Biographical Note
Jeanne Sakata
Jeanne Sakata was born in Watsonville, California, on April 8, 1954, and raised in a Japanese American farming family in the Pajaro Valley. She holds a B.A. in English literature from the University of California, Los Angeles. Sakata has been a professional actress since the early 1980s and has performed in film, television, and theater. She made her playwriting debut with Dawn's Light: The Journey of Gordon Hirabayashi in 2007.
Gordon Hirabayashi
Gordon Kiyoshi Hirabayashi was born in Seattle, Washington, on April 23, 1918. In 1942, during World War II, the United States government imposed a curfew and evacuation order for all Japanese Americans on the west coast under Executive Order 9066. Hirabayashi felt this violated his constitutional rights and defied the order. After the Japanese population was removed from Seattle, Hirabayashi turned himself into the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He was tried and convicted in the Federal District Court of Seattle. In 1943, in Hirabayashi v. United States, the United States Supreme Court upheld the conviction declaring the curfew constitutional, and Hirabayashi was sentenced to serve three months in an Arizona prison. After the war, Hirabayashi became a sociologist and taught at American University in Beirut, American University in Cairo, and the University of Alberta. In the 1980s, Peter Irons and Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga discovered evidence relevant to Hirabayashi's case that had been withheld from the Office of Naval Intelligence. In 1986 and 1987, Hirabayashi's original exclusion and curfew convictions were overturned. On January 2, 2012, he died in Edmonton, Alberta. On May 29, 2012, Barack Obama posthumously awarded Hirabayashi the Presidential Medal of Freedom.