Infamy (36 page)

He started to take a seat and the man behind the counter pointed to a sign:
NO JAPS ALLOWED
.

He got up to leave but was stopped by a hand on his shoulder. A young marine sergeant was behind him. “Be my guest, please,” the marine said, taking Kiyota to a table with four other marines.

“Mister,” said the sergeant to the counterman in a hard voice. “Give this man some ham and eggs and a cup of hot coffee and be quick about it!”

The marines asked Kiyota what he was doing. He said he had just been released from a detention camp.

“A what?” one said. “But you’re an American citizen, right?”

They talked for a while. Kiyota told his story until it was time for his train. As he thanked the marines and walked out, he noticed one of them stood up and ripped the
NO JAPS ALLOWED
sign off the wall.

Kiyota went to Arkansas, then returned to Berkeley to earn a degree from the University of California in East Asian Studies. He was drafted and served in army intelligence during the Korean War. But after a year or so, someone in Tokyo discovered his “No-No” record and renunciation application at Tule Lake. His passport was seized; he was essentially a stateless person in a foreign country. Collins, it happened, was arguing before the Ninth Circuit Court in San Francisco that the Renunciation Act of 1944 was unconstitutional. He won that case in 1955. Kiyota got his passport back and spent thirty years teaching religious studies at the University of Wisconsin. “I am,” Professor Kiyota wrote of Collins in 1997, “one of the many beneficiaries of the man’s dedication to the American ideal.”

*   *   *

Few of the officials who had pushed for the incarceration of American Japanese had their careers harmed by their actions. General John DeWitt was named commandant of the Army and Navy Staff College in Washington, D.C. In 1950, Karl Bendetsen was nominated to be assistant secretary of the army. One of the witnesses during his confirmation hearings was the former provost of the University of California at Berkeley, Monroe Deutsch. Said Deutsch: “The appointment of a man whose utterances reveal him as possessing racialist points of view analogous to those of Hitler, would be most unfortunate.”

Bendetsen was confirmed by the Senate. Telephone records released by the army in the 1980s revealed that in January of 1943 Karl Bendetsen told another officer: “Maybe our ideas on the Oriental have been all cock-eyed.… Maybe he isn’t inscrutable.” 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.

Earl Warren’s rise to the governorship was in large part thanks to the popularity of the evacuation. He was appointed the fourteenth chief justice of the United States by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953. When he sat down to write his memoirs, he wrote only one sentence about his actions in the evacuation of 1942 as attorney general and governor of California: “I have since deeply regretted the removal order and my own testimony advocating it, because it was not in keeping with our American concept of freedom and the rights of citizens.”

When Amelia R. Fry interviewed Warren in 1971 as part of an oral history for the Bancroft Library at the University of California, she brought up the subject of his involvement with the Japanese evacuation, and he broke down and burst into tears. The interview was stopped.

Clearly over time Warren had realized his role in the racism and panicked injustice driving the Japanese American incarceration. Some Americans could draw a connection between his remorse over the internment and the most famous and far-reaching decision of the Court during the so-called Warren years, the 1954 unanimous decision on public school integration in the case of
Brown v. Board of Education
; I am one of them. There is no doubt in my mind that Chief Justice Warren’s historic action in 1954 was related to Attorney General Warren’s disgraceful actions in 1942.

In memoirs, interviews, and oral histories, many of the officials who argued for or debated the American Japanese evacuation were publicly contrite, usually in a sentence or two, about what they did in 1942 and later. Secretary of War Stimson said, “To loyal citizens this forced evacuation was a personal injustice.” Milton Eisenhower called it “an inhuman mistake.” Justice William O. Douglas, who joined in the majority opinion in the Korematsu case, wrote that his opinion “was ever on my conscience.” Tom Clark, the deputy attorney general who was later appointed to the Supreme Court, said, “Looking back on it today, it was, of course, a mistake.”

Walter Lippmann was not apologetic. He insisted that his column advocating incarceration of the
Nikkei
was written to help protect them against white vigilante violence. Answering a 1968 letter from Palmer Hoyt, the editor of the
Denver Post
, Lippmann wrote: “I did indeed write the column you speak about and I felt at the time great anguish about doing it. My reason was that in the state of war hysteria after Pearl Harbor, Japanese, who are easily identifiable by mobs, might not be safe.… I felt then, and I still do, that the temper of the times made the measure justified.”

*   *   *

Courts, of course, are driven by the cases that are filed by lawyers and litigants. In 1982, eight years after Wayne Collins’s death, a law professor and author, Peter Irons of the University of California at San Diego, was researching a book on the legal histories of Fred Korematsu and other Japanese Americans who challenged the 1942 evacuation orders. Irons discovered evidence that officials at the Justice Department had withheld or destroyed evidence before the Korematsu case reached the Supreme Court. He assembled a team of young Japanese American lawyers, all Sansei, or third generation, and together they prepared petitions that led to the dismissal of Korematsu’s conviction forty years before by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The young lawyers continued their legal crusade and Gordon Hirabayashi’s conviction was eventually vacated by the same court. The heart of Irons’s team’s argument was that the Supreme Court gave “special credence” to the solicitor general’s representations and that it was unlikely the high court would have ruled the same way had the solicitor general exhibited “complete candor.” The key witness in that case was Edward Ennis, the former assistant attorney general, who testified that the assistant secretary of war, John McCloy, had suppressed evidence in the three Nisei cases of 1942. Minoru Yasui, the third of the three dissenters, died before his case was resolved.

*   *   *

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.

*   *   *

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.