A Principled Stand: The Story of Hirabayashi v. United States by Gordon K. Hirabayashi (review)

For years, I felt ensconced in World War II Japanese-American history—I received a collection of oral history interviews with Issei and Nisei (immigrants and their children, respectively). During that time period, while promoting these interviews, I met and traveled with some great Japanese-American historians, learning from them the key moments and players of this slice of 1940s US history. In short order, they quickly educated me on one of the most important Nisei of that time period, Gordon Hirabayashi. Hirabayashi shirked the early 1942 mandated curfew and evacuation order, forcing the government to arrest him. This action led to the court case in the book’s subtitle, which ended up in the US Supreme Court where the justices upheld the lower courts’ ruling, basically allowing the US government to force coastal Japanese Americans to abide by a curfew and to move to one of several inland relocation centers.

In A Principled Stand: The Story of Hirabayashi v. United States, two of Gordon’s relatives—his brother (James) and his brother’s son (Lane)—take material from Gordon’s collection to craft a story through his voice. Included in this material are interviews done with Gordon by historians and family members, as well as at least one other interview with Gordon’s father, Shungo. James and Lane cleave the book into three sections (“An Issei-Nisei Family,” “Challenges and Incarceration,” and “The Postwar Years and Vindication”) and include a few dozen photographs, arranged in chunks throughout the book.

Although they break the book into three sections, the middle one—“Challenges and Incarceration”—takes up the lion’s share of the text. In this section, and again through Gordon’s voice, the authors depict him through his trials (both in court and in public), standing up against post–Pearl Harbor laws and edicts designed to affect how Japanese Americans spent their days. Through his court case, his time spent in jails, and his travels while not incarcerated, readers get to see a deeply principled and religious person corresponding about his life. They also hear about his interactions with law enforcement and other prisoners. Furthermore, Hirabayashi reflects upon his lot in life, comparing his experience with that of his fellow Japanese Americans and other ethnic groups during the World War II era. In all, the authors succeed in one of their main goals: letting people get to know Gordon the person, not merely Gordon the plaintiff in a noted legal case.

Although I strongly recommend this book to those interested (at any level or knowledge base) in Japanese-American and World War II history, I cannot make the same case for those interested in oral history. Why? First, the authors themselves downplay the role of the interviews: in the preface, they mention all the other documentation perused first before talking about the few interviews used, mentioning them only after the list of the other primary sources. Moreover, in this section, they offer their observation that Gordon, who lived until 2012 or through most of this book’s formulation and creation, recalled little about the 1940s when interviewed. In both these cases, they privilege other documentation over the extant oral histories.

On top of the authors’ downplaying of the interviews as source material, they include no section in the appendix detailing how or where they used any of the interviews (or any other primary source for that matter) referenced in the preface. They do not include endnotes, footnotes, or a “notes on sources” section, so one cannot tell what chapter (or section within it) benefited from an oral history with Gordon, nor can one see whether any repository holds any of these oral histories. (Note: To their credit, they do acknowledge that an interview with Gordon’s [and James’s] father, Shungo, served as a primary source in the book’s first part. They, again, give...