<Begin Segment 11>

LB: So during this, it sounds like just a few day period, the idea for the book really started to gel, and it sounds like you started to feel as if this was something that you were really going to pursue?

PI: And I also realized that when I started looking at the records Aiko had from the solicitor's office of the War Relocation Authority, that there was another body of records that I really needed if I was going to make a book out of this. And there were really three things, one was the War Relocation Authority, one was the Department of Justice, which had prosecuted the internment cases, Hirabayashi, Korematsu, Yasui cases and a number of others that didn't reach the Supreme Court, and the third were records from the Supreme Court itself. One thing that I had some experience in, from my own case, my coram nobis case, was getting records from the Department of Justice. But I also knew that it was very time-consuming and usually you'd have to go to court. When I was in the archives, and there were a number of references and copies, in fact, in the WRA files of Department of Justice records that I found references to those files, file numbers for each of these cases. But they weren't in the archives. All that the archives had was a little card catalog of 3 x 5 sheets of paper. They weren't even cards. Little sheets of paper with case names and case numbers, all the cases the Department of Justice had handled during the 1930s and '40s. But they didn't have the records themselves.

So I either called up or went over to see the FOIA person in the Justice Department, which was right next door to the National Archives across the street, and explained to that person that I wanted to get the case files for the internment cases and I had the case file numbers. And the person I talked to, I don't recall his name, but he was helpful in the sense of not saying, "Well, you can't have that," or "it'll take a lot of time to review." He said, "Well, I don't know where it is, but I'll try to find out and get back to you." Because at this time I had no notion at all of anything more than an academic book. I had no notion that there would be any lawsuits. I had no notion even if the people involved, Gordon Hirabayashi, Fred Korematsu, Min Yasui, Mitsuye Endo or some of the others were even alive or where they were. My notion was simply to use the government's records and write a book, sort of a post-mortem on these cases. The guy in the Justice Department told me that he could not find these files, but he would keep looking.

My time in Washington was about to run out. So I went back to Boston, still not sure whether there was enough material to write a book. And while I, and I was teaching then and just sort of waiting. And I got a telephone call one day from the Justice Department. Said, "We have found the case files." I said, "Wow. Where were they?" And this guy said, "You'll never believe this, but they were out in a warehouse in Maryland." And they had been mistakenly put in the records of another agency, the Wartime Property Management Office or something like that that had nothing to do with the internment. But they had been put in these records, and there was just this one little sheet of paper that said, "Sent to -- " wherever the file was. And he had called out there, and they said, "Yes, the records with that case number are out here." And he said, "If you want to, you can come down to Washington to look at them." I said, "Great. I'll be down as soon as I can make it." And in fact, I went down just within a week or so. And they had said, "Well, you can look at these records. We will bring them to the Commerce Department," because that's where they had been misfiled with records of the Commerce Department, even though they originally were Justice Department records. Said, "You can look at them in the Freedom of Information Office at the Commerce Department." I said, "Okay." And I told Aiko that I was coming back down to Washington, and they had located these files. I still didn't know what was in them, was there anything useful. I'd gone through enough government litigation files working on my first book to know that many of them are just dead ends, nothing of any great interest. And sometimes you find great stuff.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.