- Jun 17
- 4 min read
Updated: Jun 24
Contributed by Ivy Yang, Founder, Wavelet Strategy & CINGS (China Institute x Next Gen Serica) Publicity Chair
CINGS (China Institute x Next Gen Serica) is our joint next-generation leadership community with the China Institute, a global network of young professionals who are committed to building people-to-people relations between the United States and China.
A New York courtroom restaged Korematsu v. United States for AAPI Heritage Month. The most powerful testimony came from the woman who learned her own father's case from a classmate's book report.
"Fred Korematsu was one person who made a difference in the face of adversity. And so can you."
That was the line Karen Korematsu left the audience with on the evening of May 18, and a standing ovation swept through the room.
The occasion was a reenactment, "Fred Korematsu and His Fight for Justice," staged by the Appellate Division, First Department of the Supreme Court of the State of New York with the Center on Asian Americans and the Law at Fordham, for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
2025 Serica Trailblazer Honoree Kathy Hirata Chin and her husband, Judge Denny Chin, lent their voices as narrators and carried the evening's arc from persecution to vindication. They have been producing and performing court case reenactments across the United States for almost 20 years to raise awareness of past injustices and to ensure they are never repeated.
The facts are simple enough to teach a child and damning enough that the country spent four decades refusing to admit. In 1942, Executive Order 9066 authorized the removal of more than 112,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of them American citizens, into incarceration camps. There were no charges and no trials.
Fred Korematsu, a Japanese-American citizen, did not want to leave his home and job, refused to comply. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) represented him and made his case a test case to challenge the constitutionality of the government’s order.
He lost. In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the removal as "military necessity," with Justice Black writing that "hardships are part of war." Two justices dissented in terms that have outlived the majority. Justice Murphy called the ruling a descent into "the ugly abyss of racism." Justice Jackson warned that a decision endorsing racial detention would lie around "like a loaded weapon" for any future authority willing to claim an emergency. The Court did not listen, and the conviction stood.
You can learn more about Fred Korematsu’s case here in the new Foundations & Futures Multimedia resource for K-12 educators, completed recently by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center.
What the reenactment made unmistakable is that the case is also a family story. Fred's daughter Karen Korematsu grew up not knowing his father’s story. She learned her family's history in a high school classroom, where a friend gave a book report on a volume called "Concentration Camp U.S.A." that described an American citizen named Korematsu, imprisoned for his ancestry.
She went home and asked. Her father's answer was characteristically plain: what he did he thought was right, and the government was wrong. Then the silence resumed. For four decades afterward, Fred said little about the case, and Karen shared that she did not grasp, at the time, the weight of what he had carried alone.
The silence broke in the early 1980s, when the legal scholar Peter Irons came along. Irons had found government documents proving that officials had buried their own intelligence, which concluded there had been no military necessity at all. He learned something else in that conversation: Fred Korematsu had never given up hope of reopening his Supreme Court case. He simply had not known how. Irons and a new generation of Japanese American lawyers gave him the how. Using a rare writ of error coram nobis, designed to correct a verdict built on facts the original court was never shown, they brought the case back before Judge Marilyn Hall Patel. In 1983, she vacated the conviction from the bench, ruling that the military-necessity claim had rested on "unsubstantiated facts, distortions, and representations."
That could have been the end, a wrong righted and a man left in peace. Fred turned it into a beginning. Karen continues to spread awareness through the Fred T. Korematsu Institute after Fred’s passing.
The reenactment now staged in New York grew out of that work, and it has always been a labor of love. It first went up in 2017, assembled over the years. The script was pieced together from opinions, records, and oral histories. The New York staging carried that spirit: a courtroom reenactment cast of judges and lawyers who volunteered their time to keep the story being told.
The audience understood the stakes without being directly told. Among them were Chanterelle and Vera Sung, whose family runs Abacus Federal Savings, the New York Chinatown bank that became the only U.S. financial institution indicted after the 2008 crisis, a prosecution that ended in acquittal and the documentary "Abacus: Small Enough to Jail." It was the second time they had watched the reenactment. "It was equally as moving and powerful as the first time, if not more so," they said.
"In the context of current events, everything seems to be ever more relevant. We must always remember to not only stand up, but fight for what is right."
Karen Korematsu measures progress in unlikely places. Korematsu v. United States is now taught in high schools she never expected to reach. A daughter who once learned her father's name secondhand, from a classmate’s book report, has spent her life making sure the next student hears it from the start.
"We are making progress," Karen Korematsu told the room. But more is to be done. That is the work the Korematsu Institute now carries, and it runs on support.
