A long search for truth brings justice, Woman's endeavor uncovers racist roots ...

LOS ANGELES — Every morning, she climbed the wide marble steps of the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga was not trained for this work. She was a homemaker, not a historian. But she had a lifetime of simmering anger and unanswered questions.

By lamplight in the grand reading room, she scoured thousands of documents, inventing her own organizing system to keep track of the information. She brought home so many copies that she commandeered a bathtub and used it as a filing cabinet.

Eventually, after years of labor, she happened upon files that would help correct injustices committed during one of the darkest periods of American history — and of her own.

These days, she works at the dining room table at her home in Gardena, Calif.

Now 86, she is busy finishing a book of first-person remembrances of the Japanese-American experience in World War II. Asked about her deadline to finish the book, she lets out a low laugh.

“Yesterday,” she says.

Her home is quiet and light-filled, with Japanese screens and a budding fuchsia orchid. Scattered about are bankers boxes packed with files.

She sits surrounded by papers, reading and taking notes until long after the sun goes down. Behind her, a black-and-white photograph hangs on the wall — a reminder of what drives her.

It shows a dust-blown desert and rows of wooden barracks.

• • •

In 1941, Aiko Yoshinaga was 17, a senior at Los Angeles High School. She loved roller skating and swimming with her friends at Santa Monica Beach. She was looking forward to prom.

Then Imperial Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and the United States was thrust into World War II.

Some officials questioned the loyalty of Japanese-Americans like Yoshinaga, who was born in California but whose parents had emigrated from Japan years before.

After President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order that authorized the forced removal of Japanese-Americans from “military areas” in 1942, about 110,000 were rounded up on the West Coast and shipped to internment camps. The government said it was a military necessity.

Her father and mother and her siblings were sent to live in the stables at Santa Anita racetrack before being transferred to camps.

Yoshinaga had eloped with her boyfriend when she learned they might be sent to separate detention centers. The newlyweds were bused to the Manzanar War Relocation Center in the eastern Sierra, 250 miles from Los Angeles.

Korematsu v. US: National Defense and Civil Rights - Lawyers.com ...

During war or military conflicts, quick decisions are often made depending on which side you're on, or appear to be on. Sometimes, it's arguably a necessity. Fighting terrorism today presents similar issues, balancing security needs and civil rights.

People of Japanese descent were excluded from certain areas of the West Coast during World War II, and over 100,000 were forced into internment camps. Birth place and citizenship didn't matter. The reason? National security and fear of a West Coast attack after Pearl Harbor. Many people find it hard to believe this part of our history.

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