UCLA Gets Internment Case Papers

Sixteen years after proving in a court of law that the World War II internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans was illegal, Fred T. Korematsu is turning to the court of public opinion.

The former welder, 80, doggedly fought to clear his name four decades after being convicted of violating wartime “evacuation orders.” Now he has donated his history-making legal papers to UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center.

Officials at the Westwood center plan to place them in a university research library and make them available to historians, legal scholars and others through the Internet.

Included among the documents are once-secret memos and reports that show how authorities lied to the U.S. Supreme Court to justify the unprecedented roundup and relocation of Japanese Americans in the early days of the war.

Korematsu was arrested and convicted in 1942 for refusing to leave his Northern California home and report to a detention camp.

He appealed his conviction. But in 1944 the Supreme Court upheld internment of Japanese Americans in the landmark case Korematsu vs. the United States.

Since then generations of law students have studied that case, learning that civil liberties were set aside in the dark days of war because the court believed there was an overriding military necessity to relocate Japanese Americans.

In 1983, Korematsu’s conviction was overturned after a dozen lawyers and researchers helped him resurrect the case in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

The case helped set the stage for the 1988 reparations paid by the U.S. government to surviving victims of the relocation roundups. But civil libertarians have been concerned that word of Korematsu’s exoneration may have gotten lost.

Some students studying Korematsu vs. United States in constitutional law classes are still not being told of the 1983 reversal.

Just this week, a student seemed aware of only the earlier Korematsu case, said Lorraine Bannai, professor at Seattle University School of Law who was on the volunteer legal team in 1983. The student said the reversal was not in the case book he was studying. “I was disappointed; this is my school,” Bannai said.

She is one of 10 team members who plan to be at UCLA on Sunday for a reunion with Korematsu and a ceremony marking his donation. The 1:30 p.m. event in the James West Alumni Center is open to the public.

Another scheduled to attend is Peter Irons, a UC San Diego political science professor. He broke the case by unearthing secret wartime memos showing that government officials lied to the Supreme Court about the need for the internment.

Memos he found at the National Archives proved that authorities incarcerated Japanese Americans because of their race--but then falsely contended to the Supreme Court that the action was taken for military reasons.

“The factual underpinnings on which the [1944] Korematsu decision was based were knocked away,” said Bay Area lawyer Donald K. Tamaki, who also helped Korematsu in the 1983 case.

Dale Minami, the attorney who headed the team, said every law student who studies the 1944 Korematsu case should also study the more recent one.

“When the fallibility of our systems is exposed, it teaches a lesson about our legal system and the fragility of civil rights,” he said.

Files from the 1983 case were found scattered in the various lawyers’ offices when the team decided to gather them.

Numerous institutions--including the Smithsonian, UC Berkeley and the National Archives--lobbied to get the 25-box collection after the paperwork was compiled, according to Don Nakanishi, a UCLA education professor who directs the Asian American Studies Center.

Korematsu said he is pleased that the papers will be accessible to the L.A. area’s large Japanese American population.

“A lot of people are shocked when they hear what happened” in the internment, he said Thursday from his home in San Leandro. “We want to make them aware.”