American Pastime opens with a Japanese family living in Los Angeles. This is the Nomura family and it is evicted from its home and business after Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Executive Order 9066. The family is rounded up into Topaz, an internment camp in Utah’s arid area. Here, they meet many other Japanese from different parts of the country. Nomura starts a baseball league in the camp. While in the camp, Lyle, Nomura’s son gets into a relationship with Billy Burrell’s daughter, Katie. Billy Burrell is one of the guards at Topaz. The climax of the film comes when Nomura’s baseball team plays against Burrell’s.
American Pastime presents a good account of the Japanese American internment of 1942. It provides a sufficient backdrop to the internment. After Pearl Harbor attack, American politicians and government officials suspected that the Japanese who were living in the country had helped Japan’s army with information regarding the harbor. Additionally, these Americans suspected that the Japanese who were residing in the U.S could have helped Japanese military thwart the country’s reaction to the attack on its base on the harbor. These suspicions led to the signing of the Executive Order No. 9066 which authorized the forced relocation of Japanese Americans from their homes and businesses into internment camps (Inada 45). In the film, the Nomura family is uprooted from Los Angeles and is relocated into Topaz, Utah.
The film is accurate in its depiction of the way in which the internment disrupted the lives of Americans. Lyle is Nomura’s teenage son. Before the internment, he had won a baseball college scholarship. The internment cut short his dreams because he now could not attend college while in the camp. White Americans were also affected by the internment. Billy Burrell works as a guard at the Topaz camp. He is disappointed and frustrated to be doing this because he was recruited against his will. It is probably this frustration or the prevailing suspicions of whites towards the Japanese Americans that makes him object to the relationship between his son and Lyle. The internment bred strife between Japanese Americans and white Americans.
American Pastime is also accurate in capturing the role of baseball during the internment. Baseball was perhaps the major sport activity that Japanese Americans used to make their time at the camps bearable. It is interesting to see how the sport occupied the internees and distracted them from their current situation of unfair treatment. Several baseball leagues emerged in the internment camps. There were both intra- and inter-camp baseball games. Besides recreation, participation in baseball served to assert the status of the internees as American citizens. A person’s membership to a community can be determined by his or her willingness to take part in that community’s cultural activities. Baseball was considered an American invention and had come to be considered a unique sport activity in the country (Holt 67). Nomura had been a professional baseball player before internment. He uses his knowledge about baseball to start a league of the sport in Topaz. His son is also a baseball player.
The perspective of internees from other camps is missing from this film. The movie does not feature much details and actions by Japanese Americans from camps such as Heart Mountain, Manzanar and Jerome (Inada 45). This is a significant omission because there might have been conditions and situations which were unique to different camps. The film also leaves out the voices of individuals who challenged the internment in the courts of law. The significance of this omission is that a viewer does not get to understand that Japanese Americans did not just accept internment cowardly. Additionally, due to this omission, the viewer does not get an insight into how the country’s legal system entrenched and justified the internment. The Supreme Court noted that a given group of individuals could be uprooted from their homes without due process even on the basis of their ancestry.
The film is biased towards the people who instituted the internment. It is clear to the viewer that the internment undermined the dignity of the Japanese Americans. Additionally, American Pastime is biased towards bigotry. Its feature implies that the tension that existed between Japanese Americans and White Americans at the time was unjustifiable. The assumption in the film is that Japanese Americans were interned solely based on their ancestry. Another assumption in the film is that Japanese American interns were loyal to America. This is seen in the film’s feature of how the internees enjoyed playing baseball.
The film could have been more accurate and inclusive if it featured more media coverage of the event. Media coverage of the time would have provided a unique dimension of things complementing the perspectives of internees, guards and government officials. As mentioned elsewhere above, it would have been instrumental to include the accounts of the people who challenged the legality of the internment in the courts of law. Finally, it would have been helpful to include the commission that proved that the internment of the Japanese Americans was not a military necessity.
Works Cited
Holt, Hamilton. The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans, As Told by Themselves. Charleston, S.C.: BiblioBazaar, 2009. Print.
Inada, Lawson F. Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American Internment Experience. Berkeley, Calif: Heyday Books, 2000. Print.
