Mitsuye Tsutsumi


While interned in a relocation camp for Japanese-Americans in 1942, Mitsuye Tsutsumi filed a court petition arguing that detention of someone who had declared allegiance to the United States was illegal.

In a unanimous decision two years later, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed, helping to bring an end to the camps across the West that had imprisoned more than 100,000 people during World War II.

Mrs. Tsutsumi, then known by her maiden name, Endo, had spent three years in two such camps. She spent the rest of her life as a mother and secretary in Chicago, but scholars and advocates of Japanese-Americans never forgot her early achievements.

"What the Endo case did was prompt the government to make a decision earlier than it might have about closing down the camps," said John Tateishi, executive director of the Japanese American Citizens League and author of "And Justice for All: An Oral History of the Japanese American Detention Camps."

"It was really an important case and speaks to what was going on during the war years so far as the treatment of the Japanese-American population."

Mrs. Tsutsumi, 85, who spent the rest of her life shunning the spotlight while raising a family, died of cancer on Friday, April 14, at a Willowbrook nursing home.

According to news reports when the Supreme Court ruled on her case, Justice Frank Murphy called the detentions "another example of the unconstitutional resort to racism inherent in the entire evacuation program."

"Racial discrimination of this nature bears no reasonable relation to military necessity and is utterly foreign to the ideals and traditions of the American people," he wrote.

Terry DeRivera said she didn't even know her mother had played such a significant role in American history until she was in her 20s. Mrs. Tsutsumi didn't talk much about the case. She didn't resist the discussion when questioned but didn't bring it up often or provide a lot of details, her daughter said.

"She was very calm about what happened to her," her daughter said. "We would get angry because they were U.S. citizens and for this to happen to an American is wrong, but she never did. She was not bitter."

Mrs. Tsutsumi was born in Sacramento in 1920 to parents who had emigrated from Japan. After graduating from high school, she attended secretarial school and went to work for the state of California as a typist, her daughter said.

In 1942, even though her brother was in the Army, Mrs. Tsutsumi and her family were sent to the Tule Lake War Relocation Center and eventually transferred to another camp in Topaz, Utah. DeRivera said her mother told stories of living in barracks surrounded by barbed wire and under the watch of armed guards.

Tateishi said Mrs. Tsutsumi filed the petition with the help of a civil rights attorney whom she never met. In the petition, she argued that there were no grounds to hold a citizen who had declared loyalty to the United States in questionnaires provided to Japanese-Americans by the government.

In the camp, Mrs. Tsutsumi met her husband, Kenneth, with whom she moved to Chicago after the war when offered a job with the mayor's committee on human relations. She worked as an officer manager, according to a 1947 Tribune article.

She and her husband raised three children in Lincoln Park and later Rogers Park. After her husband died in 1988, she moved to her daughter's home in the south suburbs.

"It's a terrible thing that [this country] did something like this," her daughter said. "These were citizens of the U.S.

"I'm very proud of what she did for us Japanese-Americans."

Mrs. Tsutsumi also is survived by a son, Wayne; another daughter, Wendy Weiner; a sister, Grace Yamamoto; and eight grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at 1:30 p.m. Saturday in Hallowell and James Funeral Home, 1025 W. 55th St., Countryside.


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