WIT Life #142: Fair Play Committee
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WITLife is a periodic series written by professional Writer/Interpreter/Translator Stacy Smith (Kumamoto-ken CIR, 2000-03). She starts her day by watching Fujisankei’s newscast in Japanese, and here she shares some of the interesting tidbits and trends together with her own observations.
I don’t make a habit of reading the obituaries, but one in yesterday’s NYT caught my eye as it was entitled, “Frank Emi, Defiant World War II Internee, Dies at 94.” It told about the life of this Japanese- American who was imprisoned during the war and refused to serve when drafted in 1944. He was being held at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in the northwest Wyoming desert, and he and six other internees there formed the Fair Play Committee in response to this order. Their rally cry was “No more shikata ga nai,” which had been the prevalent attitude until that point.
This committee stated that they would serve only when their rights as American citizens were fully restored. They tried to take their case to court, but these resisters were criticized by fellow Japanese-Americans as “no-no boys.” Many instead supported the 442nd Regiment, a volunteer unit comprised of Japanese-American detainees that went on to become “one of the most highly decorated in [US] history, earning 9486 Purple Hearts and 21 Medals of Honor.”
The story of this latter group is well known, but it was the first time I had heard in detail about Emi and the Fair Play Committee, of which he was the last surviving leader. He and more than 300 other resisters from the 10 different detention camps were charged with draft evasion and sentenced to three year prison terms. Emi and six other Fair Play leaders were separately charged with “conspiracy to counsel draft evasion,” and four including him received sentences of four years which they served at the Leavenworth, KS federal penitentiary. Interestingly enough, Emi was a black-belt judo expert and after demonstrating his skills soon after arrival, he was never bothered during incarceration.
A few months after the war ended the leaders’ convictions were overturned by a federal appeals court, and they were released after serving a year and a half of their sentences. President Truman pardoned all of the resisters on Christmas Eve in 1947. Though for decades they had been a target of the Japanese American Citizens League (which had even attempted to charge them with sedition), the league formally apologized to them in 2000. Here’s another editorial memorializing him.
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