Judge A. Wallace Tashima: A Judge Who Looks Like Us
Living in the bleak barracks of a WWII concentration camp, the young Judge A. Wallace Tashima could sense “a dark atmosphere [in American society], that there was something sinister about being Japanese.”
Because all persons of Japanese ancestry were branded as “un-American” and “subversive,” Tashima grew up during a time when Japanese Americans like himself could not be conceived as judges.
Yet in becoming the first Japanese American elevated to the U.S. Court of Appeals, Judge Tashima has successfully proven otherwise and now upholds the promises of the Constitution that were once denied to him and the entire Japanese American …