<Begin Segment 6>

AI: Well, now before we leave your law school years, another very important thing happened in that you were exposed to the Japanese American wartime internment cases. Let me ask you, before you came upon those cases, had you had much experience or personal knowledge of Asian Americans or their part in history, or considered Asian Americans in the mix of issues of racial discrimination or racial justice?

PI: Virtually none. And I think -- which is another commentary. I talked earlier about how I had gone to segregated schools when I was young and not even known about it or thought about it. I grew up and went to school, all the way through elementary school, high school, college, graduate school, and law school before I even knew anything about the internment. Now, most of my life I'd spent in the Midwest and the East Coast. I had spent three years in the state of Washington, but out in eastern Washington. I don't recall a single Asian person out there. There were Native Americans and a very small number of blacks, but no Asians that I recall. The first person I remember even knowing who was Asian was a, someone who lived in my apartment building when I was in graduate school who was Japanese American. I didn't even know at the time until after I went to law school that he had been born in one of the internment camps. He never talked about it. We just had a sort of, you know, neighborly kind of acquaintance, and it never came up. So literally the first time that I ever knew anything about the internment was in my constitutional law class, my second year at Harvard, taught by Professor Lawrence (Tribe). And I remember very distinctly the day that we talked about the internment cases. And in most law school casebooks they're put together, Korematsu and Hirabayashi, and it generally doesn't take more than one class session or not even that. It's part of the civil rights which focuses mostly on civil rights issues involving African Americans, but -- and also governmental powers. So I remember reading these cases and being struck with what seemed to me to be an obvious injustice and finding it hard to believe that the Supreme Court at that time in the 1940s... we were also trained to, to feel that the members of the Supreme Court back then, people like William O. Douglas, Hugo Black, Frank Murphy, Harlan Stone, Felix Frankfurter, were great civil libertarians and civil rights defenders, and in many cases that was true. And so here you have an example of how they all in the first, in the Hirabayashi case, they all upheld the conviction on the ground of military necessity. And how could such liberal justices have done something like that? So I do recall very vividly learning about these cases, but interestingly I didn't go any farther. You know, in law school you do so many cases, you have to get through this gigantic casebook. And I didn't say, "Well, I'm going to go find out everything I can learn about the internment." I just went on to the next set of cases, but it stuck in my mind, these particular cases.

AI: And was there anything else you wanted to relate about your law school years before going on to the next step in your chronology?

PI: I think the main thing about law school is that I went in at a relatively advanced age. I was thirty-five when I entered law school. And I also came out of a background, social activism, that made me more immune. It's sort of like an inoculation to the seductiveness of corporate law that most of my classmates succumbed to, not because there's anything wrong with them, but simply because they had not in a sense been inoculated against that. The idea that, and I met so many of my classmates in later years who to some degree regret their compromises. They all have very high-paying jobs, make a lot of money, but as one of them said to me, "I'm so mortgaged, I can't get out." He said, "I'd love to do what you're doing. I just can't do it. I can't escape." And since I had never wanted to do that kind of work, I looked at law school in a way as getting the training I needed to use the system, to learn the system, and to use the system in a very different kind of way.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.