Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Mitsuye Endo

Episode Date: July 3, 2019

In today's short stuff, we look at another amazing woman who has all but been ignored by history. The story of Mitsuye Endo.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-Pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Just a Skyline drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey and welcome to Short Stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there's Jerry over there, so this is Short Stuff because it's shorter. That's right and this is one of my favorite kinds of short stuff, kind of tailor made for a short stuff. And you have a little bit of information about a great person in history who never got their due, but there's not a lot much more known about them.

So you can talk about her in this case in 12 minutes or so. Her and him. Yeah, good point. So it'll be 13 minutes. That's right and this is the story on the her part of Mitsuyi Endo. Nicely done. I think so. I'm pretty sure too.

Mitsuyi Endo was born in Sacramento. Where was she born? Sacramento, California, which is an important point here, Chuck, because from being born in Sacramento, California in 1920, she was an American citizen, natural born. That's right. She was one of four kids to Japanese immigrants and got a job working for the government. She went to secretary school and then worked as a secretary for the Department of Employment. Natural-blooded, born American, working for the state government.

Right. And she was working for the state government in December of 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. And the sentiment toward the Japanese in America turned sharply at that point. So much so that I believe the next year, the president at the time, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, issued an executive order called Executive Order 9066, which we have recorded on before. That's right. We did a whole episode on this.

But Executive Order 9066 basically said, anyone of Italian American, German American, or Japanese American ancestry is basically fair game to have their constitutional and civil rights utterly stripped from them during this crisis of wartime just because we're not sure if they might do something hinky to disrupt America's wartime effort. Right. So within just a few months of December 7th, 1941, the United States dismissed all Japanese American state employees, which included Mitsui Endo, hundreds of people affected. And 63 of those people were brave enough to get together and challenge the firings.

And they had a little backing by the Japanese American Citizens League. And they got together and they hired a very cool dude, an attorney named James C. Purcell. Yeah. Who was not at all Japanese, had no Japanese ancestry in him whatsoever. He just saw that this was not right. He saw something that wasn't right. And he decided to take on this case. And so being summarily fired because you are of Japanese ancestry, not a Japanese immigrant,

but like an American born person of Japanese ancestry, that's bad enough. But under this executive order and this kind of wartime hysteria, things got way worse for Japanese Americans, especially ones on the West Coast. Because part of this executive order was basically like, hey military, do what you need to do and the military said, well, we figure we should probably clear the West Coast of anybody like that. We're going to forcibly remove Japanese Americans from their homes and eventually into internment camps.

And that's the episode we did. Yeah. Japanese internment, it was a good one. So they're basically incarcerated. She and her family, and we should point out that her brother was serving in the U.S. Army. That's a huge point. It is a huge point. Her family was moved.

She was moved a couple of times. They were at Tule Lake at one point, which is a very famous internment camp that I think is still around. It's like a living museum. But eventually she was separated from her family. They started by trying to keep families together and then they just stopped doing that. People like Mitsuyendo ended up being separated from her family, forced into a prison. It was a detainment detention center, if that sounds familiar.

Yeah, exactly. So Purcell's on the case. He's got to be in his bonnet to help these people out, and he's trying to build a case. And what he needs is to find somebody, just one person, who will step forward and who is brave enough to challenge their incarceration through a habeas corpus petition, which is to say that basically, hey, I shouldn't be incarcerated, and I'm officially legally challenging my incarceration. Right.

It means bring me the body. It's part of the Magna Carta, I think, where it basically says, bring the prisoner to me, the judge, and let me decide if they're being held illegally or not. We did an episode on that, too, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, we definitely did something at some point on habeas corpus. So Mitsuyendo was a perfect test case, her challenge case for this, to Purcell, because she was a Methodist. She was a citizen, a natural born citizen of the US.

Her brother was in the army, and she'd never even been to Japan in her entire life. But there's a big part of this, like, despite her just perfect presentation for a case like this, you had to convince her, too. And part of Japanese culture is you don't stand out, number one. You certainly don't stand out by making trouble for the authorities. So it was extraordinarily brave when she finally agreed to be the test case for all Japanese Americans who were being unconstitutionally treated by the US. Yeah, and that was what did it when he said, hey, listen, this is not for you.

This is for everyone. And still slightly reluctant, she agreed and saw the bigger picture. And we're going to talk about the rest of her story and Purcell's right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikala, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life.

In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, cancelled marriages, K-pop? But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology,

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Okay, Chuck, so Mitsui Endo has agreed to have her case taken by Purcell on to basically challenge all of executive order 9066 and the constitutionality of it. Right. So I think in pretty short order, this case was people in government knew what was going on on the federal level, and they found out who she was and what her story was. And I think early on, they were kind of like, ooh, this probably doesn't look good for us. Wait, she's a Methodist? Oh, God.

This doesn't look great for us, so you know what, let her out. She'll be fine and just let her out, because I think we probably did the wrong thing here. And she said, no. And I guess also at Purcell's urging, she stayed interned and said, this is a societal issue. There's something much larger at play, and I want to carry this all the way to the top in the court system. Yeah, because the government said, if you just drop this and go away, we'll let you

out specifically. And she said, nope, that's pretty cool, man. So she said, no, and they kept the case up all the way to the Supreme Court. Supreme Court heard it and just ruled unanimously that, no, this is totally unconstitutional what's happened to her. It wasn't so much that the Supreme Court case, their decision in the ENDO case, that it closed the Japanese internment camps, Japanese American internment camps. That wasn't what happened.

What happened was it produced the pressure that convinced Roosevelt to shut down the internment camps. Yeah, this is fairly cowardly, I think. In the end, they did the quote unquote right thing, but it was only because this was looming. Apparently there was inside word, and they got tipped off that like, hey, the Supreme Court is going to come down against you, Roosevelt, basically. And so the day after, I'm sorry, the day before the Supreme Court handed down their decision, Roosevelt came out and they said, oh, you know what, we're just going to end this internment

thing right here. Right. And then the next day, the Supreme Court made public their decision in ENDO, which was, yeah, cowardly, I think it's a pretty good word about it. But there's no way of getting around that it was the ENDO case that was the pressure that closed the internment camps. And so much so that there's a law professor named Amanda Tyler, who's an expert on the case.

She said that she's interviewed survivors of the Japanese internment camps, Japanese-American internment camps, sorry, who consider Purcell as they refer to him as the man who set us free. Pretty amazing. It is pretty amazing. And ENDO herself is very much regarded as a hero from this too, but she kept such a low profile that she, her own daughter didn't even know the impact that she'd had until her daughter was well into her 20s.

Yeah. She eventually made her way to Chicago after all this washed over. She worked as a secretary for the Mayor's Committee on Race Relations. A couple of years after that, married a man named Kenneth Tsutsumi, and she had met him in an internment camp. Like, tell me, this isn't a movie waiting to be made. For sure. They went on to have three kids and she kept a pretty low profile after that.

Like you said, was not a braggart, but it was a big deal, and I think as this has come out more in recent years, she's definitely gotten her due in certain corners. I wish the story was out wider. That's one reason we're doing this, but she lived in Chicago for the rest of her life, eventually very sadly died of cancer in 2006, and Purcell kept practicing law, right? Into his 80s, as a matter of fact. Yeah. That's great.

This is noteworthy still today is that Law Professor Amanda Tyler points out, because there's an ongoing debate over whether the executive, the president, and the executive branch has ultimately absolute power when it comes to matters of national security, especially during wartime, or if the courts still have a check, as the Constitution suggests that they do, over the executive's actions, no matter what it is, or no matter what the situation is, that the executive can't be absolutely right, no matter what, and unquestioned by the court. Yes, and I think by Constitution suggests you mean the Constitution clearly lays out

in demands. Right. Well, it depends on your interpretation, right? Yeah, I guess so. So I guess that's it for short stuff. Again Chuck, nice selection, I think Mitsui Endo needs a parade every year in her honor. Agreed. Thanks a lot for joining us, hope you enjoyed it, until next time, short stuff, adios.