United States vs Masaaki Kuwabara
The most important civil rights case you've never heard of
Resources
National Archives and Records Administration
Historically or legally-significant government documents are kept at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Documentation generated in the course of operating the War Relocation Authority (WRA) and Enemy Alien Control Program can be found at NARA, including case files the government created during WWII on individual Americans of Japanese ancestry.
Tule Lake Segregation Center
Tule Lake was the largest and most controversial of the ten WRA incarceration camps. Converted into a Segregation Center in 1943, Tule Lake is widely considered the crucible for Japanese American resistance to incarceration during World War II. Due to its national historical significance, Tule Lake was designated one of nine sites to be part of the "World War II Valor in the Pacific" National Monument.
Densho
Densho is a Japanese term meaning “to pass on to the next generation,” or to leave a legacy. Densho’s mission is to preserve the testimonies of Japanese Americans who were unjustly incarcerated during World War II before their memories are extinguished. This site is a comprehensive repository of first-hand accounts, images, historical artifacts, and teacher resources, to explore principles of democracy, and promote equal justice for all.
Recommended Reading & Viewing
Eric Muller
In the spring of 1942, the federal government forced West Coast Japanese Americans into detainment camps on suspicion of disloyalty. Two years later, the government demanded even more, drafting them into the same military that had been guarding them as subversives. Most of these Americans complied, but Free to Die for Their Country is the first book to tell the powerful story of those who refused. Based on years of research and personal interviews, Eric L. Muller re-creates the emotions and events that followed the arrival of those draft notices, revealing a dark and complex chapter of America's history.
Tule Lake Committee
This book focuses on the Tule Lake Concentration center in California, which was opened as a detention center for Japanese Americans in 1942. In 1943 Tule Lake was designated as "Segregation Center" after a Loyalty Oath was forced upon the interned population of Tule Lake and the other nine concentration camps for Japanese-Americans in World War II. Much of the text of KINENHI is based on interviews conducted in 1978, 1979 and again, for the second printing, at Pilgrimages in 1994 and 1996 - all with former internees of Tule Lake and other camps, as well as on discussions and speeches made at various programs at Tule Lake pilgrimages over the years.
Frank Abe
Conscience and the Constitution reveals the long-untold story of the organized draft resistance at the American concentration camp at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, and the suppression of that resistance by Japanese American leaders. Under the banner of the Fair Play Committee, 85 young men declared they were ready to fight for their country, but not until the government restored their rights as citizens and released their families from camp. Through their eyes audiences see into the heart of the Japanese American conscience and a debate that is still alive today. “The film shows the price one pays for taking a principled stand,” said Abe. “It’s also about two responses to injustice: collaboration or resistance. The resisters broke the law to clarify the rights of all Japanese Americans in camp, yet they not only served two years in prison, they spent 50 years as pariahs in our own community. It’s a classic example of civil disobedience in the American 20th century, and one that belongs in the classroom canon.”
Peter H. Irons
Justice at War irrevocably alters the reader's perception of one of the most disturbing events in U.S. history―the internment during World War II of American citizens of Japanese descent. Peter Irons' exhaustive research has uncovered a government campaign of suppression, alteration, and destruction of crucial evidence that could have persuaded the Supreme Court to strike down the internment order. Irons documents the debates that took place before the internment order and the legal response during and after the internment.
Roger Daniels
Daniels ... focuses on four Nisei, second-generation Japanese Americans, who, aided by a handful of lawyers, defied the government and their own community leaders by challenging the constitutionality of the government's [wartime incarceration]. The 1942 convictions of three men—Min Yasui, Gordon Hirabayashi, and Fred Korematsu—who refused to go willingly were upheld by the Supreme Court in 1943 and 1944. But a woman, Mitsuye Endo, who obediently went to camp and then filed for a writ of habeas corpus, won her case. The Supreme Court subsequently ordered her release in 1944, following her two and a half years behind barbed wire...
Four decades after the war ... Congress created a commission to investigate the legitimacy of the wartime incarceration. It found no military necessity, but rather that the causes were "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership." In 1982 it asked Congress to apologize and award $20,000 to each survivor. A bill providing that compensation was finally passed and signed into law in 1988.
Daniels traces the continuing changes in attitudes since the 1980s about the wartime cases and offers a sobering account that resonates with present-day issues of national security and individual freedom.
Satsuki Ina
The discovery of a small metal box leads to the uncovering of a family story, shrouded in silence for more than 60 years. Woven through their censored letters, diary entries, and haiku poetry, is the true story of a young Japanese American couple whose shattered dreams and forsaken loyalties lead them to renounce their American citizenship while held in separate prison camps during World War II.
Kermit Roosevelt
A sophisticated legal thriller that plunges readers into the debate within the US government surrounding the imprisonment of thousands of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
When the news broke about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Caswell “Cash” Harrison was all set to drop out of law school and join the army… until he flunked the physical. Instead, he’s given the opportunity to serve as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. He and another clerk stumble onto a potentially huge conspiracy aimed at guiding the court’s interests, and the cases dealing with the constitutionality of the prison camps created to detain Japanese-Americans seem to play a key part. Then Cash’s colleague dies under mysterious circumstances, and the young, idealistic lawyer is determined to get at the truth. His investigation will take him from the office of J. Edgar Hoover to an internment camp in California, where he directly confronts the consequences of America’s wartime policies. Kermit Roosevelt combines the momentum of a top-notch legal thriller with a thoughtful examination of one of the worst civil rights violations in US history in this long-awaited follow-up to In the Shadow of the Law.
Michi Nishiura Weglyn
"In 1942 110,000 West Coast residents, many of them United States citizens, were placed in concentration camps for no reason other than that they were of Japanese origin. One of them, Michi Weglyn, a teenager at the time, recounts their experience, drawing on Government documents and on her own memories of one of the camps. An appalling story of neglect and even brutality."―New York Times Book Review
Emiko Omori
Not all Japanese Americans endured their World War II internment with quiet stoicism. Not all second generation (Nisei) young men welcomed the chance to prove their patriotism by serving in the armed forces of the very government that was holding their families captive. A more complex, turbulent and intimate story of the internment camps is revealed through the stories shared by those interviewed in "Rabbit in the Moon"-- a memoir/documentary by award-winning filmmaker, Emiko Omori. "Rabbit in the Moon" uncovers a buried history of political tensions, social and generational divisions, and resistance and collaboration in the camps.
John Okada
First published in 1957, No-No Boy was virtually ignored by a public eager to put World War II and the Japanese internment behind them. It was not until the mid-1970s that a new generation of Japanese American writers and scholars recognized the novel's importance and popularized it as one of literature's most powerful testaments to the Asian American experience.
No-No Boy tells the story of Ichiro Yamada, a fictional version of the real-life "no-no boys." Yamada answered "no" twice in a compulsory government questionnaire as to whether he would serve in the armed forces and swear loyalty to the United States. Unwilling to pledge himself to the country that interned him and his family, Ichiro earns two years in prison and the hostility of his family and community when he returns home to Seattle.
Barbara Takei & Judy Tachibana
Tule Lake Concentration Camp was one of 10 used to unjustly imprison Americans of Japanese descent during World War II. It is unique in that it was the only camp converted into a maximum security segregation center after the "loyalty questionnaire" separated those who answered "no-no" from those considered "loyal." Tule Lake also became the largest of the 10 camps after it was designated the segregation center where 12,000 "no-nos" and their families were sent from the other nine concentration camps. More than 18,700 Nikkei were imprisoned in barracks designed for a maximum of 15,000. While Japanese Americans at other camps were being released, Tule Lake continued to be patrolled by armed guards and was the last of the camps to close in March 1946.
This updated edition includes a larger map of the camp and additional information discovered about Tule Lake over the last decade. In particular, the sections on segregation and renunciation have been expanded to provide a clearer explanation of the forces that resulted in life-changing decisions. The second section of the book has clear maps and explanations of 12 sites within the camp and four related sites. Using the guide, visitors to the California site just south of the Oregon border can take a self-guided tour of the historic site