(NAME-MCE) When Being Japanese Meant Losing Freedom

[Bill Howe]

courant.com/entertainment/movies/hc-postonrev.artmar07,0,5868812.story
Courant.com FILM REVIEW ***** When Being Japanese Meant Losing Freedom "Passing
Poston: An American Story"

By SUSAN DUNNE

Courant Staff Writer

March 7, 2008

Mary Higashi arrived at the Poston relocation camp in the
Arizona<http://www.courant.com/topic/us/arizona-PLGEO100101500000000.topic>desert
in 1942. The
California<http://www.courant.com/topic/us/california-PLGEO100100100000000.topic>teen
and her family had been forced out of their home, transported in a
closed train, and in the back of a truck and then walked past a gauntlet of
soldiers armed with rifles and bayonets.

Mary and her mother looked at their new home — a prison-like barracks with
dusty floors and a dilapidated stove in the corner — and began to cry.

That's to hear Mary tell it. A government newsreel of the time, aimed at a
non-Japanese audience, tells it differently: "The newcomers looked about
with some curiosities ... here they would build schools, educate their
children, reclaim the desert."

"Passing Poston: An American Story" looks at the World War II internment of
120,000 Japanese-Americans from two perspectives: From those who lived it,
still tormented by memories, and from government propaganda films, which
told the American people that the internment was not just justifiable, but
necessary.

Joe Fox and James Nubile's effective approach is galling and
heart-wrenching. Old footage of men, women and children — infants, neatly
dressed girls clutching dolls, schoolboys playing leapfrog — alternates with
newsreels offering stomach-turning bromides about how Americans were
"protecting ourselves without violating the principles of Christian
decency."

Recollections about internment are becoming common, and are essential for a
full picture of 20th-century American history. But Fox and Nubile go
farther, telling a fascinating story about the complicity of the Office of
Indian Affairs in the internment.

The office wanted to bring
Colorado<http://www.courant.com/topic/us/colorado-PLGEO1001017000000000.topic>River
water to the Colorado River Indian Reservation. But for the federal
government to justify the expense, more people would have to live there. To
attract residents, the reservation would need a stronger infrastructure:
roads, schools, irrigation, etc. John Collier, commissioner of Indian
affairs, suggested that one of the internment camps be put on the Colorado
River reservation, to provide unpaid, forced labor.

His request was granted, 20,000 people were moved into Poston and the men
were put to work. The strength of that region's postwar Indian community is
attributable to hundreds of thousands of man-hours by incarcerated
innocents. "From their suffering, we gained a lot," an Indian spokesman
says. As the newsreel said, the detainees built schools and reclaimed the
desert, but not for their own benefit.

Average Indians did not bring about the exploitation; they knew about it but
were powerless to do anything. Nonetheless, to see one racial group, which
historically had suffered from forcible relocation, benefit from another
racial group being misused in exactly the same way is ironic and disturbing.

This Indian Affairs involvement was brought to light by one of the Poston
detainees herself. In 1988, Ruth Okimoto got her $20,000 share of the
reparations decreed by the federal government. She used it as seed money for
her research.

"She took her $20,000 and started digging, digging, digging. She spent
innumerable hours at the National Archives," co-director Nubile says in an
interview. "Nobody suspected Indian Affairs of being involved in the camps,
so anyone doing research on camps wouldn't have looked there."

Okimoto, now 71 and living in Berkeley, Calif., said in an interview that
she couldn't find what she was looking for in the camp files. So she looked
in files about Colorado River water rights, and found the Indian Affairs
link. "I knew there had to be a connection. There had been a controversy
among three states, Arizona,
Nevada<http://www.courant.com/topic/us/nevada-PLGEO100103400000000.topic>and
California, who would control the flow of the Colorado River," Okimoto
says.

Further digging led Okimoto to congressional papers of spring 1942, in which
Collier officially asked the federal government to put Poston on the
reservation. "I was so excited when I found out why it was done," Okimoto
says. "I was just a child went I went to Poston, and the memories of it just
haunted me."

Okimoto has a degree in organizational psychology, but she could teach a
college course in investigative reporting. In bringing this story to public
awareness, Okimoto, Fox and Nubile have done a great service to history.

*PASSING POSTON *is a Fly on the Wall Productions film directed by Joe Fox
and James Nubile. Not rated, with nothing to offend. 60 minutes. It will be
shown with Tadashi Nakamura's 22-minute short, "Pilgrimage," about a journey
to where the Manzanar detainee camp once stood. "Poston" co-director James
Nubile will be present at the 5:30 screening today. Opening today at Real
Art Ways, Hartford.

-- 
Bill Howe
Web - http://www.billhowe.org
Blog - Travel - http://billhowe.org/BillBlog/
Blog - Multicultural Education - http://billhowe.org/MCE/

**Asian Pacific American Coalition (APAC) - http://apaact.com/