Emma Yanai is from Los Angeles, California. At Yale University, she is studying East Asian Studies and American Studies with a minor in Japanese Advanced Language Study. She has received an Academic Excellence Award for Korean language and a Richter Summer Fellowship for research on memorialization efforts in South Korea and Japan. She was also selected for a Daniel Merriman - Ted Besinger III Fellowship for intensive language study in Korea and a Richard U. Light Fellowship for intensive language study in Japan. She is headfirst-year counselor for her residential college, a Japanese tutor, a writer for Dwight Hall's alumni newsletter, and a student in the Fields Program for advanced language study at Yale. Her thesis, “The Beast and the Bomb: Godzilla’s Evolution Through Cinematic History” discusses the depictions of nuclear weaponry in the Godzilla franchise and how contemporary American productions diverge from the explicit anti-proliferation that the original Japanese films endorsed.

As a Marshall Scholar, Emma will pursue an MA in Postcolonial Studies and Korean Intensive Language at The School of Oriental and African Studies. She hopes to use her career to expose what is currently obscured in our tellings of history and to uplift historically marginalized voices.