Mitsuye Endo

Activist

• Born: 1920
• Birthplace: Sacramento, California
• Died: April 14, 2006
• Place of death: Chicago, Illinois

Mitsuye Endo challenged the right of the government to hold her in an internment camp during World War II. The case Ex parte Endo (1944) held that the government cannot hold a person of unquestioned loyalty. Endo’s legal fight strengthened the right of habeas corpus for all who were and are held in prisons.

Areas of achievement: Law

Early Life

Mitsuye Endo was born in Sacramento, California, in 1920. Her father worked in a grocery store, and her mother was a homemaker. She had two sisters and a brother. After high school, she became a typist for the California Department of Motor Vehicles. Her brother was drafted into the army in 1941, an event that would later make Endo stand out in the eyes of lawyer James Purcell.

Because of the severe discrimination Japanese Americans faced at the time, it was difficult to get a job. Endo claimed that her only options were to work for the state or for a Japanese firm based in the United States. Even as a typist, Endo was on shaky ground.

When Japan attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, allowing the government to ignore citizens’ rights protected by the Constitution in order to safeguard the nation. In 1942, Endo and other Japanese Americans were dismissed from their jobs with the state of California. They were told that their Japanese ancestry made them no longer fit to work for the state. They knew the injustice of their dismissal and, through the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), they hired lawyer James Purcell to take up their case.

Before they could go to trial, Endo and her family were ordered to evacuate what was now being called the Pacific Military Zone, which comprised the area west of the Cascade Mountains in Washington and Oregon and down the spine of California to the Pacific Ocean. All people of Japanese descent, citizen or not, were ordered to leave this area for what the government claimed was their own protection. They were ordered to report to relocation facilities further inland.

Life’s Work

Endo was first sent to the internment camp at Tule Lake, California, and then to Topaz in Utah. During her internment, her case continued. Initially, Endo did not want to be the face of the lawsuit, but because of her brother’s military service and because she was American-born, Purcell insisted that she was the perfect candidate to represent others who had lost their jobs and their homes. When he explained that it was for the good of everyone involved, Endo acquiesced.

When the case got to court, the US government offered to release Endo on the condition she would not return to the Pacific Military Zone. She refused, on the advice of Purcell. Purcell asserted that Endo’s loyalty to her native country was unquestionable, and that the government had no right to hold or relocate her without formally charging her with a crime. He submitted a writ of habeas corpus, a legal action that asserts the Constitution’s Sixth Amendment guarantee to a speedy trial in which specific allegations are presented. He insisted that the government charge Endo or release her.

Endo remained at Topaz for two more years before her case reached the Supreme Court. Finally, on December 18, 1944, the Court overturned a lower court decision barring Endo from a writ of habeas corpus. Since the government had nothing with which to charge Endo, they had to set her free.

Following her release, Endo moved to Chicago, where she found work as an office manager and lived a quiet life. She married Kenneth Tsutsumi, another former internee, and the couple had one son and two daughters. Endo died of cancer at the age of eighty-five in April 2006.

Significance

In the four years that the internment camps existed—camps that President Roosevelt called “concentration camps”—120,000 people of Japanese descent were held without due process of law. Ex parte Endo and similar cases, most notably Korematsu v. United States, shed light on the unconstitutional actions of the United States government. They strengthened Sixth Amendment rights to a fair and speedy trial as well as the writ of habeas corpus as a tool to guarantee those rights.

It was not until fifty years later that the government recognized its actions against Japanese Americans and those of Japanese descent as an injustice to its own people. In 1988, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, recognizing the use of the camps as unconstitutional and paying each internment victim twenty thousand dollars in restitution.

Bibliography

Daniels, Roger. Prisoners without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II. New York: Hill, 2004. Print. An explanation of the reasons for relocation as well as its historical roots and links to the present. Includes mentions of the Endo case.

Lement, Wendy Jean, and Bethany Dunakin. And Justice for Some: Exploring American Justice through Drama and Theatre. Portsmouth: Heinemann Drama, 2005. Print. Uses drama to examine historical issues, including Japanese American internment. Contains a section on the play Justice at War, which looks at the Endo case.

McClain, Charles. Asian Americans and the Law: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. Print. Examines the constitutional issues around Japanese American interment. Discusses Endo’s case.

Ng, Wendy. Japanese American Internment during World War II: A History and Reference Guide. Westport: Greenwood, 2001. Print. Includes primary documents and an examination of Japanese Americans before, during, and after the war. Written by a Japanese American. Details Endo’s case.