The man who surgically altered his eyes to resist a wartime mass incarceration order

History · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: After Pearl Harbor, Fred Korematsu refused to report to a detention camp, even undergoing plastic surgery to hide his Japanese heritage. His arrest sparked a landmark legal battle that reached the Supreme Court, exposing how the government suppressed evidence to justify the mass removal of over 120,000 people.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the U.S. government moved to isolate Japanese Americans. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, authorizing the military to remove individuals of Japanese ancestry from designated zones. While the order did not explicitly name Japanese Americans, it was clearly targeted at them. Within 14 weeks, over 120,000 people—two-thirds of whom were American citizens—were forced into detention camps across seven western states.

Fred Korematsu, a 23-year-old Japanese-American citizen living in Oakland, California, defied the order. He attempted to alter his appearance through plastic surgery and changed his name to Clyde Sarah, hoping to remain in his home. Arrested by the FBI on May 30, 1942, Korematsu agreed to let the American Civil Liberties Union use his case to challenge the constitutionality of the government's actions. However, in 1944, a divided Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the detention was a military necessity, not a racial one.

The case remained a discredited precedent until 1983, when a legal team reopened it using a coram nobis petition. They revealed that the government had intentionally suppressed intelligence reports—including those from the FBI—stating that Japanese Americans posed no actual military threat. Federal judge Marylyn Hall Patel overturned Korematsu’s conviction on November 10, 1983, clearing his name. Despite this, the original Supreme Court ruling was never formally overturned, though it has since been described by Chief Justice John Roberts as outside the scope of presidential authority.

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