A Real Civil Rights Pioneer

[jon]

Former U of A professor was lifelong believer in justice
By Brent Wittmeier, edmontonjournal.com
January 4, 2012

EDMONTON - Jay Hirabayashi always knew his father had spent time in jail, but he was 19 before he realized the University of Alberta sociology professor had also been an American civil rights pioneer.

Hirabayashi was working at a summer resort in Colorado when a law student from Texas asked if he was related to Gordon Hirabayashi, whose case he’d studied as one of the most egregious mistakes ever made by the U.S. Supreme Court.

“I really didn’t know that much about that history,” Hirabayashi said of his father on Wednesday. “I didn’t really understand his importance in the history of civil rights in the United States.”

Mr. Hirabayashi, a peace activist and one of three Japanese-Americans imprisoned for fighting curfew and internment camp orders during the Second World War, died in Edmonton on Monday, 11 years after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. He was 93.

Born in Seattle, Wash., in 1918, Mr. Hirabayashi was 23 when Japanese fighters bombed Pearl Harbor. Within weeks, the U.S. army began imposing 8 p.m. curfews for “enemy aliens” of Japanese descent along the country’s west coast.

A University of Washington student at the time, Mr. Hirabayashi was involved with the Society of Friends — better known as the Quakers — a pacifist Christian denomination. It was where he met his future wife, Susan Carnahan.

Faith may have influenced his decisions, his son said, but it was because Mr. Hirabayashi viewed himself as an American citizen that he defied the curfew. But the legal troubles truly began when he refused to board the last bus to inland internment camps, which would eventually house 112,000 Japanese immigrants and Americans of Japanese descent.

Mr. Hirabayashi turned himself over to the FBI and was jailed in May 1942. The Federal District Court of Seattle convicted him on two charges. Backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, Mr. Hirabayashi took his case to the Supreme Court, which upheld the decision as a proper exercise of the government’s war powers.

Mr. Hirabayashi was sentenced to time served plus 90 days. Since there was no money to send him to an Arizona minimum-security prison, Mr. Hirabayashi agreed to make his own way there, a letter in hand in case he was questioned. He slept in ditches along the two-week trek.

After his release, Mr. Hirabayashi got married in 1944. He was later sentenced to a year in prison for refusing to join the army, arguing that forms demanding Japanese-Americans renounce allegiance to the emperor were discriminatory. His interracial marriage made national headlines the next year when his wife gave birth to twin daughters while he was serving his sentence.

After the war, Mr. Hirabayashi returned to Seattle, where he completed a PhD in sociology. He spent eight years at universities in Beirut and Cairo before moving in September 1959 to Edmonton, where he took up a position at the University of Alberta. He became department head five years later and retired in 1982.

In February 1986, Mr. Hirabayashi returned to the Seattle courthouse, where his 1943 conviction was deemed invalid after legal historian Peter Irons discovered FBI and military intelligence showing no military reason for the exclusion order. The information had been withheld during his trial.

“The court has recognized the injustice committed against Japanese-Americans,” Mr. Hirabayashi said at the time. “I was denied my due process right of a fair hearing.”

The case was retried the next year and the conviction was overturned.

Although he may be best remembered for his legal battles, Mr. Hirabayashi’s life in Canada was marked by his ongoing support of peace and justice. He eventually became a Canadian citizen, and his academic research focused on marginalized people in developing countries and the impact of postwar industrialization.

In December 1979, the Canadian Society of Friends dispatched Mr. Hirabayashi to the U.S. embassy in Tehran, where Islamist Iranian students held 43 Americans hostage during a crisis that would last 444 days.

“We initially thought they may be politicals just using the guise of students as a front,” Mr. Hirabayashi, who visited the students four times. said at the time. “The Iranian foreign ministry wants to water the situation down. But the students are looked upon as folk heroes in Iran.”

In the 1980s, Mr. Hirabayashi became involved with the National Association of Japanese Canadians, who petitioned the federal government for redress for interning 20,000 Japanese Canadians during the war. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney formally apologized to Japanese-Canadians on Sept. 22, 1988.

Mr. Hirabayashi continued to attend weekly meetings with Edmonton’s Quaker community well into his 80s, when he began to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease. He turned down an interview request in January 2003, when he joined a local protest march against the impending U.S. invasion of Iraq.

His son, now 64, has had decades to process his father’s legacy.

“He was just a hard-working university professor. He probably worked too much, actually,” said Hirabayashi. “As a kid, when I got in trouble, I didn’t get physical punishment, I got lectures that were three or four hours long.”

Hirabayashi said his father would have preferred if he had followed his footsteps into academia. But after stints in competitive skiing and in graduate school, Hirabayashi became a professional dancer, founding Kokoro Dance with his partner, Barbara Bourget.

In 1987, he created Rage, a multi-disciplinary dance performance about his father’s life the company performed at the Canada Dance Festival.

He later renamed the piece The Believer and performed it hundreds of times, mostly in schools, and once for his dad.

“I think he slept through it,” said Hirabayashi, laughing. “He really appreciated what I was doing with it, I don’t know if he enjoyed it as a dance piece.”

[theallniter]

Jon
Thank you for posting this.
And RadioWest pals . . . i have so many stories relating to all of this.
But if I may, I'd like to tell a particularly unusual story to all of you.

I was sitting in the home of a Japanese Canadian family after the death of that family's patriarch. I had often sat at their Japanese-style table-in-the-floor and out back in their small yard where I'd never fail to marvel at the feel of the tiny space. Even though it didn't have any of the outward focal points that most of us know as 'Japanese Garden', it was that.
The family had just lit a Buddhist candle and at the moment of extinguishing the long match used in its lighting, by waving it in the air, a knock came at the door.
Everyone was put into a slightly-stunned-at-the-timing state of quietness when we all realized it was the local Canada Post van driver with Mr. Uchida's reparation cheque.

As I say, I have experienced many soulful moments with my East End friends of Japanese descent. This was one of the most heart-healing.
Bill Reiter

[Neumann Sennheiser]

Many forcibly interned Japanese -American citizens lived not far from where I live now on nearby Bainbridge Isand and many more passed through there on their way to the camps.
On February 19, 1942 President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which allowed Japanese-American citizens on the West Coast to be removed from their homes and forcibly relocated. On March 30, the first group of internees in the country was assembled on Bainbridge Island and forced to march to the Eagledale ferry landing near what is now Pritchard Park. The group numbered 272 men, women, and children, and all were allowed to bring only one suitcase and what they could carry or wear. The internees were eventually moved to the Mojave Desert in California, where they remained until after the end of World War II. About half would return to Bainbridge Island to rebuild their lives.
Now largely the enclave of the wealthy, the citizens of Bainbridge have recently erected a memorial wall inscribed with the names of the internees and the words:
"Nidoto Nai Yoni" which means "Let it not happen again."

[jon]

Two sisters, my mother and my aunt, aged 14 and 12, each lost their best friend and classmate early in 1942, while attending Queen Elizabeth school in Surrey, B.C. Their friends were Canadian citizens, born in Canada to parents who were also Canadian citizens, but all were of Japanese ancestry. They were never heard from again. In fact, with the passing of my Uncle nearly a year ago, my Aunt signed up on Facebook and checked Classmates, in hopes of finding her friend. Without luck. Over the years, my mother has also kept searching for her friend. Also without luck.

[jon]

CNN has a nice long article on him, too:
http://inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2012/01/ ... ghts-hero/