A search for truth brings justice to WWII Japanese American internees

Every morning, she climbed the wide marble steps of the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga was not trained for this work. She was a homemaker, not a historian. But she had a lifetime of simmering anger and unanswered questions.

By lamplight in the grand reading room, she scoured thousands of documents, inventing her own organizing system to keep track of the information she found. She brought home so many copies that she commandeered a bathtub and used it as a filing cabinet.

Eventually, after years of labor, she happened upon files that would help correct injustices committed during one of the darkest periods of American history — and of her own.

These days, she works at the dining room table at her home in Gardena.

Now 86, she is busy finishing a book of first-person remembrances of the Japanese American experience in World War II. Asked about her deadline to finish the book, she lets out a low laugh.

"Yesterday," she says.

Her home is quiet and light-filled, with Japanese screens and a budding fuchsia orchid. Scattered about are bankers boxes packed with files.

She sits surrounded by papers, reading and taking notes until long after the sun goes down. Behind her, a black-and-white photograph hangs on the wall — a reminder of what drives her.

It shows a dust-blown desert and rows of wooden barracks....