-This was a standard PBS documentary. Not mind blowing, but simply meant to just educate you on a subject. I was interested to watch this one because I watched one of those It Gets Better videos with George Takei, looked up his history, and his Wikipedia page mentioned that he was in a Japanese Interment camp….which is insane to think about. Really, what was FDR thinking?!
-This was such a fucked up moment in American history. The government took a bunch of people from the same country, most whom were now citizens, took them away from their homes, had them burn their family pictures, letters, priceless mementos, and got them all together and put them in a camp. That's incredible. That's an incredible scar on our nation's history here. And it's really a shame because WWII is known as being one of the "noble wars" (if that makes sense and is not a complete oxymoron), but with this huge scar on it, it's really tarnished forever. It sort of brings to mind the recent Presidential election which was happy and momentous, but then you think about how Prop 8 passed and that will forever tarnish a great night in American history.
-I tell you what, though, it's interesting to watch this and see how conservative and paranoid the media, press and government were. Implying that all the Japanese in America should go back to Japan and never come back, implying that every Japanese person, citizen or not, was probably working undercover against the United Staes as some kind of sleeper agent. And then to NOW see how times have changed with conservatives constantly complaining that the media is too liberal. Liberal media this and liberal media that. I guess something like this would be what they'd have in mind? A close comparison you can draw to this situation is with the current war and the way this country treats and view Muslims as if they're automatic enemies of the state. To imagine the kind of government that would then take all those people, round them up, put them in a camp (basically for safe keeping), only to be backed up by all the media outlets in the country with little to no protesting on the subject until way later…that is just something I can't even fathom. Of course there's still Fox News and other ridiculous outlets that perpetuate the same hate and fear that I saw in this film. But at least there are now checks and balance when it comes to the media. To imagine prejudice like this just being backed up. At the risk of sounding completely melodramatic, it really makes me kind of sick yo my stomach.
-"I remember our parents telling us we had to do well in school because we would have to try twice as hard to get jobs and things." Well that's a funny perspective of it. And it's ver interesting, once they got to the camps, the wages for teachers inside he camps was almost double what they would make in the public schools. So the camp was staking all the good teachers, basically. And it's incredible that the Arkansas residents actually resented the Japanese in the internment camp because they're provided food, or they're getting hospital stays, or they can go to school. But they're in a camp!! There is no comparison. Absolutely none.
-When it comes to the filmmaking, it was pretty standard PBS kind of stuff. Voice over and archive footage. I tell you what, though, it's pretty tricky to cut a bunch of archive footage together as a narrative. It's like not being around during filming, and going into something completely blind without knowing what it's about or anything that was filmed. That basically is what it is.
-"Americanism is not a matter of blood and color. Americanism has always been a matter of mind and heart." Says the guy that put them in the camps in the first place; that's FDR.
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