In 1943, Gordon Hirabayashi defied the curfew and mass removal of Japanese Americans and was subsequently convicted and imprisoned as a result. In A Principled Stand: The Story of Hirabayashi v. United States, Gordon’s brother James and nephew Lane brought together his prison diaries and voluminous wartime correspondence to tell the story of Hirabayashi v. United States, the Supreme Court case that ultimately vacated his conviction.
In this guest post, Lane Hirabayashi discusses why the first hand accounts written at the time of Gordon’s detention offer a powerful testament to his plight. Examining the nature of memory and oral history more broadly, Hirabayashi explores how diaries and letters provide a very different kind of evidence than recollections and testimony taken long after the fact.
In the mid-2000s my father, Jim, asked my aunt Susan if he could borrow the diaries and letters that Gordon had written during the war years. Jim simultaneously began to gather all of the materials that both he and Gordon had in their personal files about Gordon’s legal challenges during the 1940s and again during the 1980s. It was a large body of material—fifteen or so banker’s boxes, each of which was half- to three-quarters full—that sat for a number of years to one side of the living room in my father’s house in Mill Valley. Every time I’d visit from Southern California, typically during Christmas and summer vacations, Jim would have sets of files out and he say, “Take a look at this.” I’d sit down, read for a while, and then we’d talk about whatever Jim had put aside. Sometimes there were particular items that Jim wanted to talk about or, alternatively, specific facts or stories about our family that he wanted to relate to me. Continue reading →
University of Washington Press Blog 