Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga was a Japanese American political activist who played a major role in the Japanese American redress movement.
21 Facts About Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga
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Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga was the lead researcher of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, a bipartisan federal committee appointed by Congress in 1980 to review the causes and effects of the Japanese American incarceration during World War II.
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Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga later uncovered government documents that debunked the wartime administration's claims of "military necessity" and helped compile the CWRIC's final report, Personal Justice Denied, which led to the issuance of a formal apology and reparations for former camp inmates.
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Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga contributed pivotal evidence and testimony to the Hirabayashi, Korematsu and Yasui coram nobis cases.
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Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga Abe Louise Yoshinaga was born in Sacramento, California in 1924, the fifth of six children.
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Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga was an honors student and planned to go to secretarial school after graduating.
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Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga was two months from her graduation when she was forced to leave school for the incarceration camps before receiving her diploma.
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Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga was sent to Manzanar, California with her new husband, her high school sweetheart.
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Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga was separated from her parents and siblings who were sent to Jerome, Arkansas.
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Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga gave birth to her first child in Manzanar, and later transferred to Jerome, Arkansas to visit her father before his death.
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Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga eventually divorced her husband after he was drafted into the military for World War II.
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Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga remarried and had two more children before divorcing again, and took a job as a clerical worker to support her family.
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Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga joined the staff of Jazzmobile, a non-profit organization dedicated to education through jazz music based in Harlem, which helped deepen her consciousness around race and racism in the United States.
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In 1978, she married former Army paratrooper John "Jack" Herzig and moved to Washington, DC He had fought against the Japanese during World War II and until marrying Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, knew very little about the Japanese American incarceration.
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At the prompting of her friend, author Michi Weglyn, Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga began looking into the records of the government agencies responsible for Japanese American incarceration that had recently been made available to the public in the National Archives.
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Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga would bring her purse, a lunch, and her own copy machine, and kept a detailed filing system to organize the thousands of documents she accumulated and worked with.
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Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga joined the National Council for Japanese American Redress in 1980 and contributed her archival research to NCJAR's class-action lawsuit seeking reparations from the government.
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Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga shared the copy of the "Final Report" with the CWRIC, NCJAR and redress activists.
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Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga received her high school diploma from Los Angeles High School in 1989, along with some of her other classmates.
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Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga was widowed when Jack Herzig died in 2005.
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Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga died in 2018, aged 92 years, in Torrance, California.