Outsider citizens: film narratives about the internment of Japanese Americans.

• Author: Banks, Taunya Lovell
• Position: Legal Outsiders in American Film

"Memories, like history, constantly undergo revision...." (1)

1. INTRODUCTION

   There is an old cliche: the winners write history. Today, one might add that the powerful leave visual records, like films. During World War II, the Office of War Information (OWI) produced several propaganda films about Japanese Americans and the internment that the motion picture industry distributed. One of the earliest films, Japanese Relocation, opens with the following explanation for the removal and internment of Japanese Americans:

   Following the outbreak of the present war, it has become necessary to transfer several thousand Japanese residents from the Pacific Coast to points in the American Interior.... When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, our West Coast became a potential combat zone. Living in that zone were more than 100,000 persons of Japanese ancestry.... [N]o one knew what would happen among this concentrated population if Japanese forces should try to invade our shores.... (2) According to this narrative, the triggering event for the targeting of Japanese Americans was the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor by the nation of Japan. Implicit in the film's opening is the questioned loyalty of all Japanese Americans, citizens and non-citizens, living on the West Coast. Those loyal members of the Japanese-American community, the narrative continues, believe that their removal from the West Coast is a "sacrifice" they "willingly" made during wartime. The film assured Americans outside the camps that Japanese Americans were participating wholeheartedly in the process, accepting relocation as a necessary sacrifice for the war effort.

   More than sixty years later, the internment remains a largely invisible event in popular history about that war. (3) Law students may discuss Korematsu v. United States (4) in constitutional law classes, but most do not realize that the Supreme Court never disavowed the constitutionality of the government's internment of American citizens during wartime. (5) Many Americans do not know the most basic information about the internment--that pursuant to presidential Executive Order 9066 (6) approximately 120,000 individuals, citizens, and resident aliens alike, with one-sixteenth or more of Japanese ancestry, living in California, Washington, and Oregon were forcibly relocated by the federal government to "concentration" or "relocation" camps. (7) During the internment era, Japanese-American citizens were the ultimate outsiders. (8)

   This article examines the conflicting film narratives about the internment produced between 1942 and 2007. (9) It argues that while later films, especially documentaries, counter early government film narratives justifying the internment, these counter-narratives have their own damaging hegemony.

   Whereas earlier commercial films tell the internment story through the eyes of sympathetic whites, using a conventional civil rights template found in films like Mississippi Burning (10) and To Kill A Mockingbird, (11) Japanese and other Asian American documentary filmmakers construct their Japanese characters as model minorities--hyper-citizens, super patriots. Further, the internment experience depicted in films remains largely a male story. With the exception of Emiko Omori's documentary film memoir, Rabbit in the Moon, (12) the stories and voices of Japanese-American women, who with their children comprised the bulk of internees, are marginalized.

   Film is a potentially powerful educational tool, but this tool is only as effective as the stories it tells. Non-Asian filmmakers tend to use the internment era as a vehicle or backdrop for stories about white redemption. Asian American commercial filmmakers, perhaps in an attempt to capture white audiences, follow a similar pattern. Although Asian American documentarians do a better job of educating audiences about the internment era, even these filmmakers tend to emphasize the hyper-patriotism within the World War II Japanese-American community, an image also used by the redress and reparation movement of the 1970s and 1980s. (13) Thus, I argue that the shadow of the internment experience affects Asian American documentarians' telling of the internment story. These filmmakers engage in a degree of self-censorship, crafting their stories to show Japanese Americans as a model minority to counter persistent perceptions of Asian American as foreigners--marginal citizens whose loyalty is forever suspect.

   The second section of this article discusses Japanese Relocation, the primary film narrative created by the federal government to justify the internment. It also addresses the commercial films, produced shortly after the war ended and the internment camps closed, which questioned aspects of the internment master narrative. The government's narrative was not fully countered in film until the late 1970s. The third section of this article discusses films produced between the late 1970s and 1988, concluding that most used the internment as a backdrop for story lines about interracial romances between white men and Japanese-American women.

   Section IV compares and critiques commercial and documentary films about the internment produced following the enactment of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 that provided formerly interned Japanese Americans "symbolic" redress--a letter of apology from the President and $20,000. (14) I argue that while these documentary films provide strong visual counter-narratives to government propaganda films, they are unreliable narratives because they tend to ignore or minimize the extent of resistance, anger, and fragmentation in the camps, as well as the long-term consequences of the internment on the Japanese-American community. Instead, the preferred counter-narrative is of a hyper-patriotic but mistreated loyal citizenry. I contend that the persistence of this narrative reflects Asian Americans' continuing fear that their Asian ancestry will be used again by the government as the basis for differential and negative treatment irrespective of citizenship status; the fear that Asian Americans remain outsider citizens in the United States.

   This article ends with a discussion of Emiko Omori's documentary, Rabbit in the Moon, which I argue represents a more complex narrative about the causes and consequences of the internment. Omori's decidedly feminist reading of the Japanese-American World War II experience helps explain why historians might intentionally, or unintentionally, erase the internment from accounts of American twentieth century history.

2. THE INTERNMENT IN FILM: 1942-1987

   1. Japanese Relocation: The Government's Internment Narrative Japanese Relocation contains themes about Japanese Americans that continue to be present in contemporary internment films: Japanese Americans, citizens or non-citizens, were presumptively loyal to Japan, their ancestral home, and those Japanese Americans loyal to the United States were model minorities who went uncomplainingly into the camps. These stereotypes, Japanese Americans as perpetual foreigners and model minorities, are mutually reinforcing and equally damaging. (15) As model minorities, Japanese Americans are portrayed as politically silent and uncomplaining, but Japanese Americans were not and still are not seen as model or real Americans. (16)

      In addition, the suggested voluntariness on the part of Japanese Americans belies the forcible nature of the "relocation." (17) At the time, few Japanese Americans sought relief in the courts, but the United States Supreme Court, in a series of cases, upheld a curfew imposed only on persons of Japanese ancestry (18) and the order mandating their removal from the West Coast. (19) In 1944, President Roosevelt suspended Executive Order 9066, (20) but it took another thirty years before the order was rescinded by President Ford in 1976. (21)

      In Japanese Relocation and other OWI films, the "relocation" camps are described as "pioneer communities" where internees, described as "evacuees," labor to turn "raw lands" to green for the good of the country. In return, "evacuees" receive government provided housing and "plenty of healthful food." (22) Imagine the reaction of American Indians living on the Colorado River Indian Reservation or Gila River Indian Reservation in Arizona, where the Poston and Gila River camps were located, who lacked adequate housing and food; (23) or imagine similarly situated poor white farmers in Arkansas, where the Rohwer and Jerome camps were located, when told of the "privileges" the presumptively disloyal Japanese Americans were receiving. (24)

      Japanese Relocation ends with the narrator, Milton Eisenhower, the initial director of the War Relocation Authority and brother of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, saying in a melodramatic voice-of-God tone, "We are setting a standard for the rest of the world in the treatment of a people who may have loyalties to an enemy nation. We are protecting ourselves without violating the principles of Christian decency." (25) Thus, the government's narrative justified the forcible removal and internment of West Coast Japanese Americans based on "military necessity" and questions about the loyalty of all persons of Japanese ancestry--citizen and non-citizen alike.

      Simultaneously, the film reassures the non-Japanese viewing audience that internees were being treated with "Christian decency," ignoring the wholesale and unwarranted violation of internees' civil rights. (26) The government's overriding concern was the country's self image, not the rights of internees. Film scholar Sumiko Higashi writes that the OWI's explanation for the forcible internment of all persons of Japanese ancestry "reverberates with 'yellow peril' paranoia and attests to an ideology of racialism." (27) Yet the tone and tenor of Japanese Relocation, with its upbeat music, makes it difficult for the viewing audience to identify the smiling, cooperative "evacuees" as victims. (28) Until...