"A Very Lonely Stand"

In news this week: the death of Gordon Hirabayashi, on January 2.

Born in 1918, Hirabayashi was raised by very religious Japanese immigrant parents, who had converted to Christianity by joining a pacifist Protestant sect. If Gordon sometimes chafed at his parents' strictness, it seems that his personality as well as upbringing started him early on a path of community involvement, and of deep concern with thinking through and acting on principles.

Gordon entered the University of Washington in 1937. For two years, he attended half the academic quarters, needing the other half of the year to help his farmer parents with the crops and to earn money for school.

Photo: Sharon Maeda/The Wing Luke Asian Museum

Active in the campus YMCA, he also gravitated toward Quaker meetings and to carefully considering his position on the peacetime draft that had gone into effect. After registering as a Conscientious Objector, Gordon had been ordered to Civilian Public Service camp. But that was just before the attack on Pearl Harbor; afterward, he and other draft-age Japanese-American men would be reclassified as "aliens ineligible for conscription."

Gordon also was a UW senior in 1942, when the first restrictive measure against Japanese-Americans, an 8:00 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew, went into effect. Decades later, he would recall [transcript]—

After the curfew order was announced, we knew there would be further orders to remove all persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast. When the exclusion orders specifying the deadline for forced removal from various districts of Seattle were posted on telephone poles, I was confronted with a dilemma: Do I stay out of trouble and succumb to the status of second-class citizen, or do I continue to live like other Americans and thus disobey the law?

When the curfew was imposed I obeyed for about a week. We had about twelve living in the Y dormitory, so it was a small group, and they all became my volunteer time-keepers. 'Hey, Gordy, it's five minutes to eight!' And I'd have to dash back from the library or from the coffee shop. One of those times, I stopped and I thought, Why the hell am I running back? Am I an American? And if I am, why am I running back and nobody else is? I think if the order said all civilians must obey the curfew, if it was just a nonessential restrictive move, I might not have objected. But I felt it was unfair, just to be referred to as a 'non-alien'-they never referred to me as a citizen. This was so pointedly, so obviously a violation of what the Constitution stood for, what citizenship meant. So I stopped and turned around and went back.

From that point Hirabayashi refused to observe the curfew, without repercussion.

And then—

When the exclusion order came, which was very close to that time, I was expecting to go along. I had dropped out of school at the end of the winter quarter, which was the end of March. I knew I wasn't going to be around very long, so I just didn't register for spring quarter and I volunteered for the fledgling, newly formed American Friends Service Committee. From time to time, districts of Seattle were on a deadline to move all the Japanese. So, with a car that was made available, I'd go and help - particularly families whose fathers were interned and there were a bunch of little kids, and I helped them to move. It really horrified me to help these families pack up-their belongings and drive them down to the Puyallup fairground and leave them behind barbed wire.

I fully expected that when the University district deadline came up I would join them. Those who saw me waving them goodbye all expected to see me within a few weeks at the most. About two weeks before my time came up, I said to myself, If I am defying the curfew, how can I accept this thing? This is much worse, the same principle but much worse in terms of uprooting and denial of our rights, and the suffering. So that's when I began to mull it over...

Refusing bail conditions that would mean complying with discriminatory policy, he would spend nine months in jail. Prior to his trial, the government even moved his parents from Tule Lake back to Seattle, jailing them for ten days in the same federal holding tank as Gordon.

Soon after his release, he refused to answer a Selective Service questionnaire sent only to Japanese-Americans. This, and his later refusal to report for a physical, would lead to his serving a year in prison.

Hirabayashi's words are from his interview in Peter Irons' The Courage of Their Convictions: Sixteen Americans Who Fought Their Way to the Supreme Court.

Other details above are from an interesting UW alumni magazine piece on Hirabayashi and some of the other Japanese-American students attending the University at the time of the exclusion order.

From the LA Times obituary—

"What Gordon should be most remembered for is taking a stand on a matter of principle at a time when hardly anyone — not only within the Japanese American community but the nation at large — sided with him or sympathized with him," said Peter H. Irons, a retired UC San Diego political scientist whose research in the 1980s helped lay the legal foundation for the overturning of the convictions. "It wasn't at all like the civil rights movement where thousands of people engaged in demonstrations and civil disobedience. It was a very lonely stand."

A stand so lonely that only two other Japanese-Americans challenged the discriminatory curfew and evacuation orders.

It would take over 40 years for the convictions in all three cases to be overturned.

l-r: Gordon Hirabayashi, Min Yasui, Fred Korematsu.
Photo: Steven Okazaki

For the rest of their lives, the three continued to speak out.

Min Yasui would settle in Denver after the war, where he was a civil rights attorney. On the national scene, Yasui would become a leader of the internment redress movement that got underway in the 1970s.

In response to the post-September 11, 2001 assault on civil liberties, Fred Korematsu filed a 2003 brief on behalf of Muslims held in Guantanamo.

A year before his death in 2005, Korematsu wrote in an op-ed about the right-wing effort to re-write the history of Japanese internment as part of its outcry for racial profiling of Muslims—

Fears and prejudices directed against minority communities are too easy to evoke and exaggerate, often to serve the political agendas of those who promote those fears. I know what it is like to be at the other end of such scapegoating and how difficult it is to clear one's name after unjustified suspicions are endorsed as fact by the government. If someone is a spy or terrorist they should be prosecuted for their actions. But no one should ever be locked away simply because they share the same race, ethnicity, or religion as a spy or terrorist. If that principle was not learned from the internment of Japanese Americans, then these are very dangerous times for our democracy.