Vol. 76/No. 10      March 12, 2012

Hirabayashi, along with Minoru Yasui and Fred Korematsu, challenged the curfews and evacuation orders that were part of the internment policy.

In the summer of 1942, the U.S. Army evacuated 120,000 people of Japanese descent from the West Coast They were incarcerated in 10 remote and heavily guarded concentration camps.

Two-thirds of the evacuees held without trial were U.S. citizens. The others were immigrants denied citizenship by law.

When ordered to register for evacuation, Hirabayashi, a 24-year-old student, instead turned himself in to the FBI office in Seattle. His typewritten statement called the internment racially discriminatory and defended the rights of Japanese-Americans.

His trial lasted only one day. The judge told the jury, “You are instructed to return a finding of guilty, and if you will not you are violating your oath.” Hirabayashi was convicted.

Like Korematsu and Yasui, Hirabayashi took his case to the U.S. Supreme Court. The court in his case unanimously upheld the curfew as a military necessity.

The internment of Japanese was part of Washington’s suppression of struggles by workers and their allies during the war. These included no-strike pledges aimed at housebreaking the labor movement, infiltration and disruption of organizations fighting anti-Black segregation and racist discrimination.

The incarceration rested on a history of anti-Japanese discrimination. Following the pattern of inequality legalized against the Chinese before them, by 1924 Japanese were barred by law from becoming citizens, buying land, marrying Caucasians, and entering the United States.

The U.S. rulers appealed to jingoist and racist prejudice to whip up support for the war and disguise its true nature—a conflict among competing imperialist powers for control of markets and resources.

Hirabayashi served two concurrent three-month prison terms. On the grounds that the loyalty questionnaire sent to all Japanese-Americans was racially discriminatory, he later refused induction into the army and served one year in federal prison.

Using new evidence of government suppression and alteration of records, a team of lawyers, mostly Japanese-American, filed appeals for the three men in the 1980s.

Hirabayashi’s conviction was vacated in 1987. The following year President Ronald Reagan officially apologized for the Japanese internment and signed a Congressional bill authorizing reparations of $20,000 each to the 56,000 surviving internees.

“In 2011 President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act,” Robert Rusky, from the legal team who helped overturn the Supreme Court decisions, told the predominantly Japanese-American participants at the Day of Remembrance meeting. “It affirms the use of military force to hold indefinitely without charges any person who supports, aids or is associated with ‘terrorists.’ This is the same justification used for interning Japanese-Americans.”

“Gordon showed us that we must challenge unfair, racist laws,” Dale Minami, another member of the legal team, told the Militant. “The courts won’t protect you. The Constitution won’t protect you. The only bulwark against tyranny is people organizing to protest injustice.”
 
 
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