Origins

Fred Korematsu was convicted at trial when he decided to remain after the removal orders came down.

Gordon Hirabayashi was a 24-year old student at the University of Washington when he decided that he needed to violate the curfew and the Exclusion Orders as acts of civil disobedience.

He was convicted at trial and then appealed his case to the Supreme Court.

I was a child.

I had no idea what was happening in the world.

We packed up and went to the gate, and then we got on a bus.

We're really still afraid of how we were going to be accepted when we went back.

When residents of Seattle returned after camp, they were faced with significant discrimination and hostility from violence and threats, to the damage and loss of property, to being economically shut out from jobs and housing.

A lot of people moved east because they didn't want it to happen again.

They were scared.

And those people that came to Seattle, they had trouble finding housing.

There were a lot of areas in Seattle that we were not allowed to live.

And so many people lived in churches and in the Japanese language school.

There was just a lot of racism, a lot of graffiti, a lot of vandalism.

In the Pacific Northwest, we have stories like Tacoma, where by the late 1940s, a huge Japantown in downtown Tacoma was entirely erased.

There was nothing to come back to.

And we hear stories like Bellingham, which passed a city ordinance making it illegal for a Japanese to return after they were released from the incarceration sites.

My father had friends in Seattle and he heard when they went home They weren't welcomed back.

And so my father decided to come here first and check that out before he brought all of us home.

Bainbridge Island was truly a special and very different story.

The percentage of returning Bainbridge Islanders was 50%, which doesn't sound like a lot, but I know from my own hometown of Tacoma that number was 17%.

He actually came home alone and the neighbors were upset with him and said, "why didn't you bring everybody home?

We've been waiting for you to come home."

During World War Two, the Supreme Court upheld the orders issued against Japanese Americans in infamous cases "Korematsu v. United States" being one of them.

In the 1980s, new evidence was found that allowed us to reopen those cases.

And I was really fortunate and privileged to be able to be on the legal team that represented Fred Korematsu in reopening his case.

Documents were found that showed that the government during World War Two suppressed, altered and destroyed material evidence while it was arguing the Hirabayashi, Yasui and Korematsu cases before the Supreme Court.

General DeWitt, who was the commander of the Western Defense, had written a report in which he explained the reasons for his orders and how he carried them out.

The government was arguing that it issued its orders because there was not sufficient time to separate the loyal from disloyal.

General DeWitt's report contradicted the government's argument to the Supreme Court.

He said it wasn't that there was insufficient time to separate the loyal from the disloyal.

Instead, you couldn't separate loyal Japanese Americans from disloyal ones no matter how much time you had.

When it was discovered that that statement contradicted the government's argument to the Supreme Court, the original report was ordered destroyed.

A soldier wrote a memo and said, today I burned so many copies of this DeWitt report.

He didn't burn a copy of the memo in which he said he burned copies of the report, and he didn't destroy one copy.

And so we could argue they suppressed evidence of the true reason for incarcerating Japanese Americans and then destroyed the evidence.

And the report that went to the Supreme Court was only the altered version.

Secondly, the government had within its possession intelligence reports that basically said that they had conducted surveillance that totally contradicted DeWitt's claims of illegal shore-to-ship signaling, illegal radio transmissions.

These reports said that there was no basis for a mass group treatment of Japanese Americans.

The government had these intelligence reports and did not turn them over to the Supreme Court.

So, based on evidence like that, we were able to file petitions for writ of error Coram Nobis.

And in the end, all three were successful in vacating the convictions.

My fellow Americans, we gather here today to right a grave wrong.

More than 40 years ago, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry living in the United States were forcibly removed from their homes and placed in makeshift internment camps.

This action was taken without trial, without jury.

It was based solely on race.

The Civil Liberties Act was signed in 1988 by President Ronald Reagan, and it gave the Japanese, who were still living, who had experienced the camp or were born there, a monetary sum, and an apology and apology was what meant the most for all of us.

Discrimination is not the answer.

I hope we all will let it never happen again.

I wondered how they got everything into that Buick sedan to come bring us home.

There's no such thing as all good and all evil.

There's always some of both.

And there was some wise person who said the opposite of love is not hate, but fear.

And fear makes people do terrible things sometimes.

This is me right here.