at Washington University in St. Louis. A professor at the University of California in San Diego, his studies with Dr. Linus Pauling on sickle-cell anemia, a disease plaguing African Americans, marked the first time that a disease had been linked to a specific molecular defect. He later became the first Japanese American elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He died in 2010.

  Saburo Kido, the Japanese American Citizens League president who was twice beaten badly in the camps, practiced civil rights law in Los Angeles. He died in 1988.

  Charles Kikuchi, the diarist from San Francisco, was a psychiatric social worker for the Veterans Administration for twenty-four years. He died in 1977.

  Marion Konishi, the valedictorian of the class of 1944 at the Granada camp, became a restaurateur, opening the first sushi restaurant in Chicago and running it for thirty-four years.

  Joseph Kurihara, the embittered World War I veteran and Black Dragon leader, voluntarily accepted deportation to Japan, saying that he would work for democracy in his native land. Ironically, he worked there as an interpreter for U.S. occupation troops. He is considered by some a hero who first proposed redress for evacuees. He died in 1965.

  Ben Kuroki, the air force gunner, became something of a celebrity after the war, speaking around the country on racial tolerance. He earned a journalism degree from the University of Nebraska and eventually owned two small newspapers in the state. He retired in 1984 and was awarded a Distinguished Service Medal in 2005 to add to his dozen other combat decorations.

  Wilson Makabe, the crippled veteran from Loomis, California, and his family had to sell part of their property to settle a $1,200 tax arrears. The property was then offered back to them for $45,000.

  Mike Masaoka became a lobbyist in Washington, advocating for American Japanese interests. He married the sister of Representative Norm Mineta. He died in 1991.

  The Matsuda family. Heisuke and Mitsuno became American citizens in 1954. Yoneichi expanded the farm to fifty-eight acres and worked it with his father. He had
won a Bronze Star for bravery in the war but never told his family. Mary moved to Seattle to complete her bachelor’s degree at the University of Puget Sound, where she met her husband, Charles Gruenewald. They were married in 1951, then moved to Boston while he finished his master’s degree in theology. He served as pastor of churches in Washington, Idaho, and Colorado. They had three children. She began to write a memoir at the age of seventy-six and it was published in 2005, on her eightieth birthday.

  Robert Matsui served twenty-six years in Congress. He died in 2005 and was succeeded by his wife, Doris, who was elected in 2006.

  John McCloy, called by Harper’s magazine “the most influential private citizen in American history,” the most honored of Wall Street lawyers, advised eight presidents from FDR to Ronald Reagan. His positions included high commissioner of the American occupation zones in Germany, chairman of Chase Manhattan National Bank, and chairman of the World Bank. However, in two days of testimony during the hearings of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, he was outraged at a hostile greeting from Japanese Americans in the audience and from some commission members. He should not have been. His biographer Kai Bird wrote in 1992: “More than any other official, McCloy was responsible for the internment of the entire Japanese American community inside barbed wire camps for three years. His arguments had carried the day against the Justice Department’s constitutional concerns.” In his diary, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes wrote of McCloy: “I like McCloy a lot and I have seen him more than any other of the men in the Army but I am told he is more or less inclined to be a Fascist and this would not surprise me. I know of my own knowledge he is strong and capable.” McCloy considered the commission’s hearings “absolutely outrageous,” but he came, convinced he would be seen as a patriot and an American hero. After the first day, he came back with his own lawyers to defend his actions between 1941 and 1945 as undersecretary of war.