On November 12, The LA Local and the Japanese American National Museum will host a live staged reading of a historic Supreme Court decision, Korematsu v. United States, in Little Tokyo, using a script by the Asian American Bar Association of New York (AABANY). The case upheld the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII.
Fred Korematsu, who will be played by George Takei, was a welder from Oakland who refused to comply with Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forced removal of all persons deemed a threat to national security from the West Coast to “relocation centers” — impacting more than 125,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans.
Korematsu was arrested and jailed for refusing the order, then imprisoned for the duration of WWII. The US Supreme Court upheld his conviction in a 6-3 ruling, arguing his incarceration was justified by the extraordinary needs of wartime. In 1983, Judge Marilyn Hall Patel vacated Fred Korematsu’s conviction on the ground that the government had lied to the Supreme Court.
Read: How a Supreme Court case became a lesson in who belongs in America
As the U.S. marked 250 years of independence amid travel bans, detention centers and fights over what students can read, the Korematsu case continues to inform who is allowed to belong in America and whose exclusion the law will tolerate — in spite of the Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection.
Turning court cases into plays
The script comes from Judge Denny Chin of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Kathy Hirata Chin, who have spent nearly 20 years turning landmark Asian American legal cases into staged plays.
“These are theatrical dramatic reenactments. They are like little plays and typically they’re one hour long” said Denny Chin, the script writer.
The idea for the live case reenactments came from Inns of Court, professional organizations inspired by barristers guilds in the U.K. Chin is a member of the Federal Bar Council Inns of Court in New York and the group decided to do a reenactment of the infamous Lizzie Borden case from the 1890s in Massachusetts.
“It was fascinating, a really great teaching tool, both the research and writing of it and then the presenting of it. And then audiences, particularly lawyers who could get credit for sitting and watching this play just loved it,” said Chin.
At some point the Asian American Bar Association of New York (AABANY) approached the Chins to do something similar for the organization.
In deciding which cases to bring to life, Korematsu was an early possibility, Kathy Chin said, but they had no transcript of his original trial to work from. So instead, in 2007, AABANY staged its first trial reenactment about the trial of Minoru Yasui in Portland, Oregon in 1942 for violating a military curfew on “all persons of Japanese ancestry.”
However years later, Korematsu’s daughter, Karen, approached them at a legal conference and asked them to create a reenactment about her father.
“You don’t say no (to Karen)” Kathy Chin said.
The work took a team of about 15 people several months. They pulled together information from affidavits, a partial transcript of the Supreme Court argument and records from the proceedings that reopened his case decades later, Kathy Chin said. Together, those documents became the basis for the Korematsu case reenactment.
Incorporating the people behind the case
For the Chins, it was important to include what happened outside the courtroom when possible. Kathy Chin said they incorporated Karen’s own discovery while in high school, that the man at the center of the case she was learning about was her own father.
“We always try to bring as much as possible of a human element into the story,” Kathy Chin said.
These scripts are available to other groups because they want those stories to reach more people, not remain confined to legal conferences.
“Doing these reenactments really got me interested and passionate about Asian American legal history. And part of it is the compelling stories of the people involved. And what we saw were people of limited resources, laundry men, cooks, women suspected of being prostitutes, laborers who were willing to fight for their rights,” said Denny Chin. “They faced rampant discrimination, and yet they managed to get really good lawyering. They brought creative legal theories. And they were using our legal system, our judicial system, to stand up for themselves, to fight for their rights.”
For Kathy Chin, this history also challenges assumptions about Asian Americans as passive or unwilling to speak up. The reenactments, in her telling, make a long history of resistance visible to people who may never have known it was there.
“These were not the meek, quiet Asians that people imagined,” she said. “These people stood up for their rights and it’s remarkable.”
