Nisei Seeks Vindication for Suffering by War Internees

In the hysteria of fear and hate that followed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, 109,347 West Coast residents of Japanese ancestry were taken from their homes and evacuated inland in the name of “military necessity.”

But Gordon Hirabayashi refused to go.

To do so, he said then and says now, would have been to betray the Constitution that he believes forbade such a racially motivated roundup.

“As fine a document as the Constitution is,” he said the other day, “it is nothing but a scrap of paper if citizens are not willing to defend it.”

Hirabayashi became one of only three Americans tried and convicted for refusing to obey the evacuation order. In the 43 years since, he has hoped to clear his name.

Now, bearing recently uncovered evidence of possible government misconduct and deception in early 1942, Hirabayashi stands at the cusp of an opportunity to do just that. On Monday, U.S. District Judge Donald S. Voorhees is to begin an extraordinary hearing here on Hirabayashi’s allegations aimed at erasing his conviction.

“We can only admire his courage for standing up for his rights,” Voorhees said in ordering the hearing over government objections. “What he really is seeking now is vindication of his honor, and I feel that he has that right.”

But in the Japanese-American community, Hirabayashi’s case has become something larger than one man’s quest for justice.

“This case symbolizes the trial Japanese-Americans never had,” said Aki Kurose of the Japanese-American Citizens League. “A favorable outcome will tell us . . . the federal government was wrong in its treatment of American citizens.”

And it is apparently their final opportunity to clear the legal record surrounding the internment of the Japanese-Americans, 70% of whom were native-born U.S. citizens and the rest resident aliens. Hirabayashi, a second-generation Japanese-American, or Nisei, is the last of the three men convicted to come back to court for redress.

All three returned to court in 1983 in an effort to reverse their wartime convictions. They based their cases on newly released documents suggesting that internment was the result of public and political discrimination and not because of the potential for espionage and sabotage.

Minoru Yasui’s conviction was struck down with the government’s acquiescence last year by a federal judge in Portland, Ore. But the judge refused to pursue the allegations of government misconduct. In 1942, Yasui had been convicted of violating curfew orders and spent nine months in jail, in addition to his internment.

Ruling of Improper Conviction

Fred Korematsu’s conviction was erased in 1983 by a federal judge in San Francisco who ruled, without a wide-ranging hearing, that Korematsu was improperly convicted. Korematsu had been convicted of failing to report for internment and spent three months in jail, besides his internment.

Hirabayashi’s case is the only one to force the government to defend the legal underpinnings of what is now widely regarded as a grave national mistake.

“Their misallegations have to be corrected in court,” said Roger Shimuzu, a 42-year-old Seattle lawyer who was born in a stockyard during his parents’ evacuation to a relocation camp at Heart Mountain, Wyo. Shimuzu is with the Committee to Reverse the Japanese-Wartime Cases here.

“There are many people who still consider us the enemy for killing their sons and husbands at Pearl Harbor,” he said. “This case is important to dispel false allegations that are still being presented to us to this day.”

All three wartime convictions produced U.S. Supreme Court rulings that still stand as precedents for governmental actions based solely on ancestry.

‘This Is Not Only a Japanese-American Case’

“My case stands for the precedent that it can happen again,” Hirabayashi told Judge Voorhees in asking for this week’s hearing. “This is not only my case. This is not only a Japanese-American case.

“This is an American case.”

The U.S. Justice Department, which agrees that Hirabayashi’s conviction should be nullified, has nonetheless opposed a wider inquiry into the events of 43 years ago. “Everyone has learned from the lesson of that tragedy without needing to reopen those same wounds to determine what was the particular problem that caused a poor judgment to be made,” Justice Department lawyer Victor Stone told Voorhees in opposing the hearing.

Hundreds of documents are expected to be introduced and dozens of witnesses to be called in what may be a two-week proceeding. Hirabayashi’s lawyers, funded mostly by $43,000 in small contributions from other Japanese-Americans to the Committee to Reverse the Japanese-American Wartime Cases, will argue that the government suppressed, altered and destroyed evidence contradicting any military necessity for the evacuation.

Court Unaware of Intelligence Reports

One allegation, for example, says the Justice Department withheld from the Supreme Court the existence of intelligence reports that rejected conclusions that the Japanese-American community constituted an espionage and sabotage threat.

The court, unaware of the intelligence reports, went on to unquestionably defer to the government in accepting the finding of military necessity.

“It was a real disappointment,” Hirabayashi said of the high court’s 1943 ruling in an interview during a visit here. “Their existence is to uphold the Constitution, even with the suppression (of evidence).”

Retired and Living in Canada

Now 67, Hirabayashi is retired and living in Edmonton, where he is a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Alberta.

He was a 24-year-old college senior in Seattle when an 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew was imposed for residents of Japanese ancestry, and then the evacuation was ordered in the spring of 1942. He had never been to Japan, never corresponded with anyone in Japan and had never been in contact with the government of Japan.

His father, a follower of the Mukyokai movement, a pacifist Christian group in Japan, had emigrated to the United States in 1909 because of the military buildup in Japan. A marriage was arranged by mail for him, and his wife-to-be joined him in 1914 in the Seattle area, where they eventually went into truck farming and then owned a general store.

From them, Hirabayashi acquired a firm set of moral and religious principles of the Mukyokai. “The thing that had an impact on me,” he recalled, “was the strong moral integrity, the belief that Monday was just as important as Sunday. There was none of this going to church on Sunday and foreclosing on some poor widow’s house on Monday.”

When the curfew began, Hirabayashi initially complied. Then “it occurred to me something was phony,” he said. “I was the only one in my dormitory dashing home at five minutes to 8. It was ancestry. After a few days, I decided if I’m an American I ought to live like one. This is where that Sunday-Monday sense of values came through to me.

“I fully expected when the deadline came (for evacuation) I’d be on the bus too. But it hit me 10 days before the deadline: If I couldn’t subscribe to the curfew, how could I subscribe to this? It was much worse than a curfew. Once the question was raised, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it.”

The evacuation deadline passed on May 12, 1942. The next day, Gordon Hirabayashi went to his lawyer’s office to be taken to the FBI. “I wrote a statement that I believed in the Constitution and if I did that, I had to ignore this order. . . . I wrote statements like: ‘Citizenship should not be altered on ancestry.’ ”

Urged to Sign Up for Evacuation

He was placed in the King County jail. Three days later, a military officer tried to persuade him to voluntarily sign up for evacuation so that Seattle could report 100% compliance.

“Until then, I thought there was probably 150, 200 people like me,” Hirabayashi said. “At that time, I realized no one else was attacking this system.”

After five months in jail, Hirabayashi went to trial on two charges: violating the evacuation order and violating the curfew. Crucial testimony came from his parents, who had been summoned from the relocation camp at Tulelake, Calif.

They proved that Hirabayashi was of Japanese ancestry.

Hirabayashi spent four more months in jail before being released on bond pending his appeal to the Supreme Court. After the court affirmed his convictions, he served a 90-day term.

He would later serve a one-year term for subsequently refusing to answer Selective Service questions regarding his loyalty to the emperor of Japan. That conviction was eventually erased in a 1947 mass pardon by President Harry S. Truman.

‘Hoping for a Clearing of the Record’

“I’ve always been hoping there would be a clearing of the record, not knowing when or how,” Hirabayashi said. He hopes his case will go further than the individual relief granted to Yasui and the tempered findings of Korematsu’s case.

“We want, and with the hearing we hope there will be, more grounds for a stronger statement giving judicial reasons for the 180-degree turnaround by the government,” he said. “We would like to have it on the record so other minorities will have legal grounds to protest.

“A mere reversal (of the convictions) is not sufficient. After all these long years of wanting a change of record, it can’t be done with just sort of a payoff. . . . We have the obligation to right the wrong and clean out the black mark in history.

“It would be vindication for all the others who suffered.”