Disaster Was American Pastime. Mainstream Again.
Johnny Nakagawa, left, was the Nisei slugger often compared to Babe Ruth.
American Pastime and baseball under mass incarceration
American Pastime
Screenplay past Desmond Nakano and Tony Kayden
Story past Desmond Nakano
Warner Bros., 2007
http://warnervideo.com/americanpastime/
Nobility. If there is one affair that unifies nigh peoples' struggles to survive forms of oppression, it is the fight to maintain human nobility. Whether information technology'due south the enslavement of Africans, the colonization and attempted genocide of Native Americans, the exploitation and corruption of workers, or whatsoever other efforts of systematic domination of a group, at a minimum people survive and resist simply out of a struggle to maintain their human dignity.
The aforementioned can be said of Japanese Americans, 120,000 of whom (both citizen and noncitizen alike) suffered race-based mass incarceration in so-chosen relocation camps past the United States government during World War II.
Collectively and individually, Japanese Americans' dignified survival took many forms, including creating Japanese language verse clubs, designing rock gardens, crafting furniture from fleck lumber, constructingofuro baths, playing music, making fine art out of found materials, striking and protesting their imprisonment, and even just working to laissez passer the days in the camps.
And of class, there was baseball.
One of the means Japanese Americans sought to make their lives in the camps just a little bit ameliorate was to organize baseball teams and leagues where ballplayers could play, others could sentinel, and all could possibly forget for a moment that they were imprisoned behind barbed wire under the watchful gaze of armed guards.
American Pastime tells this story through the feel of the Nomura family, taken from their Los Angeles neighborhood and forcefully relocated to Camp Topaz outside of Abraham, Utah. While incarceration interrupts their lives and places slap-up strains on their relationships, the gaze of the moving picture falls on the two Nomura boys, Lane and Lyle.
Lane is the rebel. He loves and plays both jazz and baseball with equal passion, gets into trouble for drinking, manages to get beat up by racists in boondocks, and even enters into a risky interracial relationship with the daughter of white military sergeant Billy Burrell (the commanding officer of the army camp and an aging baseball prospect in the New York Yankee farm system). Only Lane is a rebel for adept reason. He is a baseball game pitcher, and he lost his baseball scholarship to San Francisco State University considering of internment.
Lyle, on the other hand, is the "adept" son. He is obedient, doesn't cause problems, listens to his begetter, and even joins the 442nd Infantry?a segregated regiment of all Japanese American soldiers who earned great fame every bit fighters during Earth War II.
After Lyle goes off to state of war, Lane becomes the fundamental character inAmerican Pastime. Nosotros get to watch him go through all of the breach, hurting, suffering, and fifty-fifty intermittent good times that happen during day-to-day survival in the camps. But while Lane serves as the protagonist, the struggle for dignity ultimately binds both brothers.
Nearing the last act of the film, when Lyle returns home a war hero—minus ane leg, he heads for a local barbershop run by Ed Tully, player for the local semi-pro baseball team and resident racist of Abraham. Tully refuses to give Lyle a haircut because he doesn't cut "Jap" pilus and the story culminates in a baseball game where the Camp Topaz team squares off confronting the local Abraham semi-pro team, predictably led past Sgt. Burrell and Tully the racist hairdresser.
Suffice to say, without giving up as well much more of the plot, sometimes dignity simply rests upon the outcome of a ballgame and a haircut.
At that place is a lot to similar aboutAmerican Pastime. It is like shooting fish in a barrel to follow, and middle to high schoolhouse students should have no problem keeping track of the major plot turns and characters. It also illustrates the ability of baseball—aided by an undercurrent of the power of jazz—to bring folks together and survive difficult times.American Pastime also thoughtfully delves into several of the central themes of the internment feel. Citizenship, life in the camps, cultural strains, familial strains, racism, the 442nd infantry, and babyhood under incarceration, among others, are prominent themes in the story.
American Pastime is also better than the other mainstream movies dealing with Japanese American incarceration during World State of war II, namelySnow Falling on Cedars (1999, Universal Pictures) andCome See the Paradise (1990, Twentieth Century Fox). While it has the sleeky and slick feel of these Hollywood productions, it is actually a moving-picture show that comes from within the Japanese American customs itself. And so not only are the writing and acting solid, only the characters are more fully human—unlike the above-mentioned mainstream Hollywood films.
Despite its strengths,American Pastime isn't perfect in its portrayal of the camps. So while I strongly support teachers' utilise of this film, I would likewise encourage keeping a critical center here.
For instance, one character in camp who, aside from being a great hitter, is supposed to be of Japanese and Native Hawaiian descent. The trouble is that almost every fourth dimension this character appears on screen (salve the one scene during relocation and incarceration itself), he carries an ukulele and happily sings everywhere he goes. So at the same time American Pastime breaks stereotypes of Japanese Americans, it reinforces stereotypes of Native Hawaiians.
Additionally,American Pastime does not requite military camp resisters their due as an important part of the Japanese American community. Instead they are given only a glancing await and simply written off as being disloyal.
And this points to a larger critique of the overall camp narrative constructed inAmerican Pastime. Like many other mainstream portrayals of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during Globe State of war II, this film is largely concerned with proving that Japanese Americans are just as "American" every bit everyone else—hence its preoccupation with both the 442nd and "America's pastime," baseball.
The problem is that Japanese Americans shouldn't take to prove anything to anyone. The real issue is the racism and xenophobia that led to the incarceration of Japanese Americans in internment camps in the first place. Despite these criticisms,American Pastime is a expert movie. It makes many aspects of the Japanese American internment experience accessible to viewers, and, despite some Hollywood-like predictability, information technology does then in an entertaining and engaging manner. With supplementary materials,American Pastime is definitely worth showing in middle and high school classrooms.
Supplementary Resource for American Pastime
A Classroom Guide for American Pastime
By Gary Mukai
Nisei Baseball game Research Projection
(NBRP), 2007
This guide provides some superficial and very basic lesson plans for pedagogyAmerican Pastime. While it wholeheartedly avoids more serious issues such as racism, information technology does provide some lessons around music, culture, and baseball metaphors that some teachers might find useful.
Diamonds in the Rough: Baseball and Japanese-American Internment
By Gary Mukai, in collaboration with Kerry Yo Nakagawa
Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE) and the Nisei Baseball Inquiry Project (NBRP), 2004
This more substantial curriculum focuses on baseball in the internment camps mostly. Again, while this curriculum does not provide much in the way of complex assay and neglects to deal with issues of racism or Japanese American resistance, it does provide some entertaining lessons too equally a fairly thorough background essay on internment.
Nisei Baseball Research Project
Kerry Yo Nakagawa, Project Director
4728 Northward Glenn Avenue, Fresno, CA 93704
NBRP@comcast.net
www.niseibaseball.com
This organization is leading the charge to raise sensation most baseball in the internment camps.
Baseball game Saved Us
By Ken Mochizuki
Lee & Low Books, 1995, 32 pp.
An excellent children's book that also focuses on baseball in the camps.
The Densho Project
world wide web.densho.org
An outstanding online resources for educational activity about incarceration of Japanese Americans during World State of war Ii. This site includes hours of streaming oral histories of internees, searchable transcripts of these oral histories, electronic images of actual documents pertaining to incarceration, and a thorough site for educators with lesson plans that focus on background information, ceremonious rights, immigration, and incarceration. Registration is required but complimentary.
The Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive ( JARDA)
www.calisphere.universityofcalifornia.edu/jarda/
Another excellent online resource for teaching nearly incarceration that houses a large collection of fine art, photographs, and document images. JARDA also offers lesson plans to back up the use of their materials.
Rabbit in the Moon
Directed past Emiko Omori
Produced by Emiko Omori and Chizu Omori
This award-winning memoir/documentary shares memories of the incarceration of Japanese Americans in camps during Earth War II. Through interviews and personal reflection, sisters Emiko and Chizu Omori paint a complicated familial and customs history of the camps filled with generational divisions, collaboration, and resistance.
Source: https://rethinkingschools.org/articles/dignity-and-a-haircut/
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