In Joe Fox and James Nubile's moving documentary Passing Poston, “hell” is the word most consistently used by surviving Japanese-Americans who were forcibly interned during World War II. “It was nothing short of hell,” says Ruth Okimoto, whose father—a minister in San Diego—was arrested following Franklin Roosevelt's 1942 executive order relocating people with Japanese ancestry from the U.S. Pacific Coast to camps around the country. Okimoto, who was six at the time, recalls the day armed soldiers moved her and her family, temporarily, to the Santa Anita Race Track, where her pregnant mother gave birth in a horse stable. The early days of relocation, says Mary Higashi, then a college student whose family lived in Los Angeles, were “like hell.” Higashi recalls how she and her mother sobbed when they entered their barracks for the first time and saw only a coal-burning stove and dust. Okimoto and Higashi, along with interviewees Kiyo Sato and Leon Uyeda, were among 18,000 Japanese-Americans and Japanese nationals held against their will at the Poston Relocation Center in Arizona (more than 110,000 were detained nationwide in 10 camps). Passing Poston provides a general history of the internment years, interwoven with the specific memories of Okimoto and the three other survivors, who give a vivid sense of the concrete reality of camp living, as well as the difficulties of postwar adjustment. People from all walks of life were ordered to build the Poston camp's infrastructure—schools, irrigation, farms—in labor that had a secondary purpose sanctioned by the Office of Indian Affairs (now the Bureau of Indian Affairs). The Poston Relocation Center sat on a Native American reservation in need of improvements that were “paid” for by having another group of people of color do the work. DVD extras include a “making-of” featurette and deleted scenes. A heartbreaking look at an ugly chapter in 20th-century American history, this is highly recommended. Aud: C, P. (T. Keogh)
Passing Poston
(2008) 105 min. DVD: $26.95. Docurama (avail. from most distributors). ISBN: 1-4229-1502-6. Volume 23, Issue 6
Passing Poston
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