Testimony of the JACL

              were sent to camp. The exclusion and detention are made up
of the life stories of thousands of families — farmers in the
Salinas Valley, clerks in the California state government,
small businessmen and shop keepers in the West Coast
communities. Against the sting of discrimination and, often
the hostility of the organized anti-Japanese faction on the
West Coast, these individuals held on to the hope of a better
life in America with reliance on the basic compact that they,
like all Americans, believed they had with the government.
What happened to the Tapanese Americans in 1942 is
well known. They were not treatedaaindividuals. They were
not given the presumption of loyalty or innocence. There
was no burden on the government to show that Mitsuye
Endo or Jack Fujimoto or May Ichida had themselves done
anything to raise suspicion about them, much less to warrant
the loss of the most basic American freedoms. Without
discussion, without a place to appeal or an opportunity to
be heard or to prove their innocence and loyalty to the
government — without a chance to be judged by the content
of their character rather than by their blood and facial features
— lettuce farmers from Salinas and clerks from the Motor
Vehicle Department in Sacramento and modest merchants in
Seattle were sent off to the desert of Manzanar or Poston or
the cold and dust of Heart Mountain.
These basic facts have been well known for 40 years.
What has been much less obvious until the publication of
Personal Justice Denied by the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians is the failure of the federaj
government to recognizejhat even a claim of military jyngj;-
genjcycould^xot, excuse it fjom_its obligation to jjeal with
Mitsuye Endo and Jack Fujimoto_and_May Ichida asjndivi-
duals. IfT as the military claimed in 1942, the policies of
exclusion and detention were exercised against an entire
class of United States citizens because, in the urgency of the
months following the attack at Pearl Harbor, there was no
way to distinguish the loyal from the disloyal among that
7
particular class, that determination could and should have
been made during the early days of exclusion and detention.
However, there was no attempt in the assembly centers to
determine if there were facts justifying the incarceration of
particular individuals. There was no recognition^)?ln"e~rignT
_of those released from camp to return to the West Coast. In
fact, by the middle of 1943 even the War Department recognized that its own view of "military necessity" could no
longer justify the exclusion of loyal Americans from the West
Coast. Nevertheless, the exclusion continued for another
eighteen months.
This history illustrates the fact that the^damage of the
exclusion and detention cannot be overcome without the
concrete recognition of the breaking of the trust between the
tpdpral govprnrn^nt^rid thp Japanese Americans. The exclu-
sion was not ended in 1943 because the War Department
would not stand up and fight for the rights of individual loyal
Japanese Americans to return to the West Coast. That recognition is still of supreme importance today. It is personally
important for each of the people who were sent to camp.
This is not ethnic legislation or special group legislation. Itjs_
legislation directed to those individuals to whom the federal,
f~~overnment "denied the presumptions of "Innocence and
jyalty and the right to be judged as individuals. It recognizes
"tReTndividuality of the lettuce farmer in Salinas and the clerk
in Sacramento.
It is important to acknowledge and rectify this today
because it forcefully reaffirms that if the federal government
breaks the compact that promises to members of even the
smallest and most despised minority the right to be treated
as individuals as impartially and fairly as the most powerful,
then it assures all citizens that in the fullness of time the
federal government will make amends and reaffirm the
sanctity of that central trust between the government and the
individual. There is a famous case from the civil war, Ex Parte
Milligan,10 that made the point eloquently that in times of