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Mining the Home Movie

Why would any serious scholar be interested in home movies? We’ve all seen them. The kids in Cousin Shirley’s backyard pool splashing the puppy. Your best friend’s shots of himself gawking at the camera in front of every monument in Europe.

Yet there is something important about home movies, as there is with any attempt to capture the present and preserve it for the future. Before the Internet, photo albums, diaries, scrapbooks and home movies represented the only ways that one person or one family could make order of their world and share it with others.

Karen Ishizuka’s life has been the personification of Soren Kierkegaard’s maxim that “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” Whether working as a movie producer, museum curator, script writer, fund-raiser or book author, she has reminded us that those who shape our understanding of the past determine our view of the present and future.

Thanks to Ishizuka’s efforts, we have seen how Little Tokyo photographer Toyo Miyatake smuggled a lens and film holder into one of the Japanese American internment camps, and captured life behind barbed wire with a homemade camera made of scrap wood. In another film written by Ishizuka, we have seen the ironies and dangers faced by 18 APA soldiers who fought for the United States against Asian foes during World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars.

Karen’s most recent efforts have been the publication of two books, Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (co-edited with Patricia Zimmerman) and Lost & Found: Reclaiming the Japanese American Incarceration.

In Mining the Home Movie, Ishizuka introduces us to a global movement of scholars, artists and social change activists who are using the home movie as the starting place for a re-examination of the histories of those of us who may not have had our fifteen minutes of fame. For Asian Americanists, two chapters provide new and fascinating insights. One focuses on the making of Something Strong Within, a very lightly edited collection of home movies made in the Japanese American World War II internment camps. The other details how Dave Tatsuno’s movie Topaz was only the second home movie voted into the National Film Registry — after the Zapruder film of the assassination of President Kennedy.

In Lost & Found, Ishizuka describes her work at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, as the senior curator of the multimedia exhibit, America’s Concentration Camps: Remembering the Japanese American Experience. Moving beyond a typical exhibit where the focus is on pictures, objects and some text, her exhibit became a way for the Japanese American community to both rediscover and recover from this traumatic moment in their history.

Even as her new career as an author is unfolding, Karen has taken on another role: supporter and sounding board for her son, Tadashi Nakamura, who himself is emerging as an award-winning filmmaker. His film Yellow Brotherhood, an homage to his parents and other APAs in Los Angeles who built the Asian American movement while addressing the war, drugs and other scourges in their community, was awarded Best Documentary Short at the San Diego Asian Film Festival.

His latest film, Pilgrimage, is an uplifting re-examination of the Japanese American camp experience through the lens of community members who chose to remember and address the ghosts of the past through a pilgrimage to the site of their incarceration. Combining archival footage and current footage into a community’s “home movie,” Tad clearly learned from the master.

Ishizuka’s work allows us to see a multi-hued and multifaceted history that serves as a bulwark against those who would gloss over or forget its many nuances. Taking that laudable lifetime project to a higher plane, Mining the Home Movie shows that people with similar visions are working in Mexico, India, the Netherlands, New Zealand and other countries to do the same.

With their help, maybe we can do better than simply wait for history to repeat itself.

Comments

Show me some pics of the barbed wire at the camps, ANY of the camps, please! Show us how bad the “incarceration” was — were they really like concentration camps? I’ve got to see proof that they were what these modern books seem to trump them up to be.

–Wes on Mar 30, 2008
Dear Wes,

I just went to Google, typed in “Japanese American Internment,” and found this collection of photos: http://www.lib.utah.edu/spc/photo/9066/9066.htm. Barbed wire can be seen here http://www.lib.utah.edu/spc/photo/9066/t10.htm

If you live near Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles,and many other cities, there are exhibits about the camps available for you to see in person.

As for the word “concentration camp,” it is a term coined in the 2nd Boer War at the beginning of the 20th century ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_camp ), and refers to any camp where non-combatant people are “concentrated” by characteristic, such as Japanese American ancestry in this case, during a war. While some people did die and were killed, it was not a “death camp,” as in the Nazi context.

Note that American leaders tried to downplay their incarceration of 77,000 American citizens by calling them non-aliens and sending them to “Relocation Centers” (sounds like where you go after a flood, not a man-made disaster). Look at my Yale Law Journal piece in 1986, where I have a footnote devoted to how FDR and other American military and civilian leaders used the word “concentration camp.” BTW, Nazis downplayed their death camps by giving them euphemistic names also.

For lots more info, please see http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=janm

Thanks again for writing.

Phil

–Phil Nash on Mar 30, 2008
Folks:
Wes, like far too many who fear and hate and try to justify their fears and hatreds, must be reminded of the fact that “incarceration” is always against the will, or interests of course, of the incarcerated, whatever the euphemistic nomenclature of prison.
I, personally, had a dear college friend who was sent to Heart Mountain, and, even closer, a sansei dancer who spent too many formative years in that dustblown “camp” near Bishop?
It scarred her horribly and, eventually, terminally, although who can make that call?
It’s the HATE, Wes. It’s the total disrespect of someone else’s humanity, never mind the “God” or “creed” or “nationality” or “tribe” or “difference” that triggers that fear and hatred.
And the “relocation” of Japanese-American citizens during WWII is no more and no less than the “internment” of six-million Jews and a million “gypsies” and “homosexuals” and other “types” the Nazis deemed less than human, or less than relevant.
As for numbers, well, how about the two-million Vietnam civilians?, the hundreds of thousands if not million-plus Iraqi civilians today?, and counting.
Why is any ONE of them any more expendable than YOU, Wes?
Why do you account yourself more worthy than, say, that little five-year-old Iraqi boy, four limbs gone, face half blown away along with his entire family, whom four MASH surgeons were attempting to “save,” courtesy of a CNN clip by Dr. Sanjay Gupta if memory serves, before the fall of Baghdad?
I witnessed it, unbelieving, on my television screen, and “damned” all of us, all “us” “Americans,” of whatever color or persuasion, for being, willy-nilly, aware or not, of ABSOLUTE moral COMPLICITY in that little snippet of literally unbelievable “journalism.”
No wonder Rev., Pastor?, Wright is outraged to the extent of what the media paints as “unpatriotic” sermons preache d in the heat of “white”? anger. How can a “patriot” with any respect for “the Flag” condone this totally immoral and unwinnable and STUPID neoconning in the Mideast?
No one, under ANY “God” or “flag” or “cause” or cannon has the “right” to kill, murder, maim anyone else, as we seem to be perpetrating all over the globe these days and for far too many days and years and decades past.
In that light, Wes, I find your askance at what three generations of Japanese-Americans suffered during WWII not only beyond your perceptions and FEELINGS, but totally beneath my CONTEMPT for your question.
Frank Eng
And don’t ask if I “served.” I voluinteered, and my “discharge” says “honorable.” By the way, did either Bush OR Cheney “serve,” other than themselves and their fellow pirate crew that is? Including the Halliburton today accused of “poisoning” the waters served our “brave men and women in harm’s way” over there.

–Frank Eng on Mar 30, 2008

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