Forced Out: Internment and the Enduring Damage to California Cities and Towns (film)

A 2003 documentary film that explores the subject of the Japanese American forced removal and mass incarceration during World War II and its economic impact on California's Japantowns through the stories of merchants and community institutions. Among the stories highlighted are Honnami Taedo, a ceramics shop in San Francisco Japantown; the Rafu Shimpo newspaper, Fugetsudo sweet shop, and the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo; a San Francisco-based quilt project by Japanese American women that documents the wartime events; and the Asahi Market in Oxnard, which was run for the Japanese American proprietors by a Mexican American family during the war.

Forced Out was jointly produced by the Central Valley Asian-American Chamber of Commerce, Sacramento Asian-Pacific Chamber of Commerce, and KVIE 6, a public television in Sacramento. Among the funders for the project were ChevronTexaco, the Henri and Tomoye Takahashi Charitable Fund, and the California Civil Liberties Public Education Program . The film was first shown on KVIE on May 30, 2003.

The DVD release of the program includes extended interviews with Nao Takasugi, George Takei, and Steve Fugita, a feature on San Jose's Japantown, and vignettes on Lillie Fujita, who resettled in Seabrook Farms, New Jersey after the war, and Edward Endow, a Stockton pharmacist who discusses the destruction of the Japantown there due to redevelopment.

Might also like F rom a Different Shore: An American Identity (1994); Starting Over: Japanese Americans After the War (1996); Return to the Valley: Japanese American Experience After WWII (2003)