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HY: Now, during the evacuation and a little bit before that, there were three, at least, well, there were actually four cases that challenged the legality of that. The challenge arose because these were new orders, promulgations of military orders by General DeWitt, but the military orders were backed up by a civilian law, Public Law 77503 which 77th Congress passed to put teeth in DeWitt's order. So in case somebody refused to be evacuated, there was this Public Law 503 that said anybody found guilty of this, violating this law is guilty of a misdemeanor, not a felony, a misdemeanor and can be subject to imprisonment for a year plus a $5,000 fine or both. Okay. In March 28, 1942, my brother Minoru Yasui challenged this curfew law. Now there were several different orders, but one of them that he challenged was the curfew order which said that no person of Japanese ancestry, no person who is an Italian alien, or no person who's a German alien, can be outside of his place of domicile, his residence, from 8 p.m. until 6 a.m. in the morning. Furthermore, he cannot travel further than the radius of five miles from his own home without special military permission. Furthermore, he cannot meet with more than X number of people. My brother said that was unconstitutional because it applied to American citizens, unilaterally, discriminatorily, specifically the Japanese Americans and nobody else, so he says, "That's not right. You can't do it." So anyway, he challenged it; he lost. He went all the way to the Supreme Court; he lost. Korematsu challenged the curfew, the evacuation. He was in San Leandro. He challenged it. He says, "They can't take me. I'm an American citizen." Well, guess what. They did take him, and he did lose. Okay. Gordon Hirabayashi says, "Hey, well, yeah. They can't do this to me. I'm an American citizen. They can't take me away just because I'm Japanese; and furthermore, I'm not going to obey this curfew law," so he lost on both of them. He disobeyed the curfew law, and he disobeyed the evacuation law. He lost too. The only one who won, and this case was also filed in 1942, was Mitsuye Endo, and she filed her case, and this is a habeas corpus proceeding in which she said, habeas corpus means "produce the body," says, "You can't keep an American citizen in a camp without charges, without a trial." This case was decided in December 17, 1944. The other cases were decided much earlier, in 1943. Mitsuye Endo, which was the seminal case in this particular, the Supreme Court decided, yeah, we can't hold them, an admittedly loyal United States citizen, in camp against their will. And so from that day, the next day, December 18th, the army rescinded the evacuation order, and that's when our people became free or were allowed to go back to the West Coast. It didn't happen until January of '45, but that's the only one that was won out of those four primary test cases; the other ones lost.

Until some forty years later, when Korematsu and Hirabayashi and Yasui started the coram nobis proceeding. Coram nobis is a very rarely used procedure in which they contest a previous finding. Now, in order to fit the coram nobis category, one has to be convicted. Number one, they have to have served their sentence. Okay. And then there has to be mitigating circumstances of why they should have a new trial. And their contention, and of course, all of them did serve their sentence. They were all convicted: Korematsu, Hirabayashi, and Yasui. And they said the reason why we want a new trial is because the United States government, the federal government at the highest level suppressed evidence which if the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court, had known this, may have resulted in a, would have resulted in a judgment of innocent. And so in all three cases, the federal government conceded. They said yeah, well, we ask that the court's overturn the rule. What they said, not overturn. They said vacate, like it never existed. Well, these men had all served their prison sentence, they all paid their fine if there was any, and so on. So, but this was some forty odd years later, forty-two years later that this happened. So anyway, that's how the evacuation happened and this is where, end up, 112,000, 120,000 people end up in prison camps. And so if they can do that, and this is still, this is still legal. The Constitution has not been violated so far, be by these cases because it was never declared unconstitutional, so it is possible. It is not likely, but it is still possible that people of Middle Eastern descent or Muslim could be incarcerated on the same procedure, particularly if the executive order is issued because that kind of is not exactly a law like the law that Congress makes. So the precedent is still there, and it's still highly dangerous, and that's why we have to be ever vigilant that these things are not taken out again and again, with all this hurrah and excitement about 9/11 and bombing and terrorism and so on to get out of hand because the same thing happened to us seventy years ago. We cut, put tomato plant caps in fields so that arrows pointed to airfields, and we're going to poison the water supply in Hood River reservoir, the Kingsley River. We drank that water, but boy, we're going to poison that water, and Japanese frogmen were going to swim up the Columbia River dressed as adult salmon to bomb the Bonneville Dam. I mean ridiculous, ludicrous, impossible things to believe. But these stories, they encouraged them, unbelievable. Yeah, very, very interesting, but when I think about this, god, it's just incredible to live through these things and have seen how much the people have changed and yet how much the people haven't changed either because today I see seventy years later, some sort of the same history and some of our newspaper pundits and some of our military people and you know who I am talking about, but they're going through the same ritual. Hey, this is deja vu. I've been here before. I've seen this. I've heard our President speak like this before and so on. Wow, this is highly dangerous. It's very, very touchy grounds, very touchy area that we're living on now, so we have to, if we care at all about our own liberty, boy, we got to help protect the liberty of others. If we don't, we're in big, big trouble.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.