The Japanese American Cases: The Rule of Law in Time of War by Roger Daniels (review)

In his 2000 Supreme Court dissenting opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia placed the ill-conceived jurisprudence of Korematsu alongside that of Dred Scott, a case declaring slaves were not and could never be citizens under the Constitution. Roger Daniels’s latest work examines the long history of Japanese Americans and the legal system, demonstrating Korematsu was part of a continuum of local, state, and federal discrimination that divided the Japanese American experience including resident aliens, the Issei, and the racialized citizenship of the Nisei and Kibei.

The book is laid out in chronological order and can be separated into two parts. Chapters 1 through 4 examine the prewar period through the closing of American concentration camps of World War II. Daniels reviews legalized racism enacted against Asian Americans prior to incarceration, including the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Gentlemen’s Agreement, and the Emergency National Origins Act of 1924. Perhaps most important is Ozawa v. United States (1922), declaring those immigrants outside of the black-white binary ineligible for naturalization. The second half of the work, chapters 5 through 8, focuses on the postwar experience and the Japanese Americans’ fight to redress incarceration. Finally, the end of the work includes a chronology of events beginning in 1941 and ending in 2009 and a brief bibliographic essay in lieu of footnotes or endnotes.

Daniels provides useful biographical sketches of all the major actors in these legal battles, including Japanese inmates, War Relocation Authority (WRA) officials, lawyers, and judges. Central to this story are Minoru Yasui, Gordon Hirabayashi, Fred Korematsu, and Mitsuye Endo, who brought their cases before the Supreme Court in 1943 and 1944. What Daniels reveals through these four individuals is the pervasiveness of racism and the weak legal framework of the U.S. government. Given this situation, Daniels rightly critiques the national American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for its refusal to publically challenge Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, resulting in the concentration camps. As Daniels notes, had it not been for Ernest Besig of the Northern California chapter of the ACLU and his commitment to Fred Korematsu, the ACLU would have completely “forfeited its opportunity to participate in the Japanese American cases” (50).

Daniels further exposes judicial wariness and misgivings, including Justice Frank Murphy’s belief that Hirabayashi was “over the brink of constitutional power,” but the actual language read to the “very brink” (60). While Yasui, Hirabayashi, and even Korematsu failed, the Supreme Court reached a unanimous decision in favor of Endo, allowing Japanese Americans to return to their homes on the West Coast, much to the dismay of FDR and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. Their reaction highlights Daniels’s argument that the president’s goal for incarceration reached beyond wartime isolation. Rather, the government sought the removal and redistribution of the Japanese community in California to areas all across the country (67, 80, and 114).

After the Endo decision, the government created policies for “Closing the Camps.” The title of this chapter does not do justice to the content because it is a comprehensive and concise history of resistance by Japanese inmates. Although Rohwer was not the first camp to close, in June 1944—this distinction goes to the Jerome Center, located thirty miles south (80)—Daniels provides a cogent investigation of the series of legal challenges that ultimately closed the camps. Particularly useful is his discussion of the incarcerees who resisted the cumbersome and dubious “loyalty questionnaire” at the Heart Mountain and Tule Lake centers. Daniels next examines camp politics and the transition of Tule Lake from a WRA center to the segregation camp for “dissidents,” which involved the stockade or inner prison, denaturalization of citizenship, and attempted prisoner exchange program with Japan. One complex figure throughout this process was attorney Wayne Collins, who fought for Tule Lake inmates unjustifiably thrown into the stockade. After the war, Collins brought...