Frank Seishi Emi was born in Los Angeles on September 23, 1916. He graduated from Long Beach Polytechnic High School and was studying to become a pharmacist at Los Angeles City College when his father was seriously injured in a car accident, causing Emi to drop out of college to run his family’s produce market in downtown Los Angeles. Just as he found great success in this business and invested approximately 25,000 dollars to expand the market, Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941 and eventually led to Executive Order 9066, urging the removal of Japanese-Americans from the West Coast. Emi and his family were thus forced to sell the family business and were held at the Pomona Assembly Center for three months before being sent to the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in September 1942. Emi died on December 1, 2010 and was the last survivor of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee.
Emi was a Japanese-American civil rights activist and leader of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee, an organization designed to protest the draft of Nisei (a U.S. citizen born to Japanese immigrant parents) from Japanese-American concentration camps during World War II. Emi believed it was unconstitutional to draft Japanese men who had already been incarcerated into military service, and advised Nisei who received draft orders to resist the call unless they were released from their respective concentration camps. In resolutely defending his stance, however, Emi was convicted of conspiracy for violating the Selective Service Act, consequently serving eighteen months in a federal penitentiary. Despite several efforts to advocate for the natural rights of Japanese-Americans, Emi and his followers were harshly criticized by the Japanese American Citizens League, an influential Japanese American civil rights organization formed in 1929, and the larger Japanese American community for many years.
Emi’s involvement in Heart Mountain’s nascent resistance movement began when he refused to answer two controversial questions, #27 and #28, on the “loyalty” questionnaire distributed at all War Relocation Authority camps. Emi stated that “under present conditions and circumstances, I am unable to answer this question,” and encouraged others to respond similarly. It was later in 1944 that Emi joined the movement which encouraged Japanese inmates to refuse the U.S. military service order during World War II until their full citizenship rights were restored. Although at the time, the Japanese-American community viewed Emi and his fellow draft resisters as “cowards” or “troublemakers,” the younger generation of Japanese-Americans in the late 1900s reevaluated their ancestors’ wartime experiences, causing the Japanese American Citizens League to understand the significance of Emi’s activism and acknowledge his legacy.
- Cynthia Jacob
Editor: Michelle Peng