Teaching History with Newsreels and Public Service Shorts by Gulyas Aaron;

Author:Gulyas, Aaron;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Unlimited Model
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

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How do these films characterize African American contributions to the war effort?

Far different, but still in the broad category of race and ethnicity during the war, were films produced to justify and explain the internment of Japanese Americans, including citizens, during the war. Japanese Relocation (1943) was “distributed and exhibited by the War Activities Committee of the Motion Picture Industry.” This group, made up of representatives of movie studios and other businesses within the film industry was responsible for “coordinating the roles of the Hollywood studios, theatrical exhibitors, distributors, newsreel producers, publicists, and the trade press” during the Second World War.[8] Their efforts included targeting civilian audiences through cinemas in the United States. This 1943 examination of the internment issue was produced by the Office of War Information and opens with a caption explaining that, after the start of the war, “it became necessary to transfer several thousand Japanese residents from the Pacific Coast to points in the American interior.” The film presents itself as “an historical record of the operation.”

The narrator is Milton S. Eisenhower, head of the War Relocation Office during the initial stages of relocation and internment. He opens by proclaiming that the west coast of the United States became “a potential combat zone” after the attack on Pearl Harbor. While the majority of Japanese Americans (both citizen and “alien”) were loyal, “no one knew what would happen among this concentrated population if Japanese forces should try to invade our shores.” Despite the determination that it was militarily necessary to do so, neither the War Relocation officials nor the army “relished the idea of taking men, women, and children from their homes, their shops and their farms.” Thus, officials, according to Eisenhower, undertook the effort “as a democracy should,” with “consideration for the people involved.” Eisenhower emphasized the dangers of espionage and sabotage in San Francisco and Los Angeles. The film presents mere proximity of Japanese Americans to industrial facilities or ports as a danger. Officials determined, however, that the dangers of a Japanese fifth column in the event of invasion meant that all one hundred thousand Americans and aliens of Japanese descent should be removed.

Eisenhower’s recounting of the process of relocation acknowledges the hardship faced by Japanese Americans but claims that the “Japanese themselves cheerfully handled the enormous paperwork involved.” While acknowledging that the process of relocation “often involved financial sacrifice for the evacuees,” the evacuees “cooperated wholeheartedly,” with Eisenhower noting that “the many loyal among them felt that this was a sacrifice that they could make on behalf of America’s war effort.” Life in the relocation centers is shown as cheery and, if not fun, then certainly not prisonlike. Euphemism abounds—the internment camps are “pioneer” centers, for example, implicitly drawing parallels between the internees and stereotypically American frontier settlers. Footage is shown of residents working in agricultural areas that would contribute to the war effort.

The film closes with Eisenhower saying that this a “prologue to a story yet to be told” and that this

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