Floyd Shimomura, Class of '73

Floyd Shimomura ’73 was an administrative law judge for the California Office of Administrative Hearings after serving in senior positions with the State Attorney General’s Office, State Personnel Board, and State Department of Finance. In the 1980s, he taught Contracts and Administrative Law at King Hall.

As National President of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), he played an important role in obtaining Redress for Japanese Americans who were incarcerated in internment camps during World War II. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., holds his JACL Redress papers in its permanent archives. In 1997, the Cal Aggie Alumni Association (CAAA) awarded him the Distinguished Alumni Award for his work on Redress.

After participating in the 2006 Japanese American Leadership Delegation, Floyd helped revive the JACL’s U.S.-Japan Education Committee. In 2011, he helped JACL raise over $7 million for tsunami disaster relief, visited the Tohoku area, and led JACL’s effort to provide scholarships for the children of victims. He continues to be active in JACL’s Kakehashi Project, a Japanese-American exchange program. He also serves on the selection committee for the U.S.-Japan Council’s Watanabe study abroad scholarship and on the Board of Governors of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. Recently, he helped the Historical Society of Winters create the exhibit “The Lost Japanese Community of Winters.”

Floyd and his wife Ruth have been extremely active volunteers at UC Davis, often ushering at the Mondavi Center. Floyd served as CAAA President from 2006 to 2008. They have also been generous donors, endowing a CAAA scholarship in 2007 and endowing the Shimomura Law Review Support Fund in 2023.

Could you talk about your efforts to seek Redress for Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II?

I was National President of the Japanese American Citizens League from 1982 to 1984, which was an important period during the ten-year active campaign for Redress. In 1982, I was only 34 years old, which meant I was about 20 years younger than the other leaders. I was the first person from the Sansei generation to become President. Just my age was unusual.

I went to Washington, D.C., where I testified to Congress and met with President Ronald Reagan’s domestic policy advisor in the West Wing. When I visited Tokyo and met with Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, it was only a few days before Reagan met with him. Reagan was the first U.S. President to speak before the Japanese parliament. Prime Minister Nakasone told me that Reagan was going to stay at his home, which is like the White House. He asked me if there was anything I would like him to tell the President. I said, “Tell him to sign the Redress bills.”

Ten years after Reagan left office, his files became public. A professor studying them found that the Japanese government privately lobbied President Reagan to sign the bill a few months after I talked to Prime Minister Nakasone. Personally, I don’t think I was the one who motivated the Prime Minister. But the Foreign Minister was probably against Japan getting involved in the issue. The Prime Minister was interested. None of this was public until the Presidential papers were released.

I drafted the national JACL’s resolution supporting Redress. I also wrote JACL’s legal brief for the Redress Commission before the bill went to Congress. When the legislation was introduced, I wrote a legal brief in favor of it. I used my legal skills.

How did your parents’ experience of being incarcerated in the internment camps affect you as a lawyer and judge?

That experience made me aware of the awesome power the government has over people. Most people who recognize that, and see how government can be oppressive, look for ways to sue the government to curb its excesses. They go into private practice or work for a non-profit. I looked at it and thought it would be better to be in government. If you’re in government, you can nip these things in the bud. If you go into government, your practice can be a way of doing good. The government has awesome power and a lot of money. Being in government is more efficient than litigating against it. By that point, the damage is done and you’re doing clean-up.

You’ve also done a lot of work to preserve Japanese American history. What do you wish more people knew?

I wish they knew more about the Issei story. The first generation of Japanese Americans came to the United States around the turn of the century, the early 1900s. People who think about Japanese American history tend to focus on World War II, resettlement, and Redress. They’ve largely ignored pre-World War II history. That’s 40 to 50 years, and it’s interesting legally and sociologically. Recent immigrants had no pathway to citizenship. They couldn’t vote. They couldn’t own property under state law. If you couldn’t be a citizen, you couldn’t own property. Laws prohibited marrying outside their race. If you can’t vote, buy land, or marry who you want, you’re frozen into a narrow band of things you can do.

These were extensions of restrictions placed on Black people and Native Americans. People v. Hall was a California Supreme Court case about Chinese workers in the gold fields during the Gold Rush. A white man murdered a Chinese man in a claim dispute. The only witnesses were other Chinese workers. The court found that they were not allowed to testify. At that time Native Americans were not permitted to testify, and the court decided that “Indian” must include Chinese. The restrictions affected people who were Chinese and Japanese. It was a very interesting period.

A lot of that history played out locally in Yolo County. In 1885, the Vacaville-Winters area had the third largest Japanese population in the United States, only behind San Francisco and Sacramento. Most of the Japanese were in San Francisco, and half of those were students. In 1890, there were about 4000 Japanese in San Francisco, and about 2000 were students. They were called “houseboys.” They lived in a wealthy person’s house, where they cooked, cleaned, and mowed the lawns. In the afternoons, they took classes to learn the English language and American history. They hired tutors. It was very informal.

Some of the people who had come to San Francisco earlier had published stories and pamphlets in Japan, encouraging people to come because of all the things they could learn. With their new knowledge, they could be successful when they returned to Japan. A lot decided to stay.

During the summers, the students got time off, and many of them came to Winters to make money doing farm work. Their summer jobs picking apricots led to them settling there. There were a lot of jobs in California, always a labor shortage.

There were a lot of little Japanese newspapers published in California. They lasted five to seven years. Then they would die out and new editors would come. Recently, Stanford University collected the old newspapers and digitized them. You can read them online if you read Japanese. More and more people are doing research, but they’re almost all from Japan.

Why did you choose to attend King Hall?

King Hall chose me more than me choosing King Hall. It was primarily convenience and affordability. I grew up in Winters, about 15 miles from campus. My first year, I could commute from Winters.

I applied to different law schools. I was accepted at Hastings, McGeorge, and Harvard. I didn’t really talk about being accepted to Harvard. When I was a student, it felt like it would be setting myself up for putting more pressure on myself than was already on me. In practice, it was totally irrelevant. Harvard was so expensive. To get a scholarship, my parents would have had to fill out a long financial disclosure statement. At the time, my brother was in pharmacy school at UCSF, and my two younger sisters were at UC Davis. With four people in school, my dad said no way. King Hall was a no-brainer to him.

King Hall chose me. In 1906, my grandfather came to Winters — two years before UC Davis was founded as an agricultural school. When the Law School had its first class, I was an undergrad at UC Davis. I saw the original King Hall students on campus in the temporary building by the chemistry building. We could always tell who were the law students. They all had briefcases. Most students had canvas book bags.

In that context, why go to Boston, San Francisco, or even Sacramento when a brand new law school parks 15 miles from my house? King Hall chose me. It came to me.

I had spent the year before in Japan, a farm boy in one of the biggest cities in the world. It was a jarring experience. The charm of moving to an urban area had worn off. I had also been going out with Ruth for four or five years. I didn’t want to leave her again.

It all worked out. We had a wonderful faculty. Dean Ed Barrett was a top constitutional scholar. We had Dean Daniel Dykstra and the Bodenheimers. Edgar Bodenheimer was the most learned legal scholar I ever met. He was a legal historian, and he had all of Western Civilization in his head. How Dean Barrett got him to come, I don’t know. I was lucky the law school came to me and brought a first-class faculty!

As an attorney, you’ve done different types of law. You’ve also taught at King Hall and been an administrative judge. What was your favorite job?

My favorite, in terms of most enjoyable, was being an administrative law judge. It’s like being able to go to dinner and just eat dessert. As an attorney, a lot of the work happens before you go into the courtroom. You’re always worried witnesses won’t show up or they’ll say the wrong thing. As a judge, the lawyers do all the heavy lifting. The lawyers brief you and explain all the issues to you. Making decisions is the fun part of being a judge.

Every case is different and interesting. Watching good attorneys put on a case is very entertaining. The cases that get tried are the hard cases where the facts are not that clear. It’s like watching a detective story. I always enjoyed hearings. I liked watching the witnesses and trying to figure out who was telling the truth. If I got tired, I could always say, “Hey, we’re going to take a break now.”

Once I had a case where a man was representing himself. A lot of judges don’t like that because non-lawyers don’t know how. It’s a bigger burden on the judge because we have to keep it orderly and make sure the opposing attorney doesn’t take advantage of their ignorance.

I had to explain how it works, summarizing a legal education in five minutes. At the end, I asked, “Any questions?” Usually, they said no. They usually looked like a cup when you put too much water into it.

This guy raised his hand, which was very unusual. He asked, “Do I have to call you ‘Your Honor’?” Everybody started laughing. I chuckled, but they all looked at me like they were waiting to hear what I was going to say.

I said, “No, you don’t have to call me ‘Your Honor,’ but many people have a hard time pronouncing my name. It’s easier to call me that. You can call me ‘Mr. Shimomura’ or ‘Judge.’”

“But,” I added, “I’ve never admonished anyone who did.”

What is your favorite King Hall memory?

When I was a student, there were about 160 students in our class. It was the fifth class. Women were just starting to come into the legal profession in significant numbers. About 30 to 40 students in our class were women. We had a professor who infrequently called on women. He always came to class right on time and made a theatrical entry. One day, before class started, the women said they would volunteer for all of the questions and do all of the talking that day. One of the men asked what we should do if he called on us. They said to say we lost our notes or hadn’t done the reading — just find a way to beg off.

The plan was to do this as long as it took for the professor to realize what we were doing. We did it for the whole class period, and he never caught on. It was the most amusing class because the whole class was in on the joke. It was a fun way to protest. We were making fun of him.

Another favorite memory was when Ruth and I got married in my first year. It was early April. Spring break was a week or two later. We got married on Sunday, and the next morning I had a 9:00 Property class. The professor started the class by saying, “Wonderful weather. Did anyone do anything interesting this weekend?” I tried to make myself small. Someone else told him that I had gotten married the day before. The professor said, “Floyd! What are you doing here?” Everybody laughed.

Law Review is also a favorite memory. At that time, you were invited to be on Law Review based on your first-year grades and class standing. Our year, they invited about 16 students, but a few didn’t want to do it. In our second year of Law School, we were “writers.” We were all in one big room on the second floor, with windows looking out over the courtyard. The editors had their own place.

We really got to know the other people well because we lived with them for the last two years of law school. I really enjoyed them and learned a lot from them. They were very smart. I respected all of them. A lot of them had grown up in big cities. I was still a Winters boy at heart. I learned about their experiences. That was a big, positive part of law school.

In those days, the articles were student-written and published. We learned research and citations. As editors, we checked the writers’ work. We learned a lot about legal research and writing.

My work on Law Review helped me get a job at the Attorney General’s office and also my teaching job at King Hall. I had published works to submit. I thought I was writing an article, but now it’s just a note. But now we’re ranked at 19!

You and your wife Ruth have been extremely generous to UC Davis, and particularly King Hall, as donors and volunteers. What motivates your generosity?

There are two aspects to that. First, you have to be fortunate enough to have the capacity to do it. There’s nothing wrong with making money if you do it ethically.

Ruth and I have an endowed scholarship for undergrads through the Cal Aggie Alumni Association. Our Law School endowment is also student-oriented. Outside of UC Davis, I’m on the selection committee for the U.S.-Japan Council’s Watanabe Scholarship. It’s a $10-million endowment for Japanese students to study in the U.S. and U.S. students to study in Japan. The common denominator is that I’m really interested in helping students.

I’m cynical about what adults can do. The students can do better than us. That’s what I’m betting on. Also, I had a very good experience on Law Review myself, so it’s an area that resonates with me.

Of what are you proudest?

I’m proudest of my family and particularly of my three children, who are all grown up now and have their own kids. They all went to the University of California and have good jobs. Also, they all married very good people. They had good judgment. I have four grandchildren now. They’re all wonderful. Eighty percent of the credit belongs to my wife. I’ll take some credit, but it would be very misleading to take more than twenty percent.

Do you have any advice for current law students?

When I graduated, at Commencement, a professor gave our class advice: “Do good and do well.” Everyone chuckled at the “do well.” I have a different thought on that now. If you do good, that takes up time. There’s a certain time in your life when you have the energy and time to do good. If you can also do well, then you will have the capacity to give back. I’m 75 years old now. Your energy level goes down, and mental focus becomes more difficult. Your biggest contribution is to give money to people who still have the energy and mental capacity to do good. Giving resources to students to do good and do well is the best way to give back at my age.