-Change goes slowly.
We had to rewrite history in a sense,
and promulgate the true history of what happened to Japanese Americans.
In 1941, Yae Wada owned and operated a hair salon
in Oakland, California.
-This is our shop.
That’s me.
I was very young.
I’d say about 18, 19.
But when the Empire of Japan bombed Pearl Harbor…
-A surprise attack born of infamy!
Yae began to realize that some of her fellow Americans would treat
her with suspicion.
-We looked in the mirror, we looked exactly like the enemy.
-There were reports in the press, wild and absolutely false stories,
that there had been acts of sabotage or espionage.
Japanese Americans who were signaling to
submarines off the coast with flashlights.
And that allowed the government to cast them as
dangerous alien enemies.
-Let me at him!
-Now take it easy, Jimmy.
Who said anything about the Japanese taking
over California?
-He did.
Didn’t he, fellas?
But as anti-Japanese American sentiment rose, along with
suspicions about their secret loyalty to the enemy…
-My father talks to Tokyo every night on the radio.
Yae believed that the government would not take drastic measures
against people like her.
-I was an American citizen.
I said, they might call me in, they might
ask me for some papers.
Uh, and I had my birth certificate.
I had my driver’s license.
You know, it’s the only country we knew.
You were born here.
You were raised here.
You go to school here.
But just months after Pearl Harbor, Yae saw the notices posted on
telephone poles.
-Instructions to all persons of Japanese ancestry.
She learned that she, her family, and 120,000 other Japanese
Americans would have to abandon their homes and be imprisoned in
internment camps.
-We could take anything we wanted as long as we could carry it.
On the way to their designated camp – named Topaz, in the
Utah desert – Yae and her family were made to stay in a repurposed
horse stable.
-I told my father, Papa, I am not going to go in there.
I am not a horse.
The first thing we saw was the barbed wires,
and that scared me.
I felt very betrayed.
But the only way to prove loyalty was to do
as they said.
So I did.
Some Japanese Americans refused to do what the government said,
like 23-year-old Fred Korematsu.
A welder, born in Oakland,
Korematsu hid from the authorities
and had facial surgery to change his appearance.
But he was ultimately arrested.
-I didn’t feel guilty because I don’t think I did anything wrong.
I felt I was an American citizen and – and
I had just as much right as anyone else.
From Topaz, where he was imprisoned, Korematsu appealed
his conviction, charging that internment based on race was
unconstitutional – not just for him, but other Japanese Americans,
like Dale Minami’s family.
-My parents knew that they were not saboteurs or spies.
And yet, they were taken away with my
then one-year-old brother who obviously posed no threat to this country.
My parents felt ashamed.
Dale Minami’s parents, Sam and May Minami, were imprisoned in
Arkansas during the war.
He says their hopes lay on the outcome of
Korematsu’s case, which ended up before the Supreme Court.
-Public opinion was very much against
Japanese Americans at the time.
But the Supreme Court is supposed to be devoid of all of
those different influences.
And it’s supposed to dispense justice
without passion or without prejudice.
But in 1944, the Supreme Court ruled against Korematsu
and dashed those hopes.
-The core of the court’s decision was political, that they had to
uphold the president during a time of war.
It affected me deeply about my, my sense of justice.
By the 1980s, Dale Minami would become a leading legal advocate in
the emerging redress movement, which sought cash reparations and
an apology from the government.
-The trauma of being uprooted left me confused and with a deep
sense of personal loss.
-The stage was set by the civil rights movement.
African Americans who were demanding
their rights inspired and ignited the imagination of Japanese Americans
to push for their own rights.
-Monetary reparations will at least be symbolic recognition
of the wrongs and injustice which I suffered.
In 1982, Minami got a call from lawyer Peter Irons, who’d made a
shocking discovery deep in government archives.
-It was a memorandum from a Justice Department lawyer,
Edward Ennis.
And Mr. Ennis said, I have obtained records all showing that
no acts of espionage or sabotage had ever been verified.
And I found more records backing that up.
It was one of those holy cow moments.
-The government intentionally withheld the evidence proving the
falsity of these charges from the Supreme Court.
-This secret memo to the attorney general from J. Edgar Hoover,
saying military claims of espionage were investigated
and were unfounded.
Irons and Minami joined forces with Fred Korematsu, then living quietly
in California, and together they reopened his case.
-They walked into the federal courthouse to file a lawsuit – not to
start a new fight, but to continue an old one.
At first, the government offered simply to give Korematsu a pardon.
-Fred Korematsu told me, he said, we, we shouldn’t accept a pardon.
If anything, we should pardon the government.
A federal judge wiped Korematsu’s conviction from his record
and acknowledged that he’d been grievously wronged.
-It’s quite a victory for me, and also, it’s a victory for the 120,000
Japanese that, that had to be evacuated and
put in concentration camps.
That victory bolstered the redress movement, which scored an historic
win of its own five years later.
-Today, the government apologized and agreed to pay $20,000,
tax free, to each of the 62,000 survivors.
But the president said no payment can make up
for those lost years.
-So what is most important in this bill has less to do with property
than with honor, for here we admit a wrong.
-It was liberating for this community to help regain their political
birthright, which was to be a full American citizen.
-For the first time in the past 46 years that I was an American like
the rest of the people.
But even after the government apologized, and Korematsu
received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998,
the Supreme Court’s 1944 decision remained on the books.
Then, in 2018, a different case came before the court.
After President Trump restricted travel to the U.S. by people from
five Muslim-majority countries on national security grounds, the policy
was challenged in the Supreme Court.
Justice Sonya Sotomayor compared the travel ban to the
internment of Japanese Americans.
The court upheld the ban, but Chief Justice John Roberts took the
opportunity to officially address the Korematsu ruling, writing that
Statements interpreted as disavowing
Korematsu as legal precedent.
It was a fraught ending to the Korematsu decision,
but for Dale Minami, there was still some satisfaction in it.
-There are so many differences in this country, so it’s hard
to keep cohesive.
So, if you can correct a wrong,
if you could admit you’re wrong,
if you can create a tolerance within a society about mistakes,
I think it helps you move forward.
Perhaps no one understands that better than Yae Wada,
now 102 years old.
-President of the United States, October, 1990.
She waited over four decades for her letter of apology from the
government, as well as the $20,000 reparation check for her
incarceration at Topaz.
-$20,000 is a lot of money to a lot of people.
But for those of us who lost our homes and our business,
it really wasn’t very much.
I was very angry.
And I was that way for years.
But when I got this reparation and a sincere letter from the president,
I had to accept it.