<Begin Segment 19>

LB: Has Fred's case been part of the public dialogue or the judicial dialogue after 9/11 expressly?

EY: Very much so, very much so. And in fact, part of the answer is "yes," and part of the reason is because a number of us continue to speak about it and write about it. And Dale has become a very important person, point person, in speaking about the relevance of the internment to post-9/11 national security, civil liberties. Your writing on the coram nobis cases and on the three men who resisted, the importance of resistance, and your participation and work now with the center here, is becoming so significant. And a lot of the speaking and work that I do really emanates from the sense of why the coram nobis cases and why Fred, Min and Gordon's willingness to stand up and resist, why that's so significant today. So I think we're having our -- the coram nobis team itself is having a tremendous impact today. But also, I think it's much broader. Because of the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund that was created by the 1988 Civil Liberties Act conferring reparations and apology to the internees, that public education fund has sponsored curriculum in the lower schools, sponsored films and documentaries. It's sponsored a law book that I've co-authored with Margaret Chon here at Seattle Law School, and Jerry Kang and Frank Wu and Carol Izumi, and we're doing another edition right now. To get this out not only to the law schools, but also into the undergraduate programs and graduate schools and out into the scholarly world. And so... and then, of course, there are many other people that have picked up the mantle now. And what's become significant is that in my research on reparations and reconciliation after 1988, what I've seen is that especially in the United States but actually elsewhere, that almost every reparations movement that is started up and gained some steam, in part looks to the Japanese American redress as either a model, or at least a form of motivation or inspiration. That this can be done politically, through the legal process, but also political organizing and through public education, and that it's possible for government to try to do the right thing.

And so that's become very significant, I think, in the United States, for African Americans, for example, the Japanese Latin Americans, native Hawaiians, Native Americans, the Latino Bracero workers. On and on, you see it springing up, and you see Japanese American redress as one important piece of that puzzle. Internationally now, reconciliation has become very significant. Whether we're talking about the Korean sex slaves during World War II in Japan, or you're talking about the British treatment of the Maori in New Zealand. You talk about the aboriginal children, the "stolen generation," taken out of their homes and put into horrid government schools in order to "assimilate" them -- really, abuse them. Whether it's Australia or Canada, whether you're talking about what happened in Rwanda or in Chile, Sierra Leone, the language of reparations as part of reconciliation and rebuilding countries, taking injustice and trying to repair the harms of injustice as part of what it means to be a civil society, all of those ideas now have taken hold. They're kind of all over the place, and there's no real clear sense of what it means or how do we measure what's successful and what's not? But at least part of that piece is traceable to Japanese American redress. And part of that piece of Japanese American redress is traceable to the coram nobis cases, and then back further to Fred, Min and Gordon's willingness to stand up and fight, and to the ACLU attorneys who were willing to stand up and fight for them. And so I think we can trace a lot of these things into the present, and perhaps into the future.

LB: After 9/11, have the courts, dealing with issues post-9/11, been citing the Korematsu case? Have they cited it as negative precedent? That is, "Well, we can go ahead and do this," or have they condemned it?

EY: In general now, the courts are not citing Korematsu as support for the government can incarcerated or racially profile. And the cases that do cite Korematsu tend to cite it with a negative spin, saying, "This was actually not good, this was actually wrong." They don't get into the judicial deference and the role of the courts that I talked about very much. Some of them do but most don't. But they don't use Korematsu in a damaging kind of way. Because interestingly enough, Korematsu is cited as the initial case that recognized the strict scrutiny standard of review for invidious racial classifications. That sounds like a law professor mouthful. But it's where a state consciously enacts a racial law that hurts a particular racial group and intends to do so. The strict scrutiny standard of reviews says, essentially, "You can't do it." Now, all the way up until affirmative action was challenged as reverse discrimination, if we leave that aside for a moment, up 'til the 1970s, so from '44 to 1970, every case that was challenged as an invidious racial classification, for example, Jim Crow laws, strict scrutiny was applied in every single case invalidated those racially restrictive laws. The only case which upheld the racially restrictive laws was Korematsu itself. So Korematsu itself is seen as an anomaly in that kind of certain situation. So for all kinds of reasons, it's seen as a bad decision. But because it's still not overruled, it continues to be important for all of us to write, speak, litigate and bring forward the lessons of Korematsu.

LB: Did you talk to Fred about submitting the amicus brief in Rasul v. Bush?

EY: I talked to Fred.

LB: What did he say?

EY: Well, Fred, you know Fred, he says, "You think it's a good idea?" I said, "Yeah, Fred, this is a really good idea." And he had, I talked to him also when he was, the Hamdi brief was coming out. And I said, "Your voice can be really significant here." And so he says, "Well, will you have a voice, you and Dale have a voice in it?" And I said, "We will. We'll make sure it's okay." So he said, "Let's do it." He said, "This is why my case, I litigated my case, and this is why you folks did it, too. Not just for me or not just for what happened before, but we want to stop it from happening in the future to other people." Now, it's so consistent with what Fred had felt and said right from the very beginning. It really was for other people.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.