Kenji Ito, an attorney and civic leader who in 1942 successfully fought charges that he was a spy for Japan and who later became the first Japanese American admitted to the State Bar of California after World War II, died Sunday at his Alhambra home. He was 94 and had Alzheimer's disease.
Born in Seattle, Ito was admitted to the California bar in 1945 and practiced law in Los Angeles for more than 50 years. He served five terms as president of the Southern California Japanese Chamber of Commerce and helped found the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in Little Tokyo.
A skillful debater who earned his law degree at the University of Washington in 1935, Ito was admitted to the Washington state bar in 1936. That year he earned a spot on a yearlong debate tour sponsored by the university that took him around the world, including stops in Australia, China, Japan, Egypt and England.
After returning to Seattle in 1937, he was frequently invited by civic groups to debate the Sino-Japanese War, which had begun with the Japanese conquest of Manchuria in 1931. The United States had taken China's side in the hostilities.
Ito agreed to take a rhetorical position in favor of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria "because I felt that both sides of the equation should be presented in a matter as important as this, and certainly there was nobody to defend or to even set forth Japan's position in those days," he told the Pacific Citizen, a publication of the Japanese American Citizens League, in 1985.
"I was expressing myself as an American -- of Japanese ancestry, of course -- who knew something about Japan and Japanese history," he said.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Ito's role in the debates became the foundation of a government case alleging that he was a subversive who had made 200 pro-Japanese speeches over a three-year period. He was arrested Dec. 8 on charges that he was an unregistered agent for Japan and was held in lieu of $25,000 bond.
He was one of hundreds of people of Japanese descent who were rounded up by the FBI in the weeks after Pearl Harbor and placed in custody "largely on the theory of guilt by association," said University of Cincinnati emeritus professor Roger Daniels, who has written extensively about Japanese Americans during World War II. Unlike Ito, most of those arrested were Japanese immigrants; none was ever found guilty of espionage or sabotage.
