April 15, 2026
This guide provides additional historical context for each episode of MS NOW’s podcast Rachel Maddow Presents: Burn Order. The guide highlights overlooked stories and details, addresses omissions and errors, and recommends readings and resources for further learning. The guide also links to various Densho Encyclopedia articles that offer additional information.
Episode 1: Safecracker
Summary
While the first episode opens and closes with Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga’s adventures in the National Archives, the main focus is on Kenneth Ringle, an officer with the Office of Naval Intelligence who investigated the Japanese American community in both Hawai‘i and the continental U.S. prior to World War II. His investigation climaxed with a break-in at the Japanese consulate in Los Angeles in June of 1941. Ringle’s January 1942 report concluded that Japanese Americans posed only a minimal threat—though he did express some doubt about the Kibei—and advocated against mass removal, while also arguing that Nisei should be encouraged to contribute to the war effort. He argued that the Japanese did not trust Japanese Americans, and while they successfully recruited Americans to serve as Japanese agents, none were Japanese American. Higher-ups largely ignored Ringle’s conclusions. Advocates of forcibly removing all Japanese Americans from the West Coast thus needed a new story to replace Ringle’s “true” story.
Additional Resources
Ringle’s story in relation to Japanese Americans is told in most of the relatively recent core works on the decision to exclude Japanese Americans from the West Coast, including:
- Roger Daniels’ Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988);
- Yuji Ichioka’s Before Internment: Essays in Prewar Japanese American History (ed. Gordon H. Chang and Eiichiro Azuma; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006);
- Peter Irons’ Justice at War: The Story of the Japanese American Internment Cases (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993);
- Tetsuden Kashima’s Judgment Without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment during World War II (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002);
- Eric Muller’s American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007);
- Greg Robinson’s By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001) and A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
Ringle is also a key character in Deborah K. Lim’s “Research Report prepared for Presidential Select Committee on JACL Resolution #7 (aka The Lim Report). Ringle’s son, Ken Ringle—who is also interviewed in this episode—wrote a piece on his father’s wartime activities in the Washington Post Magazine, Dec. 6, 1981, titled “What Did You Do Before the War, Dad?”
Omissions/Errors
A key omission is a second report on Japanese Americans commissioned by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s White House that came to similar conclusions as Ringle’s. A journalist and advisor to FDR named John Franklin Carter led a secret intelligence operation at the behest of the president and recruited businessman Curtis Munson to investigate Japanese American communities. Munson’s report, concluding that “There is no Japanese ‘problem’ on the Coast,” was, like Ringle’s, ignored by higher-ups, even though FDR himself had indirectly commissioned it. For more information, see Densho Encyclopedia articles on Carter and the Munson Report.
The narrative also overstates the degree to which both Ringle and Munson vouched for the loyalty of Japanese Americans. Both excepted Kibei to some degree, with Ringle calling Kibei “those persons most dangerous to the peace and security of the United States,” and Munson writing that Kibei “are considered the most dangerous element.” Munson also wrote, “There will be the odd case of fanatical sabotage by some Japanese ‘crackpot’” and, “There are still Japanese in the United States who will tie dynamite around their waist and make a human bomb, but today they are few,” though he was likely referring to paid Japanese agents in the U.S. and not Japanese Americans.
The story told in the podcast also does not include anything about the rise in pro-Japan sentiment among large segments of the Japanese American community starting in the 1930s. Scholars such as Yuji Ichioka, Brian Masaru Hayashi, and Eiichiro Azuma have documented widespread support for the Japanese empire among both Issei and Nisei, along with the thousands of Nisei who had moved to Japan before the war where they could obtain jobs commensurate with their education, in a way that was impossible in the U.S. due to rampant racism.
The narrative also leaves out the fact that the Ringle-led raid on the Japanese consulate did in fact implicate some Japanese Americans, one of whom—Toraichi Kono, who had famously been Charlie Chaplin’s valet for many years—was arrested. None of this is to imply that Japanese Americans were “disloyal” or that the incarceration was justified, only that the story of universal “loyalty” is an oversimplification of a complicated story.
Episode 2: The Jitters
Summary
The second episode focuses on the road to the infamous Executive Order 9066, the directive that authorized the mass exclusion and subsequent incarceration of Japanese Americans on the West Coast. It tells this story largely through three key individuals: John L.DeWitt, the head of the army’s Western Defense Command; his deputy, Karl Bendetsen; and Justice Department official and director of its Alien Enemy Control Unit Edward Ennis. As Japanese submarines ramp up activity off of the West Coast—including the shelling of an oil derrick near Goleta, California—DeWitt is portrayed as “jittery” and inept, allowing the shrewd Bendetsen to implement his plan to round up all West Coast Japanese Americans without due process. After implementing the arrest and detention of selected Issei “enemy aliens” after Pearl Harbor, Ennis and the Justice Department try to prevent the mass exclusion policy to no avail. At a February 1942 meeting between War and Justice Department leaders, Ennis’s boss, Attorney General Francis Biddle, capitulates, and EO 9066 is prepared for the president’s signature.
Additional Resources
The general topic of how the Roosevelt administration came to the decision to exclude all Japanese Americans from the West Coast has been the subject of a good amount of scholarship, albeit little in the last couple of decades. Among the key early works were: Morton Grodzins’ Americans Betrayed: Politics and the Japanese Evacuation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949); Jacobus tenBroek, Edward N. Barnhart, and Floyd Matson’s Prejudice, War, and the Constitution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954); Stetson Conn’s “The Decision to Evacuate the Japanese from the Pacific Coast” (Chapter 5 of Command Decisions, ed. Kent R. Greenfield, Office of Military History, 1959). The first two books were competing volumes that both came out of the University of California’s Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study, while the last was from a historian in the army’s Office of the Chief of Military History (later the Center for Military History).
Drawing on recently declassified documents—and given access to Conn’s research material—Roger Daniels published Concentration Camps, U.S.A.: Japanese Americans and World War II (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston) in 1971, which became the standard work on the topic for decades. Later works by Peter Irons (Justice at War, cited above) and Greg Robinson (By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001) have expanded the story in various ways.
There is also an excellent biography of Bendetsen: Klancy Clark de Nevers’ The Colonel and the Pacifist: Karl Bendetsen, Perry Saito and the Incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2004). Finally, there is a recent documentary film that tells much the same story as the one told in this episode, Jon Osaki’s Alternative Facts: The Lies of Executive Order 9066 (2018, 65 minutes).
Omissions/Errors
In trying to tell a really complicated story in a simplified and compelling manner with clear heroes and villains, much inevitably gets left out or simplified. Legal historian Eric Muller’s critique of the podcast in The Densho Catalyst as well as historian Scott Kurashige’s essay on the podcast, largely focus on this episode and on these issues.
Beyond what Muller mentions in his essay, there is also the missing context of a decades long anti-Japanese movement centered in California that ties directly to the push for mass removal coming out of the West, along with near unanimous public support for harsher measures that made Bendetsen’s obsessions possible. Though these topics are mentioned later in the podcast, their absence here amplifies the idea that Bendetsen and DeWitt were mostly responsible. Beyond those Eric notes, also missing are the roles of syndicated columnist Walter Lippman and, especially, the role of the president, who ultimately was the person who issued the infamous executive order. As Greg Robinson’s work noted above shows, he was not just led down this road by subordinates as depicted in prior accounts, but Roosevelt’s own anti-Japanese prejudices and racialized thinking influenced his indifference to the mass exclusion decision.
Episode 3: One Drop
Summary
This episode largely focuses on the experiences of Japanese Americans as they are forcibly removed from their homes and sent to various detention facilities, with a focus on the Mineta family, the Ina family, and on Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga. Through various interviews, stories of having to quickly get rid of possessions, being rounded up and sent to live in converted horse stables and primitive barracks, and of family hardship and strife follow. These Japanese American stories are juxtaposed with Karl Bendetsen’s efforts to implement the mass roundup—including his insistence than anyone with one drop of Japanese blood was subject to removal—as well as Earl Warren’s diatribes against Nisei, and the continuing agitation against Japanese Americans by other groups.
Additional Resources
There are an enormous number of first-person accounts of the incarceration available today, whether in the form of oral histories, memoirs, or contemporaneous accounts. Densho’s Digital Repository includes over 1,200 video life histories, which are searchable by narrator, detention facility, or topic. Among the many camp memoirs, here is a list of both classic and recent works of particular value.
Only a handful of contemporaneous camp accounts have been published, the most informative of which include The Kikuchi Diary: Chronicle from an American Concentration Camp (edited and with an introduction by John Modell, University of Illinois Press, 1973), Morning Glory, Evening Shadow: Yamato Ichihashi and His Internment Writings, 1942-1945 (edited, annotated, and with a biographical essay by Gordon H. Chang, Stanford University Press, 1997), and two works by art historian Barbara Johns that include translations of camp diaries by Issei artists, Signs of Home: The Paintings and Wartime Diaries of Kamekichi Tokita (foreword by Stephen H. Sumida, University of Washington Press, 2011) and The Hope of Another Spring: Takuichi Fujii, Artist and Wartime Witness (University of Washington Press, 2017).
But there are many more such accounts in various archives, in particular the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Records at the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley. This archive includes the records of the Japanese American Evacuation and Resettlement Study, a Berkeley based research project that includes diaries and journals of many Nisei who worked on the project.
Omissions/Errors
While the general story in this episode is well-told, there are two related problems that crop up here. The first is the reliance on Japanese Americans who were babies/toddlers in camp or who were born after the war to talk about their families’ wartime experiences. This is something that we also see in more recent documentary films or in news reporting about the incarceration. This is the inevitable result of prioritizing new interviews regarding an event that is over eighty years in the past. The producers do include some archival interviews—particulary with Herzig-Yoshinaga, who died in 2018—many of which come from Densho’s collection.
The second issue is the apparent lack of consultation with the scholars listed here, whether as voices in the podcast or as reviewers/consultants. This is in contrast to other similar mainstream programs that include the incarceration story, such as the 2020 PBS documentary series Asian Americans or the 2018 American Public Media Reports/Smithsonian National Museum of American History podcast Order 9066, both of which rely heavily on scholars. [Disclosure: Densho provided material for both, and I was interviewed for both.] As a result, there are a number of occasions where Japanese American former incarcerees or descendants are asked to talk about topics such as the anti-Japanese movement, for instance, that they are not experts in. I think it is not fair for the producers to ask them such questions. Later episodes featuring legal scholars Lorraine Bannai and Peter Irons are notably better in the way they handle the history.
Likely as a result of both issues, a number of mostly small but avoidable errors pop up here and in other episodes. I’ll note just a couple. For example, at the 6:16 mark, the episode stated that Issei businesses and houses were seized under the Alien Enemies Act, a clear attempt to tie past to present. But while some Issei undoubtedly did lose homes or businesses as a result of their detention—heck, that happened to my own family—it was not because the properties were seized under the Alien Enemies Act. The government did not directly seize properties. But many properties were lost because families had to sell them to pay bills or because they could not pay mortgages or property taxes with the family patriarch detained. Later, alien land laws were activated and escheat proceedings launched against incarcerated Japanese Americans who would have difficulty defending themselves.
Later, at the 15:10 mark, it is stated that families being taken from “assembly centers” to War Relocation Authority administered concentration camps did not know where they were being taken, even while en route. Anyone who has perused “assembly center” newspapers knows that they generally reported on destinations beforehand, sometimes even including maps of their new concentration camp homes. Given this and how quickly information (and misinformation) spread in a detention camp setting, it is hard to believe that anyone didn’t know their WRA camp destination beforehand. This is one of several examples of conditions in camp being exaggerated, something that is common in popular accounts of the incarceration.
Episode 4: “Like an Ordinary American”
Summary
This episode tells two very different stories. The first focuses on Colorado Governor Ralph Carr, who, in vivid contrast to other Western governors, did not vilify Japanese Americans and stood up for their rights as Americans. The second part of the episode tells the story of those who challenged the curfew and exclusion orders and the incarceration, starting with Gordon Hirabayashi, a student at the University of Washington and young Oregon lawyer Min Yasui, both of whom got themselves arrested to challenge the legality of the curfew and exclusion. The story continued with the story of Fred Korematsu, whose case ultimately tested the legality of the exclusion, and then Mitsuye Endo, whose case tested the legality of the incarceration.
Additional Resources
The segment on Ralph Carr is largely based on the biography of Carr by Adam Schrager, The Principled Politician: Governor Ralph Carr and the Fight against Japanese American Internment (Fulcrum Publishing, 2008). For a different view of Carr, see Greg Robinson, The Great Unknown: Japanese American Sketches (University of Colorado Press, 2016). Carr is also profiled in the film The Untold Story of Ralph Carr and the Japanese: The Fate of 3 Japanese-Americans and the Internment (Fujisankei Communications International, Inc., 2011, 49 minutes).
The story of what has come to be called the Japanese American cases is told in Peter Irons’ Justice at War: The Story of the Japanese American Internment Cases (Oxford University Press, 1983, University of California Press, 1993), and Roger Daniels’ The Japanese American Cases: The Rule of Law in Time of War (University of Kansas Press, 2013). Hirabayshi’s story is told in Gordon K. Hirabayashi, James A. Hirabayashi, and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi’s A Principled Stand: Gordon Hirabayashi versus the United States (University of Washington Press, 2013).
Korematsu’s story is told in Lorraine K. Bannai’s Enduring Conviction: Fred Korematsu and His Quest for Justice, (University of Washington Press, 2015) and the documentary film Of Civil Wrongs and Rights: The Fred Korematsu Story (Fred Korematsu Film Project, 2000, 58 minutes). There are at least six (!) children’s books on Korematsu, the most notable of which is Laura Atkins and Stan Yogi’s Fred Korematsu Speaks Up (illustrated by Yutaka Houlette, Heyday Books, 2017).
While there is no biography of Yasui, he is the subject of the documentary film Never Give Up!: Minoru Yasui and the Fight for Justice made by his daughter, Holly Yasui (2017, 56 minutes). The story of Yasui and his illustrious family is also told in Lauren Kessler’s Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese American Family (Random House, 1993) and the film A Family Gathering by Lise Yasui and Ann Tegnell (1988–89, 30 and 60 minutes).
Due in large part to Endo’s reluctance to talk about her past, there is little on her life or case. She is one of the main characters in the graphic novel We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration by Frank Abe and Tamiko Nimura (artwork by Ross Ishikawa and Matt Sasaki, Chin Music Press, 2021), and a brief oral history with her—the only one known to exist—can be found in John Tateishi’s And Justice For All: An Oral History of the Japanese American Detention Camps (Random House, 1984, University of Washington Press, 1999).
Omissions/Errors
The main issue here is the hagiographic treatment of Carr. While his views towards Japanese Americans stand in stark contrast to other governors and pretty much all other Western politicians, his actual views are more complicated than as presented. The oft repeated claim that his welcoming of Japanese Americans cost him his political career is also questionable. That being said, there is no question that he is viewed heroically by many Japanese Americans, particularly those in Colorado, many of whom credit his stance for their decision to move there.
The treatment of the Japanese American cases is generally handled well, with good use of archival interviews of the principals, some of which comes from Densho’s archive.
Episode 5: Sheep and Goats
Summary
This episode focuses on the government’s reaction to the Supreme Court cases and the discovery that the military necessity rationale for the mass exclusion was false. It begins with Kenneth Ringle anonymously publishing a version of his report in a national magazine, leading Ennis to dig up the original report and to discover that the FBI and FCC also disclaim stories of Japanese American fifth column activity. But when he brings this information to Solicitor General Charles Fahy, Fahy decides not to disclose this to the Supreme Court. The episode then turns to the story of DeWitt’s Final Report, which included language that had to be changed before being sent to the Supreme Court, then to a discussion of the Supreme Court decisions on Korematsu and Endo, with the latter paving the way for the closing of the camps.
The episode then jumps forward thirty years to the story of Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga, a Nisei woman who had become obsessed with doing research in the National Archives about the incarceration in the 1970s, using her story to discuss changes in the Japanese American community in that time period that paved the way for the Redress Movement. After Norman Mineta, whose family incarceration experience had been introduced in Episode 3, led the effort to form the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians in 1980, Herzig-Yoshinaga was hired as its researcher. In that capacity, she discovers a copy of DeWitt’s original Final Report that had been thought destroyed (the “burn order” for all existing copies of the original report is what gives the podcast its title) and that provided concrete evidence that the report had been doctored. She also meets legal historian Peter Irons, and the two agree to work together.
Additional Resources
The main narrative of this episode largely comes from Irons’ Justice at War. There is no biography of Herzig-Yoshinaga, but she is the subject of a documentary film by Janice Tanaka titled Rebel with a Cause: The Life of Aiko Herzig Yoshinaga (2016, 82 minutes) and an article by Thomas Y. Fujita-Rony, “‘Destructive Force’: Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga’s Gendered Labor in the Japanese American Redress Movement” (Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 24.1 (2003): 38–60). Several interviews of Herzig-Yoshinaga are in Densho’s Digital Repository and are used in this episode.
There are various accounts of the 1970s transformation of the Japanese American community leading to the movement for redress and reparations, but the best account of this can be found in Alice Yang Murray’s Historical Memories of the Japanese American Internment and the Struggle for Redress (Stanford University Press, 2008). Other important works on various aspects of this time period include Karen M. Inouye’s The Long Afterlife of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration (Stanford University Press, 2016); Karen L. Ishizuka’s Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties (Foreword by Jeff Chang, Verso, 2016); Masumi Izumi’s The Rise and Fall of America’s Concentration Camp Law: Civil Liberties Debates from the Internment to McCarthyism and the Radical 1960s (Temple University Press, 2019); Mitchell T. Maki, Harry H.L. Kitano, and S. Megan Berthold’s Achieving the Impossible Dream: How Japanese Americans Obtained Redress (Forewords Robert T. Matsui and Roger Daniels, University of Illinois Press, 1999); and Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress, NCRR: The Grassroots Struggle for Japanese American Redress and Reparations (UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press, 2018).
Omissions/Errors
The main omission here is the story of the WRA and their efforts to move “loyal” Japanese Americans out of the camps and to close them as soon as possible, leaving listeners with the impression that the Endo decision was what led to the closing of the camps. There is unfortunately no definitive history of the WRA, with perhaps the most influential works being the WRA’s own history, WRA: A Story of Human Conservation (Department of the Interior, 1947) and Richard Drinnon’s scathing biography of WRA Director Dillon Myer, Keeper of Concentration Camps: Dillon S. Myer and American Racism (University of California Press, 1987). Other works that consider the role of the WRA include Greg Robinson’s A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America (Columbia University Press, 2009); Brian Masaru Hayashi’s Democratizing the Enemy: The Japanese American Internment (Princeton University Press, 2004); and Yang Murray’s book noted above.
While Aiko Herzig Yoshinaga’s story is well told, largely through her own words, the story of the Redress Movement is largely told through the eyes of Norman Mineta, which leaves out much of the early history of that movement. The works by Yang Murray, Maki, et al, and NCRR above are good places to start, as is Janice Tanaka’s documentary film on the movement, Right of Passage (Nitto Films, 2015, 128/98 minutes).
Episode 6: Reckoning
Summary
The lengthy final episode of Burn Order can be divided into two distinct segments. The first continues the story begun in the prior episode, largely through the eyes of Peter Irons. His discovery of key records in the National Archives further proves that the federal government hid pertinent information from the Supreme Court. This leads to Irons searching out the Japanese Americans who had challenged the curfew and exclusion orders, and whose cases reached the Supreme Court, leading to a recounting of the coram nobis cases that eventually saw their convictions vacated. The episode then turns to the Redress Movement, covering the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC), Mineta’s efforts to craft legislation based on the CWRIC’s recommendations, and the ultimate passing of that legislation.
The rest of the episode focuses on the legacy of the various people and issues introduced in the podcast. The episode highlights a 1982 interview with an unrepentant Karl Bendetsen, who denies involvement, then claims he was just following orders, then that none of the camps had barbed wire or guard towers. The fates of Ennis, Rowe, Ringle, and others are noted as well as those of Hirabayashi, Yasui, Korematsu and Endo. After noting the various incarceration-related stories that the podcast doesn’t cover, Maddow ends by noting current activism by Japanese Americans and how history ultimately remembers those who did the right thing.
Additional Resources
The first part of the episode again draws on Irons’ Justice at War and the various works on the Redress Movement previously mentioned. The fates of the key individuals mostly come from previously mentioned works on them.
For more information on the various topics mentioned by Maddow that the podcast does not cover, see Densho Encyclopedia articles on Japanese American military service, draft resistance, the loyalty questionnaire, martial law in Hawai‘i, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Delos Emmons, and the Munson Report.
Omissions/Errors
As with the prior segment, telling the story of Redress Movement through Mineta results in leaving a lot of things out, in particular the cathartic impact the CWRIC hearings had on the Japanese American community. Because the segment on redress ends with the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, so many important stories that followed are left out, including that of securing appropriations to actually implement the $20,000 payments (with Daniel Inouye playing the key role), the role of the Office of Redress Administration in identifying those eligible for redress, and the public education fund and subsequent public funding to support further research, commemoration, preservation, and education related to the incarceration.
The 1982 Bendetsen interview is presented as the first one he granted where he addressed his role in the exclusion and incarceration, implying that this was the first time he spoke on this topic. However, he was among the government officials who had testified before the CWRIC in 1981, at which he was similarly unrepentant and made many of the same points. A transcription of his testimony—along with the entirety of the CWRIC hearings—can be found on the National Archives website. The transcript for Bendetsen’s testimony begins here. Bendetsen did an even earlier oral history in 1972 that is archived at the Harry S. Truman Library and that includes an audio excerpt along with a full transcription.
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The Listening Guide was developed by Densho Content Director Brian Niiya, with support from Greg Robinson.
This Guide is part of a short series of Densho Catalyst posts reflecting on Burn Order. Read Brian Niiya’s review and Eric Muller’s article for more historical context, and a collective contribution featuring the opinions of various community members.
