Hirabayashi, Gordon K. (b. 1918)

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In a remarkable show of personal courage, Seattle native Gordon Hirabayashi was one of handful of Japanese Americans nationwide to defy U.S. government curfew and "evacuation" orders in the spring of 1942. He was arrested, convicted and imprisoned, and eventually appealed his case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Although that bid was unsuccessful, the fight to overturn his conviction resumed in the 1980s, culminating in his judicial vindication.

Boyhood and Youth

Gordon K. Hirabayashi was born in 1918 in Auburn, Washington, where his parents ran a vegetable store. In 1937, Hirabayashi entered the University of Washington and participated in many student organizations, including religious groups and the YMCA. He also joined the Japanese American Citizens League. Over the next few years he became a religious pacifist.

At the outbreak of World War II in December 1941, Hirabayashi, then a college senior, applied for and was granted conscientious objector status by the U.S. government.

Two months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945) signed Executive Order 9066, setting in motion the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans on the U.S. West Coast. More than 110,000 people, two thirds of them American citizens, were removed from their homes and neighborhoods and imprisoned in 10 camps located in isolated inland areas.

Principled Resistance

In keeping with his deeply held beliefs, Hirabayashi could not accept the injustices of the curfew and the eventual removal and imprisonment of Japanese Americans. He viewed these as gross violations of his constitutional rights.

"As an American citizen," he told scholar Ronald Takaki, "I wanted to uphold the principles of the Constitution, and the curfew and evacuation orders which singled out a group on the basis of ethnicity violated them. It was not acceptable to be less than a full citizen in a white man’s country."

Hirabayashi joined the Quaker-run American Friends Service Committee, helping Japanese American families whose fathers had been imprisoned immediately after Pearl Harbor. The day after Japanese Americans were removed from Seattle for a temporary prison camp at the Puyallup Fair Grounds, Hirabayashi remained in the city, defying the military order that had required "all persons of Japanese ancestry" to register for the "evacuation."

Case Reaches Supreme Court

He turned himself in to the FBI, and was tried and convicted in October 1942. He went to prison for 90 days. His case before the Supreme Court, Hirabayashi v. United States (1943), was the first challenge to the government’s wartime curfew and expulsion of Japanese Americans. The Court ruled against him 9-0.

After the war, Hirabayashi resumed his education, receiving B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in sociology from the University of Washington. In 1959, he joined the faculty at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, where he was sociology chair beginning in 1970. He retired in 1983.

In the 1980s, 40 years after his wartime convictions, Hirabayshi challenged the decisions with a little used legal recourse called coram nobis, which allowed for judicial review of a judgment based on factual error not known to the court at the time the judgment was delivered.

Researchers and legal scholars had uncovered irrefutable evidence that the government had withheld information from the Office of Naval Intelligence, contradicting the Army’s claim of widespread disloyalty among Japanese Americans. This was the so-called "military necessity" rationale for the evacuation. In fact, not one Japanese American was ever convicted of sabotage or espionage during the entire war.

He Made History

Hirabayashi’s exclusion and curfew convictions were overturned in 1986 and 1987 respectively. Although the Supreme Court rulings remain intact because the government chose not to appeal the reversals, his legal victories made history in disproving the government’s contention of disloyalty.

Hirabayashi now resides in Edmonton, Alberta, where he is professor emeritus in sociology at the University of Alberta.

Sources:
Roger Daniels, Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988); Peter Irons, Justice at War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Washington Comes of Age: The State in the National Experience ed. by David H. Stratton (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1992); Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1989).

By David Takami, February 17, 1999

Gordon Hirabayashi (b. 1918)
Courtesy Gordon K. Hirabayashi