Asian American Empowerment - Film to Tell Story of Internment Camps

By Melissa Nelson
©2004 Associated Press
August 7, 2004

LITTLE ROCK - A documentary film that tells the story of World War II Japanese-American internment camps in Arkansas will air on public television next year.

The film, titled "Time of Fear," is part of a project to preserve the long-neglected history of the two Arkansas camps. It will debut Sept. 24 during a Little Rock conference, which will reunite hundreds of former camp detainees.

"We are excited because this is the first documentary that will focus exclusively on the Arkansas camps," said Jessica Hayes of The University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

The university, the Los Angeles-based Japanese American National Museum and the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation organized the film, conference, traveling exhibits and numerous other educational projects about the experiences of thousands of Japanese-Americans who were forcibly relocated to Arkansas after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Between 1942 and 1945, the Jerome and Rohwer camps in southeast Arkansas held 16,000 detainees. More than 120,000 Japanese-Americans were sent from the West Coast and Hawaii to 10 internment camps at the beginning of the war. Eight camps were in the West; the Arkansas sites were the only ones in the South.

Following its September debut, "Time of Fear" will be shown in November at Little Rock's Reel Film Festival, which will be part of the opening of the William J. Clinton Presidential Center at Little Rock.

PBS is expected to broadcast the film nationally in May.

New York-based Ambrica Productions produced the hour-long documentary. Janice Kambara, an Ambrica employee who worked on the film, said the crew traveled the country to interview former detainees and others involved with the camps.

"We went to Arkansas and to California. We interviewed a lot of people in the Chicago area and in Boston," she said. "What is different about this film from other films that have been made about the internment camps is that we interviewed people who lived in Arkansas at that time."

Producer Kathryn Dietz said the Arkansas camps were also unique because of the poverty in the area that surrounded them. Dietz said Arkansans who lived near the camps told filmmakers that the camps offered running water and electricity.

"Many people on the outside didn't have that," she said.

Because the Arkansas camps were the only camps in the segregated South, the film also focuses on race relations at the time. Kambara said racial divisions were one of the reasons few families remained in Arkansas after the war. Today, only one Japanese-American family with ties to camps is living in the state.

"We talked to a lot of different Arkansans and tried to get a sense of what Arkansas and the Delta was like in the 1940s," Dietz said.

Among those interviewed in the documentary is Star Trek actor George Takei, who was forcibly relocated from California to Arkansas with his family when he was a young child. Takei's family lived in the Rohwer camp for a year.