Local community leaders and legal-rights advocates are hailing a public "confession" by the acting U.S. Solicitor General that the U.S. government wrongly suppressed evidence in the World War II conviction of two Japanese-American men who resisted internment of people of Japanese ancestry.

"Humanity improves by a notch when the government is willing to admit its mistakes," El Cerrito Mayor Ann Cheng said Wednesday.

The El Cerrito City Council has taken an active interest in the Korematsu case and legacy. In December it declared this past Jan. 30 as Fred Korematsu Day, to coincide with a new state holiday honoring Korematsu.

Korematsu, an East Bay resident whose conviction eventually was overturned and who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1988, was prosecuted during the war along with Gordon Hirabayashi for not complying with the forced removal from the West Coast of more 110,000 people of Japanese descent, most of whom were American citizens.

In a statement Tuesday, the Korematsu Institute in San Francisco said, "The 'confession of error,' posted by acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal on the (U.S. Justice) Department's web site Friday, is the first such admission of wrongdoing since the 1940s, when the Supreme Court ruled against Korematsu and Hirabayashi, two young men who challenged the incarceration and related curfew orders that compromised the civil rights of Japanese Americans."

Katyal's admission of mistakes, which coincides with Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, said in part:

By the time the cases of Gordon Hirabayashi and Fred Korematsu reached the Supreme Court, the Solicitor General had learned of a key intelligence report that undermined the rationale behind the internment. The Ringle Report, from the Office of Naval Intelligence, found that only a small percentage of Japanese Americans posed a potential security threat, and that the most dangerous were already known or in custody. But the Solicitor General did not inform the Court of the report, despite warnings from Department of Justice attorneys that failing to alert the Court “might approximate the suppression of evidence.”

Hirabayashi's nephew, Lane Hirabayashi, a professor of Asian American studies at UCLA, called Katyal's statement "indeed momentous," and Korematsu's daughter, Karen Korematsu, co-founder of the Korematsu Institute, expressed appreciation for Katyal's "remarkable stand to correct the record."

"Let this be a constant reminder of how justice for all can only be achieved if the people responsible for upholding our rights act with integrity, responsibility and honesty," she said.

Korematsu, an Oakland native, died at age 86 in 2005. Hirabayashi, 93, was born in Seattle and is retired after many years teaching sociology at the University of Alberta.

Korematsu's family operated a nursery in Oakland, part of a large number of local nurseries operated by people of Japanese ancestry before the war, including a thriving community in the north part of El Cerrito and adjoining parts of Richmond.

The City Council proclamation declaring Fred Korematsu Day said that those incarcerated during the war included "many residents of El Cerrito, individuals who were vital to the growth and economy of El Cenito, who were leaders in the nursery community, and who were among the earliest residents of El Cerrito."

"It is critical," Cheng told Patch in an email, "to use this occasion to remind people of the history so that it would not be repeated. I recently had a friend admit that she didn't know about the internment of Japanese Americans. It surprised me but I can imagine it is because this history is probably not taught outside coastal cities.

"We need to use opportunities like this 'Confession of Error' to remind and educate us all about how far we've come and where we need to go to continue meaningfully to promote equitable treatment of all regardless of ethnicity, class, immigration status, ability, gender and sexual orientation."

The statement from the Korematsu Institute quoted Lorraine Bannai, a member of Korematsu's 1983 legal team, saying, "What Katyal has done is to acknowledge out loud that the nation, at the top-most echelon, failed to uphold justice. It doesn't heal the wounds, but it's the right thing to do."