In the News…
The Stop Repeating History team have been published in papers around the United States in op-eds, interviews, and mentions.
Opinion Editorials
Nichi Bei
Korematsu overruled or reaffirmed?
By: Don Tamaki
August 2, 2018
[Justice Roberts] pronounces Korematsu “overruled,” but in the same breath, dismissively concludes that Korematsu has nothing to do with the Travel Ban. Worse, despite Trump’s overtly anti-Muslim statements, Roberts accepts the government’s word for it that the ban’s intrusion on fundamental freedoms is necessary to make the country safe without requiring disclosure of the Homeland Security report claimed to contain the facts justifying the ban. Justice Sotomayor describes this “blind” court deference to the president as an affront to the judiciary’s role as the independent third branch in America’s checks-and-balances democracy. Urging careful scrutiny, she concludes, “Our Constitution demands, and our country deserves, a judiciary willing to hold the coordinate branches to account when they defy our most sacred commitments.”
For the same reason, in 1944, Justice Robert Jackson warned that “Korematsu lies around like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority who could bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.” In 2018, the Court may have reloaded this weapon, albeit not in Korematsu, but in the Travel Ban case.
The New York Times
How the Supreme Court replaced one injustice with another.
By: Karen Korematsu
June 27, 2018
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court got it partly right. After nearly 75 years, the court officially overruled Korematsu v. United States. In the majority decision, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., citing language used in a dissent to the 1944 ruling, wrote that the court was taking “the opportunity to make express what is already obvious: Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and — to be clear — ‘has no place in law under the Constitution.’”
But the court’s repudiation of the Korematsu decision tells only half the story. Although it correctly rejected the abhorrent race-based relocation and incarceration of Japanese Americans, it failed to recognize — and reject — the rationale that led to that infamous decision. In fact, the Supreme Court indicated that the reason it addressed Korematsu was because the dissenting justices noted the “stark parallels between the reasoning of” the two cases.
The Washington Post
My father resisted Japanese internment. Trump’s travel ban is just as unfair.
By: Karen Korematsu
December 4, 2017
If the courts uphold the travel ban, it will affirm that bigotry and intolerance take precedence over our core constitutional rights. We must stop repeating history by ignoring our past indiscretions. Korematsu is a reminder that while we may sometimes be afraid during times of crisis, fear should not prevail over our fundamental freedoms. The purpose of the Constitution is to protect the liberties that were given at the founding of our country.
In 1995, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg optimistically wrote in a dissent in Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena that “a Korematsu-type classification … will never again survive scrutiny.” In 2014, Justice Antonin Scalia unequivocally stated that the ruling from Korematsu was wrong. And Scalia gave a darker premonition: “But you are kidding yourself if you think the same thing will not happen again … In times of war, the laws fall silent.”
The courts must not “fall silent” and must act diligently not to repeat the mistake the legal system made in my father’s case. His liberties were compromised in 1944. It must not happen again. We need to be vigilant and remember my father’s words: “Stand up for what is right!”
The New York Times
When lies overruled rights.
By: Karen Korematsu
February 17, 2017
When President Trump signed an executive order temporarily banning travel from seven majority Muslim countries, he hurled us back to one of the darkest and most shameful chapters of American history. Executive orders that go after specific groups under the guise of protecting the American people are not only unconstitutional, but morally wrong. My father, and so many other Americans of Japanese descent, were targets of just such an order during World War II.
Mentions and Interviews
NPR: Michigan
Stateside: Lessons from Japanese American WWII internment
January 30, 2020
What happens when executive power goes unchecked? The internment of Japanese Americans during WWII offers ominous clues.
January 30 is observed as Fred Korematsu Day in many cities and states around the country. In 1943, Korematsu was one of a trio of men who challenged the internment of Japanese Americans all the way to the Supreme Court. They lost. But that decision was vacated in 1983, with evidence that internment was grounded, not in security concerns, but in deep-seated racism.
NPR interview with Don Tamaki on Stop Repeating History and Fred Korematsu Day.
NBC: Bay Area
Dale Minami on Asian Pacific America
January 28, 2020
NBC: Bay Area
Karen Korematsu on Asian Pacific America
January 28, 2020
NPR: San Francisco KALW
Connecting the dots between the travel ban and Japanese American incarceration.
March 13, 2019
NPR interview with Abby Ginzberg (And Then They Came for Us) and Don Tamaki.
“Well to me, I mean the Chief Justice Roberts makes a laudatory statement that “Korematsu has no place in history. It's been repudiated. It has no place under the Constitution or under law.” But in the same breath, he pivots and basically says, “And oh, by the way, this has nothing to do with Korematsu. This has everything to do with national security.” And ironically and disturbingly he repeats the Korematsu principle that when the government invokes national security, the court is going to stand down, bow to the will of the executive, and not ask any questions. And that is a problem because we're seeing this being repeated. For example, when Japanese Americans were rounded up merely because they looked like the enemy, and in its possession, the government had from its own intelligence agencies, reports which contradicted the Army's claims, that basically admitted there was no reason to do this to these Americans. Nobody asked any questions. Nobody asked for those reports. Nobody asked for any of that.” -Don Tamaki
The Washington Post
How the Supreme Court struck down a WWII-era travesty when it upheld Trump’s travel ban.
June 27, 2018
“Korematsu may be overruled, but it’s not to be celebrated,” said Karen Korematsu. “Unfortunately with this decision, we are continuing to repeat history.”
For months, Karen Korematsu heard echoes of her father’s old warnings in the way Trump’s order cast suspicion on an entire class of people, and the way its defenders in court made claim to national security without citing any evidence against the people the order affected.
She was reminded that during the campaign, Trump promised a broader ban on Muslim foreigners — as well as a registry of Muslims living in the United States.
She was reminded that one of his top backers cited her father’s case as legal precedent for such things.
“Racial profiling was wrong in 1942 and racial profiling and religious profiling is wrong in 2018,” Karen Korematsu lamented. “The Supreme Court traded one injustice for another 74 years later.”
USA Today
Supreme Court overrules Korematsu case that upheld World War II Japanese American incarceration
June 26, 2018
Sotomayor's dissent Tuesday in the travel ban case elaborated on Roberts' claims. "Today, the Court takes the important step of finally overruling Korematsu, denouncing it as 'gravely wrong the day it was decided,'" Sotomayor wrote. "This formal repudiation of a shameful precedent is laudable and long overdue."
"I don’t think there’s any doubt that the Court has overruled Korematsu in today’s decision," said Pratik Shah, a Washington-based attorney who had fought the travel ban. Roberts "took that detour specifically to do make the overruling 'express' — saying it was “wrong the day it was decided' and that it 'has no place under the Constitution.' And all consistent with Justice Sotomayor’s unrebutted characterization that the decision has been 'finally overruled.'"
“Finally after 74 years, on paper, the court says Korematsu was wrong, but the rest of the opinion repeats that historical error,” said Cecillia Wang, deputy legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union.
NBC News
Ahead of Supreme Court fight, Trump travel ban opponents reflect on past anti-Asian policies
April 24, 2018
“We were upset about the travel ban because it echoes what happened in the Korematsu case,” said Don Tamaki, who was on the Korematsu legal team, noting that the federal government declined to release a Department of Homeland Security report in lower court proceedings.
'Stop Repeating History'
Tamaki and his group have launched an educational campaign called “Stop Repeating History” to help provide a better understanding of what happened in the past, and what’s going on now, to ensure that those in power do not abuse civil rights.
The campaign has hosted speeches, panels, and screenings of the film “And Then They Came for Us” featuring actor George Takei across the U.S.
“Asian-Pacific Americans remember the first immigration bans imposed on an ethnic group – the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Exclusion Act barring Japanese Americans in 1924 and the racial profiling of Japanese Americans during World War II which accepted group rather than individual guilt,” Minami wrote in the Contra Costa Lawyer.
“President Trump’s justification of ‘national security’ for the ban on immigration from majority Muslim countries is eerily similar to the justification of ‘military necessity’ proffered in times past,” he continued.
Minami feels it’s important for everyone to understand what’s at stake here.
“You’ve got to be aware, you’ve got to be ‘woke,’ as they say,” he said. “Because if you’re not, the actions of this administration, undercutting the political system, disrespecting the press, disrespecting minority groups, all these things are essentially undercutting the foundations of a democracy.”
USA Today
Children of Japanese American legal pioneers from World War II fight travel ban
October 10, 2017
"I haven't given up hope," Korematsu, 67, said recently during an interview at the Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism During World War II, a peaceful oasis just blocks from the U.S. Capitol. "My father waited 40 years for justice."
So did Gordon Hirabayashi and Minoru Yasui. the other two men who defied FDR's order but failed to convince the Supreme Court. In the 1980s, their criminal records were thrown out following revelations that the government had lied after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor about Japanese Americans' disloyalty and espionage.
Their fathers are dead now, but Karen Korematsu, Holly Yasui and Jay Hirabayashi want the justices to avoid a decision they say would repeat the same mistakes of the 1940s: broad-brush discrimination and abdication of judicial oversight in the name of national security.
More than 80 legal briefs have been filed in the case, far more than the justices are likely to read in full. But the Korematsu brief likely has caught the justices' attention by reminding them of rulings long since discredited.
“Clearly it was an issue of ‘racial prejudice, wartime hysteria and a failure of political leadership,’” Holly Yasui said, quoting from a federal commission's 1983 report that found the relocation and internment of Japanese Americans was unjustified. She said the same thing is true when it comes to Muslims today because "we haven't learned the lesson that the Japanese American internment gave to us.”
Radio Lab
More Perfect: American Pendulum I
October 2, 2017
What happens when the Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, seems to get it wrong? Korematsu v. United States is a case that’s been widely denounced and discredited, but it still remains on the books. This is the case that upheld President Franklin Roosevelt’s internment of American citizens during World War II based solely on their Japanese heritage, for the sake of national security. In this episode, we follow Fred Korematsu’s path to the Supreme Court, and we ask the question: if you can’t get justice in the Supreme Court, can you find it someplace else?
Key Voices:
Fred Korematsu, plaintiff in Korematsu v. United States who resisted evacuation orders during World War II.
Karen Korematsu, Fred’s daughter, Founder & Executive Director of Fred T. Korematsu Institute
Ernest Besig, ACLU lawyer who helped Fred Korematsu bring his case
Lorraine Bannai, Professor at Seattle University School of Law and friend of Fred's family
Richard Posner, recently retired Circuit Judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals, 7th Circuit