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Tanaka Criminal Law Casebook
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Notes & Questions (People v Okamoto)

Elizabeth Tanaka

Notes & Questions

1.     Mass Incarceration Without Evidence of Conspiracy. Even today, when most people recognize that the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II was wrong, misconceptions continue to abound. The narrative is often something to the effect of "it was wrong to sweep the innocent up with the troublemakers; the government should have made more of an effort to sort the innocent Americans from the threats to national security." And the counterargument is often something like "but that sorting would have been very time consuming, and this was an emergency and required a quick response." The counterargument gets one thing right - it would've been incredibly time consuming to find those who were plotting treason. The problem, however, is that it would have been so time consuming because there is no evidence that such people existed.   

One of the most undiscussed and underappreciated facts of the incarceration of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans, many of whom were citizens, is that there was no evidence of treason or treasonous conspiracies.  

In 1983, Prof. Peter Irons, a legal historian, together with researcher Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, discovered key documents that government intelligence agencies had hidden from the Supreme Court in 1944. The documents consistently showed that Japanese Americans had committed no acts of treason to justify mass incarceration. With this new evidence, a pro-bono legal team that included the Asian Law Caucus re-opened Korematsu’s 40-year-old case on the basis of government misconduct. On November 10, 1983, Korematsu’s conviction was overturned in a federal court in San Francisco.

Fred Korematsu's Story - Korematsu Institute

2.     Japanese "Internment."  For more information about the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, you can begin with the following resources:

Japanese-American Incarceration During World War II | National Archives

Japanese Internment Camps: WWII, Life & Conditions - HISTORY

Final Report, Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast, 1942 (book) | Densho Encyclopedia

Asian Americans and U.S. Law Casebook | H2O (opencasebook.org) (chapters 5-7)

 

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