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June 5, 2006

Greg Robinson: Mitusye Endo, Great In Her Obscurity

itsuye Endo (Tsutsumi), who died two weeks ago, represents an unusual case of heroism—a hero both self-effacing and effaced by others. It was in the case of Ex parte Endo that the Supreme Court finally ruled that the government could not confine citizens whom it conceded to be loyal (although the Court dodged addressing the essential question of the government’s power to issue military orders against citizens). This case was fundamental in the trajectory of Japanese Americans, as it led to the opening of the camps and the return of the inmates to the West Coast.

On the one hand, Endo was largely disconnected from the actions connected with her name. Indeed, the fact that her case was brought at all, let alone went before the Supreme Court, was in some sense a matter of chance. Her original intent was not to challenge confinement as such, but to regain the civil service job in California from which she had been arbitrarily dismissed. Recruited as a test case by lawyer Jim Purcell, Endo either never met her lawyer or did so only on one occasion. It was Purcell who decided that the most promising way to proceed was to contest Endo’s confinement in the WRA camps; Endo was willing to serve as a plaintiff. Once her case was decided, she shied away from public scrutiny. She did not participate in the annual protests and commemorations that the Japanese American redress movement began in the 1970s (although she did produce a short oral history for John Tateishi’s 1983 anthology "And Justice for All"). Furthermore, because she won her case, she was not connected with the coram nobis petitions through which her fellow wartime litigants Gordon Hirbayashi, Minoru Yasui, and Fred Korematsu challenged their convictions, and were vindicated. Partly because she remained so private, and also no doubt partly because she was a woman and not a convenient symbol of manly self-assertion, she remained largely excluded from the pantheon of internment resister glory, or the honor roll of those who had “stood up.”

Yet, for all that her presence in the case was largely accidental, and her involvement in its preparation incidental, Endo showed at least as much courage and dedication to principle as any of the more prominent male Nisei plaintiffs. First, she came into contact with the lawyers because she was prepared to challenge her arbitrary dismissal from a California civil service job. The possession of such a job was an unusual achievement for a Nisei woman in the prewar days, when discrimination was the rule. Thus, in addition to her desire to hang on to such a prized position for herself, she was surely actuated by the sentiment that she needed to defend her rights on behalf of the larger group. After she brought her petition, Endo was removed from the Tule Lake camp to the camp at Topaz to remove her from the jurisdiction of the California court—a bit of government scullduggery that is not without some current echoes in the Padilla case. The War Relocation Authority’s chief attorney then travelled to see her and tried to persuade her not to continue, offering her an immediate “leave permit” if she would abandon the case, but Endo stuck to her principles. Endo remained in confinement for over 18 months so that the case could be brought and argued before the High Court. Even after her victory, she did not return to the West Coast and the job she had left, but instead settled permanently in Chicago (and lived and worked alongside African American colleagues, as an assistant to the city’s Human Rights Commission).

Not long ago I was discussing the wartime Supreme Court Japanese American cases with a distinguished historian, who posed a somewhat tendentious question that nevertheless zeroed in on the legacy of those cases: “Why is it that men like Gordon Hirabayashi and Minoru Yasui, who challenged Executive Order 9066 and arbitrary government power entirely on principle, have their contributions ignored, while Fred Korematsu, who challenged Executive Order 9066 in order to stay with his non-Japanese girlfriend, became renowned and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom?” I answered as best I could that these things were in part a matter of luck—Korematsu’s case turned out to be the decisive case in its long-term impact—but also of Korematsu’s willingness to stand up when the decisive time came. Fred Korematsu, once he decided to appear publicly and talk about his case after many years of silence, was mobilized over the years to speak about his experiences and to raise his voice against the treatment of Japanese Americans. An ordinary man, rather than an intellectual, he served as an eloquent symbol. It is interesting that the historian did not mention Mitsuye Endo at all in his litany. She, after all, was a classic case of an ordinary person who stuck up for principle. Was this another case of the unfortunate obscuring of Endo and her case? Or was Endo herself perhaps (to paraphrase the title of the aria from Gounod’s "La Reine de Saba") “more great in her obscurity”?

--Greg Robinson, Université du Québec à Montéal

Posted by Eric at June 5, 2006 1:16 PM

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