She was a champion of interned Japanese-americans
Early in 1942, two months before Aiko Herzig Yoshinaga was scheduled to graduate from high school in Los Angeles, her principal assembled the school’s 15 Japaneseamerican seniors for a meeting.
Herzig Yoshinaga was an honors student, with plans to study music and art in college, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt had just signed Executive Order 9066. Nearly 120,000 Japaneseamericans were being forced into internment camps.
“You all don’t deserve to get your high school diplomas because your people bombed Pearl Harbor,” she recalled her principal saying.
By graduation day, Herzig Yoshinaga — the Americanborn daughter of Japanese immigrants — was sleeping on a hayfilled sack at the Manzanar War Relocation Center, a dustblown “prison camp,” as she later called it, in the shadow of the Sierra Ne vada.
Herzig Yoshinaga would spend decades trying to forget the war years, a period in which she gave birth to a daughter at Manzanar, spent hours washing sand and dust from her newborn’s diapers and saw her father only on his deathbed, while he was ailing at a separate camp in Arkansas.
By her 50s, she had been pulled back into the past. The antivietnam War movement had given her a new political sensibility, and when she moved to the Washington area in 1978 she began visiting the National Archives, searching for information on internment.
She was soon spending six days a week in the archives, scouring thousands of poorly indexed documents and enlisting her husband to help make copies. They copied so many documents, they filled a bathtub in their home, enough documents that their master bedroom was lined with file cabinets and converted into an office.
And then, in the early 1980s, Herzig Yoshinaga picked up a redbound volume sitting on the corner of an archivist’s desk. As she later told the Los Angeles Times, the book contained the original draft of a 1943 government report on internment, apparently the last such copy in existence. “I began thumbing through the report, and then, when I came upon an important section, I nearly hit the ceiling.”
Herzig Yoshinaga, who was 93 when she died July 18 at a hospital in Torrance, Calif., had uncovered evidence suggesting that America’s World War II internment policy had racist motives and was not a result of “military necessity,” as Pentagon officials claimed.
Her findings helped persuade Congress to pass the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, which granted $20,000 in reparations to each survivor of the camps and a formal apology from President Ronald Reagan.
They also proved instrumental in a 1983 legal effort to overturn the criminal conviction of Fred Korematsu — a welder who had defied orders to report to an internment center, and who unsuccessfully challenged Roosevelt’s executive order before the Supreme Court.
Similar convictions for two other Japaneseamericans — Gordon Hirabayashi and Minoru Yasui — were subsequently cleared with the help of Herzig Yoshinaga’s “pivotal” research, said Dale Minami, a San Franciscobased lawyer who led the legal team in all three cases.
“What she did was expose misconduct in the government in this dark light — the alteration of an originally racist justification to a more benign one, to make it more palatable to the Supreme Court,” Minami said in a phone interview.
A former secretary and stenographer, Herzig Yoshinaga said her efforts were inspired by Michi Nishiura Weglyn, author of “Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps” (1976), who urged her to visit the National Archives if she wanted to learn more about wartime internment.
By 1980, when a congressional commission was established to study the motivations and effects of Executive Order 9066, Herzig Yoshinaga had gathered about 8,000 documents. The Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians hired her as a researcher.
Three years later, in a 467page report written by lawyer Angus Macbeth, the commission concluded that internment was prompted by “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.”