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LB: What happened after the hearing, can you remember people's reactions?

EY: Yes. I remember walking outside, and there was just this buzz and this talk. And I remember seeing Don Tamaki being interviewed, and I just remember the, sort of emotion of the Nisei in particular. And it was being expressed through their hugs, or you could still see damp eyes or this sense of wanting to be part, or being part of something. And it was really remarkable, because the Nisei had so much inside them, but 'til that moment, I think, you could visibly see them keeping it inside. And there was a certain formalness and distance. And at that moment, it looked to me like it had broken down. Broken down in tears, broken down in hugs, broken down, just standing close to each other, people being close to Fred and Dale. It was just remarkable to see that. It was really a psychological transformation of a group, I think, at that very moment. And then, of course, there's the media which are all excited, and there was just so much going on at that time.

LB: So if you had to explain why the reaction that the Nisei had, the tears, the joy, why do you think they had that reaction?

EY: I think they had that reaction because they had for so long lost their voice about the internment experience, and about who they were as a people because of that. And it's something that happens a lot to people who have suffered group-based injustice. They haven't done anything wrong, but they are in some way being punished or really severely, harshly oppressed because of their group membership. And so what it does is it takes away their voice, their ability to speak about their identity, about their experience, 'cause they can't explain it. They didn't do anything that causes them to be treated that way except that the society that they belonged to and trusted had betrayed them. And that deep sense of betrayal, the continuing stigma that they feel combines to take away their voice. I think, for the Japanese American community, the Nisei in particular, all of a sudden it was the third generation, their children, standing up to fight for them, making these points in the court of public opinion as well as the court of law, and then having that validated, all of a sudden began to take away the stigma. And to say maybe the country's going to actually undo the harm of its betrayal, and I think it really unlocked their voice.

I remember about a month and a half after the Patel ruling, at Stanford Law School there was a forum. And so, again, because I wasn't working, I went down there to represent the team. It was actually a big forum, and there were several hundred people there. And so I spoke and several people spoke, and then after it was over, a lot of people came down because Don did such a great job, it was all in the news and people wanted to talk about it. And so I spoke to a number of people, they came up, talked to the panelists. And then I saw this woman who looked like my mom, she was probably in her mid-sixties and early sixties, late sixties, waiting in the back, Japanese American woman, Nisei, waiting, waiting, waiting. When everybody was done talking, maybe twenty minutes later, she was still there. So she came up to me and said, "First, thanks to you, all the coram nobis team, litigation team, for what you did." She said, "You folks were our voice." And then she said, "You know, at first, when we were interned, I thought it was terribly wrong because we knew we didn't do anything wrong, and we thought, 'Okay, they'll recognized it's a mistake, and it's bad, but it'll be fixed.' But then it continued and continued. And then," she said, "it was the President saying that we deserved to be interned, and it was the Congress, and it was the media, and it was public, and then finally it was the courts. And so even though we knew we didn't deserve to lose our freedom, to lose our businesses, lose our homes, lose our families, everything outside of us was telling us that was the right thing." She said, "It made me feel like I couldn't talk about it for all these years." But she said, "Now, with the coram nobis cases, it's really freed my soul," I remember her using those terms, "freed my soul." So she said that was the first time she talked about this internment. So I realized how significant the litigation was in that deep, very personal way.

And then it's the power of those stories, about the significance of this form of redress, about correcting the injustice, about getting some kind of acknowledgment, that I think really has touched many, many other groups, too. And I found in my speaking both immediately after the coram nobis cases and then after I became a law professor in large part because of my work on the Korematsu case and my writing about it, in speaking with other groups, African American groups organizing for reparations, Japanese Latin Americans, that it's the power of the stories of the Nisei, about losing their voice from a sense of betrayal, of being stigmatized, and regaining a voice through this sense of bringing some form of justice, that really has touched so many other groups and helped motivate so many other groups to pursue redress as really an important thing to do for them.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.