WWII Internees : Redress: One Made a Difference

It was the early 1940s and Aiko Yoshinaga’s world seemed secure: After graduating from Los Angeles High School and spending summer vacation with friends, she would attend secretarial school in the fall.

Then the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

Less than two months before her graduation in 1942, the government--questioning the loyalty of all 120,000 Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast--sent them to inland detention camps. Yoshinaga suddenly found herself living in the desert 250 miles from home.

Released toward the end of the war, many internees tried to forget what had happened to them. But Yoshinaga vowed to uncover the real story behind the relocation program. And, some 40 years later, she did.

Stumbled on Report

More out of curiosity than anger, she began poring over boxes of war records in the National Archives. One day, almost by accident, she stumbled on a long-suppressed report which suggested that the Japanese internment policy was based more on racism than on military necessity.

During the war, government lawyers had insisted that the Army was compelled to round up all Japanese-Americans, that it had no time after Pearl Harbor to determine which were loyal and which were not. But the 1943 military report dug up by Yoshinaga--which had been concealed not only from the court but from the Justice Department--insisted that “ties of race” made all Japanese-Americans suspect, no matter how much time was available to investigate them.

It was, as one historian later remarked, “a bombshell.” Lawyers citing Yoshinaga’s new evidence persuaded federal courts to vacate the historic 1943 conviction of a Japanese-American who had resisted deportation. And Yoshinaga’s efforts helped fuel the effort in Congress, now nearing completion, to provide $1.2 billion in reparations to internees.

‘She’s an Unsung Hero’

“We couldn’t have gotten as far as we have without Aiko Yoshinaga,” said Lorraine Bannai, a San Francisco attorney active in the movement for Japanese-American redress. “She’s an unsung hero of this whole effort.”

Yoshinaga herself is not so sure. “I’m just a little old housewife. I’m not a professional archivist,” said the soft-spoken woman, who is now 63. “But I guess I showed that one person can make a difference.”

Not everyone was pleased with her actions, however. Justice Department lawyers, seeking to play down Yoshinaga’s discoveries, insisted that U.S. policy was not racist and that there were legitimate security concerns after Pearl Harbor. One attorney attacked Yoshinaga as “an ignoramus” and a “destructive force” who had no formal training as an archivist.

More important, some members of Congress and former U.S. officials who helped carry out the internment program maintain to this day that the Japanese-American roundup was necessary--and that the country should do it again under the same circumstances.

In March, 1942, Yoshinaga, an honors high school student majoring in art and music, had no inkling of what was to come. Although Pearl Harbor had unleashed strong feelings against Japanese-Americans, she and her family never dreamed that the government would carry out a massive detention program.

But the signs were everywhere. Even before Pearl Harbor, for example, some Caucasian California agricultural groups had hoped to use Japanese aggression in the Pacific as a pretext to drive544499813of business. When war broke out between the United States and Japan, many military officials genuinely feared that Japan would attack the West Coast, and believed that the Japanese-Americans living there would engage in espionage and sabotage.

Soon, California Atty. Gen. Earl Warren and other state politicians began demanding that the government crack down on Japanese-Americans. On Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9006, a sweeping edict that led to subsequent laws banning Japanese-Americans from living or working on the West Coast.

Under 72 Hours to Pack

In charge of the internment program was Lt. General John L. Dewitt in San Francisco, who headed the Western Defense Command. He got to work quickly, issuing a series of orders telling the Japanese-Americans where to report and, in some cases, giving them less than 72 hours to pack up their belongings and sell their homes.

Of the 120,000 evacuees, more than 76,000 were U.S. citizens. More than 35,000 Japanese-Americans were allowed to leave the camps during the war, either because they joined the Army, signed a loyalty oath, were attending college or found work outside the West Coast.

But most, like Yoshinaga, spent several years in detention centers. Frightened, she chose to go with her fiance to a desolate camp in Manzanar, Calif., while the rest of her family was sent to a camp in Arkansas. The adjustment was traumatic: She ate meals in barracks, enjoyed little privacy and had no indication of when she could leave.

In the camp, Yoshinaga was married and gave birth to a daughter. Then she was granted special permission to visit her father in Arkansas just before he died on Christmas Day, 1943, but her husband was not allowed to travel with her.

The government ended the West Coast confinements late in 1944, saying that there was no longer any military necessity for them. Most of the internees scattered across the country, trying to resume their lives. Yoshinaga, who was divorced after the war ended, settled in New York City, moving in with other family members.

‘It Was a Terrible Thing’

“Many of us just tried to forget this ever happened,” she said. “It was a terrible thing to think we had been branded as disloyal citizens. Most of us were pretty quiet about this.”

But four other Japanese-Americans decided to fight back.

Minoru Yasui, Gordon Hirabayashi, Fred Korematsu and Mitsuye Endo believed that the program had violated their rights as U.S. citizens. The first three defied Dewitt’s orders and were arrested. Endo, who had reported to an “assembly center” near San Francisco, later challenged the program by saying that she had been unlawfully detained.

“I asked myself two basic questions,” Hirabayashi said recently. “Wasn’t I an American citizen? And how could my government possibly do this to me? To obey such a program was impossible.”

The four cases were argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1943 and 1944. Defense attorneys contended that the detention program was racist and unconstitutional, particularly because no effort had been made to determine the loyalty of each Japanese-American, many of whom were women and children.

Time of the Essence

Government lawyers countered that military personnel were legitimately concerned about a Japanese attack on the United States. In one case, they produced a report in which Dewitt contended that time had been of the essence and that it had not been possible to determine the loyalties of so many Japanese-Americans.

By that time, Dewitt’s hostile views toward Japanese-Americans were well known. He had told a congressional committee, for example, that “a Jap is a Jap.” He had written that the Japanese were “an enemy race” whose allegiance to the Japanese emperor was implicit.

Nevertheless, government lawyers denied that his actions were motivated by racism.

In a series of landmark decisions, the Supreme Court, although ruling that there was no statutory authority to incarcerate loyal citizens, upheld the constitutionality of the exclusion policy in time of war. It let stand the convictions of the three men who had resisted deportation and related curfew provisions.

At first, like so many who had been in her position, Yoshinaga tried to forget her wartime experiences. But as time went on, she began to rethink the detention, especially in light of the civil rights movement and protests against the Vietnam War.

‘More Politically Aware’

When Asian-American groups began demonstrating in the streets against the war, she said: “I began thinking about these things a lot more. It was a real catalyst for me. . . . We were all becoming more politically aware.”

Looking back, Yoshinaga added, “We should have fought back, through the courts mostly, because there was a strong case to be made. There should have been more people raising this issue, saying it was wrong. I began to feel that, for me, this concern would never go away.”

While she took classes to complete her high school diploma, Yoshinaga held several jobs in New York, working as an administrator for the United Church of Christ and later assisting a nonprofit organization that sponsored performances of jazz. She also began expanding her contacts within the Japanese-American community, helping senior citizens who spoke little English.

Meanwhile, the redress issue began to attract more visibility. In 1976, President Gerald R. Ford rescinded Executive Order 9006, saying it had been a mistake. And in 1978 the Japanese-American Citizens League, a national organization, endorsed a policy demanding that the U.S. government apologize for its actions and compensate the victims.

Yoshinaga strongly supported those goals but, in a policy dispute, she and others broke away and formed the more-militant National Council on Japanese-American Redress. The new group endorsed a sweeping class-action lawsuit against the U.S. government, asking that the relocation program be declared unconstitutional and that victims be generously compensated.

Began Digging Into Records

Yoshinaga, now remarried, moved in 1978 to Washington, where her husband worked for the government. And one day, mostly out of curiosity, she began digging through records of the internment program at the National Archives.

“I was hardly a professional researcher,” she recalled. “I was just trying to find out what records the government had about me and my family. And I was surprised by the things they had on file. The program and its organization was more complex than I had dreamed.”

Putting in long hours, she sifted through a maze of memos, military reports and long-forgotten telephone transcripts, all casting light on the program that had shattered her life so many years before.

Yoshinaga’s growing familiarity with the archives won her a job in 1981 with a commission established by Congress the year before to investigate the relocation program and recommend possible redress. She soon became a fixture in several archival offices, working late into the night and on weekends.

Many of the records she found were intriguing, she recalled, but none more so than a series of documents that revealed a deep rift between government officials in the spring of 1943, just before Hirabayashi’s case was to be argued before the Supreme Court.

Wording of Report Altered

Dewitt, these documents showed, had prepared an official report on the relocation program, but John J. McCloy, then assistant secretary of war, insisted that key language in it be changed. Over Dewitt’s objections, the wording of Dewitt’s report was altered, and printed copies of the original were destroyed.

The modified report did not surface in Hirabayashi’s trial, but it became an issue in Korematsu’s case a year later. In closing arguments, U.S. Solicitor General Charles Fahy said there was “not a single line, a single word or a single syllable” in it suggesting that Dewitt had not acted “in honesty and good faith” because of military necessity.

Yoshinaga did not fully appreciate the importance of these facts until 1982, when she accidentally discovered a rough copy of Dewitt’s original report. It was apparently the only copy to survive the purge that had been ordered years before.

The document, apparently misfiled, was lying on the corner of an archivist’s desk. At the time, government researchers had no indication of its significance.

‘Nearly Hit the Ceiling’

“I began thumbing through the report,” Yoshinaga recalled, “and then, when I came upon an important section, I nearly hit the ceiling.” That section read:

“It was impossible to establish the identity of the loyal and the disloyal with any degree of safety. It was not that there was insufficient time in which to make such a determination; it was simply a matter of facing the realities that a positive determination could not be made, that an exact separation of the ‘sheep from the goats’ was unfeasible.”

In the “official” version of Dewitt’s report, that language had been deleted and was replaced by the following:

“To complicate the situation, no ready means existed for determining the loyal and the disloyal with any degree of safety. It was necessary to face the realities--a positive determination could not have been made.”

For Yoshinaga, the significance of the newly discovered report was clear.

“We now had proof that the commander in charge did not believe that time was of the essence in carrying out the internments,” she said. “He simply believed you couldn’t trust Japanese-Americans, which was racist, saying you’d never know if they were loyal or not.”

Might Jeopardize Case

The report contradicted the government’s key argument, she said, “and naturally McCloy wanted to change it before the court saw it. Otherwise, they might lose the whole case.”

Now, all the other pieces in the archival puzzle fell into place.

It made sense, for example, that McCloy had complained in an angry phone conversation with Col. Karl Bendetsen, who ran the Wartime Civil Control Administration on the West Coast, that the first version of Dewitt’s report “contains a lot of stuff that I question the wisdom of. . . . There are a number of things in it which I feel should not be made public.”

In a later memo to Dewitt, Bendetsen quoted McCloy as saying that he had “no objection to saying (in the report) that time was of the essence and that in view of the military situation . . . the evacuation was necessary.”

There was more intriguing evidence: In a phone conversation with Brig. Gen. James Barnett in San Francisco, Bendetsen said McCloy believed that the report, if changed, “would be of great use in the pending Supreme Court cases.” But without changes, he said, the report would not “justify” the government’s program.

Unavailable for Questions

Spokesmen for McCloy and Bendetsen said that they were unavailable, because of advancing age and illness, to answer questions about the episode for this article. Dewitt died in 1962.

One of the first scholars to recognize the importance of Yoshinaga’s work was Peter Irons, then a University of California, San Diego, political scientist who had been researching the history of the four internment cases argued before the Supreme Court. Earlier, he had discovered archival evidence suggesting that the government had suppressed intelligence reports disputing the need for the relocation.

“The greatest significance of Aiko’s discoveries,” he said, “is that they demonstrated beyond any doubt that the government . . . was trying to rewrite history. They were pushing an argument based on military necessity that their own military people didn’t believe.”

Irons, who is also a lawyer, launched a drive to reopen the cases of three of the Japanese-Americans who had challenged the internment program. The key legal battle was fought in 1986, when a U.S. District Court in Seattle reopened Hirabayashi’s case.

The Justice Department argued that the original version of Dewitt’s report was merely an earlier draft of a report that War Department officials had every right to revise. There was no cover-up, lawyers argued, because the original report was never approved.

Guilty of ‘Concealment’

But U.S. District Court Judge Donald G. Voorhees, insisting that the government was guilty of “concealment” and misconduct “of the most fundamental character,” ruled in favor of Hirabayashi, a decision later upheld on appeal.

“Nothing would have been more important to (Hirabayashi’s) counsel than to know just why it was that Gen. Dewitt made the decision that he did,” the judge said. Disclosure of the original report “would have made it difficult for the government to argue, as it did, that the lack of time made exclusion a military necessity.”

Voorhees was greatly influenced by the testimony of Edward Ennis, a former Justice Department lawyer who had helped prepare the original internment cases before the Supreme Court. During Hirabayashi’s first trial, Ennis had asked for a copy of Dewitt’s original report but recalled being told by McCloy that no such document existed.

“If I had been given the . . . original Dewitt report, I would have revealed it to the Supreme Court and, in my opinion, it would have changed the result,” Ennis said in a recent interview. “It would have made a huge difference.”

In the wake of Voorhees’ ruling, the impact of Yoshinaga’s discoveries began to spread. California Rep. Norman Y. Mineta (D-San Jose), who himself had spent time in an internment camp, said the new archival evidence--plus the overturning of earlier convictions--had prodded the House and Senate to approve legislation providing $1.2 billion in reparations--$20,000 each--to Japanese-Americans who had been sent to detention camps.

The bill, which was approved by lopsided majorities in the House and Senate, is now being put into final form by a House-Senate conference committee. Aides have not indicated whether President Reagan intends to sign it.

For her part, Yoshinaga is satisfied that a troubled chapter of U.S. history has been further illuminated. But she is not so sure that the nation has learned its lesson.

“The fact is, America doesn’t respond well to people of different races, who look different and talk different, especially in a time of crisis,” she said.

“We must never let this kind of thing happen again. That, I think, is what studying history is all about.”