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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT Yasui at his
work desk in the 1980s. Yasui and his family
at Mt. Hood during his childhood. Yasui was
awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom
in 2015.
Thirty years after his death,
Yasui is still on the minds of policymakers. Last
year, Oregon Governor Kate Brown signed a bill
naming March 28—the day Yasui broke curfew—Minoru
Yasui Day.
And the year before that,
President Barack Obama
awarded him, posthumously,
the Presidential
Medal of Freedom.
“My father proved that
if you keep on fighting
and stay ever vigilant,
eventually there will be
social change,” Holly
said. “It takes a while to
happen. And it can also
be undone.”
This year, Holly and
her sisters are joining the
sons and daughters of
two other famous Japanese-Americans—Gordon
Hirabayashi and Fred Korematsu,
the only other
Japanese-Americans to openly and publicly resist
Proclamation 3 and internment in courts of law—
to file an amicus brief opposing President Donald
Trump’s travel ban, which the Supreme Court will
hear this fall.
Hirabayashi, born in Seattle, and Fred Korematsu,
born in Oakland, both had cases heard before
the Supreme Court pertaining to their eventual
internment. Hirabayashi, like Yasui, knew the EO
and Proclamation were on shaky legal ground.
And like his fellow activist in the city to his south,
he cleverly turned himself in to the FBI after he
violated his curfew. The only problem with his case
was that nobody wanted to enforce his sentencing.
In fact, officials wouldn’t even transport him
to his assigned camp in Arizona, so he hitchhiked
his way down there. It
was his case and his case
only that the Supreme
Court overturned.
“We need to beware of
the parallels of our history,
because civil rights
are being threatened
again,” Holly warned.
Still, she sees rays of
hope, especially when it
comes to undocumented
workers. Consider
the town of Hood River,
which Holly still sees as
her family’s collective
home base. Both before
but especially after Pearl
Harbor, the Yasui family
was frequently, openly
discriminated against.
These days, Holly said, most people are too savvy
to fall for divisive racist ideology.
“Right now, Hood River’s schools are now [heavily]
Latino,” Holly said. “[The people of Hood River
are] not turning in undocumented workers, because
the whole town would empty out and then
who would do the work?
“If we let these things happen and don’t speak
out, that really matters,” she added. “We can’t get
to that point. We need to stand up now. We need
to be ever vigilant and we need to speak out.”