Mitsuye Endo honored posthumously with Presidential Citizens Medal

By Staff
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY

On Jan. 2, President Joe Biden awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal to 20 people, among them Mitsuye Endo. The Presidential Citizens Medal is awarded to citizens of the United States of America who have performed exemplary deeds of service for their country or their fellow citizens. It is the second-highest civilian award in the United States. The first is the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

On Jan. 2, a release from the White House on the Presidential Citizens Medal states: “In a shameful chapter in our Nation’s history, Mitsuye Endo was incarcerated alongside more than 120,000 Japanese Americans. Undaunted, she challenged the injustice and reached the Supreme Court. Her resolve allowed thousands of Japanese Americans to return home and rebuild their lives, reminding us that we are a Nation that stands for freedom for all.”

Mitsuye Endo was a woman of Japanese descent, born in Sacramento, who was incarcerated in an internment camp by the U.S. government during World War II in 1942 due to Executive Order 9066. At the time of the incarceration, Endo was 22 and working as a stenographer at the California Department of Motor Vehicles.

American-born Mitsuye Endo, at her job as a Sacramento civil servant, 1942. Courtesy of the National Archives.

She challenged the incarceration in court while she and her family were still held at Tule Lake War Relocation Center in California. The case, Ex parte Endo, took years to go through the court system. During that time, the government offered Endo and her family early release, provided that they never return to the West Coast of their home. Endo refused until her case was heard by the Supreme Court. This extended her internment for two additional years, and Endo and her family were relocated to the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah to avoid the jurisdiction of the California court.

Later, in “Courts and the Executive in Wartime: A Comparative Study of the American and British Approaches to the Internment of Citizens During World War II and Their Lessons for Today” (2019), Endo expressed, “The fact that I wanted to prove that we of Japanese ancestry were not guilty of any crime, that we were loyal American citizens, kept me from abandoning the suit.”

In December 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Endo’s case 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, President Roosevelt issued an order allowing Japanese Americans to return to the West Coast.

Endo is one of four and the only woman who challenged the constitutionality of the Japanese American incarceration and the only one to win her case. The other challengers were Gordon Hirabayashi, Min Yasui, and Fred Korematsu, whose cases were not successful. Though her case was the only successful one, Endo’s legacy is less known than those of Hirabayashi, Yasui, and Korematsu, the three of whom all have Presidential Medals of Freedom. Endo does not.

“I think that it relates in two parts: the fact that she’s a woman [and] I think it relates in part to the fact that her case hasn’t been elevated,” said Kathryn Bannai, 73, a member of Endo’s Presidential Medal of Freedom committee, speaking to NBC News in May 2024.