Japanese American redress and court cases

Background

Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forced removal and confinement of 120,000 Japanese Americans then living on the West Coast of the United States. Some 5,500 men arrested by the FBI immediately after Pearl Harbor were already in Justice Department or Army custody, and 5,000 were able to "voluntarily" relocate outside the exclusion zone; the remaining Japanese Americans were "evacuated" from their homes and placed in isolated concentration camps over the spring of 1942. Two-thirds were U.S. citizens and half were under age 18.

In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the forced eviction, when Fred Korematsu's challenge to his conviction for violating an exclusion order was struck down (see below). The Court limited its decision to the validity of the orders to leave the West Coast military area, avoiding the issue of the incarceration of U.S. citizens.

In 1948, the Evacuation Claims Act provided some compensation for property losses, but the act required documentation that many former inmates had lost during their removal and excluded lost opportunities, wages or interest from its calculations. Less than 24,000 filed a claim, and most received only a fraction of the losses they claimed.

Hirabayashi v. United States, 1943

Gordon Hirabayashi was convicted in terms of the violation of a curfew imposed at the time, which proclaimed that;

Hirabayashi, who was a student of the University of Washington at the time,

He further did not report for confinement to the bus that was supposed to take him to the camp he had been assigned to, which led to the charges against him becoming more severe. It was only in 1987 that the charges against Hirabayashi were dropped by the Supreme Court:

The discussion this case sparked involved two key issues. The first was one of power, and if the curfew law was unconstitutional. The second issue was the question of racial discrimination, a constant theme within all of these cases.

Ex parte Endo, 1944

Mitsuye Endo was a Nisei who had been working as a stenographer at the Department of Motor Vehicles in Sacramento, the capital of California. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor and the relocation process, she was forced to move to a segregated camp in Utah with her family. Like the other one hundred thousand Japanese Americans who were removed from their homes and sources of livelihood, Endo also found herself summarily dismissed from her job, without any hope of reinstatement or return to her home in California.

Endo hired a lawyer, James Purcell, to represent her legal protest against her illegal relocation and dismissal. Purcell and Endo filed a habeas corpus in court as a representation of her plea. The writ requested that Endo be released from the relocation camp so that she could challenge the terms of her dismissal. However, the court agreed to releasing Endo outside the West Coast area only: The U.S. government responded by offering to release Endo outside the West Coast rather than test the constitutionality of detention. Endo bravely refused the offer and remained confined without charge for another two years as she pursued her case. (“Mitsuye Endo Persevering for Justice”)

It was two years later that the U.S. Supreme Court decreed that persons of Japanese descent could not be held in confinement without proof of their disloyalty, stating that

and Endo and thousands of her fellow detainees were allowed to return to their homes on the Pacific Coast.

This case was special for a few reasons. First, Endo was a woman, while the other three internment cases dealt with Japanese American men. And secondly, this case was different because it arose from a habeas corpus petition.

Korematsu v. United States, 1944

A case that focused on Japanese Americans who were denied citizenship and forced to move is the case of Korematsu v. United States. Fred Korematsu refused to obey the wartime order to leave his home and report to a relocation camp for Japanese Americans. He was arrested and convicted. After losing in the Court of Appeals, he appealed to the United States Supreme Court, challenging the constitutionality of the deportation order.

The Supreme Court upheld the order excluding persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast war zone during World War II. Three justices dissented.

Justice Hugo Black, writing for the majority, said that legal restrictions on the rights of a single racial group will always be:

In Justice Owen Roberts' dissent, he said:

Justice Robert Jackson said that comparable burdens were not imposed upon descendants of the other nationalities such as Germans and Italians with whom the United States was also at war.

Redress movement

Swept up in the larger movement for civil rights and ethnic pride of the 1960s and 1970s, a group of Nikkei activists began pushing for a reexamination of their parents' and grandparents' wartime experiences. Many had only recently learned of the incarceration, as their elders had remained hesitant to discuss the issue openly, and a debate over whether the community was owed reparations began to spread. In 1970, the Japanese American Citizens League endorsed a resolution to urge Congress to compensate each camp survivor for each day they had spent in confinement (although the organization committed no resources to actual lobbying). Redress efforts stalled for several years due to internal divisions and external opposition. In 1979, the JACL's National Committee for Redress proposed the creation of a federal commission to investigate the incarceration, but Seattle and Chicago chapter members, favoring an immediate push for monetary compensation over the national leadership's more bureaucratic approach, left to form the National Council for Japanese American Redress. The NCJAR lobbied in support of Washington State Senator Mike Lowry's bill to compensate camp survivors, but the bill was killed in committee. The following year, the JACL, with help from Senators Daniel Inouye and Spark Matsunaga, pushed a bill through Congress to create their investigative commission, and President Jimmy Carter appointed the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. Meanwhile, younger and more left-leaning redress activists formed the National Coalition for Redress/Reparations, and worked to open the CWRIC hearings to Japanese Americans outside the elite, non-confrontational cohort favored by JACL leadership. After the hearings, NCRR activists continued to wage a grass roots campaign for redress, while the JACL focused on passing legislation that would implement the CWRIC's recommendations and NCJAR turned its efforts to a federal lawsuit that would force the government to compensate former camp inmates. The class-action suit was ultimately unsuccessful, but the work of all three organizations contributed to the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.

Timeline

Coram Nobis cases

In the 1980s, the Korematsu, Hirabayashi, and Yasui cases would be reopened by coram nobis petitions. These proceedings would eventually nullify the convictions of the 1940s.

Hohri v. the United States, 1986

Another case in point is that of Hohri versus the U.S. The plaintiffs in this case were nineteen Japanese Americans and their descendants, who brought

William Hohri was living in San Francisco when he was removed and forcibly incarcerated during World War II in Manzanar. He filed the case on behalf of all the incarceration victims, claiming that apart from injuries, the prisoners suffered "summary removal from their homes, imprisonment in racially segregated prison camps, and mass deprivations of their constitutional rights" (Legacies of Incarceration, 2002). Although the case was dismissed the following year, it remains indicative of many of the claims for redress made by Japanese Americans.