Aiko Herzig Yoshinaga
Key researcher behind reparations to Japanese-american Second World War internees
Aiko Herzig Yoshinaga, a Japanese-american whose tenacious archival research persuaded Congress to approve reparations for her fellow inmates of Second World War internment camps and an official apology to them, died on 18 July in Torrance, California. She was 93.
Her death was confirmed by her daughter Lisa Furutani.
Herzig Yoshinaga’s discovery of a document in the National Archives contributed to the 1983 decision by a Federal District Court in California to void a wartime verdict against Fred Korematsu, who had refused the blanket evacuation order of Japanese-americans from sensitive military zones, and the convictions of two others, Gordon Hirabayashi and Minoru Yasui in similar cases.
The document she discovered was apparently the only remaining original version of a 1943 government report that refuted the Pentagon’s claim that the evacuation was a military necessity.
The discovery was part of research that helped lead to a congressional commission’s conclusion in 1983 that the wartime internment was, instead, prompted by “race prejudice, war hysteria and the failure of political leadership”.
In 2011, the acting US solicitor general acknowledged that the government had suppressed evidence when the Korematsu case was originally heard during the war. The US Supreme Court concurred this year that Americans could not be forcibly relocated on the basis of race.
Thelawyeranguscmacbeth, who compiled the final report of the congressional body, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, said Herzig Yoshinaga had “in large part found and organised and remembered the vast array of primary documents from which the report was written”. She went ontobecomethecommission’s research associate.
As a result of the commission’s conclusions, President Ronald Reagan in 1988 signed the Civil Liberties Act, which apologised for indiscriminately jailing Japanese-americans during the war without trial and awarded camp inmates $20,000 each.
David Kawamoto, a past president of the Japanese American Citizens League, told The Los Angeles Times in 2011 that Herzig Yoshinaga’s research role had been indispensable.
“The work that she did was key,” he said, “because through her own personal efforts she found the evidence that our community needed to seek out redress.”
Aiko Louise Yoshinaga was born on 5 August, 1924 in Sacramento, California, to Sanji Yoshinaga and Shigeru Kinuwaki, immigrants from Kyushu, Japan. She moved with her family to Los Angeles in 1933.
Shortly after President Franklin D Roosevelt signed an executive order in February 1942 forcing Japaneseamericans into camps, her high school principal summoned the 15 students of Japanese descent in her graduating class, she recalled, and told them: “You don’t deserve to get your high school diplomas because your people bombed Pearl Harbor.”
Nearly 120,000 US citizens of Japanese descent and legal resident Japanese nationals wereevictedfromtheirhomes, mostly on the West Coast.
After eloping with her boyfriend, she was bused 250 miles away to the Manzanar War Relocation Authority camp in Owens Valley, California, where she lived in a 20-by25-foot space with three families in tar-papered barracks and gave birth to a daughter. The rest of her family was sent to the Santa Anita racetrack, northeast of Los Angeles, and then transferred to a camp in Arkansas, where her father died.
After the war, she studied to become a stenographer, went through a divorce and joined her mother and four siblings in New York. There she married an Army officer and then moved to Japan, where he was stationed.
When that marriage ended in divorce, she returned to New York, worked as a clerk, attended night classes at George Washington High School in Manhattan.
In New York she became involved with the advocacy group Asian Americans for Action, which opposed racism, nuclear testing and the war in Vietnam. She also reunited with a former American paratrooper, John Alois Herzig, whom she had met in Japan. They married and moved to Washington in 1978.
In addition to her daughter Lisa, Herzig Yoshinaga is survived by a son, David, also from her second marriage; another daughter, Gerrie Lani Miyazaki, from her first marriage, a brother, John; six grandchildren and two greatgrandchildren.
Inspired by Michi Nishiura Weglyn’s book “Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps” (1976), Herzig Yoshinaga and her husband signed on as Washington lobbyists for the newly formed National Council for Japanese American Redress, which was suing the government for reparations.
She later helped former camp inmates determine their eligibility for remuneration and advised them on how to apply. In 2009, she published a dictionary to encourage the substitution of more graphic terms to describe the Japanese-american wartime experience; the book suggested replacing “internment camp,” for example, with “gulag” or “concentration camp” and “evacuation” with “exile” or “banishment”.
In 2016, she was featured in a documentary film by Janice D Tanaka titled, “Rebel with a Cause: The Life of Aiko Herzig Yoshinaga.”
Herzig Yoshinaga, who attributed her meticulous research to her training as a stenographer and a clerk, was once asked whether other bombshells were still hidden in government files.
She replied, “I say, ‘How do I know they’re hiding things unless I know what I’m looking for and can’t find it?’”
To remind her of her wartime ordeal, Herzig Yoshinaga kept a coil of barbed wire in her apartment.
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“The work that she did was key. Through her own personal efforts she found the evidence that our community needed to seek out redress”
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