Pose a Pressing Question
Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga || Activist
Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga could not let go of her pressing question about Japanese Internment camps during WWII. Her years-long crusade revealed the truth.
Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga was seventeen in 1942, when she was pulled from her high school senior class and sent to Manzanar internment camp in California. Like approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans sent to camps after the Pearl Harbor bombing, Aiko was told the risk of Japanese espionage and sabotage was so great in the massive war escalation that there wasn’t time to separate out people who might be security risks. Knowing that she and 14 classmates, also pulled out of school and interned, were not security risks, Aiko never gave up trying to answer, “Why was I not allowed to graduate from high school?”
That pressing question drove her crusade over decades until one day in the National Archives, she found a top-level government report that should have been destroyed. It unequivocally stated “it was not that there was insufficient time in which to make such a determination [about who was a security risk], it was simply a matter of facing the realities that … an exact separation of the ‘sheep from the goats’ was unfeasible.” Today, even five years after the end of Aiko’s long, good life, she is widely known as the person who discovered that blatant racism was the true reason for the internment camps.
Aiko’s discovery and subsequent years of activism catalyzed the creation and enactment of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 which provided reparations to former internees.
Selected Bibliography:
AP NEWS, Manzanar detainee who found reason for WW2 internment dies
The New York Times, Aiko Herzig Yoshinaga, Critic of Wartime Internment, Is Dead at 93
The New York Times Magazine, The Lives They Lived 2018
Politico Magazine, Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga: The Activist Who Discovered The Truth About WWII Internment