Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga
Born: August 5, 1925
Died: July 18, 2018, Torrance, CA
Education: Los Angeles High School
Movies: Rabbit in the Moon
Associated Press nation wide
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, who uncovered proof that thousands of Japanese-Americans incarcerated in the United States during World War II were held not for reasons of national security but because of racism, has died at age 93.
Bruce Embrey, co-chair of the Manzanar Committee, told The Associated Press Wednesday that Herzig-Yoshinaga died July 18 at her home in the Los Angeles suburb of Torrance.
Her discovery of a 1942 document revealing the real reason that approximately 120,000 Japanese-Americans were kept in camps around the country led to formal apologies from President Ronald Reagan and others and the awarding of $20,000 each to those locked up.
Before she came across the document buried in the National Archives the government had maintained Japanese-Americans were sent to the guarded camps during the war because there was no time to determine who might be spies.
But the real reason, according to the document drafted by Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt, and uncovered by Herzig-Yoshinaga in 1982, stated incarceration was because authorities considered it “impossible to separate the sheep from the goats” when looking for spies among Japanese-Americans because of the cultural similarities of all.
“Her discovery of that original published justification, which was then later altered 180 degrees, revealed that the motivation for incarceration was not really a military necessity but outright racism,” said San Francisco attorney Dale Minami, who used it as evidence in getting wartime convictions vacated for those who refused to report to relocation camps.
Until Herzig-Yoshinaga found it, Minami said, the government believed every copy had been destroyed. He called her a pre-eminent researcher who knew her way around the National Archives perhaps better than anyone.
In 2009, Herzig-Yoshinaga published a dictionary of terms related to incarceration, where she encourages avoiding euphemisms to describe the experience of Japanese Americans during World War II such as referring to the camps as “concentration camps” instead of “internment camps,” given “internment’s” connotation with an action that is militarily justified
In 2011, she received the Spirit of Los Angeles award.
In 2016, Herzig was the subject of a documentary entitled Rebel with a Cause, by Janice D. Tanaka.
Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga died in July at the age of 93, in Torrance, California. Her death was confirmed by her daughter Lisa Furutani.
You can view her VEVO on https://youtu.be/yodUnsUseh8