Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga (August 5, 1925 – July 18, 2018) was a Japanese American political activist who played a major role in the Japanese American redress movement. She was the lead researcher of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC), a bipartisan federal committee appointed by Congress in 1980 to review the causes and effects of the Japanese American incarceration during World War II. As a young woman, Herzig-Yoshinaga was confined in the Manzanar Concentration Camp in California, the Jerome War Relocation Center in Arkansas, and the Rohwer War Relocation Center, which is also in Arkansas. She later uncovered government documents that debunked the wartime administration's claims of "military necessity" and helped compile the CWRIC's final report, Personal Justice Denied, which led to the issuance of a formal apology and reparations for former camp inmates. She also contributed pivotal evidence and testimony to the Hirabayashi, Korematsu and Yasui coram nobis cases. Early years Aiko Abe Louise Yoshinaga was born in Sacramento, California in 1924, the fifth of six children. Her parents, Sanji Yoshinaga and Shigeru Kinuwaki, immigrated from the Kumamoto Prefecture on Japan's island Kyushu. In 1933, Yoshinaga's family moved to Los Angeles, where her father worked as a hotel manager. Incarceration Herzig-Yoshinaga was a high school senior at Los Angeles High School in Los Angeles when President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized military commanders to designate areas from which "any or all persons may be excluded." This action led to the imprisonment of over 110,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast and Hawai'i under the justifications of "military necessity" and "national security" as the United States became involved in World War II. Herzig-Yoshinaga was an honors student and planned to go to secretarial school after graduating. She was two months from her graduation when she was forced to leave school for the incarceration camps before receiving her diploma. She recalls her principal saying when he informed her and the other Japanese American students at her school of the situation, "You don't deserve to get your high school diplomas because your people bombed Pearl Harbor." Herzig-Yoshinaga was sent to Manzanar, California with her new husband, her high school sweetheart. They had eloped in order to prevent being sent to separate detention centers. She was separated from her parents and siblings who were sent to Jerome, Arkansas. She gave birth to her first child in Manzanar, and