Movie screen: A challenge to Democracy

Thesis: Relocation camps are a good place to live and it provides you with everything you need inside of it. The main point of this show was to show how relocation camps weren’t all that bad and in fact the residents had a lot of opportunities to do things.

This show starts out talking about why the Japanese people were relocated and the basic capacities to a relocation center. Most of the centers were located in dessert areas, but a few were in wooded areas. But no matter where the center was the fields were turned into farm land and the food that was grown from those lands were used solely for the centers and not put out on the real market. They produced a lot of food because half of the evacuatees were farmers. It then talked about how people got paid: twelve dollars a month for a beginner, sixteen dollars a month for a mediate person, and nineteen dollars a month for an expert. They had schools and churches inside the centers. The schools curriculum met the states requirements. There was also even a little political system and in the free time people would play softball, baseball, or football. In the video this all looked like a pretty descent place to live but from what Takaki said in chapter ten that is not how it was. I mean from a certain extent the relocation center was ok, but not how it was shown to the public. You never saw an angry person or unhealthy people. Everyone there was happy and healthy and it looked like they didn’t want to leave the center. I just think that you can draw many speculations from this show.

1. If the relocation centers were designed to become “American” than why was there no restriction on religion?

2. The men that went into the army, were they put into their own regiment? Because the men that they showed were all Japanese.

I thought this show was kind of interesting especially after reading Takaki. It allowed you to compare and contrast what Takaki says and what you saw in the show. My belief is that the centers were not all they were cracked up to be and in fact they were much worse. Now I could be totally wrong, but I just felt that our government tried to make it appeal to the eye.