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December 7, 2006
Pearl Harbor's Collateral Victims
But it's not inappropriate also to think a bit about some of the attack's collateral victims -- Japanese Americans who ended up the victims of hysterical overreaction and nativist opportunism on the West Coast.
This article in today's Oakland Tribune tells the story of one such family -- the Ochikubo family from Oakland, California. In some respects the family's story is quite typical: the dentist and his family were uprooted and sent to the Tanforan racetrack, where they lived in filthy horse stalls. They were then sent for indefinite detention behind barbed wire at the Topaz Relocation Center in the Utah desert.
In one respect, though, the Ochikubo story is different. George Ochikubo decided to fight his exclusion from the West Coast. He filed a lawsuit in the summer of 1944 seeking an injunction against his continued exclusion from the Coast. After the November 1944 election, when FDR rescinded the mass exclusion of all Japanese Americans, the military issued an individual exclusion order against the dentist (and around 10,000 others), and the lawsuit became a test of this individual (rather than mass) exclusion order. (The photo, from the Los Angeles Daily News collection at the UCLA Library, is of George Ochikubo (in the middle), with his attorney A.L. Wirin to one side and Saburo Kido, president of the Japanese American Citizens League, to the other.)
Ochikubo's lawsuit is one of the subjects of my forthcoming book from the University of North Carolina Press.
Posted by Eric at December 7, 2006 10:27 AM