Mitsuye "Maureen" Endo Tsutsumi (Japanese: 遠藤 ミツエ,[1] May 10, 1920 – April 14, 2006) was an American woman of Japanese descent who was placed in an internment camp during World War II.[2][3] Endo filed a writ of habeas corpus that ultimately led to a United States Supreme Court ruling that the U.S. government could not continue to detain a citizen who was "concededly loyal" to the United States.[4]
Early life[edit]
Mitsuye Endo was born on May 10, 1920, in Sacramento, the second of four children of Jinshiro and Shima (Ota) Endo, Japanese immigrants. Her father worked as a fishmonger in a grocery store, her mother a housewife.[5] She grew up in an English-speaking Methodist home.[6] Her older brother Kunio, was drafted into the U.S. Army.[7] By 1940, they resided in one of the largest Japantowns in the country, a neighborhood in Sacramento, California that was home to 3,300 residents and hundreds of ethnic businesses.[8] After graduating from Sacramento High School in 1938, Endo completed secretarial school and secured a civil service position as a typist with the California State's Department of Motor Vehicles in Sacramento, as it was one of the very few professions Japanese Americans could enter at the time due to rampant discrimination.[9][10][11]
Following the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, compelling the forced evacuation and incarceration of Japanese-Americans from the West Coast in concentration camps. As a result, Endo was fired from her position as a stenographer at the California Department of Motor Vehicles.[12][13][14] She was then incarcerated, along with her entire family, first transported to the Tule Lake War Relocation Center 300 miles north of Sacramento.[14][15]
Endo met her future husband, Kenneth Tsutsumi, after she was moved to the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah.[16]
The California State Personnel Board lawsuit[edit]
In response to the Pearl Harbor attack, the California Legislature adopted Senate Concurrent Resolution 15 on January 19, 1942, which effectively barred qualified U.S.-born employees of Japanese descent from obtaining civil service employment with the State.[6] By February 27, 1942 (eight days after Executive Order 9066 was signed and issued), the California Board of Equalization as directed by the State Personnel Board (SPB) had terminated all of California's civil servants of Japanese descent, totaling over 314 employees, including Mitsuye Endo.[6] The State's cause for termination of each of its Japanese American employees was based on a blanket of false charges ranging from being a Japanese citizen to subscribing to a Japanese newspaper. On behalf of the 63 terminated employees who were eligible to file an appeal, Sumio Miyamoto, a dismissed employee, along with the Japanese American Citizens League, requested for San Francisco attorney James C. Purcell to represent them on their appeals. Purcell agreed and filed each employee's appeal. Each appellant, including Mitsuye Endo, contributed $10 to Purcell's legal fund.[6]
As the employment lawsuits against the California State Personnel Board were pending in court, Purcell’s clients were "evacuated" out of Sacramento to internment camps. Mitsuye Endo, herself was incarcerated, along with her entire family, first transported to the Sacramento Assembly Center, 10–15 miles outside of Sacramento on May 15, 1942.[4][6][17] Endo and her family were later transferred to the Tule Lake War Relocation Center 300 miles north of Sacramento in Newell, California at the Oregon border on June 19, 1942.[14][15][18]
After the closure of the Japanese Internment Camps by the U.S. government, Purcell won an order from the Attorney General's office to reinstate the wrongfully terminated employees and provide backpay for time lost between the termination and evacuation. By the end of the employment lawsuit, nearly all of the original plaintiffs, including Mitsuye Endo, had permanently resettled outside of California.[6]
Ex parte Endo[edit]
Writ[edit]
After the internment of his Japanese American clients, James Purcell decided to file suit against the detention of over 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, seeking to challenge the Administration and close the detention camps out west. Purcell sought an ‘ideal plaintiff’ to represent the lawsuit, and from the meager responses to his queries, selected Mitsuye's.[19] A Methodist, Endo had never left the United States, was a Sacramento public school graduate and did not have ties to Japan. Her brother was an active duty Army serviceman.[14] In addition, Endo was the only candidate who was willing to remain interned in the camps through the entire course of the court case.[6]
On July 13, 1942, Purcell filed a writ of habeas corpus, arguing, “If you can abrogate certain sections of the Constitution and incarcerate any person without trial or charges just because you do not like his nationality, what is to prevent from abrogating any or all of the Constitution?”.[16]
The following year Judge Michael J. Roche of the United States District Court in Northern California denied her petition. Anticipating that Endo would file an appeal, the War Relocation Authority sent an officer to offer to release her family, contingent that she and they never return to the West coast or her former home. She turned the offer down; however, some other friends and families in the camp accepted relocation east, having tired of the camp's meager provisions, the harsh, cold environments and imprisonment. Endo's refusal to leave the camps extended her internment for an additional two years.[20] Looking back at her decision to reject the opportunity to leave the internment camps, Endo wrote:
Her case continued under appeal, contrary to what the Roosevelt administration intended, and was certified to the U.S. Supreme Court for review on April 22, 1944.[4][14]
Following the filing of the writ, the government moved Endo and her family to the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah, in order to avoid the jurisdiction of the California court.[22] While she was interned in Topaz, Endo met her future husband, Kenneth Tsutsumi.[16]
Supreme Court decision[edit]
In October 1944 the U.S. Supreme Court decreed that persons of Japanese descent could not be held in confinement without proof of their disloyalty, stating that:
The Supreme Court also unambiguously stated that “the government had no legal right to confine people who had been screened and found to be loyal, but though it referred to the detention of Japanese-Americans as “racial discrimination,” it stopped short of defining the constitutional limits of wartime detention based on factors like race.”[16]
In Endo's case — Ex parte Mitsuye Endo — the court unanimously ruled on Dec. 18, 1944, that the government could not detain citizens who were loyal to the United States.
The day before the ruling, hearing that the case would go against his Executive Order 9066 Pres. Roosevelt issued an order allowing Japanese Americans to return to the West Coast. The order, Public Proclamation No. 21 was issued by Major General Henry C. Pratt of the Western Defense Command.[24]
Later life[edit]
After they were released Endo and Tsutsumi moved to Chicago, Illinois and got married on Nov. 22, 1946. Endo's parents and two sisters, Tamiko and Rayko, relocated to Chicago alongside Endo.[25] Absorbed in a community they found there of other Japanese-Americans, they settled in and raised three children.[2] She found employment as a secretary for the Mayor Edward J. Kelly's Committee on Race Relations.[2][26] They rarely revisited their time in the camps, striving to fit in. Her daughter did not learn of her involvement with the lawsuit until she was in her 20s.[27][28]
Later in life, when she was interviewed for “And Justice for All,” she marveled at how her incarceration and the subsequent court case “seemed like a dream” to her so many years later. “They felt I represented a symbolic, ‘loyal’ American,” she said in the documentary.[29] "When I think about it now — that my case went to the Supreme Court — I'm awed by it," she said. "I never believed it, that I would be the one."[16]
Endo died of cancer on April 14, 2006. She was 85.[16]
In May 2015, Senator Brian Schatz (D–Hawaii) sent a letter to President Obama recommending Endo for a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom.[30] US Representatives Doris Matsui, Mike Honda, Mark Takai, and Mark Takano also advocated that Endo should receive the honor.[31] In 2015 the California Senate issued a joint resolution to the same effect.[32]
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Overlooked No More: Mitsuye Endo, a Name Linked to Justice for Japanese-Americans
She was the lead plaintiff in a Supreme Court case that successfully challenged mass internment of American citizens during World War II.
This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
It was January 1942, and Japanese-American civil servants in California were alarmed. Within weeks of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the state government had sent an invasive questionnaire to its employees of Japanese descent.
Did they speak Japanese? Had they ever visited Japan? Were they members of any Japanese organizations?
Anti-Japanese sentiment was high, and the survey, with its accusatory tone, seemed bent on portraying the workers as untrustworthy.
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Mitsuye Endo, a 22-year-old typist with the Department of Motor Vehicles, dutifully answered the questions, and that spring she was fired, along with dozens of other Nisei, or second-generation Japanese-Americans, who worked for the state.
Although born in the United States, Nisei were accused of holding Japanese citizenship as well, a sign to many Americans of potential disloyalty. Their attending Buddhist schools and their ability to read and write Japanese raised suspicions only further.
“We were given a piece of paper saying we were suspended because we were of Japanese ancestry,” Endo said in the only interview she ever gave, to John Tateishi, for his book “And Justice for All: An Oral History of the Japanese American Detention Camps” (1984).
By then President Franklin D. Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 9066, ordering the internment of about 120,000 Japanese-Americans in camps throughout the country.
Endo, who was interned with her family, would go on to become the chief plaintiff in the only United States Supreme Court case to successfully challenge Japanese incarceration during World War II. Three similar Supreme Court cases failed, most notably Korematsu v. United States, in which the justices upheld the restrictions placed on Japanese-Americans.
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In Endo’s case — Ex parte Mitsuye Endo — the court unanimously ruled on Dec. 18, 1944, that the government could not detain citizens who were loyal to the United States.
Yet Endo, an unassuming woman, would never seek the spotlight, and by the time of the ruling she had never set foot in court.
Mitsuye Endo was born on May 10, 1920, in Sacramento, the second of four children of Jinshiro and Shima (Ota) Endo, Japanese immigrants. Her father was a salesman in a grocery store, her mother a homemaker. In the 1940s, the family lived and worked in one of the country’s largest and most vibrant Japantowns, a section of Sacramento with 3,400 residents and hundreds of businesses.
After the forced evacuation of Japanese-Americans, the Japanese American Citizens League, a national group, hired James Purcell, a San Francisco lawyer, to put together a case that would challenge the government and shutter the 10 detention camps it had opened. In looking for the ideal plaintiff to represent the group, he distributed a questionnaire to internees. In a stack of 100 or so responses, one stood out.
Endo had never visited Japan, had attended a Sacramento public school and was Protestant. To top it off, her brother had served in the Army. On paper, she was perfect.
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“They felt I represented a symbolic, ‘loyal’ American,” she said in “And Justice for All.”
The Endo family had been moved to a temporary relocation facility near Sacramento, then 300 miles north to the remote Tule Lake Segregation Center, near the Oregon border.
On July 13, 1942, Purcell filed a writ of habeas corpus, arguing, “If you can abrogate certain sections of the Constitution and incarcerate any person without trial or charges just because you do not like his nationality, what is to prevent from abrogating any or all of the Constitution?”
It took a year before Judge Michael J. Roche of the United States District Court in Northern California denied Endo’s freedom. The government, expecting Purcell would file an appeal, offered her release, but on one condition: She was not to return home.
“The top lawyer for the War Relocation Authority met with her in camp to offer her freedom in exchange for a commitment not to try to return to the forbidden area of the West Coast,” Eric Muller, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said by email. “She refused the offer.”
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Some of her friends and relatives accepted the offer and were released, but Endo remained incarcerated indefinitely while her case remained under appeal.
By this time, her immediate family had been transferred to the Central Utah Relocation Center in Topaz. They made do with meager food rations — “they gave them just any old thing — scraps here and there,” Endo’s daughter Terry DeRivera said in an interview — and Endo sometimes became ill. She remembered armed soldiers in towers watching them from on high.
“She was really afraid,” DeRivera said.
During her detainment Endo met her future husband, Kenneth Tsutsumi, who played the ukulele with friends to pass the time and entertain fellow detainees.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in her case in October 1944. That December it ruled unanimously in Endo’s favor, calling her a “concededly loyal” citizen.
The majority opinion said the government had no legal right to confine people who had been screened and found to be loyal, but though a concurring opinion by Justice Frank Murphy referred to the detention of Japanese-Americans as “racial discrimination,” the majority opinion stopped short of defining the constitutional limits of wartime detention based on factors like race.
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As Muller put it in his email, “It didn’t want, on the one hand, to approve of racial detentions, or, on the other, to hand President Roosevelt a defeat during wartime.”
In fact, the day before the court issued its ruling, the Roosevelt administration announced that Japanese-Americans could return home beginning on Jan. 1, 1945. Besides effectively closing the remaining concentration camps (though it took until the end of the year before they were entirely emptied), the Endo case has continued to be cited in matters related to the detention of United States citizens.
It was invoked in 2004, for example, in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, a Supreme Court case that ruled that United States citizens who were detained as enemy combatants were entitled to due process and could not be barred from challenging their enemy combatant status.
Despite the Supreme Court ruling citing discrimination, anti-Japanese sentiment remained pervasive on the West Coast.
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“It was not a good thing,” Endo’s daughter said. “It was a nightmare for them.”
During the war a Senate committee on Japanese resettlement released a report saying that there would be “violence and bloodshed” if internees were returned to the West Coast. It appealed to Roosevelt to keep them out of California until the end of the war.
Despite her earlier insistence on returning home, Endo decided that it wouldn’t be safe to do so. “My mom said no, she would never go back to California,” DeRivera said.
Endo and Tsutsumi moved to Chicago, where they married on Nov. 22, 1946. They raised three children in a close-knit community of Japanese-American transplants. Endo rarely spoke of the past and strove to fit in “like American apple pie,” DeRivera said.
Endo died of cancer on April 14, 2006. She was 85.
Later in life, when she was interviewed for “And Justice for All,” she marveled at how her incarceration and the subsequent court case “seemed like a dream” to her so many years later.
“When I think about it now — that my case went to the Supreme Court — I’m awed by it,” she said. “I never believed it, that I would be the one.”
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