REMEMBRANCES : JUDGE : Issei Treatment Repelled Officer

Robert Gardner, 80, of Corona del Mar is a retired Orange County Superior Court judge.

When Judge Robert Gardner’s court clerk read the list of names, the judge stopped at the name of Clarence Nishizu.

With a bang of the gavel, Gardner appointed Nishizu, an ex-farmer from Fullerton, as Orange County’s first grand jury foreman of Japanese ancestry. “I wanted to strike a blow for fairness,” the judge recalled.

That was in 1966. Gardner’s selection of Nishizu involved a personal pledge made in 1941. Gardner was then in naval intelligence, and his duties included monitoring activities of 18 Japanese-born farmers in Orange County.

“Since I lived in Orange County, one of my primary duties was to keep track of all Issei (first-generation Japanese-Americans). I was given 18 names and they were mostly Issei farmers who were on the Navy’s ‘Class A’ (enemy alien) suspect list. I was told to locate all these people, and I wrote down their whereabouts on cards,” he said.

When war with Japan broke out on Dec. 7, 1941, the FBI and Orange County sheriff’s deputies arrested the 18 residents using information Gardner had collected.

Gardner later regretted his role. “I became disgusted with the gross miscarriage of justice that was taking place, and I asked to be transferred to overseas duty.

“There were great jealousies at the time,” he said. “The Caucasian farmers hated the Japanese farmers because they worked so hard. . . . You used to think that bad discrimination only happened in the South. But we treated people as bad right here in Santa Ana as people did in Selma, Ala.”

On the island of Saipan, where he was later shipped, he saw Japanese-American soldiers, whose parents had been rounded up and sent to internment camps in the United States, killed in action in booby-trapped caves.