The internment problem did not end with camp closures or the armistice with Japan, which was signed aboard the U.S.S. Missouri on August 15, 1945. Japanese Americans encountered a struggle in the marketplace as well as on the street. Returning without homes, businesses, or cash, many were destitute. They were also confronted by a Caucasian mindset that anyone with stereotypically Oriental features and a Japanese surname was suspect and therefore open game for prejudicial actions and harassment. In addition to the internees' fears and disillusion, families also faced the return of veterans, who reunited with their families at internment camps as though they were visiting prison inmates. Officially expunged September 4, 1975, as a gesture to outcries from internees, their children, Asian-American legislators, and other victims of racist injustice, Executive Order 9066 appeared to be a dead issue thirty-three years after the fact.
It was not until 1981 that Attorney Peter Irons began a rectifying process. Following disclosure of government documents attesting to the fact that Roosevelt's cabinet and the FBI were well aware that Japanese Americans had posed no threat, Irons pressed for national acknowledgement that the internment camps were a blatant denial of civil rights. The suppression of evidence exonerating internees from suspicion of disloyalty, espionage, or sabotage brought Gordon Hirabayashi back to the same courtroom, only this time flanked by sixty lawyers and Japanese-American supporters. Charging the U.S. government with misconduct and proclaiming that "ancestry is not a crime," Hirabayashi held firm to his rights until February 10, 1986, when he was cleared of guilt for refusing curfew and internment.
