On December 7, 1941, Japan's military dropped bombs on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor. The next day the United Stated declared war on Japan. The first month of the war was relatively calm. There were few cases of public panic or hysteria occurring, and Japanese Americans were treated no differently than they had been before war began. There have been newspaper accounts showing that there was a vast majority of American citizens that were sympathetic to the Japanese's plight of loo

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which led to the evacuation and internment of 120,000 West Coast Japanese Americans. On August 10, 1988, forty-six years later, President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, awarding monetary compensation and a national apology to the surviving Japanese Americans affected by Roosevelt's wartime order, bringing to a close a shameful event in the history of the United States.

One section of the Japanese American community split off from the JACL view and opted to push for redress through the courts. Led by William Hohri of Chicago, the National Council for Japanese American Redress (NCJAR) was created in May 1979. NCJAR members felt that a commission should only be a fallback if efforts to win full monetary compensation failed. The approaches of the JACL and NCJAR were not completely in conflict; the relationship between both sides was strained, with verbal backbiting on both sides.

---, ---, Personal Justice Denied. Part II, Recommendations. Washington D.C.: G.P.O., 1983.

On December 17th, one day before the Supreme Court announced their decision; the War Department rescinded the exclusion and detention orders. On the day of the decision, the WRA announced that all concentration camps would be closed within a year and that the WRA program would terminate its commission by the beginning of July 1946.

---, Congress. House Subcommittee on Administrative Law and Governmental Relations of the Committee on the Judiciary. Hearings on Legislation to Implement the Recommendations of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, H.R. 442, the Civil Liberties Act of 1987, H.R. 1631, the Aleutian and Pribilof Island Restitution Act. 100th Congress., 1st Session, 1987.

In 1984, shortly before his massive win over former Vice President Walter Mondale, Japanese Americans and their supporters in Congress faced President Reagan with an intense lobbying effort. The issues were with the moral, legal, and economic redress of the forced evacuation, relocation, and internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. For almost five years, Reagan opposed redress legislation, reversing his position only after the political pressure reached a vehement pitch during the last days of his second term. At the start of the 1988 election campaign, Jack Kemp, a republican from NY and a close confidante of Reagan's warned that the 1988 general election posed a certain amount of danger to the Republicans if they stood against redress. The support for redress might eliminate a considerable ethnic vote-related threat to the 1988 Republican ticket. For a time, Reagan contemplated a compromise with Congress whereby a lower redress compensation budget would be!

Most of the Japanese Americans obeyed the military orders as a way of demonstrating their loyalty to the United States, but there were some individuals who challenged the constitutionality of the evacuation and internment orders. Fred Korematsu was charged with refusing evacuation, Minoru Yasui with violating curfew, and Gordon Hirabayashi with violating curfew and failing to report for detention. All three were convicted in the federal courts for disobeying military orders and appealed their cases to the U. S. Supreme Court. These three cases are considered to be criminal cases because they were direct violations of law. A fourth case by Mitsuye Endo was filed against the United States in 1942. As that she broke no laws and complied with the military orders, her case was considered a civil suit. She challenged the government's right to imprison an American citizen without charge or trial. A year later the decision denying her release was announced, and she appealed !

Chuman, Frank E. The Bamboo People: The Law and Japanese Americans. California: Publisher's, 1976.

Although a national apology has been given and redress has been achie

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