Densho Digital Archive - Frank Emi Interview (denshovh-efrank-01-0020)

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EO: What were the effects on your parents in the camps, and all this?

FE: Truly, I don't know visibly what effect it had. They probably were very sorry to see me go there, but you know, the Japanese are very resilient, they say, "shikata ga nai," you know, that we did our thing, what we believed in, and we were taking the consequences. But they felt good that we won our case, see. And in the case of the sixty-three and the other resisters, they were all pardoned by President Truman in 1947 and given all their civil and political rights restored. So I guess we all came out of it in pretty good shape. The only drawback in their case was that some of the old-timers, strong JACL members and even their relatives ostracized them, especially in the San Jose area. Very strong JACL town and that's why some of the boys still don't want to come out of the closet and in many cases their wives are very strong in not wanting them to come out in public, all this stuff.

[Interruption]

EO: Anything anyone wants to ask, say? Do you want to say anything more?

FE: Well, let's see. Well, something, like whenever... I took a lot of civil service tests after I came back, they always have, "Have you ever been convicted of a felony?" So I'd always write a paragraph on very, as briefly as I can what happened, and it never did hinder me from being accepted. And all the... of all the people that I've talked to, you know, about our case, about the resisters, almost a hundred percent of Caucasians or any other non-Japanese group would be very supportive. They would say that if they were in our position, they would have done the same thing, they'd never be put into the army under those conditions. That's why I still can't understand why more people didn't resist out of these camps. That's a mystery to me. After all the injustice, that they figured to cap it with more injustice and they don't say anything about it... I know they felt like it was wrong, because at these meetings, almost a hundred percent would say, "It's wrong to draft us out of these camps." Yet when the time came, they wouldn't go... just like I heard at Rohwer a bunch of them was going to resist and it ended up only one person resisted. Joe... what was his last name? I forget his last name. Anyway, he was the only one that resisted and he got beat up pretty bad at the Texarkana jail, prison there.

EO: Can you just say what happened to some of the other resisters? Like in Poston and how others, what kind of sentences they got?

FE: Oh, yes.

EO: Just in terms of, like, different places?

FE: Oh yeah, another very interesting thing about the resisters' case is that in the different camps, before different judges, for the identical offense, they all got very different sentences. In Poston, the resisters were just fined one penny. They didn't see any jail time. And in the case of the Heart Mountain, they got three years. And in Minidoka, I think some of them got two years, some of them got one year and Amache, some of them got one year, some of them got two years. And in Tule Lake, identical offense, even if it was a different type of camp, they were charged with the same violation, and they were, the judge threw it out of court. He said, I forget the exact words, but he said it was a real... I can't remember his words. But he said it was a very wrong and unjust thing to prosecute these people for refusing to obey a draft law after they were put in these camps without due process. And he just threw it out of court.

EO: What does this say to you about the legal system?

FE: That the legal system is really screwed up. As much back then as it is now. [Laughs]

EO: So it's sort of who you got, right?

FE: That's right. Depends on the judge. Some judges were very just, humane, the others were just go by the letter of the law and make their own laws, in fact. Interpret their own, interpret to their way of thinking.