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Chapter 2. Challenging the Government
- University Press of Kansas
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{ 28 } chapter two Challenging the Government The four litigants’ paths to the Supreme Court, including their decision -making processes, were as varied as their backgrounds. The first to act was twenty-five-year-old Minoru Yasui. The oldest and best educated, he was born and grew up in Hood River, Oregon, where his father ran a general store and was a leader of its sizable Nikkei community, that is, persons of Japanese ancestry wherever born. Min attended a Methodist church and as a teenager became a charter member of the local JACL chapter. He earned degrees from the University of Oregon and its law school in 1937 and 1939, as well as a second lieutenant’s commission through its ROTC program. When he passed the bar exam in 1939, he became the only Japanese American lawyer in Oregon—aliens could not practice law—but no firm would hire him. His own practice was unsatisfactory, and in 1940 he left for Chicago, where he went to work in the Japanese Consulate General abstracting items from the American press; he resigned on Monday morning, December 8, 1941. Perhaps a week later he got a telegram ordering him to report for active duty at Camp Vancouver, Washington, just across the river from Portland, but when, after returning to the West Coast, he checked in, a colonel told him that he would not be activated then but would be contacted later. That never happened. Min’s father, Masao, had been picked up for internment on December 12, 1941. In early February, Min traveled to Fort Missoula, Montana, to observe his father’s unsuccessful hearing before the local Alien Enemy Review Board; internees were allowed neither counsel nor the right to call witnesses. On his return to Portland, Min reestablished a law practice in downtown Portland and kept busy; many Japanese of both generations had serious new legal problems. On March 28, 1942, the day after General DeWitt’s curfew went into effect, Yasui, after consulting other attorneys, deliberately sought to make himself a test case. As he described it in a 1983 interview: 29 { Challenging the Government } I was in my office [in a small Japanese-run hotel in downtown Portland] on the 28th day of March, which is a Saturday evening. Waited ’til 8 o’clock, Rei Shimojima was my secretary [and she called] the police, the FBI, to notify them that there was a Japanese person in violation of curfew walking up and down Third Avenue. . . . I’ve told this story many a time, but I walked and walked from eight o’clock, and the record will show that I was not actually arrested until 11:20 p.m. I walked for over three hours, and during that period, I got tired of walking up and down Third Avenue. So I did approach a police officer, and being a smart aleck and being an attorney, I pulled out the proclamation pointing out that [I] was in violation of a military proclamation, I had my birth certificate with me, and I proved that I was a person of Japanese ancestry. [I] asked the officer to arrest me, and the officer says, “Look, you’ll get in trouble. Go on, run along home.” And that certainly didn’t serve my purposes, so I went down to the Second Avenue police station and talked to the sergeant and explain[ed] what I wanted done. And the sergeant obliged me and he threw me into the drunk tank. So that’s how the case began. Only after being bailed out on Monday morning by his attorney, Earl Bernard, did Yasui phone his mother in Hood River to tell her what he had done. He expected her to protest. Instead she told him, “I will support you.” Although he enjoyed the support of family and friends, including some Portland attorneys, there was no community support group for him. In addition, when news of his intention to challenge the constitutionality of the curfew and other measures reached JACL leaders, they denounced him and other unnamed protesters. In JACL Bulletin 142, “Re: Test Cases,” on April 7, 1942, national secretary Mike Masaoka denounced resisters as “self-styled martyrs” and reported that “National Headquarters is unalterably opposed to test cases.” Among the eleven numbered reasons given for this policy in the bulletin were that “as good Americans” we should do what our government tells us; public opinion is opposed to any resistance; a “challenge” might “irritate” the military into “treating...