At just 23 years old, Fred Korematsu would face the fight of his life: He stood up for his rights as an American citizen, refusing to report to incarceration camps for Japanese Americans during the second world war.

He was then arrested and convicted for his defiance. He appealed in the following years, and his case went before the Supreme Court in 1944. The court ruled against him, calling his incarceration a military necessity.

Today, his family members say, Korematsu’s story is as relevant as ever, as the incoming Trump Administration is threatening mass deportations and challenges to the naturalization of some citizens.
“On the 18th of this month, it will be the 80th anniversary of Korematsu vs. the United States. I think that my father’s Supreme Court case is more relevant now than it was in 1944,” Dr. Karen Korematsu, Fred’s daughter, told the Sampan in an interview this week. “Considering what has happened since then, it doesn’t seem like we are learning the lessons of history.”

Karen Korematsu is the founder and president of the Fred T. Korematsu Institute, which has been promoting awareness of her father’s lifelong battle to clear his name and stand up for civil rights. The story of her father serves as a reminder of how the rights of U.S. citizens and immigrants can vanish at times of unrest, despite constitutional protections. Born in 1919 in Oakland, California, Fred Korematsu was a child of Japanese immigrant parents. He tried to enlist in the U.S. National Guard and U.S. Coast Guard, but was rejected because of his Japanese ancestry. He then became a successful welder but was abruptly fired for the same reason: He was Japanese American. Then after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Pres. Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order for the U.S. military to force over 120,000 people of Japanese descent to report to prison camps. Most of them were, like Korematsu, American citizens.
It took decades for the full story of the Japanese incarceration camps and of Korematsu’s own case to surface. It wasn’t until the 1980s that a legal historian and researcher would unearth documents that revealed what government intelligence agencies had kept secret from the Supreme Court during Korematsu’s case, according to the Institute.

“The documents consistently showed that Japanese Americans had committed no acts of treason to justify mass incarceration,” according to the Institute. That information led to overturning of Korematsu’s conviction in a federal court in San Francisco. But Korematsu had to wait until November of 1983 for that bit of justice.

Then in 1998, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Pres. Bill Clinton. Twelve years later, the state of California passed the Fred Korematsu Day bill, making Jan. 30 the first day in the U.S. named after an Asian American – an effort making its way to other states including Massachusetts, as House Bill No. 3119, presented by state lawmakers Rep. Erika Uyterhoeven, Rep. Steven Ultrino and Rep. Lydia Edwards.
Korematsu’s daughter, who did not learn of her father’s case until she was a teenager, said she worries now about how vulnerable America still is to injustices similar to what happened to her father.
“In these kinds of situations, the faces change, the names change, the situations change,” she said, “but the acts of inhumanity against people” are the same.

Korematsu’s daughter also noted how her father’s case lives on today, and was referenced in 2018 during challenges to the so-called “Muslim ban” efforts in the first Trump Administration and in other Supreme Court cases.

She said she sees parallels throughout history.

“What we’re all realizing is that because of the talks of mass incarceration of immigrants that are not here (legally), that it could still be used in that regard,” she said of the her father’s case. “In 2001 after the attack of our country in 9/11, my father’s Supreme Court case was cited as a possible reason to round up Arab and Muslim Americans and put them in American concentration camps again. My understanding is that now some jails are being vacated just to mass incarcerate people that are undocumented. It was a human rights violation – the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans in 1942 and we continue to make those kinds of inhumane acts against people.”

“What the government did was they went into people’s homes, kidnapped people and separated their families. Their families didn’t even know where they were sent for years and years,” she said. “The talk is – they are threatening to do the same thing” now.

Karen Korematsu, who recently wrapped up an educational presentation in Boston, said she is particularly worried about children being separated from families.

“To this day, there are many children who have not yet been reunited with their families,” she said. “This is what is not considered.”

She went on to note the importance of everyone who is not Native American to understand the history of the U.S. and immigration and to be empathetic to others, by understanding their own history.
“The history of this country is based on economic immigration,” she said. “The Irish coming over to America during the potato famine. The Chinese that were brought over and encouraged to build our railroads and then we issued the Chinese Exclusion Act. And then Japanese that were heavily into agriculture.”

Korematsu said education about history and civil rights are critical ensuring past injustices don’t occur again.

“We have a very short memory,” she said. “We’re very shortsighted on our responsibility as Americans.”
Spreading her father’s story, she said, is one way to inform Americans.

“My father’s legacy is about moral principles, of right and wrong,” she said about his fight. “He knew that the government was wrong and he was right. Why should he go to prison when he had done nothing wrong?”