After Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt, claiming a never
documented "military necessity," ordered the removal and
incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II
solely because of their ancestry. As Roger Daniels movingly
describes, almost all reluctantly obeyed their government and went
peacefully to the desolate camps provided for them.
Daniels, however, focuses on four Nisei, second-generation
Japanese Americans, who, aided by a handful of lawyers, defied the
government and their own community leaders by challenging the
constitutionality of the government's orders. The 1942 convictions
of three men--Min Yasui, Gordon Hirabayashi, and Fred
Korematsu--who refused to go willingly were upheld by the Supreme
Court in 1943 and 1944. But a woman, Mitsuye Endo, who obediently
went to camp and then filed for a writ of habeas corpus, won her
case. The Supreme Court subsequently ordered her release in 1944,
following her two and a half years behind barbed wire.
Neither the cases nor the fate of law-abiding Japanese attracted
much attention during the turmoil of global warfare; in the postwar
decades they were all but forgotten. Daniels traces how, four
decades after the war, in an America whose attitudes about race and
justice were changing, the surviving Japanese Americans achieved a
measure of political and legal justice. Congress created a
commission to investigate the legitimacy of the wartime
incarceration. It found no military necessity, but rather that the
causes were "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of
political leadership." In 1982 it asked Congress to apologize and
award $20,000 to each survivor. A bill providing that compensation
was finally passed and signed into law in 1988.
There is no way to undo a Supreme Court decision, but teams of
volunteer lawyers, overwhelmingly Sansei--third-generation Japanese
Americans--used revelations in 1983 about the suppression of
evidence by federal attorneys to persuade lower courts to overturn
the convictions of Hirabayashi and Korematsu.
Daniels traces the continuing changes in attitudes since the
1980s about the wartime cases and offers a sobering account that
resonates with present-day issues of national security and
individual freedom.
General
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