Government lawyers had argued that the U.S. rounded up all Japanese Americans on the West Coast because there wasn’t time to determine who was loyal and who was not.
But the document Herzig-Yoshinaga found, an early draft of a report by Lieut. Gen. John L. DeWitt to his Army superiors, said that time had not been the issue. DeWitt wrote that internments were necessary because Japanese cultural traits prevented officials from distinguishing between loyal and disloyal Japanese Americans — “it was impossible to separate the sheep from the goats.”
Herzig-Yoshinaga’s discovery played an important role in the commission’s conclusion that internment was a product of “race prejudice, war hysteria and the failure of political leadership.”
The findings led to an official government apology and reparations of $20,000 per survivor.
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