40 Years Later, Ex-Internee Renews Fight for Jailed Japanese-Americans

Frank Emi is fighting for his rights. Again.

The 70-year-old retired postal worker’s latest challenge is to convince Congress that the internment that he and about 120,000 other Japanese-Americans suffered in detention camps during World War II should be redressed.

Emi’s fight is rooted in the same constitutional issues that he championed in 1943 as a founder of the Fair Play Committee, an organized draft-resistance movement among internees at the 10 detention camps established throughout the rural West.

Soft-Spoken, Reserved

The soft-spoken, reserved Emi, who lives in San Gabriel, and other leaders of that largely forgotten protest movement of the 1940s have resurfaced in the 1980s to fight for a national apology for those who were interned during the war without trial, without compensation and, they say, without regard for their constitutional rights.

Founders of the resistance movement in the camps have emerged from historical obscurity to become “spiritual leaders” for the third generation of Japanese-Americans, who have spearheaded the latest fight for reparations.

That fight will come to a head this month when Congress is scheduled to vote on the Civil Liberties Act of 1987.

The legislation would “apologize on behalf of the people of the United States for the evacuation, relocation and internment of” American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II.

It would also appropriate $1.25 billion and authorize payments of $20,000 to each of the estimated 60,000 surviving internees and finance an educational effort to inform the public about the internment “so as to prevent the recurrence of any similar event.”

Passage of the Senate’s version of the bill is virtually assured as it has already attracted 76 co-sponsors. The key vote in the House is scheduled for Thursday, the 200th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution.

That seemed a fitting date to the House leadership and the 167 House co-sponsors of the nonpartisan legislation--and to Emi, who will be at the Capitol for the vote.

Test for Democracy

“This being the year of the Constitution, we want to see if democracy really works,” said Emi, who still teaches judo at a Hollywood dojo and has the physique and looks of a man 25 years his junior.

“It has been 45 years in coming,” he said.

The internment program, authorized by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942, sought to imprison Japanese nationals living in the United States, as well as American citizens of Japanese descent, for national security reasons.

“Before the war . . . we had no fear that we would be taken away; we were Americans,” said Emi, who was born and raised in Los Angeles. “So, when the order came down, it really stunned us.”

Because Presidential Order 9066 was enforced by the military, “we didn’t think of resisting. . . . We just packed up,” Emi said. He was given three months to sell the family grocery store. It went for $1,500--what Emi said was a small fraction of its value.

After being held temporarily at the Pomona Fairgrounds, Emi and his family were shipped by train to a camp in Heart Mountain, Wyo., arriving on a cold September day in the midst of a dust storm.

Outdoor Bathing

The conditions were rustic, at best, with outdoor showers and bathing facilities. “By the time you got back to the barracks, your hair would be like icicles . . . and wet hands would stick to the door knobs,” Emi said.

While at Heart Mountain, Emi worked as a truck driver, in a tofu factory and on road construction projects. Internees were paid $16 per month for their labor. It was a gray life, with poor food and flimsy housing, but they made the best of it. Emi’s second child was born at Heart Mountain in 1943.

Then came the draft.

The War Relocation Authority, at the urging of some Japanese-Americans, developed the idea of the 442nd Battalion, a unit to be formed exclusively of Japanese-American draftees and volunteers. It went on to become the most decorated unit in the army.

And with the draft came the “Application for Leave Clearance,” a draft-registration form and its controversial Questions 27 and 28.

Sticking Points

The two questions asked whether the individual was willing to serve in the armed forces and whether he would swear “unqualified allegiance to the U.S. . . . and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor.”

“For the government to pull people out of their homes, put them in concentration camps and then try to draft them, just didn’t seem right,” Emi said. “It added insult to injury. It was just a little too much.”

So, Emi and his brother Art decided to do something about it.

They began by circulating a suggested answer to the two questions: “Under the circumstances, I cannot answer these questions.” Emi reasoned, “If we are citizens, then we cannot be interned. And if we are not citizens, we cannot be drafted.”

Emi’s efforts evolved into the Fair Play movement, which sought to fight the internment of citizens on constitutional grounds. The movement attracted hundreds to its mess-hall meetings and the ire of the government.

The Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee mounted lawsuits against the draft and internment and papered the camp with its bulletins. The movement spread to other camps, such as Poston, Ariz., and Emi sent the group’s literature to newspapers around the country.

‘Not Rabble-Rousers’

Such open dissent was unusual in the typically uniform Japanese cultural community. But Emi said, “We were not rabble-rousers. . . . It was all very businesslike.”

Still, 63 internees at Heart Mountain were eventually arrested, convicted of draft evasion and sent to prison. Hundreds more at other camps were also arrested and prosecuted.

About 4,000 Japanese-Americans were eventually drafted into, or volunteered for, the 442nd Battalion. But more than 22,000 internees became what were called the “no-no boys”--those who answered “no” to either, or both, Questions 27 and 28.

Emi and six others in the Fair Play Committee were arrested for conspiracy against the draft in December, 1943. They were convicted the next year, and Emi was sent to the federal prison at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan.

“The facilities and food were much better in prison,” Emi said. “But there was no family.”

After 18 months, the war ended and Emi’s conviction was overturned on appeal.

“If the war had lasted another two years, I would not have had a decision (on an appeal) for another two years,” Emi said. On Christmas Eve, 1947, President Harry S. Truman issued a presidential pardon to the seven Fair Play Committee members.

Joined Postal Service

After the war, Emi, like so many others, wanted to forget the past and get on with his life. He worked at odd jobs in the markets and at gardening for a few years before eventually joining the Postal Service, for which he worked 16 years before retiring in 1965.

But in the era of the civil rights movement, Viet Nam and Watergate, the children of Japanese-Americans began asking questions about the war and life in the camps. At first, many replied, “Oh, we played baseball and went fishing. . . . we just remembered the good things” and tried to forget the painful aspects, Emi said.

Redress activist Akito Maehara, 35, recalled that “it was not until I was 25 that my grandfather came to me and said, ‘I want you to know I resisted the camps.’ ” That confession helped Maehara to begin questioning the myth that most Japanese-Americans either stoically accepted internment or volunteered patriotically to fight in the 442nd Battalion.

In much the same way, Emi has been an inspiration for others in the redress movement.

“When we finally found living examples of people who went against the fable, it opened us to new horizons,” said Maehara, a third generation Japanese-American. “And we looked to them for guidance in the redress movement.”

Ones to Look Up to

“They have certainly been spiritual leaders for the younger generation to look up to,” said Ed Hatcher, administrative aide to Rep. Robert T. Matsui (D-Sacramento). Matsui has been one of the primary proponents of the Civil Liberties Act.

Emi first got involved with the National Coalition for Redress/Reparations in 1981, after being asked to speak about the Fair Play movement for a group of Japanese-American students at UCLA.

“I was just as inspired by them,” Emi said about the dedication shown by the sons and daughters of the wartime generation. “I thought, ‘This was really (our) struggle. We should be leading.’ ”

Emi now serves as spokesman for the Los Angeles chapter of the coalition and has played a key role in lobbying Congress.

However, not all Japanese-Americans are united behind the redress movement. Emi recalled discussing the topic with an older, first-generation Japanese-American, who feared that such a drive would “get white people hating us again.”

“I told her you can’t live by others’ feelings but by the law,” Emi said.

Or as Emi wrote in a Fair Play Committee Bulletin in 1943: “We . . . have been complacent and too inarticulate to the unconstitutional acts that we are now subject to. If ever there was a time or cause for decisive action, it is now.”