Junichi Kajioka, an actor turned producer, turned director sheds light on a rather unknown aspect of Japanese and Jewish history, during WW2, concerning Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese acting consul in the then Lithuanian capital Kaunas and Tatsuo Osako, an official of Japan Tourist Bureau. Sugihara issued visas in defiance of the Japanese government to allow thousands of Jewish refugees to travel to Japan via the former Soviet Union, so they could escape from the Holocaust, and Osako repeatedly traveled across the Sea of Japan to help transfer these refugees to Japan. Furthermore, the documentary focuses on Akira Kitade, a man who has published a research named “Visas of Life and the Epic Journey — How the Sugihara Survivors Reached Japan,” …show more content…
This mixture of testimonies from the victims' children, interviews with experts on the subject, actual footage from the time, including photographs and a sound recording with Osako's voice, and scenes from Kitade's travels has a very informative but also quite entertaining outcome. In this fashion, the documentary benefits the most by Kajioka's editing (along with his assistants, Gryff Bevan, Toshiya Chimura and Kenji Kitajima Oliveras), who presents the shuffling of the above parts in an elaborate way, which keeps the documentary flowing, without ever letting it become tiresome. The small length of the film (approx 24 minutes) also moves in this direction, as is stripped of any unnecessary details. Yasuhiko Fukuoka music accompanies the various scenes nicely, despite the fact that, in some moments, it becomes a bit too dramatic. Lastly, the ending, which concludes the documentary with a very optimistic note, puts a fitting conclusion to the subject. "Sugihara Survivors: Jewish and Japanese, past and future" is a documentary worth seeing, for both its subject and its presentation. The documentary had its European premiere at the Brundibár Arts Festival in Newcastle as a part of the Holocaust Memorial Day in the
The U.S. internment of people of Japanese descent during the 1940s was a major event in U.S. history, but it is often overlooked by many. It affected hundreds of thousands of people of Japanese descent, whether they were citizens or not. The incarceration of those placed in camps was affected mentally and it caused many of the internees to develop PTSD or otherwise commonly known as post-traumatic stress disorder (Potts, 1994, p. 1). The camps affected how the Japanese were viewed in society during the time period of the camps and following the liberation of them. It also changed how the Japanese viewed society. This paper will focus on the cultural and social aspects of the Internal Improvements.
The main purpose of this exhibit is to inform the audience as to the injustices committed against Japanese Americans during World War II. The exhibit shows how the U.S. Constitution was ignored for a brief time of national crisis. Another purpose of "A More Perfect Union" is to celebrate the achievements of Japanese Americans. Despite the way they were treated and the conditions they lived in at the time, those living in the relocation centers lived nearly normal lives. They wrote books, painted pictures, attended school, played sports, and so on. Their achievements during wartime are also extensively depicted.
Among this group of “Nisei” was the Uchida family from Berkeley, California. Yoshiko Uchida, the youngest daughter in the Uchida family was a senior at the University of California at Berkeley at the time of the attacks. Years later, Yoshiko became a prolific writer of children’s books (Sato 66). In her book, “Desert Exile”, published in 1982, Uchida gave a personal account of the evacuation and incarceration of her family during World War II (Sato 66). Uchida’s book raises awareness to the specter of racial prejudice and the hope that no other group of Americans would have to endure this type of injustice and violation of their human rights (Sato 66).
Startled by the surprise attack on their naval base at Pearl Harbor and anxious about a full-fledged Japanese attack on the United States’ West Coast, American government officials targeted all people of Japanese descent, regardless of their citizenship status, occupation, or demonstrated loyalty to the US. As my grandfather—Frank Matsuura, a nisei born in Los Angeles, California and interned in the Granada War Relocation Center (Camp Amache)—often
Wakatsuki-Houston presents an insightful portrayal of the Japanese-American internment camp in California known as Manzanar. She describes how her life changed throughout the experience as she grew from child to young woman. She captivates the reader's attention with intermittent interviews, describing the seemingly constant turmoil that each prisoner faced.
The Japanese-American author, Julie Otsuka, wrote the book When the Emperor was Divine. She shares her relative and all Japanese Americans life story while suffering during World War II, in internment camps. She shares with us how her family lived before, during, and after the war. She also shares how the government took away six years of Japanese-American lives, falsely accusing them of helping the enemy. She explains in great detail their lives during the internment camp, the barbed wired fences, the armed guards, and the harsh temperatures. When they returned home from the war they did not know what to believe anymore. Either the Americans, which imprisoned them falsely, or the emperor who they have been told constantly not to believe, for the past six years imprisoned. Japanese-Americans endured a great setback, because of what they experienced being locked away by their own government.
Mary Matsuda Gruenewald, Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese American Internment Camps
There is a man named Chiune Sugihara who help over thousands of Jews in the Holocaust, for most people that don’t know what the Holocaust is. It was a horrible time period in World War II when a man named Hitler didn’t like the way Jews were, so he put them in places called ghettos and then he started these camps to kill all of the Jews he can before he got caught doing this.But there were people around the world risking their life helping these Jews so they wouldn’t have to go through what Germans were doing to them. That’s were Mr.Sugihara a Japanese government official who tooked days doing what him and his wife did to save thousands of Jews. He saved over 7,000 Jews, by having him and his wife writing visas for hours and even days, because
Mitsuye Yamada in her thirty-six line poem “To the Lady” (1243) tries to address the question which was asked from the lady in San Francisco about the injustice the Japanese Americans experienced in the United States concentration camps during World War II. She asked “why did the Japanese Americans let the government put them in those camps without protest?” (Yamada 1243) As Mitsuye think about the question, she rewrite her experience in an imagery conversation with the lady from San Francisco.
The average person’s understanding of the Holocaust is the persecution and mass murder of Jews by the Nazi’s, most are unaware that the people behind the atrocities of the Holocaust came from all over Europe and a wide variety of backgrounds. Art Spiegelman’s Maus: a Survivor’s Tale, Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution, and Jan Gross’s Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedbwabne, Poland, all provides a different perspective on how ordinary people felt about their experiences in the Holocaust both perpetrators and victims.
Chiune Sugihara was a Japanese diplomat who saved thousands of Jews during the rage of the Holocaust. He was a very brave man and had saved over six thousand Jews through his courageous act of disobedience against his government orders. These men and women were saved because of Sugihara and his wife writing them out visas via Japan. This power couple helped and saved thousands of lives, yet they both get over looked for their acts of bravery. With the help of Sugihara's wife, they both wrote thousands of visas for Jews to escape the holocaust. They worked through the nights from July 31st to August 28th, 1940. They did this while the Nazis threatened to invade Lithuania, and thousands of Jews came to the Japanese consulate begging for visas
This paper is a review of the book Japan’s Comfort Women-Sexual slavery and prostitution during WWII and the US occupation by Yuki Tanaka. This book was published in 2002 by Routledge. The book deals with the thousands of Japanese, Korean, Chinese and other Asian and European women who were victims of organized sexual violence and prostitution by means of “comfort stations” setup by the Japanese military during World War II.
Space Battleship Yamato (1977) and The Silent Services (1988-1996) are both films that ‘rehabilitate’ Japan’s experience of World War II as they re-tell or imagine alternative histories or fictional stories that rehabilitate past trauma (namely their humiliating defeat of WWII and a sense of loss of masculinity to the U.S.-Japan alliance and what came corollary with it). Such narratives can be interpreted as expressing what contemporary Japan desires. The narrative of each film is reflected by the context of the time of its production (cold-war vs. post-cold war) and whilst the narratives of SBY and SS share similarities they differ in their depth of political discussions, conveyed messages and explicitness due to the constraints of post-war democracy, pacifism and U.S. relation. Relevant concepts are militarism, nationalism, anti-war messages, anti-US messages, pacifism, masculinity and patriotism and many of these co-exist in each respective film – the films try to reconcile them by ending with a lasting impression that justifies the aggression for the sake of world peace.
The story is based on a time just after the Civil War, a time when the modern western world which had just encroached upon the American West, condemning the Native American, began to engulf traditional Japan as well. The purpose of this film is to give a voice to these people, to share in their struggles and experiences and be
This source states the detailed events of 1940 and the reasons as to why Sugihara chose to sacrifice his future for others. This article is reliable because it is provided by the Yad Vashem, which is an organization that recognized Chiune Sugihara as Righteous Among the Nations in 1984.