Bytemarks

If you haven’t already seen 442: Live with Honor, Die with Dignity the time is now. The film, about the 442nd Regiment Combat Team won a Special Audience Award at this year’s Maui Film Festival in June and has since been making the rounds on the West Coast. The movie will play a short run at the:

Ward Consolidated 16 Theaters
Friday, September 10, 2010
Special screening: 9am
Additional times through the week, check listings

The movie was written and produced by Japanese film maker, Junichi Suzuki. Suzuki tells the very personal accounts of the war as documented by the stories told by the actual soldiers who fought in the 442nd and 100th Battalion. During WWII, soldiers of the 442nd Infantry Regiment, composed mainly of Japanese Americans, fought not only against the enemy, but fought against prejudice, facing severe racial discrimination in America.

As documentaries go, 442: Live with Honor, Die with Dignity is very easy to relate to. Our parents all have their stories of WWII and many of us have family or friends who fought or spent time in the internment camps. There is a line in the movie as told by Sen. Daniel Inouye which brings it all home for me. It connects how this group of men, racially discriminated against in the US, fought with such valor and commitment to become the most decorated unit for its size and length of service in the history of the United States military. This movie says as much about bravery as it does about family values. It is a must see!

The special screening on September 10th at 9am will also feature opening remarks from George Takei, famed Asian-American actor for his role in Star Trek. He spent several years as a youth in the internment camps both in California and Arkansas. Ryan Ozawa and I got a chance to interview George for this Wed (9/8) Bytemarks Cafe. We asked him how being in the internment camps shaped who he is today:

It was a defining experience in my life. At that time I was too young to really understand what was going on. But in my teenage years, I became very curious about why we had spent our wartime years behind those barbed wire fences. I studied up on it a lot, I had discussions with my father. My father was an extraordinary man, he was the one that suffered the pain of internment and the loss involved in that the most. And yet he was able to say to me that both the strength and the weakness of American democracy is in the fact that it’s a true people’s democracy, and it can be as great as people can be, and it is as fallible as people are. And when Pearl Harbor was bombed, this country was swept up by war hysteria. And the fallibility of Americans, their inability to draw a distinction between the Soldiers of Imperial Japan and American citizens of Japanese ancestry prevailed, and we were summarily rounded up in the most unconstitutional way. There were no charges, no trial, no due process, and we were summarily imprisoned. And how that experience shaped me is that made me an activist on civil rights issues. I was involved in the civil rights movements in the 60s and 70s. I testified for the redress and reparations on the unconstitutional imprisonment of Japanese Americans. And the big civil rights issue of our generation today is equality for gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgendered people. So in that sense the internment was a defining experience for me.

George Takei will also talk at the Japanese Cultural Center on Sunday, September 12, 2010 from 1:30 – 3:30pm. The event is called No Shame!: Talking About the Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender Japanese American Experience in Hawai‘i. George will deliver the keynote speech: Embracing Change.