Interviews

1. On the Impact of the Camp Experience

2. Coming into Japanese Culture and Heritage

3. “I had no idea about studying law…”

4. “How did I end up going to law school?”

5. Opening Up Shop in Little Tokyo

6. The Other Two JA women lawyers in Los Angeles—Chiyoko Sakamoto and Madge Watai

7. On Generational Differences in JABA’s Early Years

8. The Founding of JABA: Getting Judges Appointed

9. “If I hadn’t gone to that meeting…”

10. On Hon. Edward Kakita and JABA’s early efforts

11. JABA: On Engaging Students and Community

12. On the Importance of Role Models

13. On Getting the Call from J. Anthony Kline

14. On Being a New Judge and a New Mother

15. On Justice Todd’s Daughter, Mia Doi Todd

16. On Justice Todd’s Involvement with the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center

17. On Working in the Appellate Court

(b. 1942) The first Asian American woman judge

On the Impact of the Camp Experience

I was interned with my family—first at the Santa Anita racetrack as a wee babe, then at Heart Mountain in Wyoming, and then at Tule Lake in northern California. […] I was so young at the time. I have some very limited memory of some experiences there. It’s not really that so much, but the whole environment of the family coming back and the difficult times that everyone had, and then learning more about it, and the sort of silence that prevailed about it. Except for with references to “before camp” or “after camp”—things were always in terms of “before camp” or “after camp”—people didn’t talk about the internal [sic: internment] experience very much, but you just got a sense of it, and I certainly did, and I think it had a significant impact on my worldview to have been part of that, to have been excluded just because I was of Japanese heritage. My parents and I were American citizens. So it did influence my thinking.

California concentration camps Heart Mountain Heart Mountain concentration camp identity imprisonment incarceration Santa Anita temporary detention center temporary detention centers Tule Lake concentration camp United States World War II World War II camps Wyoming

Date: July 10, 2012

Location: California, US

Interviewer: Lawrence Lan

Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum; Japanese American Bar Association

Interviewee Bio

Justice Kathryn Doi Todd was born on January 14, 1942, one month before President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, after which she and her family were interned at the Heart Mountain concentration camp in Wyoming and the Tule Lake concentration camp in northern California.

After World War II, her family returned to Los Angeles, where she grew up. Todd graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1959, and she went on to Stanford University, where she received a degree in history in 1963. She eventually went on to Loyola Law School, where she received her law degree in 1970.

Todd's legal career began when she opened up her own civil practice in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo, at a time when there were only three Japanese American women lawyers working in Los Angeles. In the mid-1970s, Todd and several other Japanese American jurists came together to found the Japanese American Bar Association (JABA), whose primary objective at its inception was to increase Japanese American representation on the bench.

In 1978, Governor Jerry Brown appointed Todd to the Los Angeles County Municipal Court bench, giving her the distinction of being the first Asian American woman judge. Three years later, in 1981, Brown elevated her to the Los Angeles County Superior Court bench. In 2000, Governor Gray Davis appointed Todd to the California Second District Court of Appeal, Division Two, where she currently serves as an Associate Justice. (July 2012)

*This is one of the main projects completed by The Nikkei Community Internship (NCI) Program intern each summer, which the Japanese American Bar Association and the Japanese American National Museum have co-hosted.