Coram Nobis and the Continuum of Activism

              National Japanese American Historical Society
decided there was basis for filing a
class-action lawsuit.
A short time later Herzig-Yoshinaga
was hired by the Commission on the
Wartime Relocation and Internment of
Civilians (CWRIC). Her title of chief
researcher was misleading. "The research staff was basically me," she
sighs. "Sometimes people were assigned to help, but they kept getting
pulled away. It was an awful lot of
work." Fortunately she had already collected mounds of material for NCJAR,
which agreed that she should share it
with the CWRIC. "That was a helpful
headstart, otherwise I don't think I
could have done it all."
Peter Irons:
"I had no idea
there was
anything in
these files that
might produce
a lawsuit!"
Like most law students, Peter Irons
had studied the Japanese American
Supreme Court cases in school, where
they were held out as examples of dangerous precedent. "About three years
after law school, when I was teaching at
the University of Massachusetts, I decided to write a book about these cases.
In August 1981, on the very first day I
started research at the Archives, I met
Aiko. I introduced myself and we
quickly agreed to share information." It
was the start of a fruitful partnership.
Herzig-Yoshinaga knew the National
Archives like the back of her hand, and
Irons had the expertise to understand
the legal implications of the material
she found.
To work on his book, Irons needed
the case files, which were not at the
National Archives. Only after persis
tent requests did Justice Dept. staff locate the papers. They had been stored
in a warehouse with documents from
the Immigration and Naturalization
Service because Korematsu, Yasui and
Hirabayashi - all U.S. citizens - had
been miscategorized with "enemy
aliens."
"At that time, I had no idea there was
anything in these files that might produce a lawsuit, but as soon as I opened
them up, I found the 'smoking gun'
memos." These internal memos by
government attorneys who had
worked on the cases gave Irons the first
concrete proof that the government
had fabricated information to support
the alleged "military necessity" of the
internment and had destroyed, altered
or withheld from the Supreme Court
critical information negating that allegation.
Irons and Herzig-Yoshinaga found
documents indicating that Asst. Scty.
of War John McCloy had ordered that
parts of DeWitt's original report be
rewritten, and all ten copies of the
original document destroyed. The
cover-up was so thorough that War
Dept. receipts had been altered to hide
the existence of the original copies.
Sometime in 1982, Herzig-
Yoshinaga made a real find: "I picked
up a copy of DeWitt's Final Report
from an archivist's desk. I realized it
was the original report because it had
notes in the margins indicating what
copy should be changed. It was a gold
mine!"
Irons believed that the evidence was
strong enough to reopen the cases by
filing petitions for writs of error
Coram Nobis. He'd had personal experience with such a petition. As a civil
rights activist back in 1960, he had returned his draft card because the
country still practiced segregation. In
1963 he received a draft notice, which
he ignored. The following year, a week
after Congress passed the Gulf of
Tonkin resolution, he and many antiwar activists were indicted for draft
resistance. He was found guilty and
served two years in prison. Later, in law
school, he obtained his Selective
Service and FBI records. "It was quite
clear that I had been called a year earlier than I should have been because
they were targeting anti-war activists."
Irons filed a Coram Nobis petition,
which the government did not contest,
and his conviction was vacated.
An attorney as well as a scholar,
Irons persuaded Korematsu, Yasui and
Hirabayashi to let him reopen their
cases. Irons asked Yasui for names of
Japanese American lawyers who might
donate their time to the case. Of the
ten attorneys suggested, only one, Dale
Minami, lived in one of the cities
where the original wartime cases had
been filed.
The San Francisco Team: ait was
the h ht of our careers.
We would have almost paid to
WOrk Oft the Case!" - Don Tamaki
Dale Minami claims that he chose
law as a career "not out of any grand
social purpose, but because I couldn't
think of anything else to do."
Nonetheless, he soon became intrigued
by public interest law. In 1972, while
still a law student, he joined several attorneys to found the Asian Law Caucus
(ALC), a non-profit public interest law
firm. "I cut my teeth on cases where
poor powerless people had to challenge powerful institutions. We
developed a strategy of underscoring
and appreciating the political aspects
of these cases."
Bigger Than All of Us (cont'd on p. 15)
Nikkei Heritage • Spring 1999    ]