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"Destructive Force": Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga's Gendered Labor in the Japanese American Redress Movement Author(s): Thomas Y. Fujita-Rony Source: Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 24, No. 1 (2003), pp. 38-60 Published by: University of Nebraska Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3347288 Accessed: 06-01-2018 00:09 UTC

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"Destructive Force"

Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga's Gendered Labor in the Japanese American Redress Movement

THOMAS Y. FUJITA-RONY

In recent years, scholars have significantly deepened our understanding of the

instrumental role of women in political movements.1 As these studies have pointed out, gendered narratives of struggle have often limited the ways in which women's work is perceived as contributing to these efforts. Especially when this labor is not visible to outsiders, their crucial contributions have of-

ten gone underacknowledged, as when women act as informal organizers, as the bridges between differing sectors of a movement, or when they perform "support" functions.2

This article explores the labor of one such woman, activist Aiko Herzig- Yoshinaga, who played a vital role in the national movement for Japanese American redress in the 198os and 199os. Her discovery of previously un- known factual evidence and, crucially, her ability to recreate and document the

"paper trail" leading to and contextualizing this factual evidence for others prompted one opposing lawyer to call her a "destructive force."3 Her efforts

were essential in the redress campaign that decisively shattered the image of

government benevolence and innocence in the World War II exclusion and in- carceration of the West Coast's Japanese American population.4 The article that follows will discuss how her involvement was shaped by previous experi-

ences in political struggles, and, significantly, by her decades of experience as a clerical worker, a field which has been a largely female occupation in the post-World War II era.5

Because of her involvement in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the

1960s and 1970s, Herzig-Yoshinaga became curious about what information the government had collected on her and her family, both from the wartime

years when she had been incarcerated on the basis of her Japanese ancestry, and from more recent decades. She discovered that while contemporary records were generally not available, information on the wartime exclusion and incarceration was publicly accessible.6 Upon her formal retirement in

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1978, she dove into this vast sea of records, and began to systematically retrieve

and catalog items she found significant. Shortly thereafter, she joined an or- ganization that eventually brought a $27 billion class-action lawsuit against the

government. In 1981, a congressional commission charged with investigating the wartime treatment of Japanese Americans and indigenous Aleuts recog- nized her expertise, hiring her as the coordinator of research with the title of research associate.

The catalog she developed and the documents it indexed became the core of the commission's evidentiary base. Shortly after joining the commission, she assisted a separate, independent effort to obtain evidence showing that in win-

ning their wartime legal cases, Justice Department lawyers had perpetrated a

fraud upon the Supreme Court. Late in 1982, after examining hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, she found irrefutable proof that the U.S. Army had knowingly lied about the "military necessity" of Japanese American exclusion and incarceration.

In addition to her document-finding and retrieval abilities, Herzig-Yoshi- naga was also able to provide detailed documentary evidence that government officials had knowingly engaged in deliberately planned illegal actions. The prompt and comprehensive provision of this vital evidence was a critical fac-

tor in shaping the commission's authoritative report documenting and de- nouncing the government's wartime conduct, and the recommendations that an apology and monetary redress were due those who had been incarcerated. She later also provided the majority of the archival evidence in the suits that

destroyed the legal underpinnings of the cases used by the government during the war to legitimize the exclusion and incarceration.

To explore these issues at greater length, I will begin by profiling Herzig-

Yoshinaga's personal and professional background prior to 1978, and then will introduce a brief discussion on clerical labor to contextualize her work during

the redress campaign. Next, her critical contribution to this political struggle will be dealt with in detail. I will argue that her work in this movement was

deeply informed by her long experience as a skilled clerical worker and that this was crucial to the success of the redress campaign. By doing so, I hope to

join a growing number of scholars who have charted the specific ways women have participated in political movements, and how their experiences and strategies have been shaped by gender.

AN ACTIVIST S PATH

A California-born U.S. citizen, Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga was a seventeen-year- old high school senior in Los Angeles when she became one of the roughly

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11o,ooo West Coast Japanese Americans subjected to categorical exclusion and

incarceration during World War II.7 This unequivocal expression of the power

of racism did not break her, but it profoundly changed the course of her life. Beginning in 1942, she was imprisoned at Manzanar, California, where she be- gan her married life and gave birth to her first child. Later, she was confined at

camps in Jerome and Rohwer, Arkansas. In December 1944, the Supreme Court found in favor of Mitsuye Endo, who had contested the continued im- prisonment of Japanese Americans considered loyal, and the camps were or-

dered closed.8 After her release, Herzig-Yoshinaga returned to the Los Angeles area, where she took classes to develop her clerical skills, and found employ-

ment with a temporary agency.

While working there one day, racism hit her "right between the eyes," when

she was sent out to take dictation at a law office.9 The lawyer to whom she re- ported asked if she was of Japanese descent, and when informed of that fact,

brusquely told her that the agency would have to send someone else. In this same period, her marriage fell apart, and in its aftermath, she moved from Los

Angeles to New York City to join her widowed mother and four siblings.10 In New York, she again married, and had two more children. This marriage also

ended in divorce, leaving her as a single parent of two daughters and a son.11 During this period of her life, Herzig-Yoshinaga concentrated on being a

"homemaker," which, as she pointed out, is a "very serious, honorable posi- tion." She became part of the close-knit ethnic community centered on the Japanese American United Church in Manhattan, a community that helped to

sustain her as a single parent of color.12 At this time, she also sought to improve

her employment options. An honor student at the outbreak of war, Herzig-

Yoshinaga had been denied graduation because she was "Japanese." In New York, she took night courses to obtain her high school diploma at the age of

twenty-five, and again found employment as a clerical worker and eventually

as an office manager, remaining in this kind of work for the decades that followed.13

Herzig-Yoshinaga worked at a nonprofit organization until the early 196os, and because its mission involved both sexuality and issues of government pol-

icy, she became familiar with the use of bureaucratic language to talk about controversial subjects. At this office, she continued to encounter barriers of

race, class, and gender. She remembered being assigned the task of arranging the flowers delivered weekly to the office because she was thought to be "good with her hands." As she noted, this simultaneously defined her as appropri-

ately carrying out women's work, as incapable of intellectual activity, and as racially endowed with flower-arranging skills. This work site was also where she began to think more critically about race as a social construction through

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a discussion with an African American coworker who felt unfairly passed over

for a promotion that Herzig-Yoshinaga had obtained. The coworker had never heard about the exclusion and incarceration of Japanese Americans, and so had not considered Herzig-Yoshinaga as sharing a history of oppression. After this discussion, the two became "good friends." 14

Late in the tumultuous sixties, when her eldest daughter was an adult and

her younger two children were in school, Herzig-Yoshinaga began to move to-

ward greater political involvement. The primary vehicle for this was Asian Americans for Action (AAA), a group started in 1969 by two activist women, Shizuko "Minn" Matsuda and Kazu Iijima, both of whom were second-gener- ation Japanese Americans, or Nisei.15 This organization, the first of its kind on the East Coast, included one of the most famous Asian Pacific American ac-

tivists, Yuri Mary Kochiyama, as well as her husband, William Kochiyama.16 A

majority of the members of AAA were, like Herzig-Yoshinaga, Nisei women who had been excluded and incarcerated during the war.17 AAA engaged in a variety of activities and protests, including efforts to end the war in Vietnam,

demonstrations against nuclear research, and consciousness-raising. Herzig- Yoshinaga stated that participation in the group "turned me around," and got her thinking more actively about "minorities, about equality, about ethnic re-

lations." 18 Through this transformative group experience and with the support

of the "wonderful members" of AAA, Herzig-Yoshinaga gained confidence and a much deeper understanding of oppression, institutionalized racism, and injustice. 19

Shortly after joining AAA, she left the advertising firm she had worked for

from the 1960s through the early 1970s for a new job at Jazzmobile, a Harlem- based nonprofit organization devoted to jazz music and education. For the first time, she was in an African American environment for eight to ten hours

a day.20 She recounted how one of her supervisors told her a fact of his life was

to wake every morning knowing that the day would bring brutality and hu- miliation based on his race, the only question being the form it would take. Ap-

preciated for her clerical and managerial skills, and embraced by her coworkers

and the musicians she worked with, Herzig-Yoshinaga heard many such sto- ries of prejudice and unequal treatment in the three years she spent there. She

left with a much keener eye for detecting discrimination and a stronger deter-

mination to oppose injustice.21

After three years of working at Jazzmobile, she became the clerk of the board of the United Church Board for Homeland Ministries (UCBHM) of the United Church of Christ (UCC). In this job she joined a network of Nisei women who worked for various boards, agencies, and ministries of Christian denominations with offices in New York. She described the UCBHM and her

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coworkers there as aware and socially conscious individuals, many of whom had participated in movements for social justice. Thus, she was greatly disap-

pointed when some board members objected to divesting UCC investments in South Africa on the grounds that it was fiscally unsound, even though the cor-

porations indirectly supported the Apartheid regime. She was shocked to see "good, well-meaning Christian people" prioritizing money instead of "what we as human beings owe each other." 22

Herzig-Yoshinaga's work and political experiences thus enabled her to quickly grasp the importance of a talk given in 1976 at the Japanese American United Church by Michi Nishiura Weglyn, a fashion designer and a fellow New Yorker. Weglyn, who had been incarcerated at the Gila River camp, had re- cently published Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America's Concentration

Camps. It passionately argued that governmental misconduct was present in the planning, execution, and rescinding of both the exclusion and the incar- ceration. Her work built on earlier research and documented the fact that the

highest levels of both the civilian and military leadership knew that multiple in-

vestigations by both military and civilian security agencies had determined that

Japanese Americans were not dangerous and that the military necessity to cat-

egorically exclude and incarcerate was, thus, a myth. Given this, the actions

taken against Japanese Americans were therefore less an honest mistake than a

methodically planned and executed violation of a group's civil rights due to fear

and prejudice. Weglyn's painstakingly documented book was based on a mas- sive amount of research, utilizing primary source materials from the National

Archives and the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, and a num- ber of the more incriminating documents were included in the book itself.23

For Herzig-Yoshinaga, Weglyn's work was a revelation, for although she had read and thought much on issues of race and oppression, she had "never really studied the causes and effects of the exclusion and incarceration period."24 Weglyn and Herzig-Yoshinaga became "fast friends," as Herzig-Yoshinaga ex- panded her knowledge of the exclusion and incarceration with Weglyn's sup- port and advice by phone and through correspondence over the decades that followed.25

FINDING NEEDLES

Like Weglyn, Herzig-Yoshinaga was not formally trained as an archival re- searcher. The exclusion and incarceration had dashed her educational dreams

as a young woman, and Herzig-Yoshinaga's responsibilities as a single parent after the war made it a struggle to even attain her high school diploma. How- ever, by the time she began her research in the late 1970s, she had amassed de-

cades of experiential learning as a clerical worker. The skills she acquired and

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sharpened through years of constant practice in this overwhelmingly female occupation proved instrumental in her later political labor.

The technical skills clerical workers possess and deploy include those of composition, rhetoric, and archival research, in addition to an array of inter- personal skills. This combination of competencies is what makes them indis-

pensable in most professional spheres.26 One of the most important of these

skills is archival research, which is in general loosely referred to as "filing" when carried out by clerical workers. It was precisely this skill that enabled Herzig-Yoshinaga to play her pivotal role in the redress campaigns. Because no

index is comprehensive and because filing errors virtually always occur, to fully access the information in a set of files in paper form, it is necessary to un-

derstand how the files were created and used. This knowledge, along with the ability to recall not only the location and content of documents but the pos- sible connections between them, and thus the places where lost, improperly shelved, or other topically related files might reside, is an important skill for

clerical workers. Therefore, a degree of detective ability, allied with experien- tially based knowledge developed through actively working with a set of files,

is essential to locating and providing information. Further, it is often the case that clerical workers, knowing that they will be responsible for typing and ed-

iting reports based on the information they find, present that information with

an eye towards issues of composition and logical argument, thus "invisibly" shaping the final products.27 In general, however, this vital work goes unac-

knowledged due to a socially constructed dichotomy between the "support" work of clerical workers and the "action" of managers and technical personnel,

a separation that is further reinforced by prevailing gender hierarchies.28

Locating and retrieving the massive amounts of information that are re- quired in legal cases and government inquiries is a serious matter, especially when the information is spread across the records of a number of institutions.

Furthermore, the difficulty of finding historical documents is often heightened

by the problems of organizing and maintaining the sheer quantity of informa- tion necessary in this kind of work. In the archives themselves, indexing and

categorization are seldom priorities, and because both researchers and archiv-

ists are subject to human error, indexes and catalogs are seldom completely ac- curate, increasing the difficulties of information retrieval. In the instance under

discussion, locating and making available the elusive "paper trail" would prove to be crucial.

WHAT THE GOVERNMENT HAD COLLECTED

In 1978 Herzig-Yoshinaga married John "Jack" Herzig and moved to the Wash- ington, D.C., area where he worked. At this point in her life, with her children

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grown, and with a spouse who brought home the salary of a senior executive, she had for the first time the "luxury of not having to go to a job." After dis-

covering that FBI and other law enforcement records were largely restricted, she decided she would see what existed "in terms of historical documents

about myself and my family," at the National Archives, to see "what the gov- ernment had collected" during the war. The staff at the National Archives was

"very, very helpful," she recalled, and "encouraged me to keep looking and looking, and giving me leads on where I could look for more information over and above my own family history." In this journey, she used Weglyn's book "as

a guidepost, because she gave meticulous, meticulous attention to the sources of her information." In addition, "there was a constant communication be-

tween Michi and me," for Weglyn encouraged Herzig-Yoshinaga's research from New York and gave her "advice on where I could look." 29

It was here that Herzig-Yoshinaga began the labor that would prove instru-

mental in the struggle for Japanese American redress. Although her research

began with a few pages punched and placed into a single notebook, "it started to become notebooks, many books, and then it became xerox boxes, many boxes, one after the other," until they occupied nearly every available space in

her home, including one of the bathtubs. Herzig-Yoshinaga was able to collect this massive amount of information by examining documents in the archives

whenever they were open, working Monday through Saturday, putting in fifty

and sixty hours per week for years. For Herzig-Yoshinaga, "it was a wonderful experience" and she "became quite familiar with the records, thanks to the help of a lot of people."30 The records she examined beginning in 1979 in- cluded those of the War Relocation Authority that ran the camps as well as ones

deposited by the army's Western Defense Command, the unit that planned and carried out the exclusion. Her extensive research also led her to explore the provost marshal general records and those of the assistant secretary of war, along with the archival holdings of many other agencies and units of the government.31

The foundational core of expertise for this effort was Herzig-Yoshinaga's long experience as a clerical worker. She had learned over her years on the job that there was only one way to truly know what was contained in any set of

files. In every area that seemed promising, each page of each folder of each box would have to be examined and its contents and location within the archives

precisely and accurately recorded. The resulting notations would then have to be systematically preserved in a form that would allow access at a later date, and

this information would provide the basis for pursuing further research. This

painstaking process is extraordinarily time-consuming. It is also very difficult to carry out without error because it demands strict attention to detail at all

times, despite the tremendously tedious nature of the task.32

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To provide some idea of the magnitude of the project Herzig-Yoshinaga took on, the files of the War Relocation Authority alone consist of roughly three thousand cubic feet of records, enough to fill over two hundred and fifty

standard four-drawer file cabinets; or, put another way, the collection contains

several million pages of documents.33 These records were not easy to access, for as one researcher testified under oath in 1985, "the files of the WRA in

the [N]ational [A]rchives had a very incomplete indexing system."34 Herzig- Yoshinaga's task was roughly equivalent to indexing all the information in a li- brary, working from a card catalog that only gave a subject description by shelf,

without giving individual book titles or authors. Further, because the stacks at the National Archives are closed to the public, she had to be able to describe what she wanted before she could ask for it to be "pulled" from storage.

The records Herzig-Yoshinaga was working with had been used for research

purposes since the war by a number of trained archival scholars as well as lay members of the public such as Weglyn.35 However, these researchers had been

unable to discover documentary proof of governmental misconduct of a kind that would allow judicial redress, let alone evidence that the whole episode was

anything other than an "honest mistake." Important evidence of irregularities had emerged, and the portrayal of the exclusion and incarceration as a wise and necessary action had been rendered untenable in scholarly circles, notably

through the work of historian Roger Daniels, but nothing had emerged that was legally actionable.36 Thus, Herzig-Yoshinaga knew that if evidence proving government wrongdoing existed, it would not be easily located. The task she

set herself was akin to finding a single needle in a field full of haystacks.

To ensure thoroughness, Herzig-Yoshinaga developed a detailed cross- referencing classification scheme categorizing documents in terms of date, subject, and physical location. Her years of clerical work and her previous po-

litical activism had equipped her with a critical eye for language and a sensi-

tivity to implicit meanings, or as she put it, "seeing more than what was written

on the paper."37 As a result, she was able to discern patterns and weave to- gether fragments to create coherent wholes that had eluded others for over

thirty years. A crucial part of her ability to do this was built into her indexing

and cataloging, as she took the unusual extra step of noting when documents

she looked at mentioned other documents, adding a huge additional burden to her labors.38

As she charted the vast sea of documents, Herzig-Yoshinaga realized that the

publications of Weglyn and the other researchers had only revealed the tip of the iceberg, for she was confronted again and again with factual evidence demonstrating that abuses of power had occurred at every level, in every branch and agency of the government, and across the entire time span of the

episode. It infuriated her that government officials had so casually disregarded

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the individual rights guaranteed everyone under the Constitution. Her re- sponse to this was to strive to be even more meticulous and exhaustive in her

research, to fulfill her obligations as wartime government officials had not. It was clear to her that by doing so she might be able help correct a massive in- justice of long standing and to confirm her strongly held democratic belief that

"one person can make a difference." 39

The results of this research and her indexing were recorded on paper, as Herzig-Yoshinaga did not have access to the computer technology that today would be used to create a relational database. The technological assistance she

had was an electric typewriter that could temporarily store the data from a single index card, so that copies made at the same time did not have to be man-

ually retyped. Each document was referenced by at least four cards. One or more were filed by the subject or subjects referred to in the particular docu- ment, another card was filed by the document's date, a third set was filed by the

document's sequential accession number, and a fourth set noted the precise lo- cation of the document in the archives.40

No scholar or other researcher had ever attempted the monumental task of

a page-by-page reading of a significant portion of the enormous holdings at the National Archive on these issues. The "snowball" search mounted by Herzig-Yoshinaga, which attempted to follow up on an ever-increasing set of leads, is virtually never employed with an archive of any size. The usual model is more akin to finding buried treasure, a goal-driven, steady elimination of

possibilities until only one site remains, which is then excavated. While such

searches run the risk of overlooking information that has been idiosyncrati-

cally placed, misfiled, or deliberately hidden, this risk is generally accepted as unavoidable within the bounds of practicality.

Throughout this effort, Herzig-Yoshinaga was ably assisted by the husband

she married at the beginning of her archival odyssey, a fact sometimes rec-

ognized in joint awards they have been given. The solidity of Jack Herzig's support for Herzig-Yoshinaga did much to sustain her, spiritually and intel-

lectually.41 As a career military officer and combat veteran, Herzig had faith- fully carried out his oath to defend and protect the Constitution. He felt deeply

betrayed by the leaders who had so offhandedly disregarded the same oath, denying the constitutional rights of Americans of Japanese ancestry, while he and his comrades in arms were fighting and often dying overseas to defend and

protect those rights. Contrary to the common belief that World War II veter-

ans are firmly entrenched in traditional gender roles, he cheerfully took on work that included delivering her to the archives every morning, providing her

brown-bag meals for sustenance, and eventually giving over his retirement, and much of their apartment, to the quest for justice she had embarked upon

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and that he had joined. Herzig also provided vital technical support to Herzig- Yoshinaga's research and, especially after his retirement, labored alongside Herzig-Yoshinaga in the archives to retrieve and catalog documents.42

LETTING OTHERS KNOW

As a result of her intensive work in the archives, Herzig-Yoshinaga was poised to become a pivotal player in a collective struggle to obtain justice for Japanese Americans. In March of 1980, William Hohri of the National Council for Jap-

anese American Redress (NCJAR) met Herzig-Yoshinaga at a New York City conference. Formed roughly a year earlier, NCJAR sought to pursue legislative redress from Congress immediately, in opposition to the more moderate posi- tion of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), which contended that

a congressional commission should first determine whether or not a wrong had been committed before redress was sought.43 Hohri had been correspon-

ding with Michi Weglyn, and through her had become aware of Herzig-Yoshi- naga's work. Herzig-Yoshinaga agreed to join NCJAR, providing it with the vital asset of her knowledge and the documents she had already uncovered.44 The study commission proposal gained the backing of Congress, and the

Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) came into being on July 31, 1980.45 In light of the creation of the CWRIC, NC-

JAR decided to change its tactics, choosing to pursue justice through the courts

rather than through legislative means.46 Herzig-Yoshinaga's archival research

would now form the documentary basis upon which a $27 billion class-action lawsuit would be founded. The evidence provided by Herzig-Yoshinaga and arguments NCJAR presented based on it were strong enough that the class-ac-

tion lawsuit succeeded in being heard by the Supreme Court. While the law- suit was eventually dismissed, it remained active until after Congress had passed the redress legislation. While it remained alive, it played a significant part in publicizing the issues. The NCJAR lawsuit demanded $220,000 for each

individual whose liberties had been denied. This was more than twenty times

greater than the $20,000 per surviving incarcerated person that the redress bills

proposed, allowing proponents to portray the legislative solution as a moder- ate alternative.47

In June of 1981, Herzig-Yoshinaga was hired as Research Associate for the

CWRIC.48 Her status as a researcher for the commission allowed her greater access than she had possessed as a private individual, and as the de facto head

of a small team of researchers, she could ensure that a much greater number of

documents would be examined.49 Her catalog and index were adopted by the commission for its work, and the thousands of pages she and her husband had

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amassed, along with contributions from Weglyn, formed the core of the CWRIC's primary documentation.50

Herzig-Yoshinaga's many years as a clerical worker made her an expert ar- chival researcher and disseminator of knowledge, her lack of formal academic

training notwithstanding.51 At the commission, Herzig-Yoshinaga's work was characterized by multiple responsibilities that required her attention, a situa-

tion she had faced previously as a clerical worker, and also as a working mother. Rather than being free to pursue her own research interests and schedule, meeting the challenge of attaining justice meant that her own ardu-

ous research was constantly being interrupted, for she had to attend to the re-

search demands of others, both from research assistants asking for advice on how to proceed, as well as the needs of the commission report's authors and editors, who required specific facts and documentary evidence to carry out their work. She was thus simultaneously setting the day-to-day operational priorities for the researchers, advising those who were less familiar with the

materials on how to locate and index documents, and responding to the con-

stantly changing overall research agenda given to her by the commission's sen- ior staff. In addition, she was also attempting to identify potential witnesses to

be called to testify in two of the ten public hearings held by the commission to

amplify the record found in the documents.52 Herzig-Yoshinaga took on all these tasks in addition to her own individual responsibilities as the most expe- rienced archival researcher on the commission.

While she was working at the CWRIC, she met and befriended attorney and legal historian Peter Irons.53 Irons was interested in finding information about the Yasui, Hirabayashi, and Korematsu Supreme Court cases that had upheld the war powers of the executive branch, and the later Endo case that closed the

camps. These challenges, the first three of which were decided in favor of the

government, were central to the commission's work, and Herzig-Yoshinaga and Irons agreed to share their findings.54 Irons, a First Amendment authority,

filed a number of Freedom of Information Act requests in an effort to obtain

documents.55 In October 1981, these requests yielded documentary evidence that the Justice Department had knowingly deceived the Supreme Court dur-

ing World War II. Justice Department attorneys had discovered that the army's

Western Defense Command's official report on the exclusion and incarcera- tion, Final Report: Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast, 1942, contained se-

rious factual errors and falsehoods regarding charges of espionage and sabotage.56 Despite this discovery, Solicitor General Charles Fahy decided to il- legally withhold this information from his opponents and to thus also misrep- resent evidence before the Supreme Court.57

Unfortunately, Irons was not allowed to copy any of the memos and letters

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he had found detailing this set of actions. The official responsible for screen-

ing records for public use was unavailable due to illness, and in the absence of clearance, permission to duplicate these vital documents was denied. Irons called Herzig-Yoshinaga, who, as a researcher for the commission, had the right to access any nonsecret document related to the CWRIC's work.58 She immediately copied all the documents, which provided proof for the first time of Justice Department misconduct in the cases that upheld the exercise of pres-

idential war powers under the Constitution.59

Another indispensable piece of evidence was discovered by Herzig-Yoshi- naga late in 1982. Her cross-referencing of documents had revealed that the fraudulent Final Report mentioned above was actually a revised and corrected

printing, created to address even more serious constitutional problems that were present in an earlier version. Ten copies of this typeset, earlier version of

the Final Report had been printed in April 1943 and sent to Washington by the Western Defense Command. However, when Assistant Secretary of War John

J. McCloy read one of these advance copies, he realized that the report was not

only at odds with official War Department policy regarding the end of ex- clusion, it accurately presented the utterly unconstitutional rationale of the

commanding general regarding the impossibility of determining the loyalty of Japanese Americans.60

McCloy's solution to this problem was to pressure the head of the Western Defense Command, Gen. John L. DeWitt, into altering the offending argu- ments. It was then ordered that all evidence that an earlier report had ever been

printed and sent to Washington was to be destroyed. Once this had been done,

DeWitt officially submitted the revised Final Report as if the original version had never existed.61

These actions successfully concealed the racist basis of the exclusion and in-

carceration not only from the public, but also from the Justice Department lawyers who defended the government's actions before the Supreme Court. Even the revision that the War Department reluctantly provided to the Justice

Department contained errors and falsehoods, but this crucially altered official

document concealed the true reasoning behind the exclusion and incarcera- tion, and thus stopped short of making flatly illegal arguments.

Herzig-Yoshinaga's extensive research had discovered the correspondence between McCloy and DeWitt's command which "showed detailed exchange of information as to what page, what sentence, what word should be changed." 62 She also discovered, however, that while the military had worked diligently to

destroy all the evidence, they were never able to find and destroy the tenth

copy of the original Final Report. She held on to the faint hope that she might someday locate this "smoking gun" document. One day in the fall of 1982, as

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she was waiting to meet with an archivist, she happened to notice a copy of the

Final Report sitting on a desk. She also noted that the binding differed from the

other copies she had seen. Intrigued, she opened it and "noticed all these notes written on the margin by somebody." She soon realized that "these were the

corrections that were suggested by McCloy's office" and that the printed text differed from the publicly available version she knew.63 She had found the missing tenth copy, and with it, documentary proof that there had been no

"military necessity" to deprive 120,ooo Americans of their rights.

A REMEMBERING MIND

However, it was not only Herzig-Yoshinaga's ability to find documents that defined her contribution to the struggle for Japanese American redress. Equally important was her ability to retrieve documents and other informa- tion on demand for use by others. Herzig-Yoshinaga was an instrumental con- tributor to the CWRIC's final report, a document that would incorporate the

historical and legal scholarship on the issue, the testimony of over seven hun- dred witnesses, and the information contained in the tens of thousands of

pages of primary documents gathered by the commission.64 Angus Macbeth, the principal author of the CWRIC's report and its de facto operational chief,

was not a specialist in Japanese American history.65 A private attorney, and a former deputy assistant attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice, he

joined the commission as special counsel in October of 1981.66

In order to write the report, Macbeth had to become an expert on virtually all aspects of an episode that encompassed the lives of over a hundred thou- sand people. He had but a year and a half to both research and write up his findings, starting from scratch. Macbeth's deep knowledge of the law and his

determination to scrupulously fulfill his duties resulted in a powerfully argued

and painstakingly detailed document. Herzig-Yoshinaga's ability to provide full and comprehensive documentary evidence on almost any subject upon demand freed him to concentrate on the actual task of constructing a legally sound argument.67

In an extraordinary recognition of her labor, Macbeth's introduction to the commission's report singled out Herzig-Yoshinaga as someone to whom he owed a "special debt," noting that she "in large part found and organized and remembered the vast array of primary documents from which the report was

written."68 Herzig-Yoshinaga's encyclopedic knowledge of the ocean of gov- ernment records allowed Macbeth to boldly reach an unprecedented con- clusion regarding the exclusion and incarceration of Japanese Americans. In

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February 1983 a unanimous commission released its 452-page report, Personal Justice Denied.69 The language used by Macbeth regarding the government's actions during World War II is unequivocal:

The promulgation of Executive Order 9066 was not justified by military

necessity and the decisions which followed from it--detention, ending detention and ending exclusion-were not driven by analysis of military conditions. The broad historical causes which shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.70

This authoritative report materially aided another critical aspect of the struggle for justice, the efforts to attack the three successive Supreme Court cases that legitimated the government's right to exclude and incarcerate. In January 1982, a team of lawyers led by Peter Irons had informed Yasui, Hira-

bayashi, and Korematsu that it might be possible to reopen their wartime cases through the obscure writ of error coram nobis.71 Coram nobis allows a person who has been tried, convicted, and who has served their sentence to petition the courts when evidence can be presented that the conviction was based on fundamental factual error. It is the sole exception to the rule that a decision

upheld by the Supreme Court is final and cannot be appealed.

In these cases, Justice Department attorneys had concealed evidence from the Supreme Court, as has been recounted previously. The documents unearthed by Irons, together with Herzig-Yoshinaga's discovery of the one surviving copy of the original Final Report substantiating the army's racist justification for exclusion and incarceration, formed the basis for filing suit. All

three men agreed to once again take up the challenge.72 In 1983, backed by the research of Irons and Herzig-Yoshinaga, the efforts of

the pro bono coram nobis lawyers, and the findings of the CWRIC, the "im-

possible" was achieved and Korematsu's criminal conviction for refusing to surrender his rights and report to be incarcerated was set aside.73 Korematsu's

courtroom victory, while it did not overturn the Supreme Court's ruling, ef- fectively destroyed the legal foundation upon which much of the legitimacy of

the government's actions had been based.74 Korematsu's success was followed the next year by Yasui's victory. In the Hirabayashi case, however, the govern- ment raised an issue that crucially depended on Herzig-Yoshinaga's research expertise." The government argued that Hirabayashi had lost his right to file suit because he had waited for nearly forty years to act and that all the evidence

had been available by 1949.76 Herzig-Yoshinaga was brought to the stand to testify about the difficulties of research and the immense labor involved in finding the original version of the army's Final Report. After considering the

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evidence, District Judge Donald S. Voorhees granted Hirabayashi's coram no-

bis petition, specifically noting Herzig-Yoshinaga's testimony in his decision.

He denied the government's argument regarding timeliness, holding that dis- covery of the original version of the Final Report "would have been exceedingly

difficult" for the plaintiff, based on Herzig-Yoshinaga's clear and detailed ex- planation of her efforts.77

The Korematsu, Yasui, and Hirabayashi coram nobis teams' arguments con- vinced three successive federal judges to set aside convictions that the ultimate legal authorities in the judicial system had defined as proper. Herzig-Yoshi- naga was the tireless and precise source of the factual evidence that made these victories possible. Her knowledge and expertise enabled her to provide not only answers to specific questions, but to also supply the contexts in which documents were generated, to trace the paper trail delineating how decisions were shaped, and to identify the individuals involved and their roles with the

exactitude that legal proceedings require. Lorraine Bannai, the attorney in charge of providing the factual evidence needed for all three coram nobis pe- titions, called her an "unsung hero." 78 Irons, the overall coordinator of the ef-

fort, credited her work both by noting her efforts in the text he edited on the

successful drive to vacate the wartime convictions, and by dedicating that work

to her and her husband.79 Perhaps the most telling comment on her work, however, comes not from her compatriots, but from an unnamed Justice De-

partment lawyer who was in effect bested by the research and office manage- ment skills of an elderly clerical worker of color who had never attended college. In a newspaper interview, the frustrated attorney could not bring him-

self to recognize Herzig-Yoshinaga as a person, instead referring to her as a "destructive force." so80

FOR THE GOOD OF EVERYBODY

Herzig-Yoshinaga's ability and determination to find, organize, and recall enormous amounts of information was greatly enhanced by her work as a po-

litical activist and her decades of experience as a clerical worker, allowing her to masterfully provide others the raw material they needed to accomplish their

own tasks. It was the confluence of these streams of experience that made Herzig-Yoshinaga's support for writers, attorneys, and others so effective. Her comprehensive command of government records enabled the creation by the CWRIC of an incontrovertible repudiation of the military necessity argument

for exclusion. Herzig-Yoshinaga's skills and knowledge also provided lawyers and judges with the grounds to set aside the cases that upheld the legality of ex-

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clusion and incarceration during World War II. In addition, it was her evi- dence that kept the class-action lawsuit alive before the Supreme Court, so that

its potential political embarrassment and huge monetary cost remained a threat until after both the House and Senate passed redress bills, allowing these efforts to be cast as moderate responses to the issue.8 The commission's report

and the two legal efforts were the foundation for the passage of redress legisla-

tion and cemented the present-day popular understanding of the camps as a civil rights disaster and an illegal abuse of government power.82 Building on the sturdy foundation Herzig-Yoshinaga largely provided, the teams she was a part of were freed to focus on the reports and briefs that toppled the barriers

to justice that had stood for so many years. In this quest, her "opponents" were exhaustion, inattention, and self-doubt.

As with Mitsuye Endo, the only woman of the four Japanese Americans who brought Supreme Court challenges during the war, Herzig-Yoshinaga's con- tributions were vital, "for the good of everybody," and have often been over- shadowed.83 Her achievements as part of a dedicated team largely served others who attracted more public notice.

What Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga's actions demonstrate is that even the seem- ingly ordinary individual can strike a mighty blow for justice. They also dem- onstrate, however, that when those blows are struck, the relative importance

accorded them may well rest upon definitions that need to be expanded. Herzig-Yoshinaga was called an "ignoramus" by a frustrated Justice Depart- ment attorney for carrying out her seemingly irrational multiyear search in the

archives.84 This self-defined "ordinary person" created the solid base from which the myth of a legally permissible "honest mistake," was destroyed, ex-

posing the deliberate machinations hidden for so many years.85 Her vision sharpened by her activism, she did what she had done for decades, contribut-

ing skills, knowledge, and an extraordinary mind for detail that had been honed over years as a clerical worker. And just as the vital work of secretaries and office managers is often overlooked and minimized in public, particularly

because of the gendered way in which value is often assigned to labor, so, too,

was hers. Her story underscores the importance of critically analyzing the kinds of labor performed by women in political movements, and how this la-

bor and its recognition might be affected by issues of gender, race, and class.86

Herzig-Yoshinaga's work did not fit easily into prevailing conceptions of the "critical," or the "valiant." Nor did she herself fit the established pattern of a

champion of justice, coming from a group praised for its supposed exemplary

submissiveness, and being a retired, working-class woman of color who had never been able to attend college. But as long as we continue to take these kinds

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of labor for granted, and to see "importance" in narrow terms, we will not only

overlook heroes, we will lose valuable lessons in how the task of achieving free-

dom and justice for all may be accomplished.

NOTES

1. The author is among the many scholars, activists, and other interested parties

who have been beneficiaries of the immense labor of Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga and John

A. "Jack" Herzig. Their unflagging enthusiasm and determination to extend justice to

all who have been wronged has been an inspiration. Their generosity in sharing their

wide-ranging and comprehensive knowledge regarding the exclusion and incarcera-

tion of the West Coast's Japanese American population is unmatched, as is their hos-

pitality and patience with questions and interviews. This article is dedicated in deep

appreciation to them, and for the example they set for all who seek to redress wrongs.

2. For two examples of work in this area, see Ann Bookman and Sandra Morgen,

eds., Women and the Politics of Empowerment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,

1988); and Nancy A. Naples, ed., Community Activism and Feminist Politics: Organizing

Across Race, Class and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1998). Belinda Robinett, How

Long? How Long? African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1997) discusses the importance of the "bridge leader."

3. Josh Getlin, "Redress: One Made a Difference," Los Angeles Times (South Bay),

June 2, 1988, A1.

4. Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, interview with author, August 11, 2001.

5. Often erroneously thought of as requiring no specialized training beyond basic

literacy, "pink-collar" work is characterized by its generally modest wages, limited op-

portunities for advancement, and relatively low social status. See Evelyn Nakano Glenn

and Roslyn N. Feldberg, "Clerical Work: The Female Occupation," in Women: A Fem-

inist Perspective, ed. Jo Freeman, 2nd ed. (Palo Alto: Mayfield Publishing, 1979). See

also Margery W. Davies, Woman's Place is at the Typewriter: Office Work and Office

Workers, 187o-193o (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); Louise K. Howe,

Pink Collar Workers: Inside the World of Women's Work (New York: Putnam, 1977); and

Linda Valli, Becoming Clerical Workers (Boston: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1986).

6. Although the term "internment" is often used, it is incorrect when applied to any

person holding U.S. citizenship. The right of the government in wartime to intern for-

eign nationals from hostile countries was authorized under the Alien Enemies Act of

1798. The act specifically exempts naturalized citizens. Two thirds of those affected thus

did not fall within the strictures of the act, being a step removed even from naturalized

U.S. citizenship, as they were U.S. citizens by birth (Act of July 6, 1798, 1 Stat. 577).

7. For the prewar period, see Valerie J. Matsumoto, "Japanese American Women

and the Creation of Urban Nisei Culture in the 1930s," in Over the Edge: Remapping the

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American West, ed. Valerie J. Matsumoto and Blake Allmendinger (Berkeley: Univer-

sity of California Press, 1999); and, more generally, David Yoo, Growing Up Nisei: Race,

Generation and Culture Among Japanese Americans of California, 1924-49 (Urbana:

University of Illinois Press, 2000).

8. No Japanese American on the West Coast, citizen or permanent resident, was

ever found to have committed an act of sabotage or espionage (Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians [CWRIC], Personal Justice Denied:

The Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, 2 vols.

in 1, with a new forward by Tetsuden Kashima [Seattle: Civil Liberties Public Education

Fund and the University of Washington Press, 19971, 3, 231-39, 471-75).

9. Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, telephone conversation with author, June 14, 2002.

o10. Joy K. Morimoto, "A Housewife-Turned-Researcher Who Made History," Asian Week, July 20, 199o, 16.

11. Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, interview with author, January 26, 1999.

12. Herzig-Yoshinaga, interview, January 26, 1999. See also Susan Matoba Adler,

Mothering, Education and Ethnicity: the Transformation of Japanese American Culture

(New York: Garland, 1998); Christie W. Kiefer, Changing Cultures, Changing Lives: an

Ethnographic Study of Three Generations of apanese Americans (San Francisco: Jossey-

Bass, 1974); Sylvia Junko Yanagisako, Transforming the Past: Tradition and Kinship

Among Japanese Americans (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985); and, more gen-

erally, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Hang, and Linda Rennie Forcey, eds., Mothering:

Ideology, Experience and Agency (New York: Routledge, 1994); and Joanne Myerowitz,

Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (Philadelphia:

Temple University Press, 1994).

13. Herzig-Yoshinaga, interviews, January 26, 1999, August 11, 2001.

14. Herzig-Yoshinaga, telephone conversation, June 14, 2002.

15. Glenn Omatsu, "Always a Rebel: An Interview with Kazu Iijima," Amerasia Jour-

nal 13:2 (1986-87): 84. Herzig-Yoshinaga noted that Iijima's husband, Tak, was also a

member (Herzig-Yoshinaga, interview, August 11, 2001).

16. See Diane C. Fujino, "Revolution's from the Heart: The Making of an Asian

American Woman Activist, Yuri Kochiyama," in Dragon Ladies: Asian American Femi-

nists Breathe Fire, ed. Sonia Shah (Boston: South End Press, 1997); and Patricia Saun-

ders and Rea Tajiri, coproducers and codirectors, Yuri Kochiyama: Passion for Justice,

videorecording (New York: Women Make Movies, 1994).

17. Mitziko Sawada was another notable member of AAA, but unlike Herzig-Yoshi-

naga, had spent the wartime years in Japan. Herzig-Yoshinaga, interviews, January 26,

1999, August 11, 2001.

18. Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, interview with author, June 28, 1997. See also Robinett,

How Long?, for an insightful discussion of the ways in which gendered and racialized

understandings of political work may hamper analyses and understandings of women's

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participation in political movements, in addition to the previously cited Bookman and

Morgen, Women and the Politics of Empowerment; and Kathleen M. Blee, ed., No

Middle Ground: Women and Radical Protest (New York: New York University Press, 1998).

19. Herzig-Yoshinaga, interview, January 26, 1999. For the importance of women's

networks, see Naples, Community Activism and Feminist Politics, especially her intro-

duction to the volume, "Women's Community Activism and Feminist Activist Re- search," 1-27.

20. Herzig-Yoshinaga, telephone conversation, June 14, 2002.

21. Herzig-Yoshinaga, telephone conversation, June 14, 2002.

22. Herzig-Yoshinaga, telephone conversation, June 14, 2002; and William Minoru

Hohri, Repairing America: An Account of the Movement for Japanese-American Redress

(Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1988), 61.

23. Michi Weglyn, Years of Infamy: the Untold Story of America's Concentration

Camps (New York: Morrow, 1976).

24. Herzig-Yoshinaga, interview, June 28, 1997.

25. Herzig-Yoshinaga, interview, August 11, 2001.

26. For an analysis of these issues see Nakano Glenn and Feldberg, "Clerical Work,"

326-31. See also John Hoerr, We Can't Eat Prestige: The Women Who Organized Har-

vard (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997). For a particularly trenchant set of

analyses, see Jean Tepperman, Not Servants, Not Machines: Office Workers Speak Out!

(Boston: Beacon Press, 1976).

27. Nakano Glenn and Feldberg, "Clerical Work," 313-26. Of course, the unac-

knowledged labor of clericals might conceivably extend to "invisibly" authoring the re-

ports as well.

28. Davies, A Woman's Place, 5-6.

29. Herzig-Yoshinaga, interview, June 28, 1997.

30. Herzig-Yoshinaga, interview, June 28, 1997; Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, personal

communication with author, September 7, 2001.

31. Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, interview with author, November 22, 2000. In the 1985

Hirabayashi coram nobis hearing, Herzig-Yoshinaga listed the following as sources for

her research: the Assistant Secretary of War files, the Department of Justice files, the

Federal Communications Commission files, the General and Special Staff of the

United States Army files, the Navy Department files, the records at the United States

Naval Historical Center, and the War Relocation Authority files, in addition to records

from the Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York, and files at the Fed-

eral Records Centers in San Bruno, California, and Suitland, Maryland. Testimony of

Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, Trial Transcript at 558, Hirabayashi v United States, 627 F.

Supp. 1445 (W.D. Wash. 1986) (No. C83-122V). Herzig-Yoshinaga later noted that she

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had inadvertently left the Federal Records Center at Laguna Niguel, California, off the

list she recounted at the hearing (Herzig-Yoshinaga, interview, August 11, 2001).

32. Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, testimony at 605-7, Hirabayashi (No. C83-122V). At

625-26, Herzig-Yoshinaga testified that even when a document was known to exist

through citation in published works, its location could be difficult to obtain because

rather than indicating a precise location, the citation might well indicate a large num-

ber of files, boxed records, or even whole ranges of shelves.

33. National Archives and Records Administration, Guide to Federal Records in the

National Archives of the United States, Records of the War Relocation Authority

(WRA), Record Group 210, 1941-47 (Online catalog version, November 19, 2000,

http://www.nara.gov/ guide / rg2lo.html#21o).

34. Peter H. Irons, testimony at 448, Hirabayashi (No. C83-122V).

35. For the best introduction to this history, see Roger Daniels, Concentration

Camps, USA: Japanese Americans and World War II (New York: Holt, Rinehart and

Winston, 1971); and The Decision to Relocate the Japanese Americans (New York: J. B.

Lippincott, 1975).

36. Daniels, whose two influential monographs are mentioned above, is arguably

the dean of Japanese American history, and was the historical consultant to the CWRIC.

37. Herzig-Yoshinaga, interview, August 11, 2001.

38. Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, interview with author, November 5, 2000.

39. Herzig-Yoshinaga, interview, August 11, 2001.

40. Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, email to author, September 7, 2001.

41. Herzig-Yoshinaga, interview, June 28, 1997. Joint awards include those from the

National Council for Japanese American Redress (NCJAR), the Association for Asian

American Studies, and the National Japanese American Historical Society, in addition

to the joint dedication in Peter Irons's work on the coram nobis cases, Justice Delayed:

The Record of the Japanese American Internment Cases (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan

University Press, 1989), iv. Herzig-Yoshinaga, telephone conversation, June 14, 2002.

42. After his service in the Pacific as a combat-decorated airborne infantryman,

Herzig had risen to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Army, and so had an exten-

sive and detailed understanding of the practices and procedures of that organization.

Because he had spent much of that time as a specialist in counter-intelligence, he had

great familiarity with the specifics of how and why decisions about security issues are

made (John A. "Jack" Herzig, interview with author, November 22, 2000).

43. Hohri, Repairing America, is a narrative of the NCJAR's formation, the political

project it was formed to undertake, and actions the group took to achieve its goals.

44. Herzig-Yoshinaga, telephone conversation, June 14, 2002; and Hohri, Repairing

America, 48, 61, 65. Jack Herzig had earlier read of NCJAR's efforts and had mailed

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them materials helpful to their work, but the first direct contact between NCJAR and

Herzig-Yoshinaga was this meeting.

45. CWRIC, Personal Justice Denied, 1.

46. Hohri, Repairing America, 79-81.

47. Hohri, Repairing America, 191; and Mitchell T. Maki, Harry H. L. Kitano, and

S. Megan Berthold, Achieving the Impossible Dream: How Japanese Americans Obtained

Redress (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 128.

48. Herzig-Yoshinaga, testimony at 552, Hirabayashi (No. C83-122V); and Hirabay-

ashi v United States 627 F. Supp. 1455 (W.D. Wash. 1986).

49. Maki, Kitano, and Berthold, Achieving the Impossible Dream, 98; and Herzig

Yoshinaga, testimony at 553, Hirabayashi (No. C83-122V).

50. Maki, Kitano, and Berthold, Achieving the Impossible Dream, 98.

51. This labor of clerical workers often escapes formal public notice. Demonstrating this in a literal sense, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civil-

ians is defined on the second page of its report, Personal Justice Denied, as the nine

Commissioners and the Special Counsel, rendering all others invisible, and by impli-

cation, of lesser importance. See CWRIC, Personal Justice Denied, ii. Similarly, in legal

briefs and judgments, there is an explicit requirement that plaintiffs, attorneys, and

judges are to be identified. Contributors to the effort such as Herzig-Yoshinaga, who fit

into none of these categories, are typically unnamed, and their work often remains out

of sight.

52. The hearings took place in New York and Washington, D.C. (Herzig-Yoshinaga,

testimony at 553, Hirabayashi [C83-122V]).

53. Herzig-Yoshinaga, interview, June 28, 1997.

54. Yasui v United States, 320 US 115 (1943); Hirabayashi v United States, 320 US 81

(1943); Korematsu v United States, 323 US 214 (1944); Ex Parte Endo, 323 US 283 (1944);

and Irons, Justice Delayed, 12.

55. Irons, Justice at War: The Story of the Japanese American Internment Cases

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), viii.

56. Irons, Justice at War, 280 -87.

57. The solicitor general is the official responsible for arguing the government's po-

sition in Supreme Court cases. Irons, Justice Delayed, 3-9.

58. This did not apply to "classified" or other secret documents (Herzig-Yoshinaga,

testimony at 601, Hirabayashi (No. C83-122V).

59. Maki, Kitano, and Berthold, Achieving the Impossible Dream, 130.

60. Irons, Justice at War, 207-9.

61. Irons, Justice at War, 209-11.

62. Herzig-Yoshinaga, interview, June 28, 1997.

63. Herzig-Yoshinaga, interview, June 28, 1997.

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64. CWRIC, Personal Justice Denied, 1. Agnus Macbeth was aided in his task of writ-

ing the report by editors Judith Dollenmayer and Kate Beardsley (xxiv).

65. Paul Bannai was appointed executive director, but resigned in September 1981.

Macbeth took over his duties, but was given the title of "Special Counsel". Hohri, Re-

pairing America, 88.

66. Herzig-Yoshinaga, testimony at 617, Hirabayashi (No. C83-122V); and Maki,

Kitano, and Berthold, Achieving the Impossible Dream, 97. Leslie T. Hatamiya states

in Righting a Wrong: Japanese Americans and the Passage of the Civil Liberties Act of

1988 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 89, that Macbeth was "picked" in late

September.

67. Macbeth's official title was Special Counsel; the CWRIC's legal counsel was

Donna Komure (Maki, Kitano, and Berthold, Achieving the Impossible Dream, lo9, 256).

68. CWRIC, Personal Justice Denied, xxix.

69. The report was released on February 24, 1983 (CWRIC, Personal Justice Denied,

xvii).

70. CWRIC, Personal Justice Denied, 18.

71. Irons, Justice Delayed, 3-4.

72. Irons, Justice Delayed, 6-7. Herzig-Yoshinaga and Jack Herzig also supervised

the work of research teams of law students led by attorneys Nicholas Chen and Phil

Nash. These teams were tasked with finding additional materials to bolster the coram

nobis cases. Nash and Chen also worked on the NCJAR lawsuit (Herzig-Yoshinaga, in-

terview, August 11, 2001).

73. Irons, Justice Delayed, 225. Coram nobis requires petitioners to file at the origi-

nal sentencing court, in this case, the San Francisco District Court.

74. Only the Supreme Court can overrule a Supreme Court decision, so while Ko-

rematsu's record has been cleared through his coram nobis victory, the legal precedent still stands.

75. Herzig-Yoshinaga, interview, June 28, 1997. Although it lies outside the scope of

this article, Jack Herzig's labor was crucial in the struggle for redress in another way.

Prior to the outbreak of World War II, United States intelligence agencies had broken

the codes used by the Japanese. Opponents of redress argued that secret Japanese

communications showed that Japanese Americans were engaged in espionage and sab-

otage, and that this was the reason that the decision was made to exclude and in-

carcerate the Japanese Americans of the West Coast. It was stated that the fact that the

Japanese codes had been broken was itself a secret, and this was why the decoded

communications code-named "MAGIC," declassified in 1977, had never been brought

up. Herzig's background as an army counterintelligence officer allowed him to au-

thoritatively critique this specious argument. His research findings and incisive testi-

Fujita-Rony: "Destructive Force" 59

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mony before the House Subcommittee on Administrative Law and Governmental Re-

lations, and in the 1985 evidentiary hearing for Hirabayashi (No. C83-122V) proved

that the "MAGIC" communications did not indicate spying or sabotage by Japanese

Americans and indeed that some of the most damning information, argued to be

"proof" of espionage, was available from local newspapers. See Maki, Kitano, and

Berthold, Achieving the Impossible Dream, 143- 44.

76. Hirabayashi v United States, (1986), 1455.

77. Hirabayashi v United States, (1986), 1455.

78. Getlin, "Redress," Al.

79. Irons, Justice Delayed, iv, xi.

80. Getlin, "Redress," Al.

81. The House passed H.R. 442 on September 17, 1987, while the Senate passed its

version on April 20, 1988. The reconciled conference report was adopted by the Senate

on July 27 and by the House on August 4, 1988 (Maki, Kitano, and Berthold, Achieving

the Impossible Dream, 174-86).

82. See Hatamiya, Righting a Wrong; and Maki, Kitano, and Berthold, Achieving the

Impossible Dream. The proponents of redress legislation were also beneficiaries of

Herzig-Yoshinaga's labor, for she generously shared her findings with them, despite the

political differences between the backers of legislative efforts and of the lawsuit.

83. Mitsuye Endo, "Mitsuye Endo," in And Justice For All: An Oral History of the

Japanese American Detention Camps, ed. John Tateishi (New York: Random House, 1984), 61.

84. Getlin, "Redress," Al.

85. Herzig-Yoshinaga, interview, August 11, 2001.

86. Despite the attempts by those she has worked with to highlight her contribu-

tions, Herzig-Yoshinaga's work is less well-known than might be expected. This is the

first academic piece devoted to her role in the movement to the author's knowledge, al-

though there is a sizable historiography on the Japanese American camps and redress.

60 FRONTIERS/2003/VOL. 24, NO. 1

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