By Pat Evenson-Brady
It was March 28, 1942, and Minoru Yasui was trying to get arrested in Portland, Oregon.
Three months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt had issued Executive Order 9066 which authorized military action (including curfews and incarceration) against US residents to prevent imagined sabotage.
On the West Coast, a curfew was imposed on Italian, German and Japanese nationals AND Japanese Americans who were US citizens. Min Yasui, born and raised in Hood River, needed a “test case”: an arrest and a trial to affirm that the action against American citizens, and based on race, was unconstitutional. A graduate of the University of Oregon law school, a member of Oregon State Bar and a commissioned second lieutenant in the US Army Reserve, Min had sworn to support the US Constitution.
After walking the streets after curfew unsuccessfully, he finally went to a police station and asked to be arrested for defying the curfew. After consideration, the police did arrest him and throw him into the drunk tank.
At Yasui’s trial, the judge found that the military orders were unconstitutional when applied to US citizens, based on the 14th and 5th amendments to the Constitution. However, he also found that Min had annulled his American citizenship by working for the Japanese consulate in Chicago before Pearl Harbor and was therefore an enemy alien to whom the law applied. Min spent the next nine months at the Multnomah County Jail until his appeal reached the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ruled that while Yasui did not lose his citizenship, his rights could be overridden, based on his race, in the time of war. He was released from jail after that decision, and sent to the Minidoka Relocation Center (a concentration camp) in Idaho until the end of the war.
After the war, he moved to Denver, established a law practice and continued to fight for civil rights for the rest of his life.
Minoru Yasui’s ashes are buried, as he requested, in Idlewild Cemetery in Hood River beside the memorial marker for his parents. His father was Masuo Yasui, one of the owners of the Yasui Brothers Store, on the present location of Celilo Restaurant.
President Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, to Min Yasui posthumously in 2015, for challenging the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and leadership in human rights. In 2016, the Oregon Legislature unanimously enacted a statute designating March 28 as Minoru Yasui Day in perpetuity.