Documentary highlights fight by Japanese American in WWII

  MINDY ROSS/ Daily Bruin Senior Staff Fred
Korematsu shakes hands with students at the screening.

By Hemesh Patel
Daily Bruin Reporter

At the same time Adolf Hitler placed the Jews of Eastern Europe
in box cars during World War II, the military put the Japanese in
horse stalls in the United States.

“This is one of the most shameful and tragic events in our
history,” said Dean Jonathan Varat of the UCLA School of Law.
“A terrible and grievous wrong was done 60 years
ago.”

The incarceration of Japanese Americans during the 1940s
affected 120,000 people and though many of them kept silent, Fred
Korematsu didn’t.

Eric Paul Fournier’s documentary, “Of Civil Wrongs
and Rights: The Fred Korematsu Story,” premiered in Perloff
Hall with Korematsu, his wife and a crowd of 150 people in
audience.

Many say Korematsu’s trial represented the one Japanese
Americans as a whole never had.

It all started when Korematsu was with his girlfriend and he
received news that Pearl Harbor had been bombed.

“Of course, we weren’t talking much and suddenly
they announced that Pearl Harbor was attacked,” he said.
“My mother was crying and my father was just
disgusted.”

The police soon came and confiscated everything that they
thought could be used for signaling and spying for the
“enemy.”

A military order signed by President Roosevelt mandated the
internment of Japanese Americans in California to work camps.

While the rest of his community left in silence, Korematsu
decided not to go.

One Sunday, Korematsu and his girlfriend, who was white, were
looking through the paper and found an advertisement for eyelid
surgery.

“The doctor just slit my eyes and put some of the skin
up,” he said. “It didn’t work out right because
my mother recognized me.”

Korematsu changed his name to Clyde and lived his life away from
his community, which was sent to internment camps.

“He was not able to go to any restaurants because he was
refused service,” said his wife Kathryn Korematsu. “He
could only get a meal in Chinatown because at other places, they
just left him sitting there.”

Korematsu was eventually caught, while he was waiting for his
girlfriend on the street.

“I decided to go to the cigarette store and the police
came and checked my identification,” he said.

His girlfriend never showed up and he didn’t see her
again.

Korematsu challenged the government’s decision to
incarcerate him but lost and was sent to the Tanforan
“assembly center.”

He was welcomed by a community who shunned him for rebelling
against the government system that created the camps.

“His family and the Japanese American community were
always ashamed of him,” his wife said tearfully.

At the time, there was a feeling for many that the interment
camps were good.

Law Professor Jerry Kang said many people during the time saw
the internment situation as a precaution for protection and there
was a feeling that people were incarcerated for their own
safety.

“I think that argument was a lot of boloney,”
Korematsu said. “This was something that should not have
happened.

The case was appealed in 1944 to the Supreme Court which upheld
the decision against Korematsu.

Forty years later, the case was reversed by Marilyn Hall Patel,
in the district courts among a crowd of Korematsu’s friends
and supporters.

“We need to protect the Constitution for all people at all
times,” she said. “I don’t think there was a dry
eye in the courtroom.”

The ruling by the Supreme Court still stands, and Korematsu has
made no plans to take his case there because he wants this blemish
to stay on the government.

Some members of the crowd could relate to Korematsu and his
story.

Aki Yamazaki was a senior at UCLA when the war broke out and was
sent to the Santa Anita internment camp.

“Myself and 175 other students were evacuated by March and
April and I did not get to graduate,” she said. “But I
got my degree 50 years later.”